Angelo Buono Jr. was 43 and ran an auto upholstery business in Glendale, California, when the Hillside Strangler killings began in October 1977. Over the next four months ten women and girls, the youngest 12 and the oldest 28, were found dead on hillsides and roadsides in and around Los Angeles. Police formed a task force of more than 160 officers and logged thousands of tips, but no arrest came for almost two years. When it did, it came from Bellingham, Washington, where Buono's younger cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, was arrested in January 1979 for the deaths of two college students. Bianchi pleaded guilty in Washington and in Los Angeles, and as part of his plea bargain he named Buono as his partner in the Los Angeles killings.
Buono denied it. His case became, by the accounts of the judge, the prosecutors and the wire services, the longest criminal trial in United States history up to that time. It ran from November 1981 to November 1983, with about 400 witnesses and roughly 1,800 exhibits. Before it began, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office tried to drop all ten murder counts because it did not trust Bianchi as a witness. The trial judge, Ronald M. George, who later became chief justice of California, refused. The state attorney general took over the case, and in the fall of 1983 a jury convicted Buono of nine of the ten murders. It chose life in prison without parole over death. Buono died in his cell at Calipatria State Prison in 2002.
Buono was born in Rochester, New York, in 1934. According to a 2016 account in The Occidental, the student newspaper of Occidental College, which drew on Los Angeles Times reporting from 1979, his parents divorced when he was eight and the family moved to Los Angeles. He left school before finishing junior high.
The same account says he was married three times and had several children; HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington State history, says he married four times.
By the 1970s Buono ran an auto upholstery shop in Glendale, a city just north of downtown Los Angeles. HistoryLink describes him as having a history of sexual violence before the murders. Roger W. Boren, one of the two deputy attorneys general who later prosecuted him, wrote that investigators were interested in him early on partly because of his presence in the La Crescenta area and his relationship with a teenage girl who lived there.
Kenneth Bianchi was born in Rochester in 1951 and adopted as an infant. HistoryLink describes Buono as his adoptive cousin. In January 1976, according to HistoryLink, Bianchi moved to Los Angeles to live with Buono, who was then 42; The Occidental gives the year as 1975. Bianchi took a job with a title company in July 1976. He wanted to be a police officer, but the Los Angeles and Glendale police departments both turned him down.
By the account Boren gave of the trial evidence, the two men first went into business as pimps, using teenage runaways from Arizona. Buono had a police badge. A vice officer had dropped it during a raid on a bar, and an acquaintance of Buono's testified that he had passed it on to him. Buono's sons and others testified that he liked to flash it at women working the street in Hollywood after he had solicited them. The prostitution and sexual assault counts against Buono were later severed from the murder case, so the jury that decided the murders did not try them.
The ten people whose deaths made up the Hillside Strangler case were young women and girls from different parts of Los Angeles life. The Washington Post, summarizing the case in 2002, said they included two schoolgirls, a college student, an aspiring actress, a dancer, a waitress and a young woman who worked as a prostitute. Ages and dates follow The Occidental's 2016 account, with differences between reports noted.
Yolanda Washington was 19. Boren wrote that she was working on the street in Hollywood and was last seen walking along Sunset Boulevard. The Occidental lists her as a waitress. She was killed on October 17, 1977, and found near Griffith Park.
Judith Miller was 15. Her mother last saw her on October 15, 1977. Boren wrote that she was taken at night in Hollywood. She was killed on October 31, according to The Occidental, and found on a quiet street in La Crescenta, in the foothills north of Glendale.
Lissa Kastin was 21. She worked as a waitress at a health food store and hoped to become an actress. She was killed on November 5, 1977, and found in the hills of Glendale. The Washington Post gives her name as Elissa Kastin.
Jane King was 28, an aspiring actress and model. She was killed on November 9, 1977, and found near a freeway off-ramp.
Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, were schoolgirls. According to Boren, they rode a bus home from a shopping center in Eagle Rock, and Bianchi later said he and Buono followed them from there. They were taken on November 13, 1977, and found about a week later on a hillside in Elysian Park, near Dodger Stadium. The Occidental noted that both girls were taken a few blocks from the Occidental College campus. Boren spells the younger girl's first name Delores; The Occidental spells her surname Capeda.
Kristina Weckler was 20, an art student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She was killed on November 19, 1977, according to The Occidental, and found in Highland Park, about a mile and a half from Occidental's campus.
Lauren Wagner was 18, a business college student from Sepulveda in the San Fernando Valley. She was taken from her car near her home in late November 1977, and a witness saw two men she took for police officers stop her and drive her away. She was found on Mount Washington.
Kimberly Martin was 17. She was taken from Hollywood on December 13, 1977, and found on a hillside in the city.
Cindy Hudspeth was 20 and worked as a cocktail waitress in Glendale. She was killed on February 16, 1978, according to Boren, or February 17, according to The Occidental. She was found in her own car off a mountain highway.
There were no more deaths in the series after February 1978. In late May 1978, HistoryLink reported, Bianchi left Los Angeles for Bellingham, Washington.
From early on, detectives believed they were looking for more than one man. A 2022 Daily Beast review of a documentary series on the case reported that the lead detectives concluded the bodies had been moved in a way that needed two people, and that the men were posing as authority figures such as police officers to get women into their car. The Washington Post wrote in 2002 that the pair sometimes flashed fake badges.
Several pieces of trial evidence pointed that way. UPI reported in 1983 that one witness saw Lauren Wagner pulled to the side of the street and driven off by two men she took for policemen. A young woman testified that two men in Hollywood had shown her police badges and asked for her identification, then let her go. Boren also described a woman who, on February 16, 1978, saw a man struggling with a young woman on a sidewalk in North Hollywood; she identified Bianchi as the man and Buono as the driver of a tan car. Boren wrote that Buono later built a similar car from a kit and never registered it.
The bodies were left in places that drew attention. The Washington Post noted that some were left on hills near the Los Angeles Police Academy, and one on a hillside within view of City Hall and the police headquarters downtown. Residents of the neighborhoods north and east of downtown were frightened. Faculty at Occidental College in Eagle Rock later told the student paper that campus security warned women not to be out late, and one alumna recalled that the case was the only reason her father called her during her first year.
The Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Glendale Police Department each handled some of the scenes, depending on where the bodies were found. As public alarm grew, the agencies formed the Hillside Strangler Task Force, which The Occidental said worked around the clock for about 20 months. The Washington Post put its strength at more than 160 officers chasing hundreds of leads.
The public called in about 10,000 tips. Boren wrote that the task force stored them on a computer that could hold the information but could not analyze it. Bianchi's name was phoned in three separate times before his arrest, and the system never connected the calls.
In late May 1978 Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, where his girlfriend and their infant son lived. He found work as a security guard. On January 11, 1979, two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were found strangled in a car. Bellingham police arrested Bianchi the next day. Mandic had told friends about a house-sitting job he had offered her, and a note in Wilder's handwriting recorded a call from him, according to HistoryLink.
Bianchi's California license led Bellingham detectives to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and from there to the Hillside Strangler Task Force. Jewelry found at Bianchi's home included at least two pieces that matched descriptions of jewelry worn by Hillside Strangler victims, HistoryLink reported.
In March 1979 Bianchi changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity and claimed he could not remember the killings. Under hypnosis he produced a second personality who took responsibility for the Bellingham deaths. Other experts concluded he was faking. A Washington judge found him competent to stand trial in October 1979, and Judge George later ruled, in November 1981, that Bianchi had faked both the hypnosis and the multiple personalities, according to HistoryLink.
On October 19, 1979, Bianchi pleaded guilty in Washington to the two Bellingham murders. Prosecutors withdrew their request for the death penalty, and he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole. On October 22 he pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to five of the Hillside Strangler murders, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of a sexual offense, and received concurrent terms. In return he was spared the death penalty and agreed to testify truthfully against Buono. HistoryLink and The Occidental describe the terms.
Glendale police arrested Buono at his upholstery shop within about half an hour of Bianchi's Washington plea on October 19, 1979, according to HistoryLink. He was charged with 24 felonies, ten of them murder.
The preliminary hearing and pretrial proceedings took about two years. In 1981 the case was assigned to Judge Ronald M. George of the Los Angeles Superior Court, who had held that post since December 1977, according to the California Supreme Court Historical Society.
Bianchi did not prove to be the witness prosecutors had bargained for. The Appellate Strategist, a legal history blog by the attorney Kirk Jenkins, describes how he testified that he did not know whether he was telling the truth about Buono's role. Boren wrote that Bianchi recanted his responsibility for the murders despite his recorded confessions and guilty pleas. HistoryLink adds that he gave contradictory statements, recanted his testimony against Buono, and later took back the recantations.
A couple of months before the scheduled trial date, Boren wrote, the district attorney's office moved to dismiss the whole murder case. Its lawyers concluded that Bianchi would not survive cross-examination. Judge George denied the motion, finding enough evidence to corroborate Bianchi and support a conviction. District Attorney John Van de Kamp then declared a conflict of interest, since his own deputies had told the court Bianchi was not credible, and stepped aside. Attorney General George Deukmejian assigned two deputy attorneys general, Roger W. Boren and Michael Nash, to try the case. Boren later became a justice of the California Court of Appeal.
A 1985 UPI review of Darcy O'Brien's book on the case summed up the episode the same way: at one point the district attorney sought to drop all charges, and the judge refused.
The trial opened on November 16, 1981. Jury selection alone took about three months. The jury that was finally seated was made up of seven women and five men, UPI reported. Judge George later wrote that the trial began with an estimate of about one year; it lasted two.
Gerald Chaleff led Buono's defense, with Katherine Mader as co-counsel. Their case was that Bianchi had committed the killings alone, or with someone else, and had pulled his cousin into it to win a plea bargain and escape the death penalty. They attacked Bianchi as a pathological liar and challenged the reliability of the other witnesses, UPI reported.
The prosecution's evidence came in for months. In Boren's account the state spent about four months on its own case before Bianchi took the stand, and in all called about 250 witnesses and offered more than 1,000 exhibits, according to The Appellate Strategist. The Washington Post put the full trial record at 392 witnesses, 1,807 exhibits and a transcript of almost 56,000 pages.
Bianchi first testified on a June morning in 1982. Asked whether he had taken part in the murders, Boren wrote, he said at first that he did not know. By that afternoon he said he believed he had been involved but could remember only bits and pieces. Direct examination lasted about four weeks; Chaleff's cross-examination lasted about four months. In all Bianchi spent about six months as a witness. Boren described him as earnest in the mornings and listless by the afternoon recess, often mumbling his answers. UPI later counted 80 days on the witness stand.
The defense also called Veronica Compton, a woman who had become attached to Bianchi. Boren wrote in a footnote that she had tried to help him by smuggling samples out of jail and had failed in an attempt to strangle a young woman in Washington. She testified for the defense in the Buono trial.
The trial turned on whether independent evidence supported Bianchi's account, the question Judge George had already answered yes when he refused to dismiss the case. Boren listed the main pieces.
Fibers. A white polyester fiber recovered in the Judith Miller case matched upholstery material in Buono's shop. Nylon and acrylic fibers found on Lauren Wagner matched a chair in Buono's living room and carpet in one of his bedrooms. UPI reported that prosecutors described carpet and upholstery fibers from two victims as matching materials seized from Buono's house and shop.
Eyewitnesses. A man who said he knew Judith Miller identified Buono as the driver of the car that took her. His account matched Bianchi's on the route but not on the car, and he had left a mental hospital days before police flew him to Los Angeles; the defense used recorded phone calls to attack his credibility. A neighbor of Lauren Wagner saw her stopped by two men she took for police officers. The court found that this witness had not been hypnotized and let her testify. The woman who saw the North Hollywood struggle in February 1978 identified Buono as the driver.
Conduct after the arrest. Bianchi told investigators that he and Buono had tried to kill Kristina Weckler with household gas. Investigators found that after Bianchi's arrest Buono had destroyed the gas pipe and fitting in question. The prosecution treated this as evidence of a guilty mind.
The badge. Testimony from Buono's sons and an acquaintance tied him to a police badge he used to harass women on the street in Hollywood, matching the reports of two men posing as officers.
In the Cindy Hudspeth case, a witness saw her car being driven in tandem with a second car. The defense suggested the killer might have carried a bicycle in the back seat and ridden away alone.
Final arguments ran from August into October 1983. The prosecution's closing alone took eleven days, according to The Appellate Strategist.
The jury began deliberating on October 20, 1983, and was sequestered for the first time. Its first verdict, returned on a Monday at the end of October, was guilty of murder in the death of Lauren Wagner. Boren wrote that the fiber evidence weighed heavily on that count; UPI quoted him calling the Wagner case the strongest of the ten and describing the cousins as "cool, crafty, cunning amoral animals."
More guilty verdicts followed over several days. The last was on the Cindy Hudspeth count, delayed for about a week while jurors studied photographs of her car and concluded that the bicycle theory was improbable. The jury convicted Buono of nine of the ten murders: Judith Miller, Lissa Kastin, Jane King, Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Lauren Wagner, Kimberly Martin and Cindy Hudspeth.
It did not convict him in the death of Yolanda Washington. Boren explained that on that count the jurors had heard only Bianchi's account, because the court excluded the testimony of a man who had been hypnotized before describing what he saw. Without independent support for Bianchi on that count, there was no verdict of guilty.
With Buono convicted of more than one killing, the same jury had to choose between death in the gas chamber and life in prison without parole. Prosecutors Boren and Nash asked for death. UPI reported that they told the jury the crimes were worse than the behavior of animals. Chaleff argued that Buono should not receive a harsher punishment than Bianchi, who had been given life in exchange for his testimony. The defense called ten character witnesses, and the prosecution answered with one.
During the penalty phase Buono objected that his rights were being violated. "My moral and civil rights have been violated," he said, according to UPI. "I will not and I won't take part in these proceedings."
On November 18, 1983, after deliberating for about an hour, the jury returned a verdict of life without parole. Jurors later said a death sentence would have been too good for him, UPI reported. Boren wrote that the jury's reluctance reflected the fact that Bianchi's evasive testimony made it hard to divide responsibility between the two men.
On January 9, 1984, Judge George formally sentenced Buono to nine concurrent terms of life without parole. He told the court he was without authority to impose a greater punishment, UPI reported, and said the two killers should never see the outside of a cell. HistoryLink quotes him as saying, "They should never be paroled." The Washington Post quoted him telling the cousins, "I believe the two of you are incapable of feeling any remorse," and reported that he said he wished he could send them to the gas chamber.
The judge also dealt with Bianchi. He found that Bianchi had not testified truthfully and completely, as his plea bargain required, and ordered him returned to Washington to serve his sentence there, rather than in a California prison as he had bargained for, UPI reported. On February 1, 1984, California lodged a detainer so that Bianchi would be handed over to serve his California life terms if Washington ever released him, according to HistoryLink.
Chaleff told reporters he still believed Buono was innocent and would appeal, adding that an appeal could take years. Later, Boren recorded, Chaleff called the life verdict a "belated dose of postconviction reasonable doubt."
Chaleff said in January 1984 that Buono would appeal. No ruling of the California Court of Appeal on Buono's 1983 convictions has been reported, either as a published decision or in the news. The convictions stood at his death in 2002, when news reports described him as serving a life sentence for nine murders.
Buono served his sentence in California state prisons. He was held at California State Prison, Calipatria, at the time of his death.
On September 21, 2002, he was found dead, alone in his cell at Calipatria. He was 67. The Washington Post reported that a prison spokesman said he had a heart ailment and that there were no signs of trauma, though the exact cause was not immediately known. HistoryLink and The Occidental later gave the cause as a heart attack and a heart condition. CBS News, in a 2010 report on Bianchi, said Buono had died in a California prison in 2002 after being convicted of nine killings.
Bianchi remained in Washington. In July 1990 the Washington parole board set his minimum term at 116 and a half years, HistoryLink reported. The Washington State Standard reported in 2025 that the review board had converted his life sentence to more than 118 years because of a change in state law, with a release date, counting good time, of 2065.
In August 2010 a California board denied him parole on his Los Angeles life terms, CBS News reported, citing the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, and set his next hearing 15 years later. In 2023 he changed his name to Anthony D'Amato. In June 2025 the Washington State Standard reported that the Washington board was to consider his parole in a closed hearing, that it had denied him several times in recent years, and that a California hearing was scheduled the following month. He maintains that he is innocent of the Washington killings, the paper reported.
The case shaped the careers of the people who tried it. Ronald M. George was appointed to the California Court of Appeal in 1987, to the California Supreme Court in 1991, and served as chief justice of California from 1996 to 2011, according to the California Supreme Court Historical Society. In 2000 the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review published his foreword and Roger Boren's detailed account of the trial. George wrote that, for all its length, the legal system had run its course and worked as intended.
The Hillside Strangler case was the subject of Darcy O'Brien's book Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers (NAL Books, 1985). A UPI reviewer that year called it a strong argument for capital punishment but found it slanted in favor of the police and Judge George, and too harsh on defense lawyers who were doing their jobs. Ted Schwarz's book The Hillside Strangler is listed by HistoryLink among its sources. In 2022 the Peacock network released a documentary series on the case, which The Daily Beast reviewed.
The Yolanda Washington count. Bianchi pleaded guilty to five of the murders and said Buono took part in all ten. The jury did not convict Buono of the Washington killing, because only Bianchi's account linked him to it. Buono's responsibility for that death was never proven in court.
Which killings Bianchi pleaded to. Reports agree that Bianchi pleaded guilty in Los Angeles to five murders, but none of them names which five. A 2025 Washington State Standard report said Bianchi and Buono were "convicted of strangling five people"; Buono was in fact convicted of nine.
Bianchi's reliability. Bianchi's own testimony was unreliable enough that the district attorney tried to drop the case and the judge found he had not testified truthfully. The convictions rested on that testimony together with independent evidence, chiefly the fibers and eyewitness identifications. The defense maintained Buono was innocent, and his lead lawyer said so after sentencing.
The dates of the killings. Sources differ on the date of Cindy Hudspeth's death (February 16 or 17, 1978) and on when Bianchi moved to Los Angeles (1975 or January 1976).
The number of marriages. The Occidental says Buono married three times; HistoryLink says four.
1934: Angelo Buono Jr. is born in Rochester, New York.
1951: Kenneth Bianchi is born in Rochester; he is adopted as an infant.
1955: Buono's first marriage, which ends almost at once.
1963: His second wife files for divorce.
January 1976: Bianchi moves to Los Angeles to live with Buono (HistoryLink; The Occidental says 1975).
October 17, 1977: Yolanda Washington is killed.
October 31, 1977: Judith Miller is killed.
November 5, 1977: Lissa Kastin is killed.
November 9, 1977: Jane King is killed.
November 13, 1977: Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson are taken.
November 19, 1977: Kristina Weckler is killed.
Late November 1977: Lauren Wagner is taken.
December 13, 1977: Kimberly Martin is taken.
February 16 or 17, 1978: Cindy Hudspeth is killed.
Late May 1978: Bianchi moves to Bellingham, Washington.
January 11 and 12, 1979: Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder are found dead in Bellingham; Bianchi is arrested.
October 19, 1979: Bianchi pleads guilty in Washington; Buono is arrested in Glendale and charged with 24 felonies, including ten murders.
October 22, 1979: Bianchi pleads guilty in Los Angeles to five murders.
1981: The case is assigned to Judge Ronald M. George; the district attorney's motion to dismiss is denied, and the attorney general takes over.
November 16, 1981: The trial begins.
June 1982: Bianchi begins about six months on the witness stand.
October 20, 1983: The jury begins deliberating.
Late October to November 1983: Buono is convicted of nine murders and not convicted of the tenth.
November 18, 1983: The jury chooses life without parole.
January 9, 1984: Judge George imposes nine concurrent life terms without parole and sends Bianchi back to Washington.
1985: Darcy O'Brien's Two of a Kind is published.
2000: The Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review publishes George's and Boren's accounts of the trial.
September 21, 2002: Buono dies in his cell at Calipatria State Prison, aged 67.