Buono was born in Rochester, New York, on October 5, 1934, and was brought to California as a child. He worked as a car upholsterer and had a shop and a house in Glendale, and a long record of violence towards women behind him. In 1976 his cousin Kenneth Bianchi, seventeen years younger, moved in with him.
Between October 1977 and February 1978 the two of them killed ten women and girls aged twelve to twenty-eight. They posed as police officers, using a fake badge, to get women into a car, took them to the Glendale house, raped and tortured them, and left the bodies on hillsides around the city. They experimented with lethal injection, electric shock and carbon monoxide.
The ten were Yolanda Washington, nineteen; Judith Ann Miller, fifteen; Lissa Kastin, twenty-one; Jane King, twenty-eight; Delores Cepeda, twelve; Sonja Johnson, fourteen; Kristina Weckler, twenty; Lauren Wagner, eighteen; Kimberly Martin, seventeen; and Cindy Lee Hudspeth, twenty.
Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, in 1979, killed two students there within weeks, and was arrested almost at once. He attempted an insanity defence, then agreed to testify against Buono in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
Buono's trial ran nearly two years, at the time the longest criminal trial in California history. The Los Angeles district attorney's office moved to dismiss the case for want of evidence, arguing that Bianchi was too unreliable a witness to build on; the judge refused and the state attorney general took over the prosecution. Buono was convicted in November 1983 of nine of the ten Los Angeles murders and sentenced to life without parole. He died of a heart attack at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002. Bianchi is serving life in Washington and has his own entry here.