In January 1979, in Bellingham, Washington, two college students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were found strangled. Within days police arrested a twenty-seven-year-old local security guard, Kenneth Bianchi. Detectives in Los Angeles, where ten women and girls had been raped, strangled and left on hillsides in the fall and winter of 1977 and 1978, soon learned that he had lived there until the year before.
Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born in Rochester, New York, on May 22, 1951, to a seventeen-year-old prostitute who gave him up for adoption two weeks later. Nicholas Bianchi and his wife, Frances, adopted him that August. His adoptive mother called him a compulsive liar from the time he could talk. He fell into trance-like daydreams, his eyes rolling back, and was diagnosed with petit mal seizures at five and passive-aggressive personality disorder at ten. His father died of pneumonia in 1964, and the boy showed no grief. After graduating from Gates-Chili High School in 1970 he married his high school girlfriend, who left him after eight months. He wanted to be a police officer, took one semester of police science at Monroe Community College, was rejected by the sheriff's department, and worked as a security guard at a jewelry store, stealing valuables to give to girlfriends and prostitutes.
In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles and fell in with his older cousin, Angelo Buono Jr., a nephew of his adoptive mother, who impressed him with his clothes and his way with women. They worked together as pimps, and by late 1977 they were killing. Flashing phony police badges, they ordered women into Bianchi's Cadillac as if it were an unmarked police car, handcuffed them, took them to Buono's upholstery shop in Glendale, sexually abused them and strangled them, and they experimented with lethal injection, electric shock and carbon monoxide. They killed 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. While the killings went on, Bianchi applied to the LAPD and went on ride-alongs with officers searching for the Hillside Strangler. After his arrest he said they had once stopped Catharine Lorre, meaning to take her, and let her go when they learned she was the daughter of the actor Peter Lorre.
Other deaths were attached to the series and taken off it. Laura Collins, twenty-six, found strangled in Griffith Park in September 1977, was not listed in the 1979 complaint and remains unsolved; Kathleen Robinson, seventeen, was quickly ruled out; and Jill Barcomb, eighteen, killed in November 1977, was one of five murders for which Rodney Alcala was convicted in 2010. Bianchi was also once a suspect in Rochester's Alphabet murders of three girls from 1971 to 1973, having worked as an ice cream vendor near two of the scenes. He has denied them and was never charged.
In Bellingham he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, blaming another personality, Steve Walker. He had apparently seen the 1976 film Sybil, and he convinced several psychiatrists. The prosecution's expert, Martin Orne, told him that genuine cases usually involve three or more personalities, and a third, Billy, promptly appeared. Orne had him greet an imaginary lawyer, and Bianchi reached out to shake the phantom's hand, a tactile hallucination Orne had never seen in a real case. The name Steve Walker turned out to belong to a student whose identity Bianchi had tried to steal to practice psychology fraudulently, and police found a small library of psychology books in his home. He admitted faking the disorder and was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder with sexual sadism.
To avoid the death penalty he pleaded guilty in Washington to the two Bellingham murders and in California to five of the Los Angeles murders, agreeing to testify against Buono. On the stand he was as contradictory and uncooperative as he could manage, apparently hoping to sink the case, but Buono was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to life, and died in prison in 2002. In 1980 Bianchi began a relationship with Veronica Compton, who testified falsely for him and was later imprisoned for trying to strangle a woman in a motel to make it look as if the Strangler were still at large; Bianchi had allegedly given her his semen to plant. In 1992 he sued a publisher for putting his face on a trading card, claiming it as a trademark, and the judge dismissed the suit.
He is serving his sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church in March 1989 and that September married Shirlee Joyce Book, from Montgomery, Alabama, in the prison chapel. His appeals, including a 1994 claim that he was coerced into pleading guilty under hypnosis, failed. He was denied parole in 2010 and again in 2025.