Kenneth Bianchi pleaded guilty in October 1979 to seven murders: two in Bellingham, Washington, and five in Los Angeles County. He had been arrested in Bellingham in January of that year, the day after two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, disappeared. Within days, Los Angeles detectives connected him to the Hillside Strangler case, the series of ten killings of women and girls, some as young as 12, that had alarmed the Los Angeles area from October 1977 to February 1978.
Bianchi first claimed that another personality living inside him had committed the crimes. A panel of experts split over the claim, and a psychiatrist called by the prosecution concluded that he was faking it. To avoid a possible death sentence he accepted a plea agreement in both states and promised to testify against his adoptive cousin, Angelo Buono. On the witness stand he contradicted himself so often that the Los Angeles prosecutor's office moved to drop the case against Buono, but the judge refused, and in November 1983 a jury convicted Buono of nine murders. Bianchi has spent the decades since in prison in Washington, has denied his guilt and has repeatedly been refused parole. In 2023 he changed his name to Anthony D'Amato.
Bianchi was born in Rochester, New York, on May 22, 1951, according to an essay by the historian Daryl C. McClary for HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history, which draws on Bellingham and Los Angeles newspaper coverage and on books about the case. His birth mother was 17. He was adopted that August by a Rochester couple and was their only child.
HistoryLink's account says that as a boy he lied, had a quick temper and threw violent tantrums, and that he did poorly in school despite above-average intelligence. His adoptive father died in 1965. He graduated from Gates-Chili High School in 1970 and married the following year; the marriage lasted about eight months. He enrolled at Monroe Community College, did poorly and left. He wanted to be a police officer, but a sheriff's department turned him down, and he worked instead as a private security guard. He lost or left several of those jobs after stealing from employers, HistoryLink says.
Angelo Buono Jr. was also from Rochester. The Occidental, the student newspaper of Occidental College in Los Angeles, gave his birth year as 1934 in a 2016 account of the case. He was related to Bianchi through Bianchi's adoptive family and, by the mid-1970s, ran an automobile upholstery shop in Glendale, on the northern edge of Los Angeles. HistoryLink says Buono already had a history of sexual violence.
Accounts differ on when Bianchi moved west. HistoryLink says he went to Los Angeles in January 1976 to live with Buono; the 2016 Occidental article says 1975, and a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner photo caption from 1979 says 1977. In July 1976 he took a job with a title insurance company. He applied to the Los Angeles and Glendale police departments, and both turned him down. He began living with a woman he had met at work, and in February 1978 she gave birth to their son.
Between October 17, 1977, and February 17, 1978, at least ten women and girls between the ages of 12 and 28 were killed in the Los Angeles area in what became the Hillside Strangler series; HistoryLink attributes the killings to Bianchi and Buono. Bianchi later pleaded guilty to five of them, and Buono was convicted of nine. They sometimes posed as police officers. Some of the women they targeted were sex workers; others were girls and young women from the neighborhood where Bianchi lived. Their bodies were left on hillsides and roadside slopes around Los Angeles, which is how the press came to call the unknown killer the Hillside Strangler. Because the killings were the work of two men, the name is now usually written in the plural.
The ten Los Angeles victims are listed by HistoryLink with the dates it gives for their deaths. The Occidental's 2016 article adds a few details about who some of them were. Little else was reported about most of them.
Yolanda Washington was 19 and died on October 17, 1977. The Occidental described her as a waitress who was part of the Hollywood scene. Hers was the first death in the series.
Judith Ann Miller was 15. HistoryLink dates her death to October 31, 1977.
Lissa Kastin, whom HistoryLink names in full as Elissa Teresa Kastin, was 21. She worked as a waitress at a health food restaurant in Hollywood and hoped to break into show business, The Occidental said. She died on November 5, 1977.
Jane King was 28, an aspiring actress and model. HistoryLink dates her death to November 9, 1977; a Herald-Examiner photo caption from that month gives November 23.
Dolores Capeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, died together on November 13, 1977. They were the youngest of the victims.
Kristina Weckler was 20 and an art student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She died on November 19, 1977.
Lauren Wagner was 18, a business college student from Sepulveda, in the San Fernando Valley. She died on November 28, 1977.
Kimberly Martin was 17 and died on December 13, 1977.
Cindy Lee Hudspeth was 20 and worked as a cocktail waitress in Glendale. She was the last of the Los Angeles victims, killed on February 17, 1978.
The Occidental summarized the group as three sex workers, four young women it described as drifters, and two college students. Several of them were children. The reports do not say which of the ten deaths were covered by the five murders Bianchi later admitted in court.
In early March 1978, HistoryLink says, Bianchi's partner took their baby to her parents' home in Bellingham, a university town in northwest Washington near the Canadian border. She agreed to reconcile only if he moved there too, and he arrived in late May 1978.
In Bellingham he worked as a security guard for a local agency, and from August 1978 he was also assigned to a large store in town, where one of his co-workers was Karen Mandic. In November 1978 the agency made him a patrol captain. He applied to become a reserve deputy with the Whatcom County Sheriff's Department and took police courses.
Karen Mandic was 22 and came from Bellevue, near Seattle. She was a junior at Western Washington University, studying business administration, and worked part-time at the store where Bianchi was a guard. Diane Wilder was 27 and came from Bremerton. She was a dance major and a transfer student at Fairhaven College, part of the university. The two women shared a rented house. Their ages are also given as 22 and 27 in the Washington parole board's 2025 minutes.
Mandic had told friends and co-workers that Bianchi had offered each of them 100 dollars to sit in a vacant house for two hours while its alarm system was repaired. The house belonged to a retired executive who was traveling in Europe. The Washington parole board's minutes describe the same lure: he had used "the ruse of asking them to housesit."
On the evening of Thursday, January 11, 1979, Mandic left work for her dinner break at about 7 p.m. and did not come back. Late that night her manager called a friend in the university's security office; the friend and another security worker searched for the two women and for Mandic's car and, finding nothing, reported them missing to the Bellingham Police Department.
Police called the security agency. Bianchi told its owner he had been at a sheriff's reserve meeting that evening and did not know Mandic. The reserve commander said he had left the meeting early. At 2:30 the next morning Bianchi admitted to police that he had not been at the meeting and had been driving alone in the county, according to HistoryLink.
Police Chief Terry Mangan ordered a full investigation and put two detectives, Fred Nolte and Terry Wight, on the case full time. With the owners' permission, detectives searched the vacant house. They found nothing out of place but noticed wet footprints on the kitchen floor.
At about 4:30 p.m. on January 12, a neighbor reported Mandic's car parked in a wooded, undeveloped area. Both women were found dead inside it. The county medical examiner, Robert P. Gibb, found that each had been strangled with a ligature.
That evening Bianchi was told to report to a guard post at the port, where he was taken into custody for questioning. Acting on a tip, detectives found Diane Wilder's coat hidden about 20 feet from where he had parked his company truck. His accounts of the night contradicted one another, HistoryLink says, though the case was still largely circumstantial. The coat was one of the pieces of evidence the federal appeals court cited when it reviewed his case in 1994.
On January 13, Detective Nolte called the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department about Bianchi's California driver's license. The call reached Sergeant Frank Salerno, a member of the Hillside Strangler task force, who recognized the address. Salerno and his partner, Dudley Varney, flew to Bellingham the next day.
The evidence gathered in Bellingham, as HistoryLink lists it, included a note in Diane Wilder's handwriting recording that Bianchi had called on January 9; a slip of paper in Mandic's car with a time and the name Ken; a fresh dent in the car's gas tank that matched rocks near the vacant house; and a witness who had seen a man matching his description driving a security company truck in the area that night. A search of Bianchi's home on January 14 turned up property stolen from places he had guarded. Two pieces of jewelry, a turquoise ring and a gold necklace, matched jewelry worn by Hillside Strangler victims. The FBI laboratory matched carpet fibers on the women's clothing and on his to carpet in the house, and matched other trace evidence to him and to Diane Wilder.
On January 15, 1979, Bianchi appeared before Whatcom County Superior Court Judge Jack Kurtz on a charge of possessing stolen property. The county prosecutor, David McEachran, told the court that Bianchi was the prime suspect in the double murder and asked for high bail. Kurtz set bail at 150,000 dollars and appointed a lawyer, Dean Brett.
On January 26 Bianchi was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and the stolen property charge was dropped. Kurtz barred everyone involved from discussing the case and sealed the prosecutor's affidavit of probable cause. The Bellingham Herald asked the court to unseal it. Kurtz refused, ruling that Bianchi's right to a fair trial outweighed the claim of the press, and on April 30, 1979, the Washington Supreme Court held that the newspaper should have taken a different legal route. On January 29 Bianchi pleaded not guilty, and he was held without bail.
In Los Angeles, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said on April 23, 1979, that the task force had enough evidence to charge Bianchi with ten of the Hillside Strangler murders. On May 9 the Los Angeles County district attorney, John Van de Kamp, filed a complaint charging him with five.
In March 1979 Bianchi changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. HistoryLink dates the change to March 30; the psychiatrist Martin Orne and his co-authors, in a 1984 paper on the case, date it to March 29. Brett said that his client had no memory of the killings and that three psychiatrists had diagnosed severe multiple personality disorder. McEachran gave notice that the state would seek the death penalty if Bianchi were convicted, and Judge Kurtz appointed a panel of six experts, two chosen by each side and two by the court, to assess his competency and sanity.
The 1984 paper by Orne, David F. Dinges and Emily Carota Orne, published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, is the most detailed public account of what those experts saw. On March 21, 1979, John G. Watkins, a psychologist retained by the defense, hypnotized Bianchi, and a personality calling itself Steve appeared and claimed the killings. Steve also implicated Buono in the Los Angeles murders, according to HistoryLink. Watkins diagnosed Bianchi as a multiple personality. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist who examined him as a friend of the court, also used hypnosis; at one session, the paper says, Bianchi acted surprised to find cigarette filter tips that Steve had supposedly left behind. Donald T. Lunde, who examined him for the defense without hypnosis, reportedly called him a pathological liar.
Orne, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and an authority on hypnosis, was called by the prosecution and first met Steve on May 27, 1979. He set a series of tests. In one, he remarked to Bianchi that it was "pretty rare for there to be two" personalities. A third personality, Billy, described in the paper as "an enthusiastic, pleasant hustler," appeared soon after. Orne concluded that Billy had been created by the hint. In another test, he suggested that Bianchi's lawyer was sitting in the room when he was not. Bianchi got up, shook hands with the imagined lawyer and asked whether the examiner could see him too. Orne's team wrote that they had never seen a deeply hypnotized subject behave that way, and read it as an effort to convince the examiner.
The paper found other problems. Steve began as a passive figure and grew aggressive and profane over about two months, a change the authors called "incompatible with the pre-existence of a distinct, well-integrated alter personality." Investigators found no one who had seen any sign of other personalities or sudden shifts in Bianchi's earlier life. The name Steve Walker turned out to belong to a real psychologist, who had answered a classified ad Bianchi placed in May 1978. Bianchi had then written to schools in that man's name to obtain diplomas, which were altered to show his own name.
Orne concluded that "Mr. Bianchi was simulating a multiple personality," and diagnosed antisocial personality disorder with sexual sadism. Psychologists who reviewed Bianchi's test results reached similar conclusions, the paper says: one found that Ken, Steve and Billy appeared to be roles developed from a common core, and that Bianchi might have created the other selves to shift the blame. The panel of six, according to HistoryLink, was divided: two members believed he had multiple personalities and was not competent, two believed he was faking, and two could not be sure.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Whatcom County offered Bianchi a deal. He would plead guilty to the two Bellingham murders and to five in Los Angeles, avoid the death penalty, serve his sentence in California and testify fully against Buono. The Ninth Circuit later summed up his choice by saying that he pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty.
On October 19, 1979, Judge Kurtz found Bianchi competent to stand trial, with all six experts in agreement, HistoryLink says. Bianchi withdrew his insanity plea and pleaded guilty to both Bellingham murders. McEachran withdrew his notice that the state would seek death, and Kurtz sentenced Bianchi to two consecutive terms of life without parole.
The next day he was flown to Los Angeles. On October 22, 1979, he pleaded guilty before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William B. Keen to five counts of murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one sex-offense count. Keen gave him five life terms for the murders, a life term for the conspiracy and five years on the remaining count, all to run concurrently. The judge said he wished he could make the sentences consecutive, but California law required them to be merged. Officials estimated at the time that Bianchi would serve 20 to 35 years in California before being returned to Washington.
Within 30 minutes of Bianchi's guilty plea in Bellingham, HistoryLink says, task force detectives arrested Angelo Buono at his upholstery shop in Glendale. He was charged with 24 felonies, among them ten murders. A Herald-Examiner photograph caption from his arraignment records that he pleaded not guilty to ten murder counts and 14 related counts and was held without bail in the same jail as Bianchi.
Prosecutors knew that much of the case depended on Bianchi. His guilty plea had made him a competent witness, but his credibility was another matter.
Bianchi began to break his plea agreement almost at once, according to HistoryLink. Buono's preliminary hearing lasted ten months, the longest in Los Angeles County history at the time, and Bianchi used his testimony to make contradictory statements that weakened the case. Buono's defense lawyer, Gerald Chaleff, questioned him at length; Herald-Examiner photographs show the exchanges in about 1980 and again at the trial. On March 16, 1981, Municipal Court Judge H. Randolph Moore found probable cause and ordered Buono to stand trial. The case was assigned to Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George, who later became chief justice of the California Supreme Court.
After the plea, the Orne paper notes, Bianchi stopped keeping the diary he had kept during the psychiatric evaluations and blamed the Bellingham killings on a man who had died in an accident after the murders. Police established that the man had not been involved and that Bianchi knew of his death.
In 1980 a new figure entered the case. Veronica Compton, 24, who described herself as an actress, poet and playwright, began writing to Bianchi while he was in jail in Los Angeles. HistoryLink says the two planned to make it appear that the real killer was still at large: she would travel to Bellingham, strangle a woman and leave evidence that resembled the Mandic and Wilder killings.
On September 19, 1980, Compton met a woman at a Bellingham tavern, lured her to a motel room and tried to strangle her. The woman fought free and escaped. Anonymous cassette tapes mailed in Bellingham and Los Angeles had claimed that police had the wrong man and that the real Hillside Strangler would strike again, the Associated Press reported, and Compton was accused of leaving one of them at the Bellingham airport earlier that month. On October 2, 1980, Bellingham police arrested her in California on a Washington warrant for attempted first-degree murder; bail was set at 500,000 dollars. The AP reported that Los Angeles detectives suspected she had acted at Bianchi's direction, which threatened the case against Buono.
Compton's trial began in Bellingham on March 9, 1981, before Whatcom County Superior Court Judge Byron L. Swedberg, with jurors brought in from Pierce County. She claimed the attack had been a publicity stunt for a screenplay. On March 20, 1981, after three hours of deliberation, the jury convicted her of attempted first-degree murder, with a special finding that she had been armed with a deadly weapon. On May 22, 1981, Swedberg sentenced her to life with the possibility of parole. She escaped from the state women's prison in 1988 and was caught nine days later in Arizona, and she was paroled for the last time in 2003, HistoryLink says. According to the Orne paper, she admitted that the plan had been discussed with Bianchi.
In July 1981, with Bianchi's testimony shifting from one hearing to the next, District Attorney Van de Kamp let his prosecutors move to dismiss all ten murder charges against Buono. Judge George refused, ruling that there was enough evidence to go ahead. Van de Kamp then declared a conflict of interest, and the case passed to the office of the state attorney general, George Deukmejian. Two deputy attorneys general, Michael Nash and Roger Boren, took it to trial. They believed the evidence against Buono was strong even without Bianchi.
Pretrial hearings began on November 2, 1981. Judge George ruled that Bianchi had faked both his hypnosis and his multiple personalities and that his testimony was admissible. Jury selection began on November 16, 1981, and took about three months.
The trial ran for two years and two days, which HistoryLink calls the longest criminal trial in American history; it cost Los Angeles County about 2 million dollars. Bianchi was the 200th witness and spent 80 days on the stand. He contradicted himself again and again. At one point he claimed he had lost his memory; at another he denied committing any of the murders, including the two in Bellingham. City News Service, reporting in 2025, quoted his testimony: "I could not remember in detail my participation in the crimes. But Angelo Buono has stuck in my mind as a participant."
The jury began deliberating on October 21, 1983. On November 18, 1983, it found Buono guilty of nine of the ten murders. Rather than death, the jurors recommended life in prison without the possibility of parole, as a court clerk read out in a Los Angeles courtroom that November in a scene recorded by the Herald-Examiner.
On January 9, 1984, Judge George sentenced Buono to life without parole. He said he would not have hesitated to impose the death penalty, and he blamed Bianchi for undermining the trial. He ordered Bianchi sent back to Washington to serve his sentence there and said that neither man should ever be paroled. A Herald-Examiner photograph from 1984 shows Bianchi being helped into a county helicopter for the trip to Los Angeles International Airport and a flight to Washington. On February 1, 1984, California filed a detainer with Washington, so that if Bianchi were ever released from Washington custody he would be transferred to California. His release would need the approval of both states.
Bianchi was held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. On September 21, 1989, he married a woman from outside the prison in a short ceremony in the prison chapel; HistoryLink says they had written to each other since 1986 and met for the first time the day before. Prison officials refused him conjugal visits, citing security and his record of violence toward women. He sued, and in November 1990 Walla Walla County Superior Court Judge Donald W. Schacht ruled that the officials had acted within their authority.
Under a change in state law, Washington's parole board set a minimum term for his two life sentences in July 1990. HistoryLink gives it as 116.5 years; the Washington State Standard, reporting in 2025, said the board had revised his sentence to more than 118 years. The Standard and KIRO 7 reported that, with credit for good behavior, his release date was set for 2065.
Angelo Buono was sent to Folsom Prison and later moved. He died of a heart attack in his cell at Calipatria State Prison on September 21, 2002, at the age of 67, according to HistoryLink and KIRO 7.
Bianchi has repeatedly tried to undo his Washington convictions. In a federal habeas corpus petition, filed without a lawyer, he argued that his guilty plea had been involuntary. He said he had pleaded guilty only after studying police reports and photographs, and that hypnotic suggestion had planted false memories of the crimes. He also argued that his lawyers had failed him.
The United States District Court denied the petition, and on May 6, 1994, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judges Wright, Schroeder and Brunetti, affirmed in an unpublished decision, Bianchi v. Blodgett. The court said it was "not clear that he was ever hypnotized," noting that one of the examining experts, a specialist in hypnosis, believed he had faked his trances, and it found no proof that his memories had been engineered. Looking at all the circumstances, it held that he had pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty and that his acceptance of guilt was "an exercise of internal reason," not the result of outside coercion. It rejected the claim against his lawyers because he could not show it had made a difference: the evidence of guilt, including his lies to police, the victim's coat found near the place of his arrest and his confessions to six psychologists, made it unlikely that he would have gone to trial. Urging an insanity defense, and then advising a guilty plea to avoid a death sentence, were reasonable professional choices, the court said.
He has kept making the same argument. The Washington State Standard reported in 2025 that he had challenged his Washington convictions on several grounds, including the claim that his confession was the product of hypnosis, and that he maintains he is innocent.
Because Bianchi has life sentences in two states, he has faced two parole systems.
California considered his case in August 2010. A state board in Sacramento denied parole, and he could not apply again for 15 years, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, Sandi Gibbons, said in reports by NBC Los Angeles and CBS News on August 18 and 19, 2010. He was 59 and serving his life sentence in Walla Walla.
In 2023, according to the Washington State Standard, KIRO 7 and Fox News, he legally changed his name to Anthony D'Amato.
Washington's Indeterminate Sentence Review Board scheduled a hearing for him in late May 2025, then postponed it. He was seen at the penitentiary on June 25, 2025, in a hearing closed to the public. The board's minutes of July 14, 2025, record that he was under its jurisdiction for two counts of first-degree murder from Whatcom County and that he also had five murder convictions from California. Risk assessments placed him at high risk to reoffend. His last serious infraction had been in 2020, for lying to staff. The panel noted his "active refusal to participate in available programs or resources" and wrote that he had "spent dramatically more time pursuing legal challenges to his conviction than toward rehabilitative efforts." It found that he avoided responsibility by introducing irrelevant or confusing information, using complex legal language and pointing out the faults of others, which it said was not a sign of rehabilitation. The board decided not to release him to his California sentences and added 120 months to his minimum term. It recommended that he take part in programs, stay free of infractions and attend his next hearing, which is to be set about 120 days before his earned release date and will require a psychological evaluation.
California's turn came weeks later. In July 2025 he was denied parole for ten years, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said, as reported by City News Service. He was 74.
As of October 22, 2026, the Washington Department of Corrections' incarcerated individual lookup lists Anthony A. D'Amato, DOC number 266961, age 75, at the Washington State Penitentiary. No later parole decision or court ruling about him has been reported. If Washington ever releases him, he would be transferred to California to serve his life sentences there, which a California parole board has twice declined to end.
Proven by his own guilty pleas and final: the murders of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder in Bellingham (Washington, October 19, 1979) and five murders in Los Angeles County, with one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one sex-offense count (California, October 22, 1979). The Ninth Circuit rejected his claim that the pleas were coerced.
Attributed, never tried against him: the remaining Los Angeles killings in the Hillside Strangler series. Los Angeles police said in April 1979 that they had evidence to charge him with ten. Angelo Buono was convicted of nine of the ten in 1983, a verdict that rested in part on Bianchi's own testimony as well as on other evidence the prosecutors considered strong on its own. The reports do not say which five killings Bianchi pleaded guilty to, or which killing the jury did not find proven against Buono.
His own position: Bianchi has given changing accounts. He claimed an alternate personality, then, after pleading guilty, blamed a man who was dead, then at Buono's trial both implicated his cousin and denied any part in the killings. Since then he has said that his confessions came from hypnosis and that he is innocent. Courts and the Washington parole board have not accepted those claims.
Accounts differ on several details: when he moved to Los Angeles (January 1976 per HistoryLink, 1975 per The Occidental, 1977 per a Herald-Examiner caption); the date of his insanity plea (March 29 or March 30, 1979); the date of Jane King's death (November 9 or November 23, 1977); the spelling of two victims' names (Lissa or Elissa Kastin; the youngest victim's surname appears as Capeda in the main reports and in other spellings elsewhere); the minimum term set in 1990 (116.5 years or more than 118 years); and the Washington board's 2025 minutes, which give his age at the time of the Bellingham killings in a way that does not match his recorded birth date.
May 22, 1951: Kenneth Bianchi is born in Rochester, New York; he is adopted that August.
1965: his adoptive father dies.
1970: graduates from Gates-Chili High School.
1971: marries; the marriage lasts about eight months.
About 1976: moves to Los Angeles, where his adoptive cousin Angelo Buono runs an upholstery shop in Glendale.
July 1976: takes a job at a title insurance company; later turned down by the Los Angeles and Glendale police departments.
October 17, 1977: Yolanda Washington, 19, is killed, the first of ten deaths in the Hillside Strangler series.
October 31 to December 13, 1977: Judith Ann Miller, Lissa Kastin, Jane King, Dolores Capeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Lauren Wagner and Kimberly Martin are killed.
February 17, 1978: Cindy Lee Hudspeth, 20, is killed, the last of the Los Angeles victims.
February 1978: his son is born.
Late May 1978: he moves to Bellingham, Washington, and works as a security guard.
January 11, 1979: Karen Mandic, 22, and Diane Wilder, 27, are killed after he lures them to a vacant house.
January 12, 1979: the women are found; Bianchi is taken into custody.
January 14, 1979: Los Angeles task force detectives arrive in Bellingham; his home is searched.
January 26, 1979: charged with two counts of first-degree murder.
March 21, 1979: "Steve" first appears under hypnosis.
March 1979: pleads not guilty by reason of insanity; six-expert panel appointed.
April 23, 1979: Los Angeles police chief says there is evidence to charge him with ten murders.
April 30, 1979: Washington Supreme Court rules on the Bellingham Herald's challenge to sealed records.
May 9, 1979: Los Angeles complaint charges him with five murders.
May 27, 1979: Martin Orne first examines him.
October 19, 1979: found competent; pleads guilty in Bellingham to two murders; two consecutive life terms. Buono is arrested in Glendale.
October 22, 1979: pleads guilty in Los Angeles to five murders, conspiracy and a sex-offense count; concurrent life terms.
September 19, 1980: Veronica Compton attempts a copycat strangling in Bellingham; arrested October 2.
March 16, 1981: Buono ordered to stand trial after a ten-month preliminary hearing.
March 20, 1981: Compton convicted of attempted first-degree murder; sentenced to life on May 22.
July 1981: Judge Ronald M. George refuses to dismiss the case against Buono; the attorney general's office takes over.
November 2, 1981: pretrial hearings begin; the judge rules that Bianchi faked hypnosis and multiple personality.
November 16, 1981: jury selection begins.
November 18, 1983: Buono convicted of nine murders; the jury recommends life without parole.
January 9, 1984: Buono sentenced; Bianchi ordered returned to Washington.
February 1, 1984: California files a detainer with Washington.
1984: Orne, Dinges and Orne publish their study of the case.
September 21, 1989: Bianchi marries in the prison chapel at Walla Walla.
July 1990: Washington parole board sets his minimum term.
November 1990: his suit over conjugal visits is rejected.
May 6, 1994: Ninth Circuit rejects his habeas appeal (Bianchi v. Blodgett).
September 21, 2002: Angelo Buono dies at Calipatria State Prison, aged 67.
August 2010: California parole denied; next eligibility in 15 years.
2023: changes his name to Anthony D'Amato.
June 25, 2025: Washington parole hearing at the penitentiary.
July 14, 2025: Washington board declines release and adds 120 months to his minimum term.
July 2025: California parole denied for ten years.
October 22, 2026: held at the Washington State Penitentiary, Walla Walla.