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Angelo Buono, One of the Two Hillside Stranglers, Dies Alone in His Prison Cell at 67

Buono was serving life for the murders of nine women and girls in the Los Angeles area. He and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi were known together as the Hillside Strangler.

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Illustration of a desert state prison behind a fence and guard tower, with a pickup truck on a canal road. Not an actual scene from the case.

Angelo Buono spent the last part of his life in a cell of his own, kept apart because of his crimes. On September 21, 2002, he was found dead there, alone, at California State Prison, Calipatria.

Buono was 67. The cause of death was not immediately known, but a prison spokesman said he had a heart ailment and there were no signs of trauma. "He had assigned duties at the prison, and he was single-celled because of the nature of his crime," a Department of Corrections spokesman, Bob Martinez, said. "There was nothing exceptional about his conduct in prison."

Buono and his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, were known together as the Hillside Strangler. They killed nine women and girls in the Los Angeles area, aged 12 to 28. Buono was convicted of the murders of Judith Lynn Miller, Elissa Kastin, Jane Evelyn King, Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Lauren Rae Wagner, Kimberly Diane Martin and Cindy Lee Hudspeth. Bianchi was implicated after his arrest in Washington state, pleaded guilty to five of the California murders and was serving a life sentence.

Buono's trial in Los Angeles Superior Court, before Judge Ronald M. George, lasted about two years and ended in 1983. It heard 392 witnesses and produced nearly 56,000 pages of transcript. The jury did not recommend death, and Buono was sentenced to life in prison. "I believe the two of you are incapable of feeling any remorse," the judge said at sentencing.

The Washington Post dated Buono's sentencing to 1984, while The New York Times, as later cited by Oxygen, reported that he was sentenced in 1983.

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