Hillside Stranglers (25 page)

“Did you ever discuss the Hillside Strangler cases,” Finnigan asked, “at the time they were on the news, with Ken Bianchi?”

“Oh, we commented on it, Kenny commented on it, I commented on it, like I said, I commented like, you know, could have been two girls or a guy and a girl doing it. And he didn’t respond too much to it, when I think back now. ’Cause my daughter just told me he used to ask her, you know, he said you want to go somewhere, I’ll take you. So, you know, when, ah, then he, ahm, used to see it on the news and comment to me, he was kind of quiet about it. You know, he said something, but not like me and you would talk about it, you know, like two people would talk about it.”

“Do you know of Kenny having any weird sexual hang-ups?” Finnigan asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t, ah, you know, been double dating together and end up shacked up with screwing the same broads. You know, everybody’s got funny things, you know.”

Grogan inquired once more whether Angelo had ever been involved in prostitution, with girls and pimps and pimping.

“I never pimped any girls. If you call knowing Kenny, hustling girls in my place, and that makes me a pimp, then I’m a pimp. All the girls I know, if they sell their butt, they’re doing it without me. I ain’t getting no money.”

Finally, Angelo denied having contacted Kenny since his arrest in Bellingham.

“No,” Angelo said calmly. “I haven’t even talked to his mother and I’m surprised she hasn’t called me. She used to call all the time and ask me how Kenny was getting along.”

Grogan and Finnigan concluded the interview. They had questioned Angelo for nearly two and a half hours. He had contradicted himself at several points, especially about whether he knew Becky Spears and whether he knew about the prostitution, and of course it was absurd for him to admit it had been headquartered out of his own house and then to say he had nothing to do with it. He had tried to paint Kenny as irrational and, absurdly, to depict himself as a concerned father.
His theory about two women being the murderers was certainly unique.

“The creep will never admit to anything,” Grogan said. “We might as well forget about that. He’s the type would go to the gas chamber denying everything. And you know something? There are people out there would believe him. There are juries would believe him. They’d believe Angelo Buono is just a hardworking guy with all these kids to support. Just a guy who happened to get divorced and settles down with a nice Chinese girl twenty-five years younger than him. They would actually believe him.”

Grogan got further insight into Buono’s family life when he went to see Candy at the house on Glover Street. Candy was not reluctant to talk about her ex-husband, and perhaps the most important information she supplied Grogan was that Angelo knew Landa Street, the most obscure of the body sites, very well. She remembered his taking the family on a picnic to the “cow patch.” She also described to Grogan the beatings she had endured, the threats against her life; she told him about Angelo’s handcuffing her and tying her to the bed and about how Angelo would never give her any money for the children after the divorce. She doubted that her children would talk about their father. Her son Peter was afraid Angelo would kill him, and, in Candy’s opinion, he would not hesitate to kill anyone who crossed him, including his own son.

When Grogan and Finnigan talked to Peter, he was so gone on drugs that he could barely speak, but he did manage to get out that his father would kill him if he talked. And when Grogan was interviewing Artie Ford, the story about Angelo’s turning on the gas and not caring whether the kids blew up along with Candy came out, as did Angelo’s boast that he and his sons had slept with his stepdaughter and Peter’s statement that Angelo had had sex with him, too. Grogan wondered what else Angelo might have done; it was beyond imagining.

The police obtained a warrant to search 703 East Colorado. They moved Angelo into a Holiday Inn for three days so that they could make the search as thorough as possible, but they
found nothing. They used a chemical spray, ninhydrin, which was capable of revealing fingerprints even years old, but Angelo’s tidiness paid off for him. No fingerprints of any age or kind showed up, not even Angelo’s own. That a man could live for years in a house and avoid leaving a single set of his own prints seemed incredible.

Angelo bitched, of course, about being moved out of his own house, claiming that his rights were being violated, and he complained that his privacy was being invaded also by his being publicly identified in the newspapers and on television as a suspect in the Stranglers case. What if some nut should take it into his head to kill him, an innocent man? Angelo had good reason to be apprehensive about vigilantes. He received several anonymous threatening letters, which he turned over to the police:

To Greaser Buono:

You sure are guilty as hell. You are a perfect example of a sub-human mutation and your existance [sic] is a disgrace to normal human beings. I pray to God someone kills you.

And:

Mr. Buono, why don’t you and your gook wife go back to New York where New York wops belong. We do not like your kind in Glendale.

Grogan hoped that no one would actually shoot Buono, only because there would be so much public sympathy for the assassin that it would create a messy public relations problem for the police who would have to arrest him.

Grogan now spent most of his days and nights interviewing anyone he could find who had had anything to do with either Bianchi or Buono, weaving together the hundreds of threads that bound the two. One Sunday he took his girlfriend—for so she had become and yet remained, the woman he had met through the case—out for a ride on the boat. He could not stop
talking to her about Buono and Bianchi, and because the case had broken after Grogan and she had begun their affair, it gave them a common ground, far more than the usual connections for middle-aged lovers, more like the violent intensities of a wartime romance. When Grogan was not actually working on the case he was thinking and talking about it; at night he dreamed about it, reenacting the stranglings as he imagined them, Angelo’s flesh-crawling voice ever in his ear.

That Sunday he piloted
Sunny
ten miles out toward Catalina Island and cut the engine, letting her drift. He sat in a deck chair in swimming trunks, a baseball cap on his head, fishing for yellowtail, drinking a Cape Codder, vodka and cranberry juice, a link to home. Here he was happiest, or as happy as he could be with his life messed up, rocked by the swell, breathing in the salt, thinking that this was the California he loved. Out there on the sea he liked to look back toward shore and imagine what the city had been before all the human beings had fouled it up. The California Indians had been so content, Grogan had read, that they had forgotten what war was and had been easy prey for the Spaniards and their militia-backed missionaries. Then there was the pueblo that became the City of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, a paradise for a while of sun and sea. But everything was only for a while. The good old days had lasted about sixty years. Looking windward, Grogan observed Catalina, a hump of the state preserved, owned for years by
Wrigley, the chewing-gum mogul, a remnant, a deep-green bushy haven rising softly out of the ocean, beyond it nothing till Hawaii. Often he had dived for abalone there, spent cool-damp nights on the boat, moored in the quiet harbor of the isthmus, forgetting everything. But now he could not get Angelo Buono out of his mind.

“That is the coldest, most dangerous son of a bitch I have ever met,” Grogan shouted at the sea. His girlfriend listened as she sunned herself on the deck. He rattled the ice in his glass. “That guy would stop at nothing, and look, he’s lived in this town for forty years. Forty years! Like a snake. Waiting to strike. And look who he strikes. Lauren and Kristina. A guy like that, gassing’s too good for him. You wouldn’t believe how cold. And
all those kids of his! But you just wait. Some nitwit is going to come along and say Angelo’s mother was mean to him. Poor Angelo! I tell you this world is so fucked up it isn’t even worth saving. We ought to never leave this boat.”

Another thing Grogan said he could not understand: how could all those girls go for Buono? He was so ugly! Slimy! But more girls were turning up every day. Frank Salerno had found another one. Frank had been over at the Trim Shop and Angelo had actually introduced him to her. She was Melinda Hooper. It so happened that she lived on Alta Terrace, just down the street from where Judy Miller had been found, so it was a great break in the case, it linked Angelo to another dump site. But what did all these girls see in Angelo? “I mean, this guy has shit coming out of his pores,” Grogan said. “How do you figure it, K.O.?” Grogan called her by her initials, because, he said, she was a knockout. Sometimes he called her T.K.O.

K.O. said that she did not find Angelo’s attractiveness to women so difficult to understand. It was like
Beauty and the Beast
. Even Quasimodo had his appeal. Some women thought ugly men were cute, like newborn babies, which was what Quasimodo’s name meant in French. She started to explain, but Grogan cut her off:

“You’re talking like a goddam English major.”

But K.O. said that she could explain without recourse to literary references. Grogan had been talking so much about Angelo that her curiosity had gotten the better of her. She had decided that she had to get a look at the guy herself.

“You didn’t go over there?” Grogan swung around and stared down at K.O.

“Yes, I did,” K.O. said. “I went over to the Trim Shop.”

“You must be out of your mind!”

“I pretended I needed some upholstery work done on my car.”

“You talked to him?”

“He was talking to some other customers, they must have been. He gave me a look. I’ll never forget it. He looked right through me. I must have been standing about ten feet from him. If I hadn’t known who he was . . .”

“Yeah? You what?”

K.O. grinned. “I might have taken my clothes off right there. No kidding. The guy is magnetic.”

“I suppose you think he looked like a newborn baby!”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Jesus Christ! Don’t you ever go near that place again! Don’t you know we’re getting calls from the neighborhood? People are afraid. They should be! Are you nuts? Are you kidding me?” K.O. shook her head. “Oh, Lord, what is life? Why didn’t my mother tell me about life?”

Grogan put down his fishing pole and his drink and hurled himself over the side, disappearing, breaking the surface snorting, swirling and splashing, the large-hearted walrus.

Locked up safely in the Whatcom County Jail, Kenny Bianchi had little opportunity to indulge his inclinations to evil, but he could still lie. And he found several people important to his fate who were ready, for one reason or another, to believe him. His initial, foundational lie was that he could remember nothing about the night of January 11 except that he had gone out for a drive. He told his court-appointed lawyer, Dean Brett, that he was so concerned about his situation, so distressed about his apparent amnesia, and so horrified at the possibility, which he could scarcely imagine, that he had killed two people, that he was considering suicide. Worried about his client, Dean Brett called in a psychiatric social worker, John Johnson, to counsel Kenny.

John Johnson spent a great deal of time with Kenny during February and found it difficult to square his mild, intelligent, and sensitive personality with that of a multiple murderer (by
this time Kenny had been publicly identified as a prime suspect in the Hillside Stranglings as well). After listening for weeks to Kenny’s sorrows, his love for his mother, his concern for Kelli and Ryan, his shocked disbelief in the possibility of his guilt, his desire to regain his Roman Catholic faith, his belief in his fellow man, his love of children, his affection for nature, the pride he had taken in his work in Bellingham, his admiration for his deceased adoptive father, his respect for his mother’s present husband, the high regard in which he held womankind—after weeks of this John Johnson ruminated on the various categories of neurosis and psychosis into which Kenneth Bianchi, murderer, might fit. How best, Johnson reasoned, proceeding deductively on the basis of his psychological training, could one label a man who had committed acts so at odds with his observable personality and his social and moral values, as manifested during so many hours of discussion? How could one reconcile Kenny’s obvious concern for the welfare of his wife and child, who were visiting him regularly in jail, with his strangling to death at least two women?

His amnesia, Johnson thought, might well be a key. It just might be that Bianchi was suffering from a multiple personality disorder, a condition in which more than one person or personality appears to inhabit the same physical body. Certainly multiple personality disorder was a possibility worth investigating. Just as there had been
The Three Faces of Eve
, there might be three, four, or five faces of Kenny, each one unaware of the others. Johnson told Dean Brett about this possibility and hinted at it to Bianchi.

Kenny took the hint, leaped at it. He remembered having seen the movie of
The Three Faces of Eve
years before, and his considerable readings in psychology and psychiatry told him that here just might be a golden opportunity to beat this rap with an insanity plea. He would have to be careful. He would have to pretend complete ignorance of his supposed illness and yet manage to behave exactly as someone suffering from it might behave. This role would be quite a challenge, perhaps the greatest of his life, but if he could fool Dr. Weingarten into believing that he, Kenny Bianchi from nowhere, was a bona
fide psychologist and renting him an office, why couldn’t he convince another shrink that he was suffering from some fantastic lunacy? As usual, Kenny had faith in his abilities and undying hope that somehow everything would turn out all right for him. And after all, he had already apparently convinced a highly educated psychiatric social worker without even trying, without even knowing what disorder was supposedly afflicting him. The rest might be a snap.

At John Johnson’s suggestion, Dean Brett called in a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Donald T. Lunde, author of
Murder and Madness
and a professor at Stanford University, to examine his client. The first interview was scheduled for March 11, and Bianchi tried to prepare for it by pumping John Johnson. Kenny was nervous. This new scam might be all that stood between him and the electric chair. In Washington, he knew, they still fried people.

But then fortune smiled on Kenneth Bianchi. On the evening of March 9, just two days before his session with Dr. Lunde, Kenny was flipping the dial on the television set in his jail cell and stopped at Channel 8, BCTV, whose signal came to him from across the border in Canada like a protective blessing from his guardian angel. The Friday Night Movie was, to Kenny’s delight, the story of a multiple personality case,
Sybil,
starring Joanne Woodward, who had played Eve in
The Three Faces of Eve
and this time played the psychiatrist, and Sally Field, who played Sybil and her other personalities, including Vicky, Peggy, Marsha, and so on. What a break.

Kenny watched
Sybil
with all the intensity of a college student cramming for a final examination. He noted that as the mystery of Sybil’s illness unfolded, tremendous emphasis was placed on the role of early childhood traumas. According to the movie, Sybil had been sexually abused, and her music teacher had been a tyrant. As an adult Sybil suffered from monstrous headaches accompanied by terrific noises in the head, and she endured frequent nightmares, many of them featuring little animals and fantasies of pursuit and entrapment. Dreams and headaches, Kenny told himself, headaches and dreams, I am going to have to have plenty of both. Watching Joanne Wood-ward
brought back memories of
The Three Faces of Eve
which assisted Kenny in his research, and now he studied the kinds of questions she directed at Sybil, asking her what other personalities were inside of her and how she felt about one or another. “Marsha is going to kill Sybil someday,” Sybil said. “Marsha is the only one with any
joie de vivre.
” He watched as Sally Field skillfully took on the radically different characteristics of the various personalities. He concluded that he would have to invent someone opposite from his own sweet-natured public self, someone surly, foul-mouthed, and arrogant. Someone rather like Angelo. For the moment, he did not worry about naming this other self. A name would come to him in due time. He knew that if he overprepared, he might come off phony. After all, he was not supposed to know about these other selves yet. His performance, like Sally Field’s, would have to suggest a tormented voyage of interior discovery.

As it happened, Dr. Lunde did not try to investigate the question of multiple personalities. He focused on Kenny’s apparent inability to remember anything about the Bellingham murders, and he suggested that either amytal, a barbiturate sometimes given to reduce anxiety, or hypnosis be administered to explore Kenny’s faulty memory. Kenny, of course, preferred to be hypnotized or rather to be given the opportunity to pretend to be hypnotized. He had read a book on the subject and he knew that no one could be hypnotized against his will. There was no telling what he might say if drugged, but if he could fake being hypnotized he might be able to convince anyone of anything. To his relief, Dean Brett decided to call in Dr. John G. Watkins, who had had extensive experience for over thirty years in the field of dissociative reaction, including amnesia and multiple personality.

Although it is the generally held view among psychiatrists and psychologists that multiple personality disorder is an extremely rare phenomenon, Dr. Watkins was one of a growing number of clinicians who believed that it was not nearly so rare as had been supposed and that amnesia could, more often than one might think, be a sign of the disorder, since one personality
was typically unaware of what another had been doing, resulting in amnesic gaps. At least twice as many cases of multiple personality had been reported since 1970 as during the previous hundred years. Medical literature had become full of controversy about the phenomenon, with skeptics arguing that doctors themselves tended to induce the disorder by making implicit and explicit suggestions during therapeutic sessions, which usually involved hypnosis. The skeptics argued that too many therapists, egged on perhaps by the appeal of the phenomenon to the gothic corners of the popular imagination and insulated from criticism, or so it appeared, by the reluctance of professionals to call one another quacks, were finding multiple personalities with increasing frequency. A rapist, William Milligan, had used multiple personality disorder as a successful not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity defense in Ohio in 1977.

Dr. Watkins, who was a professor of psychology at the Univeristy of Montana and a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology and the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis, and who, like Bianchi, had a degree, although a genuine one, from Columbia University, was a firm believer in the prevalence of multiples. When Frank Salerno learned that Dr. Watkins was being called in to examine Bianchi, Salerno and Pete Finnigan rushed up to Bellingham to be present at the session. They knew that Dr. Watkins’s participation represented a move toward an insanity plea, and they greeted that possibility with dismay; but they hoped they might catch Bianchi lying and that, perhaps under hypnosis, he would confess and implicate Angelo Buono.

On March 21, Dr. Watkins began interviewing Kenny in a small room at the county jail in the presence of John Johnson, Dean Brett, Salerno, and Finnigan. The detectives were there with the permission of the defense lawyer. A videotape machine recorded the session and all subsequent sessions.

Dr. Watkins began by telling Kenny that John Johnson and Dean Brett “felt that maybe I could be of some help to you. I don’t know if I can or not but maybe if we talk a little bit together, I could be of some help.”

To Salerno and Finnigan, this statement was already a bad sign. Was Dr. Watkins here to make a diagnosis, regardless of the outcome, or was he here, as he said, “to be of some help”?

“I’m just here as a consultant and as a psychologist that may or may not be of some help to you,” Dr. Watkins went on. “I know that you’re in a lot of trouble and . . . it’s not pleasant, I know, but how’ve things gone since you’ve been here?”

It’s not pleasant for twelve dead girls, either, Salerno and Finnigan thought.

Kenny said that it was very hard on him. He had never been in jail before. He was trying “to make do and keep calm and keep my wits as best I can.”

“You worry a lot, though, of course,” Dr. Watkins said.

“Constantly.”

“Do you dream much when you sleep?”

“Sometimes. It varies from time to time. There are some days when I can remember two or three dreams.”

Kenny had the right dreams ready, but for the moment Dr. Watkins passed on to touch on Kenny’s past life:

“John was telling me a little bit about your life . . . I understand it’s been kind of a rough one, it hasn’t been all peaches and cream, your life, all together. I thought maybe you might tell me a little bit more about you. . . .”

Kenny was prepared. He knew that he would have to come across as an abused child and that he somehow had to wriggle out of all the nice things he had said to John Johnson about his mother, so he began:

“If you would have come and talked to me about three, four weeks ago, you could have talked till you were blue in the face, for example, about my mother, trying to discredit her, and I would have fought you tooth and nail, thumb and screw. I mean, I would have disagreed with whatever you had to say bad about her because I’ve always had a respect and a deep love for her. And on what foundation, I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve always felt, all these years. But now . . . seeing
that I had problems, some more serious than others, which could develop into serious problems . . . it leaves a question there . . .”

“You mean,” Dr. Watkins encouraged him, “you feel that maybe you’ve kind of forgotten the unpleasant sides of the pictures that might have happened then? . . . You’re beginning—what you’re saying in a sense is that the picture isn’t as rosy as you thought of it . . . it’s a lot less pretty than you thought it was. It’s a possibility, you know.”

“I know. I thought about it. It’s like skeletons in a closet,” Kenny said aptly.

Dr. Watkins praised Kenny’s courage in facing up to his “problems” and his unrosy family life: “You’ve started on the road to becoming a more authentic person.” (Salerno and Finnigan winced at this.) Dr. Watkins wanted to know whether Johnson and Brett had told Kenny anything about him.

“Ah, yes,” Kenny said. “Your credentials preceded you.” Indeed they had. One of Kenny’s many psychology texts,
Hand-book of Clinical Psychology
, even had a chapter in it written by Dr. Watkins.

Dr. Watkins remarked modestly that it was difficult to live up to one’s credentials. What about hypnosis? Did Kenny know anything about that? What did he think about it?

“Well, I don’t really know much about it,” Kenny lied. “I’ve read a few things about it, but it was very minor, just in a small pamphlet once.”

“And movies,” Dr. Watkins said, “have a lot of scary stuff about [hypnosis] and so on and so forth and television.”

“Oh,” Kenny jumped in, “I don’t pay much attention to what’s on TV. Just a lot of junk, you know. I—the thing I feel bad about is that I’m locked in a little cell and I not only have to contend with myself, I have to contend with—the boob tube, you know.”

“Yeah,” Dr. Watkins agreed.

“It rots your brain,” Kenny said ruefully.

“Yeah.”

“But it consoles me once in a while.”

In truth Kenny had had the chance to study
Sybil
yet again before meeting Dr. Watkins. The movie had been shown again·on BCTV the evening of March 12, the day after the session with Dr. Lunde. When Dr. Watkins said that now he would explore Kenny’s feelings about hypnosis, Kenny said that it would be a new experience for him and that he was fearful of what might happen, what he might find out about himself.

“It sometimes hurts,” Dr. Watkins said. “It isn’t always pleasant.”

“Life isn’t easy,” Kenny philosophized.

“Huh?”

“As they say, life isn’t easy.”

“No, that’s very true. . . .”

“Well, my curiosity has really been aroused.”

After some brief discussion about how Kenny felt when he learned that he was adopted, about his father’s death and about his dreams—“I imagine that some of the dreams you have are sort of upsetting and frightening,” Dr. Watkins suggested—Dr. Watkins began his hypnotic induction, telling Kenny to take a few deep breaths, to stare at his hand, to feel heavy, “to really go down into the most beautiful and relaxed feeling,” and so on. The induction took about half an hour, and then Dr. Watkins said: