Hillside Stranglers
The serial killers Kenneth Alessio Bianchi (born May 22, 1951 in Rochester ) and Angelo Buono (born October 5, 1934 in Rochester , † September 21, 2002 in Calipatria State Prison ) were known as the Hillside Stranglers . Between 1977 and 1979, several women in Los Angeles were murdered using the same pattern and their bodies dumped in the Hollywood hills . Until the crime was cleared up, the perpetrator (only later it turned out that there were two perpetrators) was given the name " Hillside Strangler " by the press and police .
Kenneth Bianchi
Bianchi was born to a prostitute on May 22, 1951 in Rochester , New York, and was given up for adoption after birth. Even as a child he was considered a compulsive liar , he was prone to violence and outbursts of anger. Bianchi was an eccentric with a strong need for recognition. He told a friend that he was responsible for a murder, which she dismissed as a lie. When a series of murders (the so-called “Alphabet” or “Double Initial” murders) took place in Rochester in 1973 , Bianchi feared being suspected. Although his car was seen near one of the crime scenes, his involvement could not be proven.
Bianchi was obsessed with becoming a police officer; however, his applications to several police stations were rejected. His urge to exercise power over others temporarily drove him to impostorate offenses: during the series of murders he committed, he appeared as a policeman to intimidate his victims; and for a while he practiced as a psychiatrist - without training and without license. In the spring of 1976, Kenneth Bianchi moved from the east to the west coast of the United States to Los Angeles .
Angelo Buono
In Los Angeles, Bianchi met his cousin Angelo Buono. The elder Buono, like Bianchi, was born in Rochester and moved to Glendale, California with his mother and sister Jenny in 1939 after his parents divorced . Even as a teenager he appeared as a petty criminal (in 1950 he was convicted of car theft). He developed "an early obsession with anal intercourse " and made no secret of his admiration for sex offenders known at the time , whose approach he acquired in the course of his own criminal career. Buono was considered a sexual monster: he raped a number of women - including his girlfriends and his wives - and made no other bones about his contempt for women. He gave birth to a total of nine children with three different wives; he raped one of his stepdaughters.
Angelo Buono died on September 21, 2002, at the age of 67, in Calipatria State Prison due to a heart condition.
Hillside Strangler (s)
When Bianchi and Buono met in Los Angeles in January 1976, they soon discovered a kind of soulmate. They expanded Buono's already existing small prostitute ring in Los Angeles and dragged more women into their “harem” through rape and torture . In 1977 two of the women fled, which Bianchi and Buono finally cited as the spark for their series of murders . Within only two months, both murdered ten girls and women - mostly from the prostitute milieu. They "perfected" their approach from murder to murder.
Disguised as police officers (or pretending to be police officers), they attacked the women on the street, stopped them in their cars, and loaded them into their own vehicles to question them. They abducted their victims in an apartment, handcuffed her, tortured her with electric shocks, chemicals (for one of the victims was detected a cleaning agent for window glass in the blood) and strangulation , raped several times and strangled finally. They finally "disposed of" the naked corpses in the Hollywood Hills and along an arterial road from Los Angeles in degrading positions: naked and with their legs apart, "as if to mock the authorities."
The victims of the two mostly came from the prostitute milieu, but they also caught schoolgirls, innocent drivers who had stopped them as "police officers" and - when Bianchi later killed alone in Washington State - college students as well . On October 17, 1977, 19-year-old prostitute Yolanda Washington became their first victim. Only 14 days later, the body of 15-year-old Judith Miller was found. The naked body of the 21-year-old waitress Elisa Kastin was found near Buono's house on November 5 of the same year. Jane King lost her life three days later. However, the body of the 21-year-old was only discovered two weeks later next to a motorway entrance. Three victims were discovered in different parks in Los Angeles on November 20, 1977: the 20-year-old student Kristina Weckler (who was tortured with an injection of detergent), and the 12 and 14-year-old schoolgirls Sonja Johnson and Dolores Cepeda. Finally, on November 29, the body of 18-year-old Lauren Wagner, who had been tortured by electric shock, was found in the hills of Glendale.
At the end of 1977, an escaped victim of the two reported to the police, who initially had no success in investigations: Catherine Lorre, the daughter of the Austrian film actor Peter Lorre . Her testimony led the police to look for two perpetrators. Bianchi found it too dangerous to continue his stay in Los Angeles and moved to Bellingham ( Washington ) in the spring of 1978 . There he worked as a security guard (which came very close to his desire to be a police officer) and began murdering again in January 1979, this time without the help of his cousin who had remained in Los Angeles. Two students who studied at Western Washington University and whom he found a supposed job as housekeeping became his victims. When the police investigated that they both had contact with Bianchi, they summoned him. Inconsistencies during interrogation and items found in the apartment eventually linked him to the two murders in Washington and then to the acts in Los Angeles.
Arrest, trial and conviction
In June 1979, Bianchi was charged with five counts of murder. In order to avoid the death penalty, he first tried to pose as a sufferer of " multiple personality disorder ", which the court saw through. In a deal with the public prosecutor, in which he incriminated his cousin as an accomplice, he finally averted the death penalty. He was sentenced to 118 years in prison (five times for life). Buono was arrested in October 1979 and charged with ten murders. In March 1981 the guilty verdict was passed against him, after which he also went to prison for life and with no prospect of a pardon.
The Bianchi trial found a memorable interlude when the person in custody received a letter in June 1980 from the young author Veronica Lynn Compton. The woman, who in her conversation with Bianchi made no secret of her admiration for the killer and revealed her “obsession with murder, mutilation and necrophilia ”, planned to write a play about serial murder. When she finally fell in love with Bianchi after a few correspondence and a visit, he suggested a defense strategy: Compton should go to Bellingham and commit a murder there along the lines of the "Hillside Strangler (s)". At the scene of the crime, she was supposed to spread some of Bianchi's sperm, which he gave her at the meeting in a cut rubber glove finger, on the corpse. The plan failed and the copycat offender was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
filming
A total of three films were made in the USA about the deeds of the two serial killers .
In 1989, the television film The Case of the Hillside Stranglers , directed by Steve Gethers , was made in the German version Die Würger von Hillside . The role of Angelo Buono was played by Dennis Farina , that of Kenneth Bianchi by Billy Zane . In another leading role, Richard Crenna played Officer Bob Grogan. The film lasts around 95 minutes.
In 2004 the movie The Hillside Strangler was released. The cinema premiere took place on October 8, 2004 in New York, around four weeks later the film was also available on DVD in the USA. The role of Angelo Buono was played by Nicholas Turturro , that of Kenneth Bianchi C. Thomas Howell . Chuck Parello directed the 87-minute film .
In 2006 the television film Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders was directed by Chris Fisher with a running time of 85 minutes . The role of Angelo Buono was played by Tomas Arana , that of Kenneth Bianchi Clifton Collins Jr.
References to the Hillside Strangler cases are also made in the plot of the US film Copykill from 1995.
literature
- Peter & Julia Murakami: Lexicon of Serial Killers. 450 case studies of a pathological type of killing . Munich: Ullstein 2001, pp. 228-230.
- Michael Newton: The Great Encyclopedia of Serial Killers . Leopold Stocker Verlag , Graz 2002, pp. 37–39.
- Ted Schwarz: The Hillside Strangler - A Murderer's Mind . New York: Doubleday 1981.
- Darcy O'Brian: Two of a Kind: The Hillside Stranglers . New York: Penguin Group 1985.
Web links
The Hillside Stranglers in the Serial Killer Crime Index
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Michael Newton: The great encyclopedia of serial killers. Leopold Stocker Verlag , Graz 2002, p. 37
- ↑ Michael Newton: The great encyclopedia of serial killers. Leopold Stocker Verlag , Graz 2002, p. 39
- ↑ The Strangler Hillside in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ The Hillside Strangler in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- ↑ Film description and film review on jump Cut magazine
- ↑ Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders in the Internet Movie Database (English)