Serial Killer Of The Month – Kenneth Bianchi: The Hillside Strangler 

He was an all-American boy. A loving husband. A devoted father. A reliable employee. A member of the sheriff’s reserve. And a cold-blooded murderer. The hillside strangler story ends in Bellingham, Washington. Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, both young, intelligent but poor college students, meet Kenneth Bianchi: coward, rent-a-cop, liar, and moderately attractive man. He offers the girls $100 each to watch his house for the night. They bite at the offer, and they are found dead the next day in the back seat of Mandic’s Maverick. The cops put two and two together, and figured out it was Bianchi. And they arrested him for possessing stolen power tools found in his house. They had their man, but they couldn’t prove it. While he was in jail, psychiatrists appointed to examine him confronted a bizarre phenomenon: Bianchi vehemently insisted he was innocent, despite quite a bit of evidence against him. So the psychiatrists decided to hypnotize him, to see if they could trigger any memory of the crimes. While he was under hypnosis, a second personality which Bianchi called “Steve” seemed to emerge. So the questions the experts faced were: Could Bianchi be a genuine split personality? Could his body have been taken over during the crimes by a malevolent personality who actually bragged about torturing and murdering young women? Most of the doctors examining Bianchi were convinced he was a split personality, and therefore, innocent by reason of insanity. Though both he and his cousin, Angelo Buono were found guilty in Los Angeles’s exhaustingly long Hillside Strangler trial.

But long before all this, Bianchi moved from his mother’s house in Washington to Los Angeles where he lived with his cousin, Angelo Buono. a woman hater, and sex maniac – sexual egotist extraordinaire – Buono always had a group of girls hanging out around his car detailing shop. Buono liked to claim that he was affiliated with the mafia. When Bianchi and Buono lived together, they decided to become pimps. They found a 16 year-old girl, Sabra, told her she could be a model, but she would have to pay them $100 to get started. Then they told her she couldn’t be a model, but to pay the money back, had she ever considered prostitution? Well, they beat the shit out of her with wet towels, to avoid bruising, and then made her perform oral sex on each of them. And soon she was out earning money with similar acts. Before long she did a trick for a mob lawyer, who, seeing that she was lost and helpless, sent her home on a plane with enough money to get by. When Buono found out about this, he said he was going to kill the lawyer. The mob, as they often do, got wind of Buono’s threats, and sent thugs to beat him up, which they did, leaving Bianchi alone because he ran away crying.

Soon the cousins thought it would be easier to demonstrate their power and contempt for women by simply murdering them. These killer cousins started their reign of terror in LA in 1977. They impersonated cops, picked up hookers, raped and killed them. They killed more than 10 women in similar ways. Their M.O was very hard to track. Women simply disappeared in the night, sometimes being escorted by police officers. Later they would turn up dead, strangled, their corpses in provocative positions in hillsides east of Hollywood. The cousins then had a fight, so Kenny moved to Bellingham, Washington, the killings stopped.

Bored with his small town life, Ken decided to get back to his old habits. He then proceeded to kill two more women. When he was arrested he feigned being possessed by a violent alter ego named “Steve Walker.” While in prison he was contacted by a twenty-three year old woman named Veronica Lynn Compton who was seeking information for a book about a female serial killer. Together they hatched a plan to free him in which Veronica would take a sample of his sperm, kill a woman and deposit the sperm in her. Good idea but it never worked. Instead it landed Veronica in jail, where she has recently been re-admitted after going totally crazy while on bail. —St. Feltcher

Read more Serial Killer of the Month from the SLUG Archives:
Serial Killer of the Month: Henry Lee Lucas
Serial Killer of the Month: Andrei Chikatilo “The Red Ripper”

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