Hillside Stranglers (11 page)

There were so many young girls that Angelo stuffed his wallet with their school pictures, arranging them in the plastic windows next to his police badge, little colored squares of bright-eyed California teenagers, who inscribed them:

To the
stud
of the year!

It’s been really fun knowing you.

See ya around.

Love ya,

Dawn

For her picture, blond Dawn wore a pink angora sweater and a tiny gold cross. Another blond girl, large-featured and whole-some- looking, wrote in careful, rounded script:

Tony,

Someday when I get mad and walk out

on you you’ll have a picture of me.

But that day will probably never come.

We’ve come this far, let’s go all the way.

Love, Missy

Another snap showed Angelo kissing a brunette in a long Laura Ashley dress. A Glendale romance.

One lovely young girl posed wearing very short red cutoffs and a white, lacy blouse tied up in front to display her caramel midriff. She was bent slightly to one side, brushing out her tawny hair. She had inscribed the picture:

Dear Tony (Dad)

Here’s a small picture for your wallet,

to keep just in case you can’t picture

me and you can remember it and what I

looked like.

Love you,

So that the picture could fit into the plastic window, Angelo had snipped off the signature, but it had read “Annette”—Nanette Campino’s daughter, who was far away in Florida with her mother and brothers. She had come to visit Angelo in his new house. Ever resourceful, Angelo had conned yet another of his girlfriends into paying Annette’s air fare.

He kept the payee’s picture in his wallet, too. Of all the little wallet-girls, this one was the plainest, a frizzy-headed, dark girl who looked out of her photograph with eyes so innocent that they might have come from a different time and place, Italy a hundred years ago or Ellis Island. She was Antoinette Lombardo, sixteen, the daughter of the couple who owned Tony’s Hardware in Glendale. Antoinette worked in her parents’ store after school and on Saturdays, and Angelo often saw her there. He was so friendly and warm and strong-looking that Antoinette got a crush on him. To her, Angelo was mature and self-confident, not like the high school boys. They were children, compared to Angelo. When Angelo gave her his card and said that she should come by his shop, she started riding her bicycle over to see him, on her way to and from work or after her tennis lessons. She was trying out for the high school tennis team, and when Angelo presented her with a tennis racquet, he won her heart. He was her first love, old enough to be her father
yet, she thought, with a softness and tenderness beneath his tough exterior that she longed to cradle in her arms and make her very own. The sight of him, the thought of him, began to quicken her teenage pulse. She longed for him to embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her little body to his big one, and love her, his very own Antoinette, for herself alone. Marriage was on her mind.

Angelo broke Antoinette in slowly. There were so many other girls, he was in no rush, and he was too clever and skillful to want to frighten a girl who was more naive than most. When he first kissed her he left it at that and sent her away on her bicycle atingle with romantic passion. Then he took her into his bedroom and lay with her on the water bed, lightly touching her, sliding his big hand beneath her bra. He spent weeks at the foreplay, touching her adolescent heart with his artful, thoughtful tenderness. Only after a couple of months did he begin initiating her into some of the deeper mysteries of love, but once seduced, she believed everything he told her and accepted everything he did to her, even when it hurt, though she did tell him that she preferred not to have him put a cucumber into her. When he would put his penis down her throat and tell her that it would feel better if she passed out, she thought this was another of the mysteries, although she found this one painful and frightening and preferred not to lose consciousness. And when Angelo told her that he would marry her after she finished high school, she knew that this was no passing fancy but life’s most profound commitment.

She believed that Angelo would marry her, even though he sometimes did things that upset her. When a lively, creamy-coffee-colored girl called Peaches began living at Angelo’s from time to time, Antoinette accepted his assurances that Peaches was just a girl out of a job who sometimes needed a place to stay. When one day Antoinette walked into the house to find Angelo with his penis in Twyla Hill’s mouth, Antoinette went away and came back later. She wept, but she understood that Angelo was a man of enormous passion; that once they were married, everything would be sacred and it would be just the
two of them, faithful till death; but that until she could be with him every day and share his bed all night long, she could not expect him to be perfect. He was a real man.

When Angelo asked her to loan him three hundred dollars so that he could fly Annette out for a visit—he would pay it back as soon as this year’s profits from the Christmas-tree lot began to roll in; at the moment he needed his capital to buy trees—she dug into her savings and gave him the money, happy to be of use. When Antoinette got pregnant, she was frightened and confused: was it a disaster or only the beginning of their real life together? But Angelo comforted her and told her not to tell her parents, and he arranged an abortion for her at a local clinic, assuring her that it would be better to start the family after she graduated. After the abortion, he said that they should probably not have any children together, but that she did not have to worry about getting pregnant again. He was getting a vasectomy.

Her trust was absolute; they resumed their romance; six months later, she was pregnant again. This time she suffered a miscarriage. But she was certain he would marry her before too long. They had gone through so much together.

With all the young things in his life, Angelo had to think about his image. He began dyeing his gray hair black. He added a gold chain, a big turquoise ring, and red silk underwear to his wardrobe. With his swagger and his cocky, if monosyllabic, joshing, he made a plausible Glendale Don Giovanni. When, in January 1976, Kenneth Bianchi arrived from the East, he found his cousin Angelo living in what could have passed for a harem. Cousin Kenny did his best to fit in to Angelo’s ménage and to adjust to a new life in the metropolis of make-believe.

Back in Rochester in 1972, Kenneth Bianchi, then twenty-one years old, wrote a letter to his girlfriend telling her that he had killed a man. He was not too worried about being caught, because he had made the death look like a heart attack, but at the same time he was sure he was a suspect in three other murders, killings of little girls, one aged ten and two aged eleven. These were being called the Alphabet Murders, because each of the girls had first and last initials which were the same. He told his girlfriend that he knew that the police were looking for a young man driving a small blue car.

The girlfriend, Janice Duchong, did not take the letter seriously. She knew that it was just another one of Kenny’s crazy stories. She understood him as the kind of guy who would make things up just to impress a girl and to gain her sympathy, and she could see through the stories. They were so far out. Kenny was really a nice guy, and he could be so sweet. He was always
writing her poems and sending her flowers, and not many guys did that these days. There was something old-fashioned about Kenny Bianchi; he was so courteous, thoughtful, almost courtly, but sometimes she wondered if he knew what century he was living in or who and where he was. He had such an imagination—there was a touch of the artist about Kenny. That stuff about the police looking for a guy in a small blue car, for instance. Kenny didn’t even own a car. She had a small blue car, it was true, which Kenny sometimes drove, but that was hardly something to make him a murder suspect. She wished Kenny could be more practical, have more common sense. He wasted a lot of time. He must have spent hours constructing a collage of pictures of little girls cut out of magazines and pasted up on a big piece of cardboard. He was artistic, he said, and he loved children, but still . . .

Yes, he was smart and nice and fun to be with; he was always entertaining; but she wished he’d get his feet on the ground. A young man like that might fritter away his life on dreams.

But young Kenny was no practical, workaday sort of a guy. Kenny had the imagination of a visionary or a deadbeat. If Angelo Buono believed that in acquiring his own upholstery shop and house and the freedom to carry on with women as he liked he had accomplished most of what he wanted out of life, Kenneth Bianchi would never be satisfied with such banalities.

He sensed a future of ill-defined greatness. Following his father into the American Brake-Shoe foundry was not for him. Bianchi was temperamentally an aristocrat, inherently convinced that ordinary work and certainly manual labor were beneath him. Yet, not being an aristocrat in fact, he sensed that he would rise, as effortlessly and inevitably as hot air. In the street sense of the word, he had class. His favorite comic book character had been Prince Valiant; he could imagine himself sipping mead with the other knights at the Round Table and attracting maidens by means of words and hair. He knew that anyone could be President. He considered becoming a statesman, an artist, a doctor. He had a confidence in his opinions
comparable to that of an evangelist. He had the egocentricity of a method actor. Had he turned out harmless, he might have been just another Walter Mitty.

Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born May 22, 1951, the child of a Rochester prostitute. He never met his mother but knew vaguely who she was, a woman whom he associated with bars and working-class nightclubs. She gave him up at birth, and at the age of three months he was adopted from a foster home by Jenny Buono’s sister, Frances Sciolino Bianchi, and her husband, a foundry worker fond of following the horses. The unfortunate Bianchis—they were no luckier at picking a child than at the ponies.

Kenny appears to have arisen from the cradle dissembling. By the time he could talk, Frances knew she was coping with a compulsive liar, and his childhood unfolded as one of idleness and goldbricking. When he was five and a half, Frances became worried by his frequent lapses into trancelike states of daydreaming; she knew that this would not do when he went to school, and she consulted a physician. The doctor, hearing that little Kenny’s eyeballs would roll back into his head during these trances, reached a diagnosis of petit mal seizures. But they were nothing to worry about. He would grow out of them.

By the age of eleven, Kenny’s inattention to schoolwork and his angry outbursts at home had become major worries to his adoptive mother, who, as a first-generation Italian-American, wondered whether her boy had been struck by the evil eye. His IQ tested out at 116, considered “bright-normal,” but of course neither his nor any intelligence could be measured by a number, and his laziness affected his attention to the test. His teachers said that he was working at well below his capacity; his grades ranged from average to below. He had verbal and artistic abilities, but even in his best subjects his performance was erratic, and whenever he could get away with it he would plead some illness to avoid going to school. Frances’s anger at his sloth provoked temper tantrums. She took him to a clinic, where a psychologist prescribed an extensive course of therapy, finding Kenny a hostile child overly dependent on his
mother and suggesting counseling for the mother as well. Frances declined. She hoped that Kenny would find himself. Maybe religion would take hold.

He spent six years at Holy Family elementary school, where even the minimal tuition was a sacrifice for the Bianchis. Although he learned to read and write with superior facility, showing particular adeptness at what would now be termed “creative writing,” daily indoctrination in the precepts of Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church failed in their intended effect. He took communion and made his confession weekly; he was taught about sin, its occasions and its consequences. He was told about the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance: willful murder, the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor, and defrauding laborers of their wages. A person committing any of these would have to make a perfect act of contrition to avoid eternal damnation.

None of this made any serious impression on Bianchi. He heard the words, but they were mere words to him, of no obvious and immediate use, and in language as in life, he did not separate the wheat from the chaff. In Christian terms he remained unregenerate, a soul lost to God, rudderless on the voyage of life, a creature who caused weeping in heaven. In secular terms he was the sort of child any experienced teacher could see was headed for trouble. But no one could have foreseen how much trouble he would be in and how much misery he would cause.

When he was thirteen, his adoptive father died, and Frances went to work to support herself and her son. At Gates-Chili High School, Kenny dated frequently, approaching all the girls as he did Janice Duchong, with Prince Valiant courtliness. Considering the period in American life, 1966–70, he was remarkably clean-cut in high school, avoiding long hair and sloppy clothing, giving every appearance of a boy respectful, even emulative, of his elders. He joined a motorcycle club, but they were no Hell’s Angels. He had his right arm tattooed with the image of a motorcycle and the letters “Satan’s Own M.C.,” but was regretful and remained embarrassed and apologetic for
the rest of his life, though he took some pleasure in the hint of waywardness in the emblem.

At eighteen he married Brenda Beck, whom he had known since childhood. The marriage lasted only a few months, soured in part by his belief that Brenda had been intimate before the union with another young man. Her being a nurse also made him nervous, for he thought nursing an occupation dangerous for a married woman, because it provided too many opportunities for illicit relationships and even encouraged them.

Bianchi set high standards for his women, which they repeatedly failed to meet. His Catholic education served him here in a twisted way. He was able to confuse ordinary women with the Virgin and could be moved to bitter disappointment, even anger and fury, at their human frailties. The import of the idea of the Virgin, that she was unique, he chose to ignore. Denying female sexuality even as he was attracted to it, he objected to V-neck sweaters and tight jeans and asked of women absolute fidelity in return for his outwardly absolute devotion. Yet he always dated several girls at once and did not require of himself comparable standards of purity. With Catholicism as with other systems or bodies of belief, he was self-pleasingly selective.

After his divorce, which he liked to term an “annulment,” he went on as before, wounded but persistent. He proposed to another girl, Susan Moore, but she told him that she could not consider him seriously until he learned to stay out of trouble and hold on to a job.

Neither was Susan Moore happy about Bianchi’s chronic lying and his skill at it. She suspected that he was simultaneously seeing another woman, Donna Duranzo, and herself, although he assured Susan that his only interest in Donna was concern for her two children, especially her little boy, for whom he professed acute fondness. “The poor little kid,” Kenny would say, “he needs a father. I know how he feels. My daddy died when I was thirteen, you know, and I never knew my real father.” But twice Susan caught Kenny and
Donna alone together, once in her apartment and once in his. “I didn’t know how to tell you, Sue,” Kenny said, looking miserable.

His demands for both women’s fidelity in the face of his duplicity created some heated confrontations. One night, on the outs with Donna, he came to her apartment and she refused to open the door to him. He shouted at her in the hallway, then went outside to peer at her through a window. He demanded that she open the window and speak to him, and when she turned her back, he smashed the glass and started to climb into the apartment. Donna fled out the front door and called the police.

But she dropped charges when, at the police station, Kenny seemed so contrite, so pitiful and polite, assuring everyone that he had not meant to break the window, only to open it, referring to the incident, tenderly, as a lovers’ quarrel.

“The window just fell into the apartment,” he said. “I thought, My God, how can this be happening?”

He announced his intention of becoming a policeman, as a start, he said, toward achieving some position of authority in life and to satisfy his urge to help people. To this end he enrolled at Monroe Community College, taking courses in police science and psychology. The first subject fit his vocational goals; the psychology courses fed his one consuming interest, himself. Psychology also attracted him as an attitude to life more appealing than the harsh insistence of Roman Catholicism on personal responsibility for one’s actions: he found in modern psychology an agreeable tendency to see man as victim of impersonal forces which could be explained but not really controlled, man as acted on rather than acting. But he attended classes only sporadically and, true to form, took advantage of the school’s medical facilities, complaining of migraine headaches and other afflictions. When he did apply for a job with the Sheriff’s Department, he was rejected, but he regarded this as a momentary setback, blaming the nature of the test. Undiscouraged, he landed a job as the next best thing to a policeman, a security guard, a position that had the advantage of requiring no rigorous course of study.

Another advantage of being a security guard was the excellent opportunity it afforded him to take what he felt belonged to him, the merchandise. Kenny was naturally light-fingered. He stole clothing and jewelry, showering girlfriends with looted trinkets; but his larceny, never proved but often suspected, forced him to change jobs often, an imposition he resented. His selective readings in psychology helped him to cope with dismissal, however, providing him with explanations—excuses—for his acts and failures. He had his needs. The urge to steal he compared to the urge to urinate, a build-up of forces which required release. If his employers fired him for theft, they had suffered a failure to understand his needs. For a time he also worked as an ambulance attendant, gaining early experience with dead bodies, saying that the job met his need to help people; but the hours proved inconvenient.

He was going nowhere, and by 1973 the idea of California had begun to lure him. At that time he was working as a security guard at J. B. Hunter’s Department Store and was pursuing Susan Moore, who also worked at Hunter’s. She saw that he stole. When he would present her with costume jewelry, she would remonstrate with him and tell him that she even knew which counter in the store it had come from. Yet she felt for him; she could see how bright and animated by dreams he was. Someone like Kenny should not waste away his talents in an inferior position. He proposed marriage to her, but she resisted, telling him that he had to find himself, show that he was on track toward a steady life, demonstrate the reliability of a family man. Only then would she consider succumbing to his romantic rush. Kenny’s mother objected to Susan, who in ways not specified was somehow not good enough for her son.

Kenny knew that he was in a rut. His thoughts radiated elsewhere, away from Rochester, away from his mother. He imagined other worlds, New York City, Hollywood. Finally, at the start of the new year in 1976, he made his move. He would go to California in search of a new start, a better life. Through his mother and Aunt Jenny, he made contact with Cousin Angelo, who agreed to take him in temporarily.

Like millions before him, Kenneth Bianchi moved to California because of the appealing images he harbored of the place. He would leave winter behind. A one-way plane ticket would buy him June in January, the good vibrations of the Beach Boys, surfers and healthy inarticulate women, Acapulco gold and Gallo Hearty Burgundy, orange-blossom-scented naked rap sessions. Linking these sunny images in his mind was an idea of freedom no different in its vagueness from a child’s vision of the wonders waiting beyond any fence. Out there in the sleepy, salty beach towns, he would stake out his umbrella and feel renewed, happy, and himself. He would achieve California by dispensing charm, of which he had oodles.

To be exact, it was Bianchi’s second trip to California. In 1957, when he was barely six and Angelo was just married to Candy, Kenny’s parents had brought him to Los Angeles for a month or two to visit relatives. All Angelo remembered of him was that he had been a restless nuisance who kept wetting his pants, but he figured Kenny had learned to control himself by now. He gave him the spare bedroom on the stipulation that he would get a place of his own as soon as he landed a job.