Hillside Stranglers (17 page)

“I used to take her car out and fill it up with gas,” Joe Wagner said. “She tried not to take money from me.”

“I told her to be careful about this Strangler business,” Mrs. Wagner said. “The night before she left us . . . . In the kitchen, she was all dressed up. And I looked at her, and she looked so bright and so trusting and vulnerable. And I put my hand on her face and I touched her.”

“I’m sure Lauren was a great person,” Grogan said. “From everything you say, Lauren was wonderful.”

“That’s good of you, sergeant,” Mrs. Wagner said, “calling her Lauren like that.”

“What else would I call her?”

“Oh, everybody else seems to call her ‘the victim.’ You calling her Lauren, that shows you know she’s still alive for us. Always will be. Our family has to have our Lauren.”

Grogan told the Wagners that he would be in constant touch with them and reminded them that they did not have to talk to reporters. If the media refused to let up on them, they should call him and he would see what he could do.

As Grogan walked across the street to talk to Beulah Stofer, he was prepared to despise her as yet another example of the sort of person who, witnessing a crime, fails to report it for fear of getting involved. To Grogan such behavior was itself criminal, but he did not expect most people to act otherwise. He approached Mrs. Stofer’s house. A Doberman in the front yard
barked at him. Mrs. Stofer opened the door and told the dog to be quiet when Grogan identified himself.

One close look at Beulah Stofer softened Grogan’s judgment of her. A sickly-looking woman in her late fifties, she was breathing heavily and appeared near collapse, her eyes watering and rolling nervously behind glasses. Her hands trembled. She managed to gasp that she was having an asthma attack. Her husband was in the back, not feeling well. Could Sergeant Grogan have some coffee and cookies while she recovered herself? She was sorry to receive him like this.

Grogan sat down and ate a cookie. “Gee,” he said when she returned, “these are great cookies. You make them yourself?”

“Yes. Have some more.”

Grogan asked several irrelevant questions to try to calm her down. He told her to call him Bob. She said to call her Beulah.

“I had a terrifying phone call just now,” she said. “I thought I should tell the police.”

“Yeah? A phone call?”

Mrs. Stofer said that a voice on the phone, a very rough, male voice, with some kind of accent, maybe New York, had said to her, “You the lady with the dog?” When she had said yes, that she did have a dog, the voice had told her that she had better keep her mouth shut about what she had seen last night. If she talked to anyone about it, she was as good as dead.

Grogan told her not to worry. He would see that she was protected. What was it that she had seen last night? She repeated what she had told Joe Wagner.

“Did you know it was Lauren being abducted?”

“I didn’t know it was an abduction. How could I have known that? I thought it might have been a quarrel, you know, with a boyfriend.”

“With two boyfriends?”

“Sergeant Grogan, I am from the South. I believe in—” She started coughing, straining for breath again.

“It’s okay, Beulah. Just tell me, what about the dog? What
does the dog have to do with it? You tell me this voice asked if you were the lady with the dog.”

Mrs. Stofer said that her Doberman, Caesar, had started barking. Caesar was her protection when her husband was out, but her husband had been home. He was in the back, taking a bath. He had not seen anything. So when Caesar had started barking, she had gone to the window to look out. As Grogan probed, Mrs. Stofer got more specific. The other car had been a big, dark car, with a white top. The two men had argued with Lauren, and one of them had dragged her from her car into theirs, and she had heard Lauren cry out, “You won’t get away with this!”

“But you didn’t call the police or tell the Wagners?” Grogan asked quietly, not wanting to upset Mrs. Stofer by accusing her. She was his best, his only, witness so far.

She struggled for breath. She wept. Then, Grogan would later testify, she told him that she had been raped when she was young. What she had seen last night had brought back all the terror of that. She had been paralyzed with fear. She had sat up all night. She had not even been able to tell her husband.

Grogan comforted her. He asked her whether she thought she would be able to identify the men.

“One of them had bushy hair,” she said. “One of them was taller and younger than the one with bushy hair. He had acne scars on his neck.”

“But do you think you could identify them if you saw them again?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Stofer said. “Definitely.”

Grogan ate more cookies. He drank some coffee. Mr. Stofer appeared briefly and confirmed that he had been taking a bath and had neither seen nor heard anything. Grogan stayed for nearly two hours chatting with Mrs. Stofer. He commented on what a nice house Beulah had, how, being from the South, she must find it difficult living in Los Angeles, how his wife made cookies, too, but to tell the truth, Beulah’s were superior cookies. And he got her to go over her story several more times. She stuck to it, adding that the shorter man was “Latin-looking,”
and repeated the threatening telephone conversation exactly as before. He believed her, or almost.

Outside, Grogan paused to look around the front of the Stofer house. Like all the houses on the street, it was set back from the curb by a strip of grass, a sidewalk, and a front lawn, in this case a fenced yard for Caesar. The window through which she said she had seen Lauren Wagner’s abduction was a good thirty feet or more from the street, which was not brightly lit. Mrs. Stofer obviously had poor eyesight. Yet she said that she could be certain of identifying these men, even though she also said that she had not been sure she recognized Lauren Wagner, her neighbor. And how, inside her house, with her dog barking outside, could she have heard Lauren tell the men, “You won’t get away with this"?

Gauging again the distance from the window to the street, Grogan concluded that Mrs. Stofer, out of shame and fear, was not telling everything. What actually had happened, he felt certain, was that Caesar had barked and Beulah had gone outside to see what was the matter. She had witnessed the struggle and had probably snuck up to her fence, behind some shrubbery, to get a closer look. She had been within ten feet of what was happening, had recognized Lauren, gotten a very good look at the men, and heard Lauren’s futile warning to them. Then, terrified and, as she had said, paralyzed, she had retreated into her house and sat there all night.

Probably Lauren’s killers had seen Beulah. Why else would they have called to threaten her? This was further evidence, Grogan concluded, that Beulah had been outside. The killers had traced her telephone number somehow and, when she had answered, had asked whether she was the woman with the dog. Grogan hoped that they would be stupid enough to come back to try to harm her, but he doubted it. He would have her house watched for the time being. He would not tell Beulah what he had figured out. He did not want to frighten her more; she looked near enough to collapse already. He needed her. He would talk to her again. He hoped that she would agree to be hypnotized.

Grogan did not sleep that night. He did not even try to play
his jazz records, and he sensed that he would not be playing golf or going fishing for some time to come. He sat up with images of the bodies and of Charlie Weckler and of the Wagners, huddled bewildered in their house, before him. Lauren’s and Kristina’s faces merged in his mind with his daughter’s face. He imagined Lauren at home on Thanksgiving, cooking. The first thing he had noticed, he admitted to himself, when he had seen her body, was how beautiful she was, the pale, long legs, the waist dramatically small, the brilliant hair. She had gotten the red hair from her father. Grogan had not told the family about the strange marks on her palms or about the evidence of sodomy the coroner had quickly noted. Nor had he told the family that he had already found out what Lauren had been up to from late that afternoon until she had driven home, or almost home, at nine. A word from her sister had led Grogan to Lauren’s boyfriend, an older man married but going through divorce, he said. Lauren had spent those hours in bed with the boyfriend. There was no need to tell the family that.

She had driven home, probably, to judge from the conservative atmosphere at the Wagners’ house, feeling good but a little guilty about what she had been up to, had gotten within yards of her front door, and had been carried off, raped, strangled to death, and dumped way off in another part of the city. Her mother had warned her about the Strangler. Lauren had sensed who they were the minute they approached her. That was why she had said, “You won’t get away with this.” What a ride she must have had to wherever they had taken her. She would have known her fate all that time. Had anyone ever felt greater terror?

That Lauren had been abducted from the Valley, so far away from any of the other girls, worried Grogan more than anything else. At least up till now the killers had confined themselves to Hollywood and the Glendale area; now they might find a victim anywhere. Probably they knew the heat was on in Hollywood. The whores would be wary of them, too. They might try anywhere next. That would heighten the city’s panic, and soon enough the panic would turn to anger at the police, if something didn’t break quickly. It gave Grogan some
solace to think that he had found time in the frenzy of the past week to buy his daughter a car. But Lauren had had a car. He told his daughter to keep the doors locked, to park in well-lighted places, and to drive off if strange men approached her. At least she was not living alone, like Kristina Weckler. He could not imagine what had caused Kristina to leave her apartment that night. She had been worried by an obscene phone call she had received earlier in the week, Grogan had learned from Kristina’s friend.

A dark, big car, white on top, Beulah had said. That might tie in with their posing as policemen. The press should know that now; women should be warned. At least Grogan knew that there were two of them. Latin, Beulah said. Mexican? A pair of Juan Coronas? Mexican Mansons? Grogan tried to picture them and could not. A psychiatrist would say that they hated women. So what else was new? Nobody would ever explain acts such as this. They were out for kicks. They had gotten away with it once, twice, again. By now they felt invulnerable. Grogan thought on, his emotions fluctuating wildly between rage and pity for Lauren and Kristina and their families.

By dawn he was ready to get back into the hunt. He left his house before his wife and children were up, taking the morning paper with him. The front page carried a map of where bodies had been found, beginning with Yolanda Washington, and Grogan noticed that the sites formed almost a circle. What he could not notice was that at the center of that circle was 703 East Colorado Street.

But when, later that morning at his desk in the Glass House, as Parker Center, the LAPD headquarters on Los Angeles Street, was called, Grogan saw the headline on the front page of the late final edition—

FATHER OF SLAIN GIRL ADMITS

KIDNAP STORY HOAX

—he wanted to lob a grenade into the men’s room of the
Times.
The headline was to Grogan infuriatingly misleading and insulting
to Joe Wagner, who of all men on the face of the earth deserved better at this moment. When he had noticed Lauren missing and had talked to Beulah Stofer Tuesday morning, he had tried to file a missing-person report with the police; but when the police informed him that a twenty-four-hour waiting period was standard before they acted in such cases, he had told them that he was sure his daughter had been abducted by two men from in front of his house the previous evening. This was hardly a hoax. By that time Lauren’s body had been discovered.

Before Grogan was able to tell a friend of his on the
Times
what he could do with that headline, Joe Wagner telephoned. Late last night, Mr. Wagner said, a reporter from the
Times
had telephoned to ask about rumors that there had been witnesses to the abduction. The police would not reveal the names of the witnesses. Would Mr. Wagner, the reporter had wanted to know, reveal the names to help with the story?

“That prick!” Grogan screamed. “Jesus Christ, Joe,” Grogan said. “You didn’t tell him, did you? If they start bugging Beulah Stofer, she’ll drop dead. If the killers don’t get her first.”

Mr. Wagner had declined to talk to the reporter.

“What’s the asshole’s name?”

Mr. Wagner gave it.

Grogan dialed the
Times:

“Hey, how’s it going? Listen, you working on the Lauren Wagner story? Right. I think I got something for you. Can’t give it to you over the phone. It’s real hot. Come on over here to Robbery-Homicide, room 321. And bring your editor. On the double. I’ll be here. Sergeant Grogan.”

When the reporter arrived with his editor, Grogan, all cordiality, ushered them into an interviewing room and closed the door. Then he began:

“You want some coffee? No? Good. Because let me tell you something. You’re not getting anything but shit from me.” He began shouting. “You are the most unethical son of a bitch I ever saw! What the fuck do you mean asking Joe Wagner about witnesses, you rotten prick? You want to fuck up the investigation? You want to get them killed? Don’t you think the Wagners
have suffered enough?” And so on. When the reporter said that he was only doing his job, getting a story, Grogan threw a chair against the wall and screamed that as far as he was concerned, this reporter would never get anything out of the Los Angeles Police Department except traffic tickets.

Two days later, at Lauren Wagner’s funeral, the priest deplored in the course of his eulogy that Lauren had been killed because, in the new culture that had corrupted the city and the country, “everything is justified if it fulfills one’s own desire.”

If happiness is doing as one likes, Thanksgiving was a joyful season for Buono and Bianchi. Not only did they accomplish two fresh murders; they at last received the recognition they felt due them, publicity beyond a flak merchant’s dreams, the entertainment capital of the world enthralled by their acts. As they watched the news together they took particular pleasure in learning that the media, and presumably the police, were crediting them with two or three murders they had not even committed, including a girl way out in Pomona. “They’ll have us in Nevada soon,” Angelo said.

Bianchi paid more attention to the publicity than Buono, who had always been indifferent to fame. Kenny subscribed to the
Times
and read all of it every day. A man who understood the value of information, he reveled in the spotlight. It was better than having a hit movie, and as nothing much else was going on in the world except the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations,
Kenny could rightly feel that he was the center of everyone’s attention. At work, he would hear the office girls chattering nervously about the sex-mad murderer who was loose in the city. Coyly, impishly, ever the tease, he would wink and say to them, “You never know. He could be anyone. Why, I could be the Hillside Strangler. . . . “ That would get a rise out of the ladies every time.

For nearly two weeks after Lauren Wagner, publicity and the still-warm memories of their most recent killings were enough to buoy the cousins. They had accomplished so much, even the virgin they had decided should follow Jane King. That Sunday at the Eagle Rock Plaza they had noticed Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson boarding a bus and had decided to follow them. A double play! The possibility of capturing both girls multiplied pleasurable anticipations: an orgy, then a twin killing. When the girls got off the bus on York Boulevard, Angelo and Kenny motioned them over to the car, flashing their badges. Kenny told the girls that a burglar was loose in the neighborhood. He was armed and dangerous. The girls had better accept a ride home from the police.

Dolores and Sonja, who had just stolen about a hundred dollar’s worth of costume jewelry from a shop at the Plaza, were anxious to cooperate for fear that their crime would be discovered; and at first, when they were told to strip down at Angelo’s “satellite police station,” they thought that they were being searched.

Angelo and Kenny, after getting their sexual fill of the girls, each of them raping and sodomizing both, murdered Sonja first in the spare bedroom. When they came into the living room to get Dolores, she asked plaintively:

“Where’s Sonja?”

“Don’t worry,” Angelo said. “You’ll be seeing her soon.”

The jewelry the girls had stolen was a great temptation to Kenny, but Angelo was watching too closely and made sure that it went into the dumpster along with their clothing and the jewelry they had been wearing, ceramic pins of unicorns, cloudbursts, rainbows, a thin gold-plated necklace with charms —a floating heart, a teddy bear.

Kenny happened to be driving Kelli’s Mazda station wagon this time, and it proved convenient transport. With the two bodies laid out in the back under a blanket, Angelo directed Kenny to the cow patch. It gave Angelo particular pleasure to dump the bodies there, an arbor alive for him with bittersweet romantic memories, trysts, courtships, and later family picnics.

Then came Kristina Weckler. They had driven over to Hollywood and observed the heavy concentration of police, and they knew that there were others undercover. They required something nearer to hand. Kenny, remembering Kristina as a girl who had spurned him at 809 East Garfield, checked to see whether she still lived there by making an anonymous phone call to her, telling her he would like to eat her underwear, while Angelo stood by the phone, grinning. A few days later, on that Saturday night, with Angelo waiting in the Cadillac, Kenny knocked on Kristina’s door and, showing her his badge, said:

“Hi. Remember me? It’s Kenny Bianchi. I used to live next door. How’s it going? Listen. I’m a member of the Police Reserve now. See” —he chuckled, shaking his head self-deprecatingly, emanating a gee-whiz sincerity—"they even give you a badge. I was just patrolling the neighborhood and I noticed your car, the VW, right? Well, wouldn’t you know it, looks like somebody’s crashed into it, right there in the parking lot. If you’ll come out and help me write up a report, it might help you collect on your insurance.”

That was all it took. But having done everything sexually they could think of to Kristina, finding themselves at the moment for murder, they agreed that they ought to try something different, for the sake of experiment and to confuse the cops. Angelo said he had just the thing. He fetched from his cigar box a hypodermic syringe that he had stolen from the hospital during a visit to his mother, filled it with Windex, and injected the fluid into both of Kristina’s arms and into her neck.

The Windex produced convulsions, but Kristina failed to die. So Angelo came up with another idea. He had recently bought a flexible gas pipe for a stove from Antoinette Lombardo at her parents’ hardware store. The stove itself he had not yet
purchased, so there was no difficulty in dragging the bound and gagged Kristina up to the gas outlet in the kitchen, placing the pipe against her neck, slipping a vegetable bag over her head, and sealing the bag with cord. While Angelo turned the gas on and off, off and on, Kenny pulled on the cord. They managed to kill Kristina by two methods at once.

With the holiday approaching, Angelo and Kenny paused for the traditional celebration. Kenny, however, suffered a blow to his pride that week. He and Kelli had not been getting on at all well as her pregnancy advanced. Sex between them had come to a standstill, and to Kenny, Kelli seemed intolerably cranky, even allowing for the discomforts of her condition. On the night before Thanksgiving Day, they got into a shouting match, and Kenny, losing his cool, took a swing at Kelli and knocked her to the floor. He was instantly awash with tears and apologies, but Kelli said that he had gone too far this time. Violence was one thing she would not tolerate. Something was definitely wrong between them. He was always out at night. He cared more for playing pool or whatever he did with Angelo than for her. What kind of a father would he be for her child? She packed her bags, her eye blackening, and went to stay with her brother.

So, despite the killings and the notoriety they brought, the holiday did have its melancholy side for the abandoned Kenny, but at least he had the comfort of sympathetic relatives to see him through. He telephoned his mother in Rochester. She had married again, and Kenny got a good pep talk from her and his stepfather. He celebrated Thanksgiving itself at Angelo’s mother’s place. Jenny, temporarily released from the hospital, cooked the turkey. She was now married to George White, the Indian. Nobody said grace, but all in all the dinner went well, an Italo–Native American ritual that provided the cousins a breather between murders. With all the news in the paper and on television about the Hillside Strangler, there was plenty of material for conversation. Angelo professed concern for his daughter Grace. He did not like the creep she was going with, and he hoped she had the sense not to hitchhike or walk the streets alone at night. He had warned her to watch out for this
Strangler guy. Angelo said he figured the killer was probably some weirdo escaped from an institution.

By Monday, the joys and depressions of the holiday worn off, Angelo and Kenny were ready to roll again. They agreed that branching into new territory would be the smart thing to do, a way of avoiding and confounding the police. Angelo suggested Malibu, then decided that would be too long a drive. He said he knew the Valley well, and they settled on it, only a reconnaissance trip perhaps, but they would see what turned up. There were plenty of girls in the Valley, that was for sure.

They were cruising Sepulveda when Angelo spotted Lauren Wagner getting out of her Mustang at a doughnut shop. Angelo liked red hair. They waited for her to drive off again and then followed her. They had their badges and the handcuffs, and this time Angelo had stuffed a .45 automatic into his belt. Kenny was driving the Cadillac.

When Lauren turned onto her own street, Lemona, things happened just as Beulah Stofer described them to Bob Grogan. Bianchi brought the Cadillac alongside Lauren’s Mustang; Angelo held his badge up to the window and pointed forcefully for her to pull over. Kenny got out and told Lauren they were going to have to take her in. When Lauren said that they would have to talk to her father, who was in the house just over there, Kenny dragged her out of her car and into his, and she shouted that they would not get away with this. By then Caesar was barking, and as they drove off, Angelo spotted what he thought was a woman crouching near the dog.

It was a thirty-five-minute drive back to Colorado Street. Lauren had plenty of time to meditate on her situation, and somehow in her terror she decided that her only hope lay in cooperation with these men, who she had no doubt were the Hillside Stranglers. Angelo won the coin flip, and in the spare bedroom with him, Lauren told him that he had nothing to worry about. She liked sex, she said. She had spent hours in bed with her boyfriend that evening and was ready for more. When Angelo passed her over to Kenny, Angelo said that this was the best one so far. She knew what she was doing; she enjoyed it; Kenny would have a great time.

Then, as with Kristina Weckler, Angelo suggested that they try something new. He brought in an electrical cord from his shop, pared away the insulation on one end, separated the wires, taped them to Lauren’s hands, and plugged in the cord. She trembled and moaned behind her gag, but the shock did not kill her. Angelo rewrapped her hands and tried again, repeatedly putting the plug in the socket and pulling it out, but again she refused to die. “We might as well go back to the old method,” Angelo said.

In the next two days enough information reached the media to put a little scare into Buono and Bianchi. It had been reckless, they admitted to each other, to take the girl from almost directly in front of her parents’ house. Their car, the
Times
reported, was said to have been a black-and-white sedan, leading police to suspect that the Strangler was posing as a policeman. Remembering the barking dog and the crouching woman, Angelo drove over to the Valley in one of his customer’s cars and sped past Beulah’s house, noting the address. Then through an old girlfriend who worked for the phone company he traced Beulah’s number and made the threatening call to her. “That should shut her up,” he told Kenny, who recalled that a car had come up behind them just as they had been pulling away. But they were not much concerned. The more the news reports increased, the more pleased with themselves they became; but they agreed that next time they would try an entirely new approach. The abduction should be made from a completely safe place.

Kenny spent a lot of time during the next two weeks trying to coax Kelli into coming back to live with him at 1950 Tamarind. He missed her, and he could not afford to rent there all by himself. On several nights he slept over at her brother’s place, but on the couch, not with her, and she remained adamant, saying that at least a trial separation was in order. She needed peace and quiet during the last couple of months of her pregnancy. Meanwhile Jenny Buono returned to the hospital; Angelo visited her there nearly every other night, and he was also occupied with getting his Christmas-tree lot open for the sea-son.
But by Tuesday, December 13, he and Kenny had a new scam ready.

Kenny had noticed an apartment vacant on the ground floor at 1950 Tamarind, number 114. He had gotten the manager to show him the place, saying that he was thinking of moving down from his third-floor spot. On one of his inspections of 114, he was careful to leave the sliding glass door unlocked, and he brought Angelo over to case the location. The idea was to get a call girl to come to the vacant apartment. An ad in the
Hollywood Press
of December 9 (“A Sexual Freedom Publication”) had given Kenny his inspiration:

The ad carried a photograph of a baby-faced, pouting blonde. Kenny suggested that they call the Climax outcall service from a pay phone, ordering a girl to apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind. Then they would tell her she was under arrest and take her back over to Angelo’s. The police would trace the call to 1950
Tamarind; that would pull the whole investigation back to Hollywood and the prostitution scene there and help mess them up even more. Angelo added that since apparently the Cadillac had been spotted last time, they would use a different car. He had a white Mustang that a woman had left with him to sell. It would do just fine.

That evening Kenny made the phone call to the Climax service from a phone booth in the lobby of the Hollywood public library on Ivar Street, across from the Ivar Theater, which had once been legitimate but now offered live sex shows. Bianchi gave the name Mike Ryan—he remembered the name, he thought, as that of a police officer he had met during his attempts to join the force—and the Tamarind address, asking for a blonde with black underwear, agreeing to pay a hundred and fifty dollars in cash. The whore-dispatcher at Climax asked for his phone number: she would contact the girl and then the girl would call back to verify the time of her arrival. Bianchi looked at the number on the pay phone and read it off: 462-9794.

“Is that a pay phone?”

“No,” Bianchi said. “This is my home number.”

“Numbers with nines in them are usually pay phones.”

“Gee,” Kenny said, ‘‘I’m not that hard up.”

In a few minutes a girl calling herself Donna telephoned, saying that she would arrive within half an hour.