Hillside Stranglers (27 page)

Kenny knew that it was important for him to try to establish that he was capable of understanding himself—in the light of the already assumed perceptions of the doctors—and therefore of becoming one day “integrated” or cured. And so, in writing specifically about his alter ego, Steve, he was careful to suggest that he, Kenny, was making progress and that he was beginning to figure out Steve’s origins:

The name Steve that keeps popping into my head has been familiar. I think I know something now about myself—there is another stronger person inside of me. I think he calls himself Steve. He hates me—hates my mom—hates a
lot. I feel this person wants to get me. I’ve had dreams of someone who is a twin but he was exactly opposite from me—for the past few days I feel like my insides were at war—for the past two nights just as I’m about to fall asleep bits and pieces have been forming—the name—the struggle, me against him—in my dreams it felt like the body of the twin was exactly mine but the attitude totally foreign. I feel stronger but scared. I feel hate but I don’t feel like reacting to the feeling. . . . Why does he hate me so much? Where did he come from?

And always he slipped in that his mother had caused this warring split in him:

I dreamt of my mother. She was yelling, screaming. I was backing down some stairs—she was slowly pursuing.

For good measure on April 17 Kenny began adding poems to his diary. Poems had been effective with women; they might make a doctor more sympathetic, too. In them he tried to create the impression that his poetry showed that through art he was able to express a new integration of personality—a somewhat clever idea, when one considers that from Freud on the psychoanalytic community has always considered art the expression of personality and analogous to dreams in its unconscious expression of inner conflicts:

I’m scared

my stomach hurts

there’s no place to run

now,

it was easy to run away

before.

I feel strong, in control

but still unsure

of someone I’ve come to know,

someone I don’t understand

as well as I know myself now. . . .

I’m so alone now, somewhat

I feel naked.

I’m knowing me.

I wish I were free of him.

I want help.

I don’t care for him

and he doesn’t like me.

I feared confinement but

I’m thankful for it now.

Here Kenny picked up on Dr. Watkins’s prediction that he would get stronger, become an “authentic” person. Kenny was clever enough not to suggest that he was already cured—he knew that that would appear premature—but that he was ripe for healing. He wanted to present himself as eager for treatment, so as to lay the basis for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, to be followed by treatment in a mental hospital and a return to the world as a cured maniac. He would try to take advantage of a contemporary willingness on the part of the courts, the doctors, and, to a lesser extent, the public to forget about the real victims and to see the criminal as victim.

With Dr. Watkins’s blessing, Bianchi and his lawyer made known to the court that they intended to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The court, recognizing that whether Bianchi suffered from a multiple personality disorder now represented the crucial issue in determining his ability to stand trial, called in Dr. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist from Davis, California, who had the reputation of being an expert on multiple personalities and was at the time completing work on a book entitled
Minds in Many Pieces.
Dr. Allison began interviewing Kenny on April 18. That morning Kenny wrote in his diary that he had had a dream the night before about his “twin”:

He told me life wasn’t what I thought it was like, he said there are no rules, you have to make your own, he said he wanted to get me away from people I was leaning on for help. . . . He said he would hurt my kid. I became angry. I stood up and grabbed him, told him I didn’t like him, I punched him, he broke free, I ran after and reached to grab him and he just disappeared. I felt an easy cool breeze, slowly it turned warm.

As if he worried that the doctors would be unable to interpret the significance of this invented dream, Kenny decided to help them out by suggesting an interpretation, which he added in the margin: “This doesn’t feel like a dream, like the dreams I use[d] to have of my father it seemed so very real, too real. . . . If this person is more real than just my dream and if this is the same person haunting me, which is more than likely, then this person could have been responsible for the uncontrollable violence in my life, the instigator of the lies I’ve done, the blank spots I can’t account for and the deaths of the girls; all the ones in California and the two here. But if .he is insane, then he killed them using me—why can’t I remember for sure I want to know if this is so.” Make sure you don’t miss this, doctor, the entry beckons.

But there was no chance that Dr. Ralph Allison would miss it. Dr. Allison was alert to every hint of the presence of multiple personalities. His new book was about them and he had already published five articles and for a time had issued a newsletter on the subject, and for the past three years he had moderated programs at the American Psychiatric Association meetings on multiples, as they were called in the trade. Dr. Allison thought that multiples were about the most exciting phenomenon current in psychiatry, and if anyone was going to recognize one, or them, when he saw it, or them, surely Dr. Allison would. Before the session he read over Kenny’s diary, perused his medical records, and viewed the videotapes from the sessions with Dr. Watkins. He had seen Steve. He was ready, and Kenny was ready for him.

In a gentle, avuncular voice, Dr. Allison sat opposite Kenny in the small interviewing room and began by asking general questions about Kenny’s life, tracing his movements from the East to California and up to Bellingham. Then he told Kenny to respond to certain finger signals which would, supposedly, trigger his unconscious memory. The number of fingers held up represented the years of Kenny’s life, and when the fingers added up to a year that contained some memory, Kenny was supposed to tell Dr. Allison about that memory. At nine, Kenny began talking about his playmates at that age, and when he said that he had enjoyed playing games of hide and seek—“I like hiding. It’s easy to hide away from everything”—Dr. Allison took the bait. If John Johnson and Dr. Watkins and
Sybil
had given him early leads and suggestions, he was now able to lead Dr. Allison—progress of a kind. Dr. Allison asked:

“Did you ever hide inside your own head?”

Kenny knew where to go from there:

“Sometimes, just to get away.”

“What do you do in there?”

“Talk.”

“Anybody else in there to talk to?”

This was getting to be old hat for Kenny now. But again he was duly cautious, not naming Steve yet. Kenny knew that he had to make Dr. Allison feel that he, the doctor not the patient, was bringing out the alter ego. Kenny identified the other person as simply “my friend.”

“Who’s that?” Dr. Allison asked obligingly.

“Stevie,” said Kenny, adding the diminutive in consonance with a juvenile memory, or rather the invention of one. “He’s my second best buddy.”

So now Steve had an origin as Stevie.

“Does he have a last name?” Dr. Allison asked.

This question posed a challenge for Kenny. He had not anticipated being asked for a last name, and he did not want to screw up now, having come so far.

“He did have a last name,” Kenny stalled.

“What was it?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Well, what’s Stevie—”

“Walker,” Kenny mumbled, barely audible.

“Walker,” Dr. Allison repeated. “Where’d he get that name? Do you know his parents?”

“He didn’t have any parents. Stevie was alone.”

After further infantile excursions, Dr. Allison asked Kenny to grow up to his current age and said that he wanted to talk to Stevie now. “What’s your name?”

“Steve.”

“What’s your last name?”

This time Kenny decided not to play the last-name game. He was uncertain about the wisdom of giving Steve a last name and decided to concentrate instead on getting into character as quickly as possible, so he replied:

“You’re the motherfucker who’s been trying to get me to leave [Ken].”

“You can’t,” Dr. Allison said.

“Fucker.”

“What’s your last name?”

“What business is it of yours? What’re you, writing a fucking book?” To divert Dr. Allison further from the surname question, Kenny took out a cigarette and ripped off the filter, lighting the butt with his best macho manner.

“Ashtrays are in the chair over there,” Dr. Allison offered.

“I know where the fucking ashtrays are, you don’t have to tell me. Oh, fucking assholes, you know, I was doing fine, I come out whenever I fucking felt like it. Now you got to stick your goddam nose in this whole shitty mess. I was doing fine, you know. Now I can’t even fucking come out when I want to.”

Snarling and ranting, Kenny as Steve attacked Ken: “Fuck him, his mother too.”

“She was pretty weird . . .?” Dr. Allison offered helpfully.

“Fucking cunt.”

“She was quite a bitch, wasn’t she?”

“She was a fucking cunt. You know, he still puts up with her shit a little bit. You know, I mean, granted, I can’t come
out, but I can see what he’s doing, and fuck, man, he has got to wise up.”

“But you did get yourself in a jam.”

“He got himself into a jam. I fucking killed those broads, you know, to smarten him up, to show him that he couldn’t push me fucking around.”

The idea of Ken pushing Steve around, rather than the reverse, was new, but Kenny pretended to rave on. He said that he, as Steve, had killed the Bellingham girls to get rid of Ken, to “get him out of the way.” This concept derived, of course, from Kenny’s attempt to banish Angelo from his thoughts by doing murder on his own; in this sense Angelo remained Kenny’s constant inspiration, acting not only as the model for the Steve character but as the source of Steve’s motives, as Kenny invented them.

“Let me clue you,” Kenny said, “it’s a fucked job you got.”

“True,” Dr. Allison said, “and that’s—”

“You know, you should go out and live a little bit.”

“I find [my job] interesting.”

“I bet you do.”

“How about down in L.A., with Angelo?”

“Angelo. Now, he’s my kind of person,” Kenny said, silently indicating the Angelo-Steve identification but not so that Dr. Allison would notice it as the source of fiction.

“Um. How so?”

“He just—he doesn’t care a fuck about life . . . . It’s great. Other people’s life. Doesn’t give a fuck. That’s great. That’s a good attitude to have.”

Kenny went on to elaborate on the Angelo-Steve connection, describing how Angelo and Steve had killed the girls in Los Angeles, with Ken an innocent bystander. It was, with all the evidence against him, as close as Kenny could get to blaming everything on Angelo. But then, pride surpassing discretion, Kenny suggested that Steve had given Angelo the idea in the first place and that Steve had killed the first girl—“some black broad”—on the freeway.

When Dr. Allison began to press for details of the killings,
Kenny, not wanting to reveal too complete a capacity for recall too soon, decided to heighten the impression of Steve as a wildly irrational creature, menacing, out of control. He jabbed the air with the defiltered cigarette and stood up, shouting:

“That’s [Ken’s] problem! It’s not my fucking problem. I want him out of the way! You don’t really know, you don’t fucking understand that I want him out! I don’t want to sit here anymore!” He took a swipe toward the videotape camera. “I don’t want no fucking cameras! Turn that shit off!”

“Just sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, cool off, cool off . . .” Dr. Allison held up his hand, as if trying to calm an evil spirit. “You don’t have to talk to me anymore.”

“That’s right, I don’t. And I don’t fucking want to either!”

“Okay, you can go back where you came from.”

“I don’t want to. I want to stay now.”

Kenny slumped back into his chair and pretended to fall into a trance.

“Ken’s going to have to come out,” Dr. Allison said, urged, seemed to pray. “Ken is going to have to come out! Come out Ken! Come out Ken! Ken?”

“Yeah.”

“You here?”

“I’m here.”

Dr. Allison pointed to the cigarette in Kenny’s hand.

“When did I take this out of my pack?” Kenny asked in his sweet-tempered Ken-voice, acting for all the world like a bewildered child. “I don’t remember taking it out of my pack.”

“That’s right,” Dr. Allison reassured him. “You were in a trance at that time.”

“Why’s the filter broken off?”

“Just a hand broke it off. Don’t you break off filters?”

“No,” Kenny said, his voice rising in wonder, “I can’t smoke a nonfiltered cigarette.” The delicate boy.

“I guess somebody around here smokes without a filter,” Dr. Allison suggested. “You ever found that before? Where and when?”

“At different times, you know, around apartments I’ve had.”

Kenny was simply reacting to the law of supply and demand: if Dr. Allison wanted to know where and when, Kenny would supply him with an answer. And Dr. Allison’s voice was so soothing and encouraging. Dr. Allison said that it looked as though Steve had been at work again, as though Steve were a mischievous leprechaun. All at once Steve was now playing devilish little tricks on poor Ken.

Dr. Allison was relieved to be talking to Ken again instead of Steve. The doctor, although he had diagnosed many multiple personality cases before this one, had never talked to what he believed was a multiple personality who was also a murderer until Bianchi. The doctor had been frightened by what he perceived as Steve’s murderous anger and was glad that, as he believed, he had succeeded in banishing Steve at a crucial moment. Dr. Allison considered himself lucky, although he also prided himself on his skill and bravery in dismissing this monster. He had feared that he was about to become Steve’s next victim. Kenny’s act had been that successful.