Hillside Stranglers (35 page)

Those were the days, Grogan thought. I bet they convicted Castella in a week. He read on:

February 19, 1915

HOR FOOK, alias BATTLING NELSON, Chinaman, resident of Chinatown, about midnight Feb. 14, 1915, beaten up with pick handle and badly wounded, dying on Feb. 18. On Feb. 19 officers Leland and McAuliffe arrested ALFREDO GALLARDO on suspicion of doing the job. Four days previous to murder, GALLARDO gave Chinaman 50¢ to buy him opium but was given charcoal instead; GALLARDO remarked to Y Sam that the “Battler” had tried to poison him and would kill him for doing it. The day and night of murder GALLARDO was hanging around vicinity of the crime . . . . When informed the “Battler” was dead GALLARDO
turned very red and seemed to get very nervous and then spoke of leaving town immediately.

ALFREDO GALLARDO charge changed to vagrancy. Sentenced to $100 or 100 days.

I guess Gallardo had a good lawyer, Grogan thought. He tried one more:

July 17, 1915

ETARO or GEORGE IGUCHI, Jap, shot by MRS. MABEL SMITH at her residence, 1700 West 43rd St., Apt. 3, at about 8:45 p.m. this date. He died in receiving hospital . . . . Mrs. Smith had been keeping company with Iguchi since Feb. 1, 1910, unbeknown [sic] to her husband.

Imagine that, Grogan thought. Iguchi and Mrs. Smith carrying on for five years, and Mr. Smith never knew. What a scandal.

Iguchi had come to her apartments to return some pictures he had taken of her, when Mr. Smith and the Jap were having some words over his being infatuated with his wife. All three started for the gun which was lying near. Mrs. Smith reached it first, shooting Iguchi. Mrs. Smith acquitted by jury.

Acquitted! Grogan marveled. Well, some things never change. But those were the days! Grogan got special pleasure reading about the first murder case in Los Angeles in which psychiatrists had been permitted to testify, arguing, of course, that the defendant was insane. Psychiatrists had been termed officially by the court “alien witnesses” then, an apt phrase in Grogan’s view. The jury had sentenced the defendant to death.

Grogan tried to imagine what Buono and Bianchi’s entry would look like in these files. The transcript of the preliminary hearing was already nearing seven thousand pages. Grogan felt
himself a man out of his proper time. But it made him feel better to think that once there had been a better world.

Grogan had cause to rejoice when the ten-month-long preliminary hearing in Case No. A 354231, People of the State of California, Plaintiff, versus Angelo Buono, Jr., Defendant, ended with a decision by Municipal Court Judge H. Randolph Moore that the case should go to trial. At least that hurdle was past.

The case was now assigned to Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George, who began hearing preliminary motions. Because the Public Defender’s Office was representing Bianchi, Buono required separate, private counsel, lest a conflict of interest in the defense take place. The supervising judge of the Criminal Division appointed Gerald L. Chaleff, who had already handled Buono’s defense on the murder counts at the preliminary hearing, as Buono’s attorney because of Angelo’s alleged indigency. At Chaleff’s request, Katherine Mader was appointed co-counsel for the defense. The lawyers’ pay was adequate: sixty-five dollars an hour for Chaleff, somewhat less than that for Mader; by the trial’s end, Chaleff’s firm alone had been paid over half a million dollars by the County of Los Angeles. But not every criminal lawyer wanted to represent Angelo Buono. Chaleff’s first choice as co-counsel had been another woman, who, after a conversation with Angelo, declined the opportunity. Chaleff, a Harvard Law School graduate who had had several years’ experience as a public defender before going into private practice, was known as bright, tough, and tireless. Mader, a U.C. Davis Law School graduate, had the reputation of being a vigorous researcher and investigator. Grogan was not alone among observers in thinking that Angelo had gotten a definite edge over the prosecution in his legal advocates. And, as Chaleff later confirmed, Angelo himself had asked for a woman as co-counsel, with an eye toward affecting a jury.

Before jury selection began, however, Judge George’s first task was to rule on various pretrial motions. He denied a defense motion to set bail for Buono, ruling that Angelo must
remain in jail for the duration of the trial, but he sustained a defense objection to television coverage, accepting only still photography in the courtroom and denying a request by the television networks for live coverage. These and other motions occupied several weeks, and for all the publicity of the event, things proceeded in the orderly, sometimes dreary way of trials, until the defense moved to sever the eleven nonmurder counts against Buono (including pimping, pandering, sodomy, conspiracy to commit extortion, oral copulation, rape, and false imprisonment) from the ten murder counts. The motion argued that the nonmurder counts should be tried separately at a later, different trial.

Judge George was faced with a decision that could have an important, perhaps determining effect on the outcome of the murder trial. If the nonmurder counts were severed, the jury for the murder trial would be permitted to hear little about the life which Kenny and Angelo had led together before they had actually begun the Hillside Stranglings. The picture of a man who in league with his cousin had committed innumerable criminal sexual and violent acts would be but dimly perceived by the jury.

Judge George, who had studied the preliminary hearing transcripts in detail, was not yet convinced of Angelo’s guilt, but the evidence before him certainly suggested a strong possibility of guilt. To sever the nonmurder counts now would, he knew, make conviction far more difficult. Yet legal precedent dictated that they be severed, the principle being that to try noncapital offenses along with capital offenses was wrong because the jury could be swayed toward conviction on the more serious charges simply because there was greater evidence on the lesser charges: the lesser charges could have a buttressing effect on the more serious ones. A jury should not, in other words, be swayed to believe a defendant guilty of, say, murder simply because he was guilty of burglary.

At the same time Judge George also knew that, one way or another over the course of a trial he estimated would last at least a year, the other evidence, the testimony of Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears and all the others who had suffered everything
thing short of murder at Buono and Bianchi’s hands might somehow work its way into the murder trial, through one gap or another created by the defense or the prosecution or a combination of both.

Judge George’s task, then, as he saw it was to sever the nonmurder counts or risk reversal on appeal. At the same time he knew that the prosecution would be expected to be aware that somehow the severed material, or some of it, might later be admitted anyway. On June 11 he ordered the nonmurder counts severed but he also indicated, in response to questions from Roger Kelly, “that nothing the Court was saying would preclude a proper showing at trial. And that [it] might even develop by way of defense cross-examination or defense testimony [that something might be put at] issue that was not initially at issue.” Roger Kelly appeared to take the hint that at some later point evidence might be admitted which initially was being barred. At least Kelly said that he might make a motion to that effect later on, and Judge George said that nothing he was now ruling would preclude such a motion. Judge George even had in mind, although he did not and could not say so, a specific piece of evidence, namely Sabra Hannan’s testimony that both Buono and Bianchi had tried to force her to insert a dildo into her anus and that Bianchi had beaten her in the presence of Buono. This incident, which in a memo to himself Judge George called “The Sabra Hannan Dildo Incident,” would be admissible because it specifically involved both Buono and Bianchi together in an act of violence against a woman and therefore had direct bearing on the charge that Buono had committed murders in league with his cousin. It was, in other words, not merely an incident from the past showing bad character.

But if Roger Kelly did take the judicial hint, his subsequent actions failed to show it.

On July 6, Bianchi gave what by now was his typical flip-flopping performance on the stand, contrary to his agreement to testify truthfully against Buono. He had no recollection, he said, of faking being hypnotized; yet, he said, he had “probably” faked being a multiple personality. When he had told the
psychiatrists about committing the murders with Angelo, he was “not sure” whether he had been telling the truth or not. Then he said that he had “probably” been lying when confessing. “Probably” he had not been present during the crimes at all. At another point he acknowledged being present at the Los Angeles killings but denied those in Bellingham.

One week later, citing this and other contradictory days of testimony by Bianchi, Roger Kelly moved to dismiss all ten murder counts against Angelo Buono, to drop completely prosecution of Buono as the Hillside Strangler.

In making his motion to dismiss, Kelly told the court that Bianchi had been giving inconsistent versions of the crimes since he had signed the plea-bargain agreement, saying not only that he could not remember whether he or Angelo had killed different victims but sometimes that he had not been involved in any killings at all. An attempt to clarify Bianchi’s status as a witness on July 6 had brought all these inconsistencies to a head, and now, Kelly had determined, prosecution of Angelo Buono was impossible. Kelly was making the motion with the full support of his boss, District Attorney John Van de Kamp, who concurred in the decision with Kelly and his co-prosecutor, James Heins. “It is the belief of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office,” Kelly said, “that the person [Bianchi] whose continued credibility is essential to the successful prosecution of the murder charges against Angelo Buono has lost such credibility . . . . The prosecution for murder now pending against Mr. Angelo Buono cannot be predicated on the evidence now in existence and should be dismissed.”

Kelly went on to argue that the severing of the nonmurder charges made conviction still more unlikely—this in spite of Judge George’s indications to him that evidence of the nonmurder charges might be admissible as the trial developed. Kelly moved that, the murder charges being dropped, Buono should be tried at a later date on the pimping and other nonmurder charges, with bail set at fifty thousand dollars.

Grogan believed that his worst fears and suspicions had been realized—no, worse than that, because he had never been
able to bring himself to suspect that
all
the murder counts would be dropped. In Grogan’s opinion, Kelly had given up, Van de Kamp had given up, justice had given up. Grogan felt, as he said later, as though someone had just pissed on the American flag. He could not bear to look at his fellow detectives. They were all there in court, Salerno, Finnigan, Varney, Williams, all of whom had just been told that they had wasted years of their lives in the mistaken belief that they had been acting in the interests of an outraged community. Even if Angelo could be convicted on all the other counts, he could get no more than ten years, would be given credit for time already served in custody, would have his term reduced by one-third for good behavior, and would be out on the streets in less than five years. Five years for ten murders. Never had Grogan felt so futile. What would he say to the Wagners and the Wecklers? He felt suddenly as if he had been conscripted into an army of deserters, tainted, compromised, sucked in unwillingly by some gross act of disloyalty. Kelly had mentioned the possibility of trying the murder charges at some future date, but he had also said that this was unlikely, and, as Grogan knew, a case gets weaker, not stronger, as the months or years pass, as memories dim and witnesses disappear. Justice, Grogan believed, had taken a dive.

It was impossible to read Judge George’s reaction to this turn of events. Remote on the bench, he said simply that he would take the matter “under submission.” He would not rule on it now. Court would be adjourned for a week. He would rule on the district attorney’s motion on Tuesday, July 21.

Grogan and Salerno went directly to the Code 7 bar after court. There they encountered an investigator for Angelo’s defense team, a man for whom they harbored contempt, who was in such an ebullient mood that he offered to buy the detectives drinks.

“I wouldn’t drink your fucking whiskey,” Salerno said, and retreated with Grogan to a comer.

Angelo and his attorneys were elated, agreeing to celebrate together with dinner at an Italian restaurant as soon as Judge George granted the motion to dismiss and Angelo walked out
of court free. There was little doubt as to how the judge would rule, for it was routine for judges to accede to the prosecution’s wishes in such matters. Only the previous March, Judge George himself had agreed to dismiss murder charges against a woman at the request of the prosecution, when new evidence had turned up implicating another suspect. What would be the point of ordering the prosecution to proceed with a case it said it could not win? Kelly, Heins, District Attorney Van de Kamp, Angelo and his lawyers—all had every reason to believe that the Hillside Stranglers case was at long last over.

But they had misjudged this judge.

My God, my Father, and my Friend,

Do not forsake me in the end.

Well may they curse their second birth,

Who rise to a surviving death!

—Dies Irae
[The Day of Wrath]

Judge Ronald Marc George was the son of a Parisian father, who had immigrated to America in the late twenties, and a Hungarian mother, who had come to the United States a few years later. More quickly than is usual with an intellectually inclined American son, his views of life and of human nature had swung toward those of his European parents. By the time of the Hillside Stranglers trial he was forty-one, young for a judge, but youthful delusion of the kind that searches out goodness in everyone was already many years behind him. Unlike so many others of his generation, he was never a flower child.

Educated along with his Younger sister at the Beverly Hills public schools and at the École Internationale in Geneva, where he discovered a love of languages, he had decided on a diplomatic career by the time he left high school. But in 1961, after graduating from Princeton University, where he majored in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
he entered the Stanford Law School, where his interest in the criminal law was kindled. He became fascinated by aspects of criminal behavior and the means of preventing or identifying it. But he had no wish to defend criminals, and, having received his law degree, he joined the staff of the attorney general of California as a deputy attorney general, specializing in criminal cases.

For the first time, now, Ronald George had direct experience with the criminal class, and the exposure changed his thinking as well as his politics, which had until then tended toward the liberal. The good intentions of liberalism melted away as he was forced to confront extremes of human violence and behavior. Nothing in his excellent yet exclusive education had prepared him for the shock of human behavior at its unremorseful worst, and he came to believe that he had lived the first twenty-five years of his life as a privileged naïf. He did not regret the privilege, but naiveté was no longer possible. Most of the assumptions of his liberally educated generation—the perfectibility of mankind, the belief in general and broad possibilities of moral rehabilitation, the efficacy of altruism—he abandoned as Maginot lines against barbarism. Hemingway’s phrase “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” took on more weight. The liberal-humanist tradition seemed to have grown desperate, the prayer of a man already half eaten by a shark.

He married a girl whom he had known in high school, moved into a house close to his parents, and fathered the first of three sons. He achieved a reputation in the Attorney General’s Office as a brilliant legal scholar adept at oral argument. At the age of thirty he was chosen to present the case for the death penalty on behalf of the State of California, one of six cases he argued before the United States Supreme Court.

In 1972, Governor Reagan appointed Ronald George to the municipal court bench in Los Angeles, and in 1977, Governor Jerry Brown, entirely out of character with his other, very liberal appointments, elevated him to the superior court. Four years later he began presiding over the trial of Angelo Buono and immediately had to decide whether there was to be a trial at all.

Judge George had sensed from the manner in which Roger Kelly had been cross-examining Kenneth Bianchi, evoking, it seemed, Bianchi’s contradictions rather than penetrating to the consistencies behind them, that something was about to emanate from the District Attorney’s Office, perhaps even a motion to dismiss. But when the motion to dismiss all the murder counts was made, the judge was sickened. As different as they were in background, in education, in their stations in life, and in society, and though they had never spoken to each other, the judge’s feelings at that moment ran parallel to Sergeant Bob Grogan’s. It had been imaginable, even vaguely anticipated, but actually to hear the motion to dismiss was another matter. From the moment he heard it, Judge George had no doubt what he must do. He adjourned court for a week, he said, to take the matter “under submission,” to make up his mind; but in truth he needed the time to construct a ruling that was legally watertight.

So unpredictable had the California Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal become, so inclined toward defendants’ rights had the higher courts revealed themselves in recent years, that the judge had to take account not only of precedent but of what the courts were likely to do in future. Judge George did not mind these extra considerations: they simply added to the intensity of legal scholarship, which had over the years come to delight him more and more, much as the mysteries of texts once delighted monks. Nor did the shifting of legal winds lessen his respect for the established hierarchy of the court system. But he did not want to rule against the district attorney and Angelo Buono now only to have his opinion picked apart and reversed. He knew, as he liked to say, that as a superior court judge he was “engaged in the practice of preventive jurisprudence,” as mindful of the possibilities of reversal by a higher court as of the correctness of his present rulings.

He also wanted to take the time to phrase his ruling in such a way as to make it understandable to the literate public as well as to lawyers and appellate judges. It was beyond his proper role to speculate publicly on the motives, or lack of them, behind Kelly’s motion and the D.A.’s concurrence in it, whether
it had been prompted by a lack of will or by fear of losing a highly publicized case, or by neither, or by a combination of both. But he did want to spell out in plain English his concern with what he regarded as a grave error by the District Attorney’s Office in asking him to turn loose Angelo Buono without a trial. This, the judge believed, would be a misuse, even a circumventing, of the judicial process, and whatever the motives behind it, it suggested to the public an indifference to the most serious of crimes. Had society reached the point, the judge wondered to himself, where it no longer cared to defend itself? Had the murder rate in Los Angeles so numbed people that they were willing to acquiesce to killing as a part of the culture, like going to the movies and the beach?

As he worked on the ruling, the judge felt entirely isolated. No one outside his family, not a single broadcaster or reporter or columnist, was anticipating anything but his granting of the D.A.’s motion. Police Chief Gates had told D.A. Van de Kamp that he was getting bad advice and should reconsider aspects of the case, but this exchange had occurred in a private meeting, and the judge did not know whether he had a single ally in legal circles. One television commentator, Baxter Ward, a theatrical former county supervisor with a portentous, old-style radio announcer’s voice, began attacking the judge
ad hominem
in anticipation of the ruling, saying that this was the judge who was going to set Angelo Buono free. His guess as to how the judge would rule was consistent with everyone else’s.

On the morning of July 21, Angelo Buono, wearing a long-sleeved shirt to conceal his tattoos, entered a courtroom packed with newspeople. He swaggered to his chair before the bench, physically unchanged by his nine months in jail except that he was pale, and his hair showed a lot of gray, since he had been unable to dye it. His female counsel, Katherine Mader, whispered to him, slinging her arm around his shoulders. In the hallway outside the courtroom, cameras waited to convey his walk to freedom. Roger Kelly stared ahead, avoiding the contemptuous eyes of detectives. Salerno and Finnigan sat together off to one side, silent. Grogan exiled himself to a corner
at the back, subdued by frustration. He had done some asking around about Judge George and had concluded that if any judge in the state might save the case, this was the one; but Grogan held out little hope, had already begun rehearsing to himself phrases of regret to the Wagners and the Wecklers, words he knew would stick in his throat.

All courtrooms are churches, the raised bench, so named since the Middle Ages, an altar of sorts; and as the robed priest of justice appears, the people rise as a congregation. That morning Judge George entered his courtroom and assumed the elevated place. He glanced down at the packed room through glum brown eyes set in a long, Manolete-medieval face, over a nose that veered toward the grandiose, and arranged before him a thirty-six page sermon. Gray hair made him appear older than his years, but he broke the silence with a youthful voice.

He began by citing the district attorney’s motion to dismiss each of the ten murder charges, emphasizing that the motion specified that it was made “without the likelihood of refiling”: without, in other words, the likelihood that Angelo would ever be tried for these murders. He noted that Buono, even if convicted on all eleven of the nonmurder counts, would serve less than five years, and he pointed out that the pending motions for dismissal and for bail “reach this court after twenty-two months of proceedings,” the preliminary hearing alone having lasted ten months; and he quoted the prosecutor’s statement of only two months earlier, in which Kelly had said, “We believe there is more than sufficient [evidence] to show presumption of guilt by Mr. Buono . . . and I think the evidence the People put on at the preliminary is sufficient to withstand any conviction, the jury believing Mr. Bianchi, and could convict Mr. Buono.”

At this point Grogan took a deep breath. Was it possible that in underlining Kelly’s former position in favor of prosecution the judge was getting ready to deny the dismissal motion? Grogan began to hope.

Judge George launched into a brief excursion detailing legal scholarship on the subject of the duty imposed by law upon a court in ruling whether or not to grant a prosecution
motion to dismiss criminal charges. Citing various precedents, he summarized that “the common thread in this legal fabric . . . is the principle that a prosecutor has almost total discretion as to whether to file charges (and which charges to file), but that once he has made the decision to file charges the disposition of such charges is a judicial function.” It was the judge’s prerogative, in other words, to accept or not a motion to dismiss.

He then, again by way of reference to legal precedent and authority, reminded the District Attorney’s Office that it was charged with grave responsibilities which demanded integrity, zeal, and conscientious effort in the gathering and presentation of evidence. He quoted the American Bar Association’s standards for prosecutors: “In making the decision to prosecute, the prosecutor should give no weight to the personal or political advantages or disadvantages which might be involved or to a desire to enhance his or her record of convictions.”

At this point spectators in the courtroom may have remembered that District Attorney Van de Kamp was planning to run for the office of attorney general of California, and Grogan also thought of Roger Kelly’s pride in his record of convictions. Grogan now permitted himself something more than hope. He was beginning to believe that Judge George was going to rescue the case. The judge added that it was “the court’s duty to dismiss pending charges only if it is apparent that dismissal would be ‘in furtherance of justice.’ ”

Judge George now took up the matter of the persistent contradictions in Bianchi’s testimony, on which the motion to dismiss primarily rested. He accepted that there were such contradictions, but he concluded that “it is more significant that to the extent that Mr. Bianchi at any given time claimed personal recollection of a particular murder, the participants in the criminal conduct were always the same—Mr. Buono and Mr. Bianchi, and no one else. Furthermore, [Mr. Buono’s] potential guilt of first-degree murder would not depend [under California law] upon whether he had done the actual strangling (or had had forcible sexual relations with the victim) or had merely assisted Bianchi in doing so.” At no time, the judge pointed out, had Bianchi, in spite of his contradictions, ever represented that
Angelo Buono was not involved in the homicides. Contrary to what Kelly had argued in his motion, no “novel infirmities” in the prosecution’s case had lately arisen: Bianchi’s flip-flopping had been a factor ever since his arrival in Los Angeles, and the prosecutor had been fully aware of the problem from the moment he had filed charges against Buono. “Basically the doubts and lapses which Mr. Bianchi expressed during the past several weeks amount to nothing more than a modest increment to the morass of contradictions which have characterized this case from its inception and which apparently left the District Attorney’s Office unmoved enough to be able two months ago to characterize its case as one in which the proof of guilt was both evident and sufficient to sustain a conviction on appeal.”

The judge then reviewed important evidence which the prosecutor had failed to mention in his motion to dismiss. Kelly had listed only the prior association between Buono and Bianchi, Catherine Lorre’s testimony, and the Judy Miller fiber evidence. (Kelly had said nothing about the Lauren Wagner fiber evidence.) The judge added to these Markust Camden’s testimony, and Deborah Noble’s, Jennifer Snider’s, and Antoinette Lombardo’s, as well as the testimony of the driver of the Foxy Ladies van, that of a waitress at the Robin Hood Inn, and that of a man who apparently had witnessed the abduction of Yolanda Washington from Sunset Boulevard, an incident that had involved the use of a police badge. The judge cited also the evidence of Buono’s wallet, which “has a cut-out area customarily employed in that type of wallet for the placement of a badge,” and Buono’s denial at the time of his arrest that he had ever owned a wallet, “possibly a false statement; if so, interpreted under the law as showing a consciousness of guilt.” All of this evidence was certainly enough to meet the legal requirement that the testimony of an accomplice be corroborated “by such other evidence as shall tend to connect the defendant with the commission of the offense. Case law establishes that such corroboration ‘may be slight and entitled to little consideration when standing alone. The requisite corroboration may be provided by circumstantial evidence.’ ” The judge added that convictions were routinely obtained on the corroborated testimony
of an accomplice who had made inconsistent statements, and he cited the Manson case as one recent example. A jury would be free to decide which statements to believe and which to disregard.