Hillside Stranglers (38 page)

In light of these charges against Salerno and Finnigan, the defense moved to dismiss the case “due to denial of due process.” If that were denied, the defense called for the declaration of a mistrial.

Headlines the next morning read:

COPS ON TRIAL

IN BUONO CASE?

Judge George took the new motion to dismiss under submission. The prosecution would have to be given time to reply, and he would need extensive preparation to make his ruling. Alleged police misconduct had become perhaps the most frequently stated reason for appellate reversals of criminal convictions in recent years. In 1976, for instance, the California Court of Appeal had reversed a defendant’s conviction for burglary because police officers coming upon a burglary in progress had not stopped to knock at the door and announce their purpose before entering the house, arresting the burglar, and seizing the evidence. Mindful of his commitment to “the practice of preventive jurisprudence,” the judge would have to construct a careful ruling in order to avoid having it overturned later by a higher court—especially if he ruled against the defense, as, after reviewing the facts, he was inclined to do. If Salerno and Finnigan could be shown to have deliberately concealed Markust
Camden’s mental problems, their conduct could easily be construed as grounds for at least a mistrial.

Meanwhile the trial poked along. In December, over defense objections, the jury was taken on a series of elaborately planned excursions to the locations central to the prosecution’s case: 703 East Colorado, apartment 114 at 1950 Tamarind, 809 East Garfield, the railroad diner, Alta Terrace Drive, and all the other abduction and body sites. The prosecution and the detectives, including Sergeant Roger Brown of the Glendale P.D., who had original responsibility for the Lissa Kastin investigation, orchestrated these “jury-views” to demonstrate the plausibility of the killers’ movements. Each juror was given an elaborate itinerary.

But the jury-views could not proceed before the judge resolved a dilemma. Angelo had the right to be present at these as at all phases of his trial, but security required that he be shackled when transported anywhere, as he was each morning and afternoon when he was taken to and from the courthouse and the jail. Earlier that year the California Supreme Court had reversed a voluntary manslaughter conviction because the defendant had been seen, against his wishes, in jail clothes by the jury, and the shackling of defendants in court had caused other reversals. Angelo did not want the jurors to see him in shackles, and if they did the Supreme Court would certainly find this prejudicial. The judge resolved the dilemma by advising Angelo that he also had the right
not
to go along on the jury-views. Angelo was told that he could go or not, but if he did, it must be in shackles. He decided not to go.

The judge and jury were transported to the jury-views in a Sheriff’s Department van, escorted by motorcycle police, the detectives and attorneys following in separate cars. Each principal detective acted as a sort of master of ceremonies at the location for which he had primary investigative responsibility, with Salerno piecing together what had happened at the railroad diner, Grogan pointing out how and where Lauren Wagner had been abducted, and so on. The excursions were taken at night to convey authentic circumstances. Grogan was anxious about what the jury would think of Beulah Stofer’s testimony
when they saw that the shrubbery in her yard now blocked completely the view from her front window to the street. (Mrs. Stofer still maintained that this had been her vantage point, so Boren and Nash had decided not to introduce her having picked both Buono and Bianchi out in the mug runs, since identification from behind the window would have seemed impossible. She had testified simply that she had definitely seen two men.) To solve the shrubbery problem, Grogan took Mrs. Stofer’s garden shears and chopped the shrubbery back down to its 1977 level. The defense objected heatedly to the sergeant’s landscaping, to which he admitted in court, but the judge found no fault with it.

The most dramatic of the jury-views was the visit to the “cow patch” on Landa Street. The jurors were able to see how obscure a place it was, concluding, so the prosecution hoped, that only someone who like Angelo had lived for years in the area would know about it and could find it quickly, especially in the dark. To emphasize this point, on the way up to Landa Street, Paul Tulleners pointed out Jenny Buono’s house, where Angelo had grown up, and the house on Glover Street, where Candy still lived and where Angelo had lived with her. Then at the cow patch, as the jury looked down the hill toward the trash heap in the darkness, Dudley Varney described how the bodies of Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson had looked when he had found them.

As the jurors waited in the December darkness on this hillside overlooking the Elysian Valley, Dudley Varney said to them: “Please follow visually the helicopter you see above you. It will turn on its spotlight to point out certain locations to us. In each instance, I’ll then tell you what location that is.” One by one the helicopter flew over the fateful places, switching on its spotlight and illuminating each as Dudley Varney identified its significance. Up behind the cow patch, “That is the place on Alvarado where Kimberly Martin’s body was found.” Below and to the north, “That is the Golden State Freeway offramp where Jane King’s body was found.” Farther north, Jenny Buono’s house. Across the Elysian Valley, Lauren Wagner,
Kristina Weckler. And in the center, Angelo’s house, or at least where it had been.

This performance had been Boren and Nash’s idea, when they had cased the cow patch during the day and noticed how many of the key locations could be seen from that spot. They hoped the illuminations would have a powerful effect on the jury. Afterward, standing in the courthouse parking lot, the jury gone home, Grogan told the prosecutors:

“That was some show! Jesus. Mikey, Roger, I tell you, Warner Brothers couldn’t have done it better.”

The judge said it had reminded him of a
son et lumière
display he had witnessed at Pompeii, where spotlights had also illuminated scenes of death.

I like this fucking judge, Grogan thought. Please God don’t let anything happen to him.

Just then Katherine Mader, in a jocular mood as she drove out of the parking lot, made a playful swerve toward the detectives and the prosecutors. Grogan did not think it was funny.

“That bitch’ll be able to buy a dozen more of those Mercedes,” Grogan said, “with the taxpayers’ money she’s making defending that asshole.”

Grogan surpassed all the detectives in his aversion to Katherine Mader, because she had made a special point of trying to undermine his credibility every time he took the stand. Once, when he had said that Angelo’s accent reminded him of Brooklyn, she asked whether he had ever been to Brooklyn. Of course he had, he said, but you didn’t have to go to Brooklyn to know what a Brooklyn accent was. Then she asked him what his own accent was. Boston, he replied, glowering. How, Mader wanted to know, could someone with a Boston accent living in Los Angeles identify a man born in Rochester who had lived forty years in Los Angeles as having a Brooklyn accent? Grogan said nothing, but he vowed at that moment to get back at her someday. He did not care for people who implied ridicule of his Boston accent or mocked it as though it were some sort of mental impediment.

On another occasion, Mader tried to impugn Grogan’s testimony that he had observed a space between Angelo’s front teeth when interviewing him. She asked Grogan to come down from the stand, go over to the defendant, and look into Angelo’s mouth. Grogan did so, clenching his fists to control his anger as everyone in the courtroom saw the big detective bend down to peer at Angelo, who leaned his head back and bared his teeth at Grogan with obvious malice. There was no space. What this proved, other than that Mader was trying to make a fool of him, Grogan could not imagine. Later he found out that Angelo had had dental work done since the 1979 interview.

Angelo’s teeth, or one of them, threatened to delay the trial for weeks at one point. He had complained of a toothache, and since by law a defendant must be able to concentrate his full faculties on the proceedings, undistracted by molar or other pain, a dentist was summoned, first the regular jail dentist and then a specialist, who announced that Mr. Buono needed root canal work. There would be several appointments, over a period of three to four weeks. Trial would have to be adjourned on those occasions. But someone, perhaps knowing that dentists tend to be law-and-order types, telephoned the root canal specialist anonymously and reminded him that it was costing the taxpayers about five thousand dollars a day every day that the trial was adjourned. “I understand,” the dentist replied. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He pulled Buono’s tooth that afternoon, saying how sorry he was that it could not be saved. The prosecutors were relieved, since they figured that once Buono realized how easily he could foul up the trial, he might discover a new toothache or other affliction every day. Now, with his tooth a thing of the past, he might think having the trial continue preferable to losing another tooth or perhaps something even more precious—“I wish Angelo would get a pain in his balls,” Grogan said.

Angelo’s lawyers were as attentive as they could be, under the circumstances, to his physical comforts. One afternoon Gerald Chaleff appeared in the judge’s chambers to complain that Angelo’s red silk underwear had been confiscated. Although he
did not see this deprivation as constituting cruel and unusual punishment, Judge George ordered the silk underwear returned to the prisoner.

Just after the new year, 1983, Judge George announced his ruling on the defense motion to dismiss or declare a mistrial because of Salerno and Finnigan’s alleged misconduct. The detectives resented the attack Chaleff and Mader had mounted against them, especially since the defense lawyers had notified the media ahead of time so as to get maximum publicity for their charges. Salerno and Finnigan did not like having their integrity questioned in the newspapers, and from that point on they tried to avoid any contact with Chaleff and Mader. On the night of the jury-view of Angeles Crest, the lawyers had asked the detectives to have dinner with them, as if Chaleff and Mader had not initiated an action potentially ruinous to the detectives’ careers, for surely they would be seriously damaged if found responsible for botching the Hillside Stranglers trial. The detectives refused the invitation, Finnigan saying, “I’m not that much of a hypocrite.”

The judge’s ruling was sweet to Salerno and Finnigan. In charging the detectives with willful misconduct, Judge George wrote, Chaleff and Mader “made the allegation recklessly, with disregard for the truth.” He castigated the lawyers for deliberately stirring up publicity for their motion, thereby endangering “the right of the prosecution—like the defense—to a fair trial free of prejudicial publicity concerning unsubstantiated charges.” Although Chaleff pointed out that information about Camden had originally been given to Buono’s previous attorneys, not the ones presiding at the trial, the judge ruled that it was not the prosecution’s fault if the defense, acting without “due diligence,” had failed to follow up on material that had been available to the defense in files since 1980, material that included Camden’s stay in the Indiana mental hospital. Nor was there any evidence that Camden had been “delusional” or “psychotic,” nor that he had spent, as alleged by the defense, “almost his entire adult life” in mental hospitals: forty-two days
appeared to be the total amount of time in which he had been, voluntarily, institutionalized, and the detectives had been within reason in believing it to have been only two weeks.

The judge threw out the motion to quash the search warrant for Angelo’s house and suppress evidence found there, and he rejected as “totally unwarranted the conclusion voiced by the defense that [the detectives] perpetrated a fraud upon the court.”

When interviewed by reporters after the ruling had been issued, the judge suggested that the media ought to give as prominent coverage to the clearing of the detectives’ names as had been devoted to the smearing of them. For the most part, the press and television did this, and Salerno and Finnigan were able to feel wholly vindicated. It was after this ruling that Katherine Mader complained to the judge that Salerno and Finnigan had been smirking at her and had made obscene gestures to her in court; but since she gave as the sole source of these charges a “court-watcher,” an old man who came to court every day to doze and pass the time, the judge brushed off her complaint.

In April the prosecutors, having introduced over a thousand exhibits and called two hundred and fifty witnesses, were about ready to rest their case when they got an important break. Cheryl Burke, who had been in the Hollywood public library the night of Kimberly Martin’s murder, had testified that Bianchi had bothered her in the parking lot that night, but she had said nothing about Buono, who had stalked her in the stacks earlier that evening, frightening her into leaving the building. A couple of weeks after testifying, she happened to be at a party where a deputy attorney general, neither Boren nor Nash, was present, and he asked her what it had been like in court. Suddenly she confessed to him that she had been terrified. Not until she had gotten up on the stand did she recognize Angelo Buono as the man who had followed her around the stacks that night. “Predatory” was her word for Angelo. But she had not said anything about this in court. She had been afraid. The deputy attorney general convinced Mrs. Burke to go to Boren and Nash, and she testified again, placing Buono with Bianchi
in the library that night. Her testimony, followed by that of Catherine Lorre, made what Boren and Nash thought was a powerful end to their presentation, which had taken more than a year to get through.

Ironical political changes had taken place during that year. John Van de Kamp was elected attorney general and was therefore technically in charge of a prosecution that as district attorney he had moved to drop. He kept distant from the case, however, not communicating with Boren and Nash at all, who felt oddly that they were working against the political interests of their new boss by going after Buono and that they were operating in a peculiar sort of vacuum as autonomous prosecutors. George Deukmejian had been elected governor, and the new Los Angeles County district attorney was Robert Philibosian, who had previously worked under Deukmejian in the Attorney General’s Office and had supervised Boren and Nash’s work on the Buono case. Philibosian had as one of his first moves as district attorney transferred Roger Kelly to Compton, which many observers considered the Siberia of the county for a deputy D.A. Occasionally Grogan would run into Kelly and would invariably snub him.