Hillside Stranglers (41 page)

When Judge George, after hearing arguments from the attorneys, announced to them in conference that he had decided to sequester the jury until they reached a verdict, certain hostilities, if they did not explode, surfaced. Chaleff and Mader maintained that to sequester the jury now, after they had been free to go home to their families at night for two years, would act on them as pressure for an early or even a premature verdict. But
the judge said that newspapers and television stations were planning to do stories on the jurors. He could not take the risk after all this time that some reporter would try to contact a juror during deliberations: that would cause a mistrial, and to have a mistrial now was unthinkable. The
Los Angeles Times
alone had assigned six reporters to do nothing but background checks on the jurors. During the trial itself reporters had tried to do stories about various jurors and had, fortunately, been discouraged. In the last month in Los Angeles there had been two mistrials because of improper approaches to jurors. Even a chance encounter in a grocery store, the judge said, could cause a mistrial. A friend could advise a juror what to do—that would be enough.

One of Gerald Chaleff’s several talents as a criminal defense lawyer was to discover, after a trial was over, just such jury misconduct or jury tampering as the judge had described. Chaleff was not, therefore, at all happy with the decision to sequester, since it effectively closed off a last avenue of defense.

“I think personally,” Chaleff told the judge, “I have stated throughout the record, that at times the court has done things which I felt were unfair to the defendant. And I think at this time that the only purpose of sequestration is to put pressure on the jury to arrive at some verdict, whatever that verdict may be.”

Chaleff continued in this vein. The judge interrupted him:

“I think your remarks are very much out of line . . . . I resent the implication that somehow the court is again doing something as part of some grand conspiracy and is unfair to you and your client.”

“No grand conspiracy,” Chaleff said.

“I resent it and I think it is inappropriate and unprofessional.”

The jurors were escorted to two hotels, the twelve actual jurors to one and the four remaining alternates to another. Each day the twelve would be taken back to the jury room in the courthouse to deliberate from nine to twelve o’clock and from one-thirty to four. Bailiffs were with them twenty-four hours a
day. In the evenings, after dinner at the hotel or at a restaurant chosen by the bailiffs, the jurors could watch television as a group, with a bailiff switching off the set whenever anything about the trial was broadcast. They could read newspapers and magazines, but only after a bailiff had cut out stories about the trial.

Many stories about this jury had already appeared in Los Angeles publications and in the national newsmagazines. That the jurors had managed to associate together without apparent conflict throughout what had now become the longest criminal trial in the history of the United States, perhaps in the known history of the world, was itself news. They had given themselves a party on the first and second anniversaries of the proceedings, and they celebrated one another’s birthdays. They were prisoners of a peculiar sort of modem war, hostages to justice, and like prisoners of other kinds of wars they tried to make the best of their predicament. If one or another of them had a particular hardship, Judge George would adjust the trial schedule, and once he had adjourned so that one juror, the Pan American flight attendant, could run in the New York Marathon. During most weeks they served four days, going to their regular jobs on Friday, which the attorneys needed to prepare witnesses and other aspects of the case. Two of the jurors encountered resentment from their civil service bosses at the amount of time lost from work—a conflict of democratic values—and the judge had conveyed warnings that to hinder a juror from his or her duty was to risk a citation for contempt of court.

But if the jurors had indeed endured with cheerful camaraderie two years of hardship and frequent tedium, acting as an exemplary enclave of ethnic and racial harmony, their ability to come to a unanimous decision on Angelo Buono was still in doubt. Judge George wondered whether the extent of the testimony— the transcript, prepared daily by two court reporters and three typists who usually worked until after eight in the evening, had now passed fifty thousand pages—and the complexity of considering ten separate murder counts would be overwhelming to twelve citizens who, however conscientious, were of varying degrees of intelligence and education. The
judge’s belief in the jury system was absolute, but no one could deny that this trial would put that system to the severest test imaginable. What would happen, moreover, if during the deliberations one of the jurors fell ill or even dropped dead? By law one of the alternates would have to be brought in, with deliberations begun again from the beginning. A hung jury was always a possibility: Bob Grogan in his gloomier moments thought it a probability. To end up with no verdict after all this time and money spent—the costs to the county alone already approached two million dollars—would render the trial one of the great fiascos of legal history.

Considering all of these factors, the judge determined that he would be prepared to have the jury announce a verdict on any single count as soon as agreement could be reached on it. The verdicts, in other words, could come in piecemeal. If the jurors could achieve unanimity on just one count, they could then return to deliberate on the remaining counts. The procedure was unusual but not unique, as Judge George was careful to establish. The defense, of course, strongly objected, sensing accurately that it would be far easier for the jury to agree on one count at a time than on ten together, but the judge stood his ground, citing legal precedents.

Jury deliberations began on Friday, October 21. Saturday passed with no verdict, Sunday was a day off. No one had expected a quick verdict, but when a week had gone by without a decision on any count, Boren and Nash began to feel some apprehension, Chaleff and Mader some optimism. By the end of the week the jury began asking to reexamine certain exhibits and to have certain passages of testimony read back to them: they were not permitted to read the transcript itself, which contained far more than they were allowed to know. When the jury began asking for material relevant to later counts—Cepeda and Johnson, Lauren Wagner—it was clear that they had been unable to agree on one of the strongest counts, number two, Judy Miller. Salerno wondered whether his discovery of the fiber and of Markust Camden would go for naught. Had the defense been successful in impugning Camden? How could the jury ignore the fiber? The defense had argued that Bianchi
could have used material from the Trim Shop without Angelo’s knowledge, but did anyone actually believe that? Could anyone possibly accept the defense’s contention that because Bianchi had killed two women on his own in Bellingham he had killed ten on his own in Los Angeles? As the prosecution had countered, the depth of the ligature marks on the Bellingham girls’ necks indicated that a different, more abrupt and furious kind of strangulation had taken place up there, the victims murdered quickly without even having been undressed first. And the carelessness with which the Bellingham bodies had been disposed of, the clues Bianchi had left, the ease with which he had been caught—all these factors pointed to the absence of Buono’s cold-blooded meticulousness and to the absurdity of imagining that Bianchi could have achieved the Hillside murders on his own.

Grogan, who had little faith in juries anyway, grew anguished and sullen when it became clear that the jury had failed to agree on any of the first seven counts, had passed Kristina Weckler and were now considering Lauren Wagner. If they couldn’t agree on Lauren, Grogan thought, with the fibers and Beulah Stofer to go on, Angelo would walk. The Wagners, Grogan knew, had already begun discussing whether they could or would kill Angelo themselves if he was acquitted.

Inside the jury room there had been trouble from the start of deliberations.

It was a matter of ego. The jury’s first act was to elect a foreman. They chose Edward McKay, a black man, but the vote was not unanimous. Another male juror, not black, who for the sake of his and his descendants’ pride shall herein be known as Mr. Smith, had hoped to be elected, had for some reason assumed that he would be elected foreman. When he failed in this ambition, which in relation to the magnitude of the jury’s task seemed to others trivial but was anything but trivial to Mr. Smith, he grew resentful, sullen, angry, and, at length, recalcitrant. He would show the others what a mistake they had made in rejecting him.

Ironically Mr. Smith had been one juror whom the prosecutors had been delighted to see impaneled two years before. He had been eager to serve and had brought with him letters from his employer describing him as a “solid citizen” type, and his answers during juror examination seemed to mark him as a
law-and-order man. But, unknown to anyone but his fellow jurors, as the trial dragged on he had grown restless and irritable and was heard, as the trial adjourned for a weekend, to boast, “Well, you won’t be seeing me on Monday! I’ve had enough! See you suckers sometime!” Now that his fellow jurors had shown their lack of appreciation for his leadership potential, he would get back at them. He had the power to foul things up, and he would express his resentment by using that power. To hell with the others. To hell with
The People
v.
Angelo Buono.

Such egocentricity was no more rare among jurors than among the rest of humanity. Only the previous year a juror in a child pornography trial in Los Angeles had announced at the outset of deliberations that he hated the police, would rather die than give the police a victory, and would vote for acquittal no matter what the evidence and no matter what anyone else thought. He had pulled a chair into a comer of the jury room, opened a book, and refused to participate in the discussion. In the end the jury had deadlocked hopelessly at eleven to one. More common were problems with sequestered juries. Alliances often formed that had nothing to do with the case at hand. One Los Angeles bailiff told of how a woman juror had become attached to him and refused to cast her vote until he agreed to go to bed with her. When a jury was sequestered for more than a few days, romances often sprang up during the night at the hotel, affecting rational discussion the next morning. A bailiff would be asked to supply birth-control pills. Another Los Angeles bailiff recalled a romance between jurors that caused a divorce. Three days after the verdict had been reached, the lonely husband of a smitten juror telephoned to ask how much longer this trial was going to last. He missed his wife. The bailiff had to tell him that the jurors had been sent home days ago.

Mr. Smith dug in. On count number one his attitude was relatively inconspicuous. Five of the jurors were convinced from the start that Angelo was guilty on all ten counts, but only these five voted for conviction on Yolanda Washington, which everyone agreed was the count offering the least evidence implicating Buono: here there were only Bianchi’s word and testimony
about Yolanda’s connection to the bad trick list. When the jury passed on to consider Judy Miller, Mr. Smith got the chance to throw around the weight of his pique.

After taking into consideration the Judy Miller fiber and Markust Camden’s testimony, together with the proximity of Melinda Hooper’s house to the body site, the jurors voted on this count eleven to one for conviction. It was then Tuesday, October 25. They had been out only four days and they were already that close to a verdict. But now Mr. Smith was showing the others where he stood. They were in his power. They would have to sit there indefinitely because of his not-guilty vote.

Others pressed him. Discussion grew angry. Two especially articulate female jurors let Mr. Smith know what they thought of him. Foreman McKay tried to calm things down. Finally, under the pressure of being a minority of one, Mr. Smith caved in. He would vote, reluctantly, he said, for conviction. The jury was at last unanimous, and Foreman McKay prepared to fill out the verdict form and signal that a verdict was ready.

But then everything fell apart again. A female juror sympathetic to Mr. Smith announced that she felt he had been pressured into his vote. She did not think it was right for him to vote against whatever he truly believed, so, as a gesture of kindness to Mr. Smith, she was changing her vote to not guilty. No one could fathom the motive of this bizarre act of self-abnegation. Could it be that she felt indebted to Mr. Smith because he had been the only one to give her a birthday present the night before? Was this a group therapy session?

Mr. Smith, rejoicing in an ally, quickly changed his vote to not guilty. Foreman McKay, perhaps trying to mollify hurt feelings now in the hope of future agreement, changed his vote to not guilty, too. In a matter of seconds the vote had gone from twelve to nothing to nine to three. Discussion passed on to Lissa Kastin.

And on: King, Cepeda, Johnson, Weckler. The tally varied on each, but Mr. Smith, emboldened by sympathy, voted for acquittal on all. He was like a stone sitting in the middle of a
stream, troubling discussion whenever it approached a level flow. The articulate women grew shrill, then agreed between themselves to temper their ire. They could recognize disturbed male egos when they saw them, and they feared pushing other males over to Mr. Smith’s side. The second Sunday arrived. Bailiffs escorted jurors on a tour of an arboretum, an excursion designed to keep them from going stir-crazy.

The courtroom meanwhile was for the most part deserted. Judge George worked on other matters in his chambers, where the model of Angelo’s house and the pictures of the victims still rested, trying to distract himself while the jury debated in their room two doors down the hall. On one quiet day Roger Boren and Michael Nash encountered Katherine Mader in the building. They exchanged pleasantries and speculated about when the jury would finally report. Then Mader, chattering in her usual cheerful way, made a series of revelations that startled the prosecutors. Rather in the spirit of “I know something you don’t know,” she told them that the defense had known about several things that would have been highly useful to the prosecution, but it was too late for them now, so she would tell them.

The defense knew where the Excalibur was, she said, stored in a garage in Glendale. And it would have been useful had the prosecution known, as the defense did, that Angelo’s mother had died of vaginal cancer, specifically. Didn’t they think that this provided an extra deep psychological motive for Buono to kill women? And one more thing. The hairs on Lauren Wagner’s hands, found mixed in with the fibers from the carpet and chair, were not cat hairs, as everyone had thought, but rabbit fur—another link to Angelo. Too bad Boren and Nash had missed all that! If the jury had been told about one or two of these things, they might not be taking so long.

Boren and Nash could not recall in their experience a defense attorney making revelations, confessions really, such as these after a trial—certainly not while the jury was still out, with a retrial always a possibility should the deliberations result in a hung jury. Oh well, Nash observed, it was not the first bizarre incident in this case. It was fitting, in its way.

Halloween again, the sixth anniversary of the discovery of Judy Miller’s body. Just after lunch a buzzer sounded three times in the courtroom: the signal that the jury had reached a verdict after nine days. The judge had his clerk inform the media that the jury’s decision would be announced at four o’clock. Radio and television stations began broadcasting the impending event on the half-hour. By four the courtroom had filled with reporters, the detectives, and the few spectators who could get in. Absent were any friends or relatives of Angelo Buono: none had appeared at any time during the trial, except to testify. Grogan, standing near the back with the other detectives, was experiencing what Dr. Watkins might have diagnosed as dissociative reaction: he had invited friends over to his apartment that night to watch
Monday Night Football,
and he kept inquiring aloud of no one in particular, ‘‘I’m having all these people over. What am I going to do? What’ll I do with all the Chinese food I ordered?”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Judge George began the ritual, “I am informed by the bailiff that you have arrived at a verdict. I would inquire of the foreman, Mr. McKay, whether this is in fact the case.”

“Yes, we have.”

McKay then handed the verdict form to Jerry Cunningham, who handed it to the judge, who opened the envelope and read the verdict silently. The judge seemed to take a long time to read the few words. It was like a moment of ominous quiet in the middle of a thunderstorm. He handed the form to the clerk, and she, hands shaking, read it out:

“ ‘We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the defendant Angelo Buono guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner in violation of Section 187, Penal Code, a felony, as charged in Count Eight of the Information and we further find it to be murder in the first degree. This 31st day of October, 1983. Edward McKay, Foreman.’ ”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict, so say you one, so say you all?”

The jury intoned a collective yes.

Judge George, with characteristic scrupulosity, asked the clerk to poll the jurors individually, a step usually taken only at the request of the defense or prosecution. It was an act as final as the last out in the ninth inning; after it no juror could change his or her vote. Mr. Smith’s turn to be polled came more than halfway through. Head low, he mumbled an affirmative like a man whose judgment was being extracted from him with forceps, as Michael Nash noted, wondering whether Mr. Smith was ill and thinking that he would have to ask the jurors after the trial whether something had been wrong with Smith. As Nash eventually learned, after nine days Smith had caved in, the evidence on the Lauren Wagner count being greater even than his pride.

The judge told the jury to resume their deliberations on the other counts in the morning, and he advised them not to be affected by the presence of so large a number of reporters and photographers in the courtroom. He had noticed, as had Boren and Nash, that the jury had registered shock at the mass of media people who had come to record the verdict: the jurors had looked rather like prisoners who, suddenly released from darkness, felt bombarded by harsh worldly light. Grogan too had noticed the jurors’ seeming surprise at their public importance. Grogan figured that at least some of them had achieved, as he said, the courage of conviction only by ignoring the social impact of a unanimous verdict. “Sometimes a horse needs blinders to win,” was the way Grogan phrased it.

Grogan’s first act after the verdict was to rush to telephone the Wagners, who had moved to Oregon, and the Wecklers, who had moved to Hawaii. Salerno reached Cindy Hudspeth’s mother, and the other detectives telephoned most of the remaining families. Sabra Hannan, who had heard the news on Phoenix television, managed to get through to Roger Boren at his courthouse office, telling him how much she appreciated the work he and Nash had done. Because of them, she said, she could now go on with her new life. She would never forget her ordeal, but she could at least have faith in people and the courts again.

Then the detectives gathered with Boren and Nash at the
Code 7 bar. The name of the bar had never seemed so appropriate: it was a play on police code, 4 being the gravest emergency, an officer in distress, 7 a fantasy number suggesting that a situation so extreme had arisen that the only possible response was drink. At the Code 7 that afternoon the mood was less celebration than purgation. Boren and Nash felt less triumphant than relieved and bemused: since Van de Kamp’s election as attorney general, the prosecutors had worked the case on their own without encouragement or advice from their superiors, as though as prosecutors they had not been tied to an official state office. Attorney General Van de Kamp had not telephoned to congratulate them, nor were they optimistic about their futures under his stewardship. By the second drink, emotions cracked open and the gruffest of all, Grogan, who was especially moved because the first guilty verdict had come on Lauren Wagner, began to weep. As he had said to a
Herald-Examiner
reporter, who Put the quote on the front page the next day, “The man who killed Lauren Wagner deserves to die.” Grogan strode around the bar hugging people, his emotions melting everyone’s reserve, tears Niagarous. He grabbed Michael Nash, roaring, “My little imp, you did it, Mikey, you and Roger, my little imp!” Then Grogan proposed a toast to Judge George:

“To the greatest judge in the state. He’s the real hero. He kept it going. Thank God for Judge George.”

The next morning, after a long night at his apartment during which nobody talked football, Grogan awoke thinking about the judge again. He would have to do something to honor him. He decided to arrange a high-dollar lunch at the Tower Restaurant. He would pick the judge up in a police helicopter, landing on the roof of the courthouse, and fly him over to the restaurant, which was on the top floor of a skyscraper a few blocks away. Everyone would be there, Salerno and Finnigan, Boren and Nash, Chief Gates; and Grogan’s friend the maître d’ would lay on snails and veal and the best wines. The lunch would take place after the rest of the verdicts and the sentencing were all over. Lying in bed, Grogan started composing the speech he would make. But all that would be weeks
away. He wanted to do something for the judge right now. A compulsion seized Grogan.

He quickly showered and dressed and drove to the liquor store. It was ten in the morning. The judge would be in his chambers. Grogan bought a bottle of chilled Dom Pérignon and two wineglasses and raced to the courthouse, hiding the sack under his suitcoat. He hurried through the empty courtroom into the hallway behind and burst into chambers, pulling out the champagne and waving it aloft:

“Goddammit, Judge George”—pronounced
Ge-aaawge—
” ‘let’s have a drink! I got to congratulate you.”