Hillside Stranglers (42 page)

Grogan set the glasses down on the judge’s desk and began struggling with the wire on the cork, slicing his finger.

The judge leaned far back in his chair, looking as though a wild animal had just broken in through the window. His mouth fell open, but he was unable to speak as Grogan twisted at the cork with bloody fingers, let it pop and hit the ceiling, and started pouring, drops of blood falling onto the desk.

“No, no, Sergeant Grogan,” he finally got out. “Please, don’t do that. Think, sergeant, think! This wouldn’t be right. Really, I appreciate how you feel. I know what you’ve been through, but please take the champagne away. My God, the jury’s just down the hall!”

At first Grogan looked hurt, but then, downing both glasses, he said he just wanted to let the judge know how he felt:

“Judge, it’s a resurrection of faith.”

And Grogan left, finishing off the champagne in the elevator.

On Thursday, November 3, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on the Yolanda Washington charge, but immediately afterward they asked to see the Judy Miller fiber evidence again. Gerald Chaleff expressed satisfaction to the press at the not-guilty verdict, saying that it bespoke a jury capable of making up their own minds. On Friday, Katherine Mader waited around the courtroom wearing shorts and a T -shirt with the words ‘‘I’d rather be in Rochester” printed on the front. On
Saturday, the jury brought in a guilty verdict on the Judy Miller count, which made Salerno feel that his efforts had not been wasted and that his integrity had been once again vindicated, and found “special circumstances” tying the Wagner and Miller killings together as multiple murders. This meant, under a recent California law passed in response to the public’s outrage that killers such as Charles Manson and Robert Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, were eligible for parole, that Angelo Buono must be sentenced either to death or to a minimum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole.

On Monday morning the jury returned guilty verdicts on Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, again with special circumstances applying. Dudley Varney became very emotional at this and had to leave the courtroom: the two girls had been his special charge. On this day Angelo, his pachydermal sensitivities finally affected, refused to put on civilian clothes and appeared in court wearing jailhouse blues, his tattoos revealed. He announced that he was firing Chaleff and Mader. That afternoon he was found guilty on the Kimberly Martin count. “I am no longer speaking to Mr. Chaleff,” he told the judge.

Two days later the jury brought in guilty verdicts on Kristina Weckler, Lissa Kastin, and Jane King. That left only Cindy Hudspeth, but after another two days, Foreman McKay told the judge that the jury were “hopelessly deadlocked” on this last count, eleven to one. The judge instructed the jury to resume deliberations, but on the way to the hotel a woman juror suffered chest pains and was taken to the hospital. Deliberations would be suspended until she was released, or else an alternate would have to be brought in and discussion started over on the Hudspeth count. Media commentators noted that her sudden illness would silence any remaining criticism of the judge’s decision to have each verdict reported separately. At least nine counts were already safely delivered.

This time the stubborn juror was not Mr. Smith but his former female ally, the woman who had originally changed her vote on Judy Miller out of sympathy for Mr. Smith. The question here was whether the evidence showed that two men must
have been involved in the dumping of Cindy Hudspeth’s body miles up the Angeles Crest Highway, and everyone except this lone woman believed that there must have been two men, one following in a second car for the return trip. She argued that Kenneth Bianchi must have taken a bicycle along and had ridden down the mountain on it. To the other jurors’ protests that no mention of any bicycle had ever entered anyone’s mind before this, that not even the defense had suggested that Bianchi so much as owned a bicycle, she answered that she was entitled to her own opinion.

Finally on Monday, November 14, the ill juror recovered and the holdout changed her vote to guilty on Cindy Hudspeth. In all by this time the jury had noted seventy-two special circumstances tying the murders in together, so there was no question that the most lenient sentence Angelo could get would be life without parole.

All the time that the jury had been deliberating, Gerald Chaleff had not been idle. He continued to look for every possible means to argue for a mistrial, and he made two such motions, one saying that the jury had viewed a television movie prejudicial to their opinions of Angelo and the other almost metaphysical in concept. The movie was called
Chiefs.
It was set in a small Southern town, and the plot involved a corrupt white police officer, a noble black chief, and a murderous former chief, white, who killed young boys and buried them under his front yard. How seeing this movie could possibly have prejudiced the jury against Angelo neither the bailiff, who had permitted them to watch, nor the judge could imagine. The judge dismissed this motion, commenting that Chaleff’s fears about the jury’s exposure to this television program certainly stood in contrast to his earlier opposition to sequestering the jury.

The other motion came when the jury asked to see the big plasterboard with all the pictures of the victims on it. Chaleff argued that while the individual photographs had each been admitted to evidence, the board to which they were glued had not been formally admitted and that therefore the jury ought not to have been permitted to look at the pictures as they appeared
lined up on the board. When Chaleff suggested that as a compromise the board be cut into ten separate strips, the judge said that this sort of discussion reminded him of medieval scholastic philosophy—he was about to ask Chaleff whether he thought that the board should be sliced up with William of Ockham’s razor but decided the reference was too arcane—and directed that the board remain intact.

Judge George also denied Angelo’s motion to represent himself during the penalty phase of the trial, when the jury would determine whether to fix the punishment at death. Angelo failed to appreciate all that Gerald Chaleff was trying to do for him, and the judge questioned Buono whether he was planning to ask for the death penalty so the state could “help you commit suicide.”

“Ain’t part of my motivation,” Angelo replied.

“If you had a medical problem,” the judge told him in a hearing held in chambers, “the way you did with your tooth, you wouldn’t have pulled your tooth out. You sought a professional dentist. And when you are in a court of law, I think it is equally absurd to try to represent yourself, especially on the question of whether you should live or die.” Had the judge known of the circumstances under which Angelo’s tooth had been pulled, he might have chosen a different analogy. He concluded that “even a multimillionaire” could not have had a better defense and ruled that the danger of erroneously imposing a death sentence outweighed the minor infringement of Buono’s asserted right to represent himself after two years in court.

But Angelo remained defiant. On November 16 he took the stand for the first and only time, as a gesture of contempt for the court, for the law, for ten dead women and their families. Chaleff asked him whether he would like to tell the jury what punishment he felt he should receive, and Angelo replied, regaining his old cockiness:

“My morals and constitutional rights has been broken.”

The meaning was elusive but ultimately clear: he was thumbing his nose at everyone. The judge asked him to speak up.

“My morals and constitutional rights has been broken,” Angelo repeated. “I ain’t taking any procedure in this trial.”

Chaleff asked him to clarify his response.

“I stand mute,” Angelo said, and when the judge asked him if he had anything further to say, he added, “I am standing mute to anything further.”

It was not easy, during the penalty phase, for the defense to find character witnesses for Angelo. His daughter Grace, loyal to the end, wanted to testify for him, but Angelo, talking to her alone in the judge’s chambers (“a conjugal visit,” Grogan called it), convinced her to keep silent. His sister Cecilia said that her brother could never commit murder, and a man who said he had known Angelo Buono for years assured the jury that Buono “wouldn’t hurt a canary bird.” He had once asked Angelo to do something illegal, and Angelo had refused.

“What did you ask him to do?” Michael Nash inquired.

“I asked him to burn down a guy’s house. He wouldn’t do it.”

The witness was excused.

In the closing arguments of the penalty phase, each attorney had the opportunity to plead for mercy or for death to Buono. Michael Nash took this chance to remind the jurors once again of the victims. He knew that although the trial had now been a way of life for the jurors for years, some of them might well by now be confused about the particular identities of the murdered women; and the penalty phase itself had concentrated so much on Angelo as an individual that the individuality of the victims might have been forgotten, as Bob Grogan had all along feared. Such indeed was what so often happened in a highly publicized murder trial, the killers becoming celebrities, their victims nonentities, remembered as alive only by their families and friends. Certainly it would have been a rare member of the public who could have named anything unique about any of the women. Casual discussions with random citizens indicated that most people believed that all of the victims had been prostitutes: it was easier to accept the crimes that way; it was less threatening.

Nash succeeded in resurrecting the victims by pointing out that none of them would be able to enjoy any of the comforts which Angelo Buono would enjoy were the jury to spare his life. Because the jury had found Angelo not guilty of killing Yolanda Washington, Nash skipped over her and began with Judy Miller. He ignored that she had been a runaway and a prostitute, citing instead her simple girlish nature:

“Do you think [she] is ever going to watch television or listen to a stereo or a radio? Angelo Buono will be able to do that.”

Recalling Lissa Kastin’s ambitions to be a dancer and her concern with good health, Nash reminded the jury that she would never be able to go to a gym or work out. It was the same for Cindy Hudspeth, the hardworking girl who loved to dance, had won dancing contests, and was trying to earn some money to go to college by offering dance lessons. But if he were permitted to live, “Angelo Buono can get himself into tremendous physical shape if he wants to, and we all know that the better shape we are in physically, the better we feel mentally. He can do that. These girls cannot.”

Nash then turned to the youngest victims:

“Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, two children that were killed by Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, never got the chance to grow up with their schoolmates. They will never get the chance to experience any of the joys of life, many of which Angelo Buono can continue to enjoy. I suppose he can make himself useful in some way. Maybe he can do some upholstery work in prison.” Nash paused to let this sink in and then added, “Who the hell knows?

“Or he can worship whatever God he chooses. Jane King, she never got to pursue the career that she wanted to, an acting career. And she never got to follow up on her freedom of religious expression that she was involved in when she died.” Jane King’s Scientology may have seemed a strange, even a hokey sort of religion to some, but Michael Nash was pointing out that she had been deprived by Buono of one of the basic American freedoms, along with her life.

What would Buono do in prison? Nash wondered:

“Maybe he will take up sketching. Maybe he will sit in his cell and sketch people or maybe when he gets to go outside he will sketch whatever he sees. Who knows?

“Kristina Weckler—she is never going to get a chance to draw anything again.

“Angelo Buono can get visits from his family and friends. They came to testify for him in court. They care for him, so they said. Well, they can visit him in prison. They can send him birthday cards”—at this Nash shot a glance at Katherine Mader —“and they can wish him a merry Christmas. But Lauren Wagner or any of these other girls, are they going to get birthday cards, Christmas cards? Their families year after year have to live with the fact that their loved ones were killed in a cruel and inhuman and disgusting way by that man.”

Continuing with his theme of family, Nash mentioned Angelo’s children. How many were there, seven, eight, nine? However many there were, Buono had taken the right to have children away from Kimberly Martin. Yes, she had been a prostitute and she had had no children. But when she had pleaded for her life, she indicated that she was thinking about children:

“ ‘I have a child. I have a baby. Don’t kill me.’

“She is not going to have a child,” Nash said. “She is not going to enjoy whatever the joys of childbirth and having children can bring to one. Angelo Buono has had the opportunity to do that.”

Nash finished by telling the jury that they should say to Angelo Buono that “for what you’ve done, you deserve and should receive the ultimate penalty, death.”

But despite Nash’s eloquence and Roger Boren’s more strictly legal argument that the multiplicity of the murders called for a death sentence, the jury, which had taken nineteen days to determine Angelo’s guilt, took only an hour of deliberation to spare his life. They fixed the punishment at life without parole. Perhaps they thought that it would be unfair to give Buono a stiffer sentence than Bianchi, but all of the jurors denied that this had been a major consideration. When it became evident that there was a division as to the proper penalty, those in favor of a death sentence gave in, unwilling to prolong deliberations
that had already pushed them to the limit of their endurance. They had been sequestered for twenty-eight days in all.

Many people, under the mistaken impression that Judge George had the power to overrule the jury and impose the death penalty, wrote to the judge pleading with him to send Buono to the gas chamber. Among these were parents and friends of the victims. A friend of Lauren Wagner’s wrote the judge that it would be a cheapening of the tragedy of Lauren’s brief life and death not to make Buono pay with his life. Joe Wagner told the
Times
that he worried that God in His infinite mercy might let Buono into heaven. Ninety-four percent of the respondents to a
Herald-Examiner
poll said that they thought that Buono should be put to death.