Hillside Stranglers (43 page)

Gerald Chaleff immediately began interviewing the jurors to see whether he could find grounds to impeach the verdicts. He believed, apparently, that he had found such grounds, since he did make a motion for a new trial, alleging various categories of juror prejudice and misconduct. In his opposition to the motion, Boren called Chaleff’s charges trivial, and the judge agreed. They included the allegation that one juror had had a dream that Buono had been acquitted and had found the dream unpleasant: this was supposed to show prejudice. Far more alarming to Boren and Nash than Chaleff’s motion was what they learned, in the process of interviewing the jurors, about the alternates. Three of the four alternates had been adamantly opposed to any guilty verdicts and were hostile toward the jurors for having convicted Buono. Two of the alternates had become so depressed as guilty verdicts had come in that they had refused to eat. If one or more of the jurors had fallen ill during deliberations or before, and one or more of the alternates had become a juror, Angelo Buono would probably never have been convicted.

The judge had no power to increase the punishment on which the jury had decided. He was able to make known his personal feelings, however, on January 9, 1984, when it was his final task in the trial to pronounce formal sentence on Buono
and to determine whether or not Kenneth Bianchi had violated his plea-bargain agreement. The judge could have dealt with the two cousins at different court sessions, but he decided to bring them together once more, to make them stand together before the bench as a symmetrical denouement before physically separating them forever.

He ordered Bianchi returned to Washington, saying that far from cooperating he had done everything in his power to sabotage the case against Buono. Whether Bianchi had gone, as the judge said, “into his nut act” out of friendship for Buono or out of fear, “I don’t know and I don’t care,” but his performance in the case had been “laughabl’e.” When he had told the truth at all it was perhaps “out of some hope that he could wheedle his way through and claim that due to mental problems he had not violated his plea bargain.” Neither Buono nor Bianchi should “ever see the outside of prison walls.”

As for Angelo Buono, the judge regretted not being able to sentence him to death:

The ultimate justification for any punishment is that it is the emphatic denunciation by the community of a crime, and there are some murders which demand the most emphatic denunciation of all, namely the death penalty.

In view of the jury’s mercy in this verdict . . . I am, of course, without authority to impose any greater punishment.

However . . . I would not have the slightest reluctance to impose the death penalty in this case were it within my power to do so. If ever there was a case where the death penalty is appropriate, this is that case . . . Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi slowly squeezed out of their victims their last breath of air and their promise of a future life. And all for what?

The momentary sadistic thrill of enjoying a brief perverted sexual satisfaction and the venting of their hatred for women.

The judge then reflected that those states in the union which permit execution now employ a variety of means:

And ironically, although these two defendants utilized almost every form of legalized execution against their victims, the defendants have escaped any form of capital punishment.

Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi subjected various of their murder victims to the administration of lethal gas, electrocution, strangulation by rope, and lethal hypodermic injection. Yet the two defendants are destined to spend their lives in prison, housed, fed and clothed at taxpayer expense, better cared for than some of the destitute law-abiding members of our community.

Judge George concluded by stating that he did not believe that life imprisonment for these “evil spirits” would do either them or society any good. Looking down at the cousins as they stood before him—Angelo glaring as if he were trying to put a curse on the judge, Kenny shaking his head as if to say yet again, “Why is this happening to me?” -the judge gave his final reason for believing that only death ought to have been their punishment:

I am sure, Mr. Buono and Mr. Bianchi, that you will both probably only get your thrills reliving over and over again the torturing and murdering of your victims, being incapable, as I believe you to be, of ever feeling any remorse.

In subsequent weeks, now that he was able to talk about the trial, Judge George was often asked about the harshness of his final words to Buono and Bianchi. Had he not gone too far? Did not his saying that he would have preferred to sentence them to death represent a backward step in the progress of civilization away from violence? The judge would always reply
that he failed to understand how any intelligent person could imagine that civilization had progressed away from violence, when we were living in the most violent century in the history of mankind. Tyranny of any kind, whether instigated by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin or Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, could be countered only by superior force and will: this would always be true, and societies which lost their will to defend themselves with appropriate force had already lost their will to peace. A society that acquiesced to its criminals had made itself into a battered wife. Something of the kind had happened in America. Those who opposed the death penalty for men like Buono and Bianchi reminded him, he said, of Neville Chamberlain, whose personal weakness had helped to demoralize all of Europe and in the name of peace had sacrificed millions of lives. Society must proclaim by its acts its respect for the lives of its citizens.

It was the same with the argument for the insanity of all or most murderers. Surely men who committed such acts as Buono and Bianchi had committed were insane? Surely no rational person could do what they had done? Surely a sane man was a good man? The judge was asked such questions dozens of times after the trial. His reply—when he made it he was invariably thinking of death camps and gulags and lynchings and child molestations and sectarian assassinations as well as of Buono and Bianchi—was always the same:

“Why should we call someone insane simply because he or she chooses not to conform to our standards of civilized behavior?”

These conversations, which usually took place at cocktail parties among people who had never been in contact with violent criminals, always depressed the judge, because he doubted that he could convince anyone by reasonable argument. The temper of the times was wrong. Having a daughter strangled to death would change their minds, but reading about such acts in the newspapers never did: it was too easy for people to abstract the crimes and put them at a distance from themselves, even when, as during the Hillside Stranglings, an entire city experienced terror.

Maybe, the judge worried, the city would even have found a way to accept the dismissal of murder charges against Angelo Buono. Could people have told themselves that freeing Buono because of a supposed lack of evidence was all for the best? After all, this was Hollywood, where happy endings always worked.

Such cynical speculations faded as the tedium, horror, and frequent absurdities of the trial receded from the judge’s mind. Justice had been done. The common sense of the jurors had prevailed over legal and psychiatric sophistry, over indifference and moral muddle. The dead would not awaken, but in the end the trial had provided that elusive and necessary thing, a sense of redemption.

A story such as this has no proper ending. Not only the victims but everyone connected with the Hillside Stranglers case was permanently affected by it, most obviously the members of the victims’ families. After the trial a newspaper reporter had the poor taste to send each of the victims’ parents a letter asking what they thought about the verdict and the sentencing and how they were coping with their lives six years after their child’s murder. Even the parent who had attempted suicide received such a letter. Judy Miller’s mother, by then living alone with her two surviving children in a trailer, replied feebly and sadly; Lauren Wagner’s parents, who had moved to Oregon to try to start a new life, talked openly of their grief; but most of the parents had little or nothing to say. When Kristina Weckler’s parents failed to reply, the reporter found out where they were living in Hawaii and telephoned Charles Weckler in the middle of the night to try to pry a statement
from him. He was furious; he slammed down the receiver and then telephoned Bob Grogan to complain of this latest indignity.

Relations between Attorney General John Van de Kamp and his prosecutors Michael Nash and Roger Boren and his special investigator Paul Tulleners remained uneasy. When an emissary from the Attorney General’s Office came to them and suggested that they release a public statement saying that Angelo Buono had been convicted because of new evidence that had surfaced during the course of the trial, long after Roger Kelly and Van de Kamp’s motion to drop murder charges, Boren and Nash refused. They insisted that all the important evidence, including the Lauren Wagner fibers, had been known from the beginning. And Paul Tulleners said that if he was forced to join in such a statement, he would turn in his badge.

Fortunately for Boren, Governor Deukmejian soon appointed him to a municipal judgeship. Michael Nash meanwhile found himself prosecuting the death-penalty conviction of Douglas Clark, Veronica Compton’s former fiancé, on appeal. Clark began sending Nash taunting letters, asking him why he was bothering to try to resist the appeal when he knew that the California Supreme Court was likely to grant it on the basis of some technicality, ordering a new trial.

In November 1984, Michael Nash married a woman to whom he had been engaged since the start of the Buono trial: he had not thought the marriage would prosper if begun while he was obsessively involved in such depressing work. Judge Boren performed the ceremony. In February 1985 Governor Deukmejian appointed Nash to a municipal judgeship and in April elevated Boren to the superior court branch.

Gerald Chaleff, his reputation enhanced by Buono’s not having received the death penalty, continued his work as a prominent criminal lawyer, but he told a reporter that he would be reluctant to accept another multiple murderer as a client. He had not been surprised, he said, that the jury had convicted Buono on nine of ten counts, because most accused multiple murderers got convicted. Katherine Mader told the same reporter that “nothing seems that interesting” after the Buono
trial. She was writing a book, she said, about famous Los Angeles murder trials.

Judge Ronald George was ready for a change from the criminal law after nearly twenty years’ involvement in it. He switched to hearing civil cases in 1985. Late in 1984 the California Supreme Court ordered that its hypnosis ruling was to be applied retroactively. Had Judge George not had the foresight to exclude hypnotized witnesses and the wisdom to declare that Bianchi had been faking being hypnotized, the ruling would have thrown out Buono’s conviction, and he would have had to have been tried all over again. To Judge George the thought was unbearable.

Angelo Buono survived his first year in Folsom Prison. Fearing death, he refused to leave his windowless cell to exercise, sitting surrounded by heaps of the hundreds of volumes of his trial’s transcript, which he attempted to read.

Kenneth Bianchi found Walla Walla Prison in Washington much to his disliking. He was kept away from other prisoners, but he legally changed his name to Anthony D’Amato (“of the beloved” in Italian) and then to Nicholas Fontana, as if that would prevent the vengeful from knowing that he was one of the Hillside Stranglers. He then began petitioning for transfer to another prison and came within an ace yet again of fooling the system. Washington officials were prepared to grant his request, and arrangements were made to transfer him to Reno, Nevada, where his adoptive mother planned to move so that she could be near him and visit him daily. His bags were already packed when Paul Tulleners got wind of this scheme and put a stop to it.

Of the principal investigators, Frank Salerno, Bill Williams, and Bob Grogan continued in homicide; Dudley Varney and Pete Finnigan retired. Grogan also launched a second career for himself in Hollywood, forming his own production company, which he called Sunny, after his boat.

It happened this way. Grogan’s first case after the Stranglers was the murder of a Hollywood film executive. Grogan felt sure that the victim’s son, angered by a change in his father’s will, had committed the murder. The surviving executives
of the movie company were about to turn over assets to the son, but Grogan tipped them off: “I wouldn’t do that,” Grogan told them. “You wouldn’t want the kid running your outfit from jail.” So grateful were the executives to the sergeant—he had saved them millions—that they wanted to do something for him. They gave him an office at the studio and offered him a trip to Europe. He now spent his free time dreaming up movie and television projects. The new trial, however, ended in a hung jury, ten to two, after six months in court.

As for the trip to Europe, Grogan chose to visit the land of his fathers. He spent a month in Ireland, much of it at a pub in Tipperary called O’Looney’s that was owned by an ex-policeman, cooling down from the Stranglers and sorting out his life, which had been so messed up by his six-year obsession. When he returned, he moved out of his apartment in Glendale, finally breaking connections to the Hillside murders. He drank less. He was almost enjoying life again.

Los Angeles—Tulsa—Dublin, 1981–1986

During many months from 1981 through January 1984, I observed court proceedings in the trial of
The People
v.
Angelo Buono.
I was also able to examine police reports on Buono and on Kenneth Bianchi and to read the 57,079-page transcript of the trial. I studied as well the nearly two thousand exhibits, including audio tapes and videotapes and written transcripts of police, psychiatrists’, and others’ interviews with Buono and Bianchi and some three hundred witnesses.
Two of a Kind
derives primarily from these official public records and from my own interviews with people concerned with the case.

Judge Ronald M. George and Sergeant Bob Grogan were of great help to me. Judge George, whom I have known since 1954, when we were high school students together, and who was my roommate at Princeton for four years, would not discuss Angelo Buono’s trial with me until it was finished; but his insistence
that the case be tried was what first alerted and attracted me to the subject.

My regard for Sergeant Grogan should be obvious in these pages. I hope I have, as it were, done him justice. In a way I like to think that the portrait of him here is also an oblique tribute to my late grandfather, Daniel J. O’Brien, who was chief of police in San Francisco during the 1920s and who, though less profane, was as admirable a cop as Grogan. The many days and nights I spent with Grogan discussing the Hillside Stranglers will remain with me as bright spots of time along a continuum that was often gloomy.

I am grateful to Patrick MacEntee, S.C., chairman of the Bar Council of the Republic of Ireland, for sharing with me his architectonic perception of the criminal mind and his informed speculations about Buono and Bianchi. His insights, many of which I have borrowed, gave me confidence.

Frank Salerno and Pete Finnigan allowed me to accompany them on visits to Angeles Crest and other stations and provided me with persuasive documents. They were in every way courteous and helpful.

Roger Boren and Michael Nash gave me important truths, helped me to verify facts, and inspired me by their commitment to a just cause.

To Paul Tulleners I must express special gratitude. Without access to his files on the early life of Angelo Buono, I could not have known much of the story of Buono’s childhood and adolescence, nor would many of the details of Buono’s marriages have been known to me.

Because of the restrictions imposed by the attorney-client privilege, I could not interview Gerald Chaleff or Katherine Mader about their client. I am sure they know a great deal more than they can tell.

For ease of access to documents and for other courtesies I am grateful to Lu Gonzalez, Jerry Cunningham, Pete Martinez, Judy Leff, Christopher M. George, Art Acevedo, Frank Fuller, Charline Howell, and Christine Olson.

Writing a book such as this demands the help, practical and intangible, of family and friends.

Molly O’Brien added vivid details and encouragement, and her reaction to the Bianchi psychiatric tapes helped to fashion my treatment of that peculiar episode. She also accompanied and assisted me during the final research and composition.

Suzanne Beesley gave me emotional and intellectual assistance in countless ways. Her insights into human nature, including the author’s, and her unthinking kindnesses will not be forgotten.

My University of Tulsa colleagues Donald Hayden, Gordon Taylor, and Joseph Kestner helped in numerous ways. Without the support of J. Paschal Twyman, president of the university, and Thomas F. Staley, provost, I could not have considered taking on a project that required so much time away. I must thank also Dr. Corinna del Greco Lohner, professor of Italian, for deciphering and interpreting the term
mi numi
as it appeared in garbled form in police interviews and in Bianchi’s Bellingham diary; and Priscilla Diaz-Dorr, my graduate student, who enlightened me on the subject of the religion of the Numa as she discovered it in Walter Pater’s
Marius the Epicurean.

Michaela Hamilton, editorial director of NAL Books, has had much to do with the appearance of this book in its present form. She anticipated errors of proportion from the start and was meticulous in her attention to detail and nuance, without once resorting to nit-picking. She was sensitive to the author’s intentions and proved herself adept at the diplomatic arts. The book has benefited immeasurably from her care, commitment, and literary sophistication.

I am fortunate in having as a literary agent a fiercely loyal friend, Erica Spellman, whose role in the writing and in attendant matters has been exemplary.

D.O’B.