Hillside Stranglers (8 page)

“Never mind. She’s one of those Scientology crazies. The thing is, we’ve got her so she trusts us. We could handcuff her now, or better if we could just get her to ride with us all the
way home. She won’t fall for a party or something, though. She’s pretty cautious.”

“Tell her I got to go home first. Tell her you’ll take her home after.”

“I’ll try it.”

In the car: “Listen, Jane, would you mind something? The thing is, my cousin here, he’s such a nice guy, he didn’t want to tell us, but he really has to go home right away. He’s got some things to do and he’ll really be messed up if he doesn’t get home right away, and the thing is, he could go home, and then I could drop you off, if that’s all right.”

“It’s too much trouble for you guys.”

“No, no. Really. I mean, we can’t offer you a ride and then say no, can we? It’s no trouble. No trouble for me at all.”

“Okay. I really appreciate it.”

Bianchi switched on some music, and Jane King did not even seem to notice how far they were going, up over the Hollywood Hills, down along Forest Lawn Drive and on to Glendale. It was after eleven at night, traffic was light. Jane King stared ahead, nestled between the samaritans, content with her good luck, listening to the music and rhythmically chewing on the gum Bianchi had given her. She hummed the tunes she recognized. Bianchi commented on her ring. It was called a mood ring, she said. It changed colors with her mood. She said she was in a good mood now. Bianchi kept expecting her to ask how far they were going, and when she did not, he wondered whether she was spaced out on something. He wished he had a joint on him. He would have offered her a toke. This was so easy, and he was proud of his negotiating skills. In the big car distances rolled by like clouds.

In the driveway Angelo switched off the motor. Sparky ran up. For a moment the three of them sat there, Jane King waiting for Angelo to get out and Bianchi to drive her home.

Bianchi looked at Buono behind Jane King’s head and saw him give a slight nod. Angelo grabbed her left arm, Bianchi her right. She started squirming.

“What are you doing? What’s going on?”

Angelo pulled out the handcuffs with his free hand.

“Don’t hurt me! Let me go!”

They pushed her forward and forced her hands together behind her back, and Angelo snapped on the cuffs. Bianchi grabbed her purse.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Angelo said, “and nothing’s gonna happen to you.” She began to shake. She let out a sound. “Just button that lip.”

Inside, they sat her down in the easy chair.

“Don’t be nervous, honey,” Angelo said. “Nothing’s gonna happen to you. Keep calm and keep your mouth closed.”
Sotto voce
he told Bianchi to watch her while he went to the shop to get the materials. This time he brought some sponge rubber, a white rag, and coarse brown twine. With the tape and scissors from the kitchen, he was ready. He worked quickly. Jane King, trembling violently, was gagged and blindfolded in seconds. He stood her up and removed the handcuffs, saying that she wasn’t going to be any trouble, but as soon as he had removed her light jacket, she began flailing her arms, so he clapped on the cuffs again and cut her blouse and bra free with the scissors. Her skin was pale; her frail ribcage heaved. Angelo unzipped the fly of her jeans and with great effort began to drag them down. “She’s sewn into these things,” he said. “Tight to show her ass. Cunts love to show their ass if they’ve got one. Nice ass.” He smoothed his hand across the round buttock. “Lift your leg.” He removed a shoe. “Silver. Silver fucking shoes. Class. Lift the other leg, honey.” Now she stood in green pantyhose. Angelo pulled them down.

Then he stood back, pointing, grinning, doing a little hop from foot to foot like Geppetto gleeful at a new puppet. Wordlessly pointing, he motioned Bianchi to come around from behind her for a look.

She stood there, a moon-tinted offering, slender, bound, a silvery undine, her narrow thighs pressed together and quivering, tapering upward to an absence. She had no pubic hair.

“Bald pussy!” Angelo whispered reverently. He gripped his hands together and lowered his head. “Shaved pussy, can
you believe it? We must be living right. Hurry up, man. I can’t wait for this. Stash her stuff over there by the mirror.”

Angelo permitted himself a long appreciative gaze at her. So helpless, her hands linked behind her back, her sex bare as a girl-child’s, blindfolded and gagged, her narrow feet self-consciously pressed together, she was everything Angelo Buono could desire, a tender virgin vessel, soft-hued as ivory, immaculate, enslaved.

He led Jane King into the spare bedroom, put her on her back on the bed, and told her in a low, paternal voice that nothing was going to happen to her. He returned to the living room and found Bianchi already putting her belongings into a garbage bag. “Don’t put the purse in yet. We want to go through it. How are we gonna do this? Shit.” He rubbed his crotch. “I need to go first. I want to real bad, man. But I’ll show you what kind of a guy I am. We’ll flip a coin, just like before.”

Angelo won the toss. He shook Kenny’s hand and disappeared into the spare bedroom. Kenny decided that he wanted to see this one from the beginning. Quietly he stepped into Angelo’s bedroom and took up a position behind the hanging beads in the doorway. He watched as Jane King did everything she could to deny Angelo, protesting that only her boyfriend was allowed to see her naked and to have sex with her, then questioning whether her boyfriend had set this scene up as a sick joke. She gave in to Angelo’s stabs when he threatened to beat her if she continued to resist.

When he was done, Angelo pronounced her “choice,” but with Kenny she was equally resisting, saying that she might not be able to do anything about what was happening to her but she was not going to pretend to like it. Hearing this, Angelo got an idea.

He brought in the twine and worked quickly. “She needs a lesson,” he said. He wrapped the twine around her ankles, turned her over, forced her legs backward toward her arms, and wrapped the twine around her handcuffed wrists, hog-tying her. Bianchi, picking up his cue, mounted her from behind as
Angelo watched, pulling out his penis, feeling himself, ejaculating as Bianchi reached his own climax.

“Stay in her,” Angelo said. From the kitchen he brought a vegetable bag, and, Bianchi still in her from behind, forced the bag over her head and wrapped the twine around her throat.

“See if you can get off again,” Angelo said. He pulled, Bianchi pumped. Jane King screamed within the bag, tried vainly to suck air. Building on his technique with Lissa Kastin, Angelo let the twine slacken, reviving her, then pulled again. He repeated the pulling and slackening several times as Bianchi rutted, but finally Jane King had no more breath. Bianchi finished after she was dead.

“I could have gone on longer,” Kenny said. “I could have gone on all night. She’s still hot.”

Searching her purse, they were surprised to learn from her driver’s license that she had been born in 1949. “Well-preserved,” Kenny called her. “She’s the kind of chick would have looked good at forty.”

“We let her die gorgeous,” Angelo said. “We did her a favor.”

Angelo drove. As usual, he said nothing of his destination. This time he headed back toward Griffith Park. It was now after one in the morning and the cars were few. “We’ll head up there,” he said, pointing vaguely in the direction of Dodger Stadium, holding a steady fifty-five on the Golden State Freeway, but he slowed as he approached the Los Feliz offramp.

On the offramp, curved and dark with trees and heavy shrubbery, he suddenly pulled over to the side, saying, “Quick. Let’s dump her here. Move fast.”

They threw Jane King well into some bushes.

“No one will see here there,” Angelo said as he drove off. “She could be there till somebody gets out to take a piss. She could be there for days.”

“Somebody’ll get a shock.” Bianchi laughed. “What’ll you think of next?”

“You never know.”

During the next few days they talked about what a great success the Jane King murder had been. Angelo recapitulated the pleasures of her shaved pubis. The weekend arrived without any press or television coverage of their latest act.
Impunitas semper ad deteriora invitat
,
goes the Latin legal maxim: Impunity always invites to greater crimes. They were beginning to feel invincible. There was no telling what they might be able to get away with. Angelo, still praising Jane King, began suggesting the next logical step: to abduct a very young girl, a schoolgirl, unspoiled, inviolate, barely ripe and helpless; a girl, Angelo emphasized, who did not have anything to shave or only the first fuzzy hints of womanhood. Bianchi said that he had never been with so young a girl but had often fantasized about it, the buttery baby skin, the thin little voice, the hairless smallness. Angelo assured him that there was nothing comparable to very young girls, their helplessness, their fear, their crying out. To make a sacrifice of one—that would be something to make life worth living. If they could find one and “break her in” and then kill her, she would have lived just for them, they would be her beginning and her end. That would be the ultimate snuff.

On Sunday, November 13, four days after Jane King, Buono and Bianchi drove over to the Eagle Rock Plaza in search of their vestal virgin.

Jane King lay moldering beside that Golden State offramp during that week and the next. Her roommate and her boyfriend reported her missing. The roommate, a young man she had met through an apartment-sharing service, who lived with her only to share rent and to enjoy safety in numbers, had seen her near six o’clock that Wednesday evening. They had eaten TV dinners, before she had gone off to her Scientology class. Her boyfriend had not been with her since the previous Friday, when she had spent the night with him. They had quarreled a couple of days later because he had not wished to spend another night with her, but he had telephoned Wednesday evening and had been told she was at a Scientology class.

Her fellow students at Scientology Manor described her as a quiet girl, introverted, fond of exercise and salads. One of her friends there, a girl who had roomed with her that past summer, said that she had offered Jane a ride home after class at eleven,
but Jane had preferred to take the bus. On other nights Jane had complained that she was wary of sitting alone at bus stops and often preferred to hitchhike. That way you could select the person to hitch a ride from, Jane had said. You could tell by looking at a person whether he was all right. Jane had not been known for logic. Her friends liked to call her Jupiter Jane.

Frank Salerno was then aware of none of this. Other officers were handling Jane King as a missing person; until and if she turned up dead, there was no call for the Homicide Bureau. Salerno was spending his days and nights pursuing the Judy Miller case and keeping an eye on the Lissa Kastin investigation. His partner, an older detective, was helping out but was due to retire soon, so Salerno felt that this was really his own case for now, unless another body showed up. He spoke to the bounty hunter, Markust Camden, again, getting nothing more out of him but still sensing that he had more to tell. Salerno decided to check out Pam Pelletier, the prostitute. Maybe she had more to tell about seeing Judy Miller leave the International Hot Dog stand early Halloween morning.

Pam Pelletier turned out to be one of those many tantalizing but false leads which take up most of a detective’s time. When she seemed to be unable to recall much of anything, Salerno asked her to undergo hypnosis, and she revealed that she had worked in her spare time as the subject for a professional hypnotist, who she said had hypnotized her thousands of times before audiences. She was so used to this man’s techniques, she doubted that she could be put under by anyone else. Salerno acquiesced and permitted her hypnotist to work on her in an office in Hollywood, where for hours she recalled the sad story of her life—constant moving around, changing men, attending the Woodstock Festival, three times giving birth, ending up in Hollywood drugging and hustling, drifting.

It was a familiar story to Salerno and not helpful. When the hypnotist at last got around to asking her about Halloween and Judy Miller, Pam Pelletier spun out a tale Salerno believed was imagined about seeing Judy Miller take off with “a light-skinned Negro in a maroon pimp hat” who had “eyes like a Doberman.” The hypnotist obligingly drew Salerno a sketch of
this improbable suspect, complete with mirrors and buckles on his hat and a Teddy Roosevelt mustache. This was one instance, Salerno felt, in which hypnosis had stimulated the imagination rather than the memory of a subject. He had to keep himself from snickering when the hypnotist awakened Pam Pelletier by shouting at her:

“You will not feel anything but great! You will feel as though you just had a steam bath! A cold shower or a complete body massage! One! You’re waking up! Two-completely-relaxed- Three - light - elevated - exceptionally - clear- headed-Four-look-at-you-Five-you’re-wide-awake! And now you will be able to resume whatever
miserable
life to which you are accustomed!”

Listening to Pam Pelletier’s ramblings made Salerno think that he had better check out Markust Camden again, unless he wanted to waste days looking for the guy in the pimp hat. He would file his report on Pam Pelletier, but he did not think anything she had said would end up meaning much.

This time Salerno cornered Markust Camden at the Fish and Chips and let him know that since it appeared that he was the last person to have seen Judy Miller alive, he would have to be considered a suspect. Blood tests would have to be run on him. They would have to take samples of his hair, stuff like that. Without threatening him, Salerno let Camden know that this was serious. If he knew anything else, he had better come across with it now. Camden understood. He suggested they take a walk.

Out on the Boulevard, Camden had a lot more to tell. He admitted that he had seen more of Judy Miller than he had let on, but he hoped Salerno understood his point of view, too. He had not done anything, yet he didn’t want to say anything to incriminate himself. Salerno assured him that he had nothing to worry about. The more he helped the police, the better off he would be.

“I’m a law enforcement kind of guy myself,” Camden said.

“Fine. Go ahead. What happened?”

Camden talked. He had not let Judy Miller walk off from the Fish and Chips that night. After he had chatted with her for
a while, he had invited her back to his room at the Gilbert Hotel.

“You had sex with her?”

“Yeah. You see now, I didn’t want to say nothing.”

“You had sex with her. Anything unusual?”

“Just a straight lay, man. I mean, it was nothing.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then, let’s see. We took a shower. She said she was hungry. She was broke, man, and thin, real thin. I didn’t have nothing to give her. I give her a bra.”

“You keep a lot of bras around?”

“No. Don’t get me wrong. It was just some bra one of my girlfriends left behind. I give it to Judy Miller. She didn’t have nothing. Then I said, okay, so let’s get something to eat or a cup of coffee or something.”

The Gilbert Hotel was on Wilcox just above Sunset. Camden said that he and Judy Miller had walked down to Sunset and turned west. They had walked for a long time. She was looking for a trick. She had said that she needed a trick, but because she was walking with Camden, nobody stopped. Eventually they ended up at a place that looked like a railroad car.

“Carney’s?” Salerno asked. “Carney’s railroad diner?”

“That’s it. Anyways, we went into this place and got coffee. Then she left to find a trick.”

“Did you see her pick up a trick?”

“I’m getting to that.”

Camden said that Judy Miller had gone outside. He had watched her through the window of the railroad diner for a while.

“Where was she standing?”

“Right in the driveway, between the diner and some store. It was a kitchen place. Sold pots and pans or something. I was a little worried about the chick, I don’t know why. So I took and went outside and waited.”

“You waited with her?”

“Not with her. I sort of stood back, you know. So after a while, this car pulls in and she starts talking to the guy. You know, making arrangements.”

“Wait a minute,” Salerno said. “What kind of a car was it?”

“Big car. A limo.”

“A limousine. You sure of that?”

“It was a limo. Dark blue limousine, yeah.”

“How close were you? Did you get a look at the guy driving? Was he alone?”

“He was alone. Yeah, I saw him. I kind of moved closer. I got a good look. I’d say he looked like a Puerto Rican.”

Salerno wanted to know why the man looked like a Puerto Rican. Camden said that the man was dark, with curly dark hair. Latin-looking. And he had a big nose. He remembered that now. The man had definitely had a big nose. Salerno questioned Camden several times about this description, but he stuck to it.

“Do you think you would recognize this guy again if you saw him?”

“I would,” Camden said.

Salerno asked Camden whether he would mind driving over to the railroad diner so that he could demonstrate exactly what had happened. Camden said he would be happy to do that. As they approached the diner on Sunset, Salerno did not slow down until Camden pointed it out. Next door to the diner was a kitchen design and equipment. store called, appropriately, Kitchens.

Camden repeated his story exactly and added that after Judy Miller had gotten into the limousine, it had pulled out onto Sunset, had turned east, and had then turned south at the next corner, which was Sweetzer. He had watched the limousine disappear down the hill.

After checking Camden into Cedars-Sinai Hospital for tests, which Salerno doubted would show anything, he drove downtown to file his reports. The Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau was in room 832 of the old Hall of Justice Building at Temple and Spring, just across the street from the Criminal Courts Building. Room 832 had been converted from a courtroom—the Manson case had been tried there—and now consisted of about thirty metal desks, each with a telephone, lined up side
by side in rows. The floor above its high ceiling was still a jail, holding cells for prisoners awaiting trial across the street, and when the prisoners got bored they would amuse themselves by stopping up the toilets with paper and rags. You could tell when the prisoners were playing this game because the toilets would overflow and urine would drip down through the old ceiling and form little puddles on the detectives’ desks. It was not an ideal place for a detective to work, puzzling out leads and making the endless phone calls that made up a good portion of his job, but morale in the bureau was excellent. Sheriff’s Homicide had the best record of obtaining convictions in the region, 71.6 percent versus 49.3 percent for the Los Angeles Police Department. Partisans of the LAPD would explain the discrepancy on the basis of a disparity in case loads, but prosecutors and judges tended to rate the Sheriff’s higher, saying that it was more inclined to stick with a case as it progressed through the tangled court system, while the LAPD seemed to lose interest once an arrest was made. They also praised the Sheriff’s practice of preparing a detailed “murder book” for prosecutors, a meticulously arranged file of all material relevant to the case, with suggestions concerning the strongest and weakest points. The LAPD, it was said, presented only a miscellaneous file, which made the prosecutors’ job more difficult and increased the chance that important elements of evidence might be overlooked or misconstrued. Again, people who were pro-LAPD had their own versions of the relative merits of the two departments, arguing that all that time spent shepherding cases through the courts could be better spent arresting more murderers. If the LAPD conviction rate was lower, it was the fault of sloppy, lazy prosecutors and muddle-headed judges: that was where reform was needed. Why should the police do the courts’ job? The Sheriff’s, the LAPD would argue, was overly concerned with its public image.

What no one would deny was that the rivalry between the two agencies was intense and of long historical standing. Officers of either department were always ready to cast aspersions on the other, usually in the form of dark allusions to “the way they do things over there.” The rivalry was much the same as
that among the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and it had similar consequences: intensified esprit-de-corps within each department and a tendency to secrecy and self-interest when cooperation between them was needed. They worked better alone than together, and when a case called for their combined efforts, as with a crime affecting both county and city jurisdictions, they too often worked at cross purposes.

Salerno himself cared little about the rivalry. He had friends in the LAPD and would not hesitate to call on them even though his loyalties were to the Sheriff’s. After he had written up his reports on Camden and Pelletier, he walked over to the Code 7 bar, a favorite police hangout a couple of blocks from his office, where he knew he would find members of both departments and deputy D.A.s and a newspaper reporter or two. As he ordered his Scotch and water at the bar, a big LAPD homicide sergeant named Bob Grogan came over, threw his arm around Salerno, and told the bartender to put Salerno’s drink on his tab. For himself, Grogan ordered a double straight shooter of John Jameson’s Irish.

“Hey, Frank,” Grogan said in his booming Boston-Irish voice, “what’s happening? Goddammit, you wouldn’t believe what they laid on me today. A 1968 suicide, so now it’s supposed to be a murder. Jesus Christ, I love those. Can you believe it? Why do they do this to me? Holy shit, nine years too late and they want me to make a case. I guess they want to make me prove what a genius I am.”

Bob Grogan was six-three and well over two hundred pounds, but his brash Boston voice and his wild gestures made him seem even bigger. His buddies called him Cro-Magnon. He had been known to kick in a door, rumble past a cowering suspect, grab two beers from the refrigerator, slam the cans down on the table, and read the poor bastard his rights. Grogan had a fringe of red hair left on his bald head and a red mustache under his little nose on a broad, red face that looked as though it had been airmailed over in a bottle from County Kerry. He had just turned forty. He asked Salerno what he was working on.

“This strangling,” Salerno said. “Runaway girl. I’ve been living on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“Scum of the earth,” Grogan said. “Worst collection of assholes in America. You find the parents?”

“Took me ten days. They didn’t care, I guess. I don’t know.”

“That’s it. Sure. Makes you feel terrific, doesn’t it? You’re trying to find who killed their kid and they don’t give a shit? I’m telling you, Frank, this town is the ends of the earth. I had one like that last month. You know what I did? Listen to this, will you listen to this? I find the parents’ house, right? The family abode. A shithole. A fucking rat pit. So I knock on the door and this cretin, you know, the guy looks like he was strained through a sheet, remember that one? This guy opens the door to the family abode and he tells me to get the hell out of there. I wanted to kill him right there. It’s her father, right? So I tell him, look,
sir,
I say, I’m a homicide detective, show him the badge, I’m here to find out who killed your daughter. I
care
who killed your daughter, for Christ’s sake. He tells me get the fuck out, we don’t want no cops here. The fucking illiterate turd doesn’t want cops here!