Hillside Stranglers (9 page)

“Listen, Frank, I got so pissed off, you know what I did? I lifted the son of a bitch up by the neck, like this, right off the ground his legs are dangling and he’s gurgling and trying to spit in my face, and I threw him into the street and I handcuffed the asshole to a telephone pole. I said, don’t go anywhere, motherfucker, and shut up or I’ll kick the shit out of you.

“So I go inside, and you know, what a lovely group.
What a beautiful collection of human beings!
I wouldn’t want my dog living in there. And they all just glared at me, like, get out of here, cop, we don’t want you. We don’t care who killed her. Fuck it. I left. Write it off.

“Listen, Frank, it’s a great job we got, isn’t it? It’s great to be appreciated. Have another. Have an Irish, Frank. It’s okay, Salerno, listen, Italians can drink Irish. You got special dispensation from me, Frank. Have one. It’s the pure stuff.”

Salerno acquiesced. He did not know Grogan very well,
but he enjoyed him. Grogan seemed to be in a perpetual state of moral outrage, an unusual condition for homicide detectives, most of whom kept their outrage buried, if they had any left. Grogan had been a cop for his entire adult life, yet he continued to act and feel as though he had only recently discovered that people often cheat, lie, and murder one another. The lawyers who defended killers, Grogan liked to skewer with what was for him the most withering of all epithets, “unethical.” His blue eyes shot bolts of anger, judgment, humor, and disgust.

“Frank,” Grogan continued, his voice improper Bostonian, a shout, an order, a commandment, “you want to keep your sanity—of course I lost mine years ago—you want to keep your sanity, you got to get a boat.”

“A boat.”

“Yeah. I just bought a cabin cruiser. Greatest thing in the world.”

Grogan explained that he had picked up a small bundle of cash working as a technical adviser to a new television series called
T. J. Hooker.
It was about an L.A. cop, and Grogan had dreamed up situations and characters. The production company had hired him at twelve hundred a week for advice. They had fired him, however, when he told them flat out that they were ruining his ideas and turning the show into just another piece of Hollywood horse shit. But he had earned enough to buy himself a new car and to put a down payment on the cabin cruiser.

“I keep it down at Long Beach. Took my kids out last weekend. Greatest therapy in the world, Frank. I get out there and do a little fishing and a little drinking, go over to Catalina. I tell you, you could be anywhere, you could be in Tahiti. Just sitting out there peaceful and quiet. I’m working on some fucking case, I don’t care how bad it is, now I know I’ve got that boat. I can get out there and there’s nothing but ocean, you feel like a human being again. Come on out with me, Frank. Bring the wife and kids. You got to get away from all this shit.”

Even before he had begun murdering women, Angelo Buono had not been living the humdrum life of any ordinary upholsterer. If not glamorous, neither were his days dull. There were fast cars and frequent women. Fortunately for his wives, his marriages ended in divorce, but from youth he was a ladies’ man and a lady-killer in spirit long before flesh. Although he was more goat than horse, when in the mid-seventies he chose “Italian Stallion” as his Citizens Band radio handle, inspired by the title of a pornographic movie, no one who knew him denied that he had earned it.

Italian Stallion was by Angelo Buono, Sr., out of Jenny Sciolino. He claimed Sicilian breeding, and there is no reason to doubt the purity of line, but he was born in Rochester, New York, on October 5, 1934, the child of native-born parents and immigrant grandparents. His parents divorced, and he arrived in Los Angeles in the year of
Gone with the Wind,
1939, accompanied
by his mother and his ten-year-old sister, Cecilia. They settled in that section of the City of Angels then known as Dogtown, so christened for its nearness to the municipal animal pound, northeast of downtown and Union Station. Only an old-timer would have called it Dogtown after World War II: it was Highland Park, the south edge of Glendale, and also, according to signs and maps but never in the common tongue, the Elysian Valley, one of those places in Southern California, like El Contento Drive and La Placentia and Happy Valley, named by way of some real estate developer’s calculation of nirvana. Its most prominent feature was the Southern Pacific freight yard. With its freeways and broad streets and railroad tracks, the Elysian Valley had by the 1960s become nearly all steel and concrete, and except for rare days of wet or breezy weather, its air was so polluted that it would turn the windmill in a Dutch painting. In the seventies it was still favored by newcomers to the city. The Chinese, descendants of railroad workers, had stayed on; but the Irish, originally railroad workers also, had scattered westward, supplanted mostly by Mexicans. The dog pound had yielded its place as touchstone to Dodger Stadium, that blue monument to an Easterner’s vision and gall that overlooked Angelo’s theater of operations to the north and downtown Los Angeles to the south.

For forty years the Elysian Valley remained not the abode assigned by the Greeks to the blessed after death but Angelo’s stomping grounds: he rarely strayed farther from it than Hollywood, and although he often moved and married, his mother’s house at 3113 LaClede Avenue, just off Glendale Boulevard, was the omphalos of his life until her death in 1978. It must have been difficult for Jenny Sciolino Buono to maintain that house in the early years, though it was small, a frame bungalow. Her salary as a piece worker in a shoe factory, where she did top-stitching, was minimal. Angelo Sr. later remarried and moved to Los Angeles to work as a security guard, but he was a remote, silent figure, and he had acquired another family to support. After her children were grown, Jenny would marry George White, an American Indian, but she raised the children on her own.

Although Jenny’s family were practicing Roman Catholics, Angelo had no formal religious instruction, and what spiritual inspiration he obtained from attending mass did not impart with it a sense of sin. Nor did his education in the Los Angeles public school system have much effect on him, since he went into the world without learning reading, writing, or arithmetic. Junior Buono, as his mother, much to his annoyance, called him, had his mind on other things, and only the indifference or liberality of teachers enabled him to pass through elementary school and Washington Irving Junior High on to John Marshall High School. It cannot be said of him that he grew up too hopeful and trusting. He believed he could figure out life for himself, without the aid of education or authority. By the time he enrolled at Marshall High, he thought he had figured out something about his mother, and he began referring to her as “that cunt.”

It was an appellation that rang so true to him that he continued to use it in reference to his mother and, later, to all other women, for the rest of his life. Though he had no evidence for it other than that Jenny did have boyfriends, he considered his mother loose, a whore. Throughout his manhood he told intimates, and there were not many, of being taken along by Jenny as a child on visits to men. He would be kept waiting outside, he said, while she would go with a man. He said he knew what she had been up to, and in this she was no different from all women. He found that he could break Jenny down by calling her a whore and accusing her of sleeping with repairmen, shop owners, and delivery boys in return for favors, a reduced bill or a free radio or refrigerator. Jenny would deny his accusations, but he could get at her that way. And in other ways. One of his favorites was to bring home a black girl and announce his engagement, knowing that his so much as dating a black would infuriate Jenny. As to women, Angelo was no racist. They were all the same to him, and it gave him satisfaction to observe his mother’s anxiety at his black date.

Indeed, Angelo had formed in his mind his concept of the proper function of women by the time he was fourteen. Though he was still too young to have a driver’s license, he enjoyed
stealing a Buick or a Cadillac, driving around with his pals, and bragging about what he planned to do with girls. He wanted to pick up one who was hitchhiking, he said, and take her to some secluded place and rape her and “fuck her in the ass,” as he phrased it, showing a precocious awareness of sodomy. It was just talk, then, but one of his friends, Stillman Sorrentino, was confused by Angelo’s boasts. Sorrentino was fairly sure he knew what rape was, but he had no idea why Angelo or anyone would want to have sex with a girl “in the ass.” Maybe Angelo meant something else. Sorrentino was so puzzled that he asked his parents what Angelo meant. They forbade him ever to see or speak to Angelo again.

Angelo quit high school at sixteen, and by that time he was getting himself into a lot of trouble, picking fights and running with gangs, stealing and earning a reputation as a tough, bad character. When he was first arrested for “grand theft auto” and committed to the California Youth Authority, he managed to escape, but when he was rearrested in December 1951, the juvenile authorities decided that he needed to cool off for a spell at the Paso Robles School for Boys, in central California, where he celebrated his seventeenth Christmas. The reformatory did not reform him.

Out on parole, he would drive around with his buddies looking for girls or, in the parlance of the day, for some guy to “choose off.” Marshall High was always a good place to spot a victim: it was common for those who had left school to hang around and taunt the students. One afternoon Angelo and his pals cruised by as school was letting out and noticed a boy standing alone with his books, waiting for a ride. The boy was wearing a maroon satin jacket with the name “Aristocrats” spelled out across its back.

“Hold it,” Angelo said. “I want that jacket.”

Angelo got out of the car while his three buddies waited. He walked up to the solitary boy.

“Hey, I like your jacket,” Angelo said with the gruff brusqueness that was already his characteristic speech. “How about letting me try it on?”

The boy, younger and smaller than Angelo, hesitated, but
when Angelo, long thumbs in pockets, feet apart, pelvis forward, stepped closer, the boy slipped off the jacket and handed it over. Angelo’s friends lounged against the car, watching.

“Looks good,” Angelo said, and he shouted to his pals, “Not bad, huh?” They gave their approval.

“Hey,” Angelo said to the boy, “I think I’ll keep it.” He started to walk off.

The boy came after him and jumped on his back. Angelo threw him off, turned, and slapped his face, and his three buddies came running up to help. The boy panicked and ran away.

In the next days Angelo worked at removing the word “Aristocrats” from the back of the jacket. He had gotten only as far as the first two letters, but was wearing the jacket when one afternoon the boy and four older kids spotted Angelo at a gas station and surrounded him. Angelo gave the jacket back.

But the next day the boy appeared at Angelo’s house, again accompanied by his four older friends. He pointed to the missing letters. He did not want a jacket that said “istocrats.” He wanted money from Angelo to repair the jacket.

Angelo ran out onto his front porch, pulled out his pocket knife, and offered to cut the face of anybody who tried to get money from him. He scared them off.

The boy reported the entire incident to the police. Angelo was called in and warned that he was facing jail if he continued getting into trouble. Angelo said it had all been a misunderstanding. The boy had given him the jacket, willingly, and when he had asked for it back, Angelo had returned it. But he would be glad to give the boy money for repairs, he said.

By this time Angelo had a hero. His hero was not the usual sports figure, although he enjoyed seeing Golden Boy Art Aragon, then the most prominent of Los Angeles boxers, perform at the Olympic Auditorium. And occasionally Angelo went to see the Los Angeles Angels, a Chicago Cubs farm team, play at Wrigley Field. But neither boxing nor baseball produced Angelo’s real hero. His hero played in a different league.

He was Caryl Chessman, known as the red-light bandit, who had been arrested and convicted in 1948 on charges of kidnapping with infliction of bodily harm, a crime then punishable
by death in California, and sexual assault. Chessman’s crimes and mode of operation, his scam, made an indelible mark on Angelo’s mind, for Chessman had demonstrated the possibilities of a police ruse. The red light he had attached to his car enabled him to con lovers parked in the hills of Los Angeles into opening their car windows and doors to him. They took him for a policeman telling them to move on. Showing a .45, Chessman would force the girl into his car, drive her to another secluded spot, and, usually, make her perform oral sex.

Unfortunately, from Angelo’s point of view, Chessman failed to kill his victims, so their testimony assured conviction. But Angelo admired Chessman for more than the scam. By 1951 Chessman was acting as his own attorney on appeal, and his manipulation of the law enabled him to fend off his own execution for twelve years. He became the most notable, if that is the word, jailhouse lawyer in California history. To Angelo he was a heroic combination of guts and brains, no everyday rapist, a man who could stand up to the system and, if not beat it, foul it up beautifully.

Angelo always worked on some job or other. He started as a plasterer and builder of brick fireplaces, and he quickly displayed his manual skills. Then, working in garages, he caught on to the auto upholstering trade. He had some money in his pocket, and he dated a lot of girls. At twenty he cut a dashing figure, in a raffish sort of way, favoring suits, dark shirts, and bright ties in imitation of movie gangsters, and somehow he drove Cadillacs. He hung around the old Van de Kamp’s Drive-in at the corner of Fletcher and San Fernando Road. It was a good place to meet girls.

But his favorite place to take girls parking was Landa Street, an obscure little road up in the hills on the western side of the Elysian Valley, just beyond Elysian Park. It was, and it remained, very hard to find, paved but more of a track than a road, heavily wooded, with owls and bats and coyotes that wandered over from Griffith Park. At night you could see the lights of the city from Landa, but the street itself was dark, a Halloween sort of place, ghostly enough to make a girl want to cling, a place that might have been imported with its running ivy and
morning-glory vines from some less arid clime than Southern California’s. Hardly anyone traveled it except lovers, people who got lost, and people looking for an obscure spot to dump trash. And there was enough trash dumped on Landa’s slopes to make it stink. Angelo liked to call it the “cow patch,” by which he meant that it stank like a cow pie. But still, the cow patch was the best place to take a girl. You could get away with anything there.

It may have been at the cow patch that Angelo got Geraldine Yvonne Vinal pregnant in April 1955. She was seventeen, from Marshall High. He did what any gentleman would do. He made Geraldine a June bride.

A Protestant minister performed the ceremony, and this upset Jenny, but within a week Angelo had left, never to return to his first wife. Their son, Michael Lee Buono, who in the 1970s moved to North Carolina and toured with a band called the Sidewinders, was born on January 10, 1956, and shortly afterward Geraldine filed for divorce, on grounds of desertion, and child support. The court awarded her twenty dollars a month, but she never saw a penny from Angelo. Michael knew his father, but Angelo would not permit his son to call him Dad, and in the Buono family, whose holiday celebrations she sometimes attended, Geraldine became known as Aunt Gerry.

Angelo had not been around to celebrate Michael’s birth. Two months before the event he had been sentenced to sixty days in the county jail for petty theft. He had been arrested on suspected auto theft.

But once released, Angelo lost no time with the ladies. By the end of 1956 he had fathered another son, Angelo Anthony Buono III, and on April 15, 1957, he married Angelo III’s mother, Mary Catherine Castillo, in time for her to give birth later that year to his third son, Peter Buono. His fourth, Danny, was born in 1958, and his fifth, Louis, in 1960, and a daughter, Grace, in 1962.

It was a Roman Catholic ceremony this time, performed by the Reverend K. R. O’Brien, who was able to sanctify the nuptials because Angelo could claim the Pauline Privilege, which then denied the validity of a non-Catholic marriage for a Catholic.
In the eyes of the church, this was Angelo’s first marriage, and it can be said of it that it lasted longer, though it was no happier, than the Protestant one.

Mary Catherine, called Candy, was seventeen when she married Angelo. They had courted at the cow patch. At first, when they married, they lived in a cottage behind Jenny’s house. Then they moved to Huntington Drive, then to Coolidge, to Highland Park Boulevard, to York, to Casitas, finally to Glover, where in 1964 they divorced. All of the houses were within a two- or three-mile radius of Jenny’s, but there were seven moves in seven years, and Candy bore Angelo a child in every year but two. She found him a difficult husband.