The Ventura Freeway, where they threw the body of Yolanda Washington
The crime did not arouse much interest in the media. The murderers found this experience so enjoyable that two weeks later they repeated it.
Yolanda Washington
On the morning of October 17, 1977, the first body was found. They body was lying on a hillside near Forest Lawn Cemetery, next to the Ventura Freeway. She was tall and black, and naked. Most likely, they would have thrown her body down the hill from a car. The temperature of the girl’s body showed she had died the previous night. The identification was surprisingly easy.
Her fingerprints were registered in police files. She was a prostitute named Yolanda Washington. Normally, she worked in the vicinity of Hollywood Boulevard. The autopsy showed that sex had taken place and that two men had participated. One of them was “not segregated,” a person whose blood group cannot be determined from other bodily fluids. These men, however, could have simply been customers. They could have nothing to do with the murder. The woman had been strangled with a piece of clothing while the murderer was on top of her.
Detective Bob Grogan
On Sunday, November 20, 1977, LAPD Homicide Detective Sergeant Bob Grogan was hoping to be able to enjoy his day off when he was called to an obscure area in the hills between Glendale and Eagle Rock. As he tried with difficulty to locate the site, he thought to himself that whoever was using this area to dump bodies must be very familiar with the neighborhood to even know this place existed.
The dead girl was found naked in a modest, middle-class neighborhood. Grogan immediately noticed the ligature marks on her wrists, ankles and neck. When he turned her over, blood oozed from her rectum. The bruises on her breasts were obvious. Oddly enough, there were two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that indicate a drug addict.
As Grogan examined the scene, he saw no indication of any disturbance in the foliage nor any sign that the body had been dragged there. He made a mental note to himself that the murder occurred somewhere else and a man, maybe two men, had carried her body and dumped it there in the grass.
The term “Hillside Strangler” was coined by the media, even though police were convinced that there was more than one person involved. People did what they always do in a panic: they warn their children to be careful; buy large dogs; install new locks on their doors; take self-defense classes; carry guns and knives to protect themselves.
None of this seemed to work, however, since the strangler still did not have any problems getting new victims.
Bianchi and Buono would usually cruise around Los Angeles in Buono’s car and use fake badges to persuade girls that they were undercover cops. Their victims were women and girls aged 12 to 28 from various walks of life. They would then order the girls into Buono’s “unmarked police car” and drive them home to torture and murder them.
Both men would sexually abuse their victims before strangling them. They experimented with other methods of killing, such as lethal injection, electric shock and carbon monoxide poisoning. Even while committing the murders, Bianchi applied for a job with the Los Angeles Police Department and had even been taken for several rides with police officers whilee they were searching fort eh Hillside Strangler.
One night, shortly after they botched their would-be eleventh murder, Bianchi revealed to Buono he had attended LAPD police ride alongs, and that he was currently being questioned about the strangler case. After hearing this, Buono erupted in a fit of rage. An argument ensued at one point during which Buono threatened to kill Bianchi if he did not flee to Bellingham, Washington. In May 1978, he did flee to Bellingham.
On January 11, 1979, Bianchi lured two female students into a house he was guarding. The women were 22-year-old Karen Mandic and 27-year-old Diane Eilder, and were students at Western Washington University. He forced the first student down the stairs in front of him and then strangled her. He murdered the second young girl in a similar fashion. Without help from his partner, he left many clues and police apprehended him the next day. A California driver’s license and a routine background check linked him to the addresses of two Hillside Strangler victims.
Following his arrest, Bianchi admitted he and Buono, in 1977, while posing as police officers, stopped a young female by the name of Catharine Lorre with intentions of abducting and killing her. But after learning she was the daughter of actor Peter Lorre, they let her go. Only after he was arrested did Catharine learn of the true identity of the men whom she encountered.
Sabra Hannan
She moved into the house of Angelo Buono. The modeling jobs were not true. Kenneth Bianchi asked her if she had ever thought of engaging in prostitution. Sabra reacted angrily, but after a beating and being forced to perform various sexual acts, surrendered.
Buono told her that if she ran away, she would be “a dead cat.” Sabra was the first of his prostitutes. The two cousins took the role of pimps. They liked to think of themselves as super men who were born to use women. Buono used his shop to cover up his company of prostitutes, forcing Sabra Hannan and another girl named Becky Spears to work for him. At first the two girls worked in the back room, but later they reached an agreement with the owner of “Foxy Ladies Outcall,” a prostitute phone service, owned by J.J. Fenway, for the girls to visit clients in their own homes.
Bianchi’s girlfriend visited him, but his possessive sense cause trouble and strife. He wept uncontrollably with his head in his lap when the girl decided to leave. Shortly after that, Bianchi broke into her apartment and put a hole in the diaphragm. He consoled herself with a new friend, Kelly Body, who became his wife. They met in the real estate company.
Bianchi lost his job when they found marijuana in a drawer of his desk. Then, he rented an office and set up a psychiatric consultation, but patients did not appear anywhere. At that time, his cousin Angelo made a brilliant suggestion: why not be pimps?
At a party, he told a Phoenix girl called Sabra Hannan and guaranteed her $500 dollars a week as a photographic model. Sabra was sixteen, and she said no at first. A few weeks later she accepted because she was short of funds.
Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Bianchi told a friend that he was suspected of killing three young girls in his hometown of Rochester, in upstate New York. These crimes are known as “The Alphabet Murders” because the first name of each victim began with the same letter as their last name.
Victims:
- Carmen Colon, 10, disappeared Novemeber 16, 1971. She was found two days later 12 miles from where she was last seen. Although found in the town of Riga, the village of Churchville is the town’s center of population, and the town of Chili is nearby.
-Wanda Walkowicz, 11, disappeared April 2, 1973. She was found the next day at a rest area off State ROute 104 in Webster, seven miles from Rochester.
-Michelle Maenza, 11, disappeared Novemeber 26, 1973. She was found two days later in Macedon, 15 miles from Rochester.
The three were raped and strangled. Certain tests that were never made public linked the three deaths.
Bianchi was an ice-cream vendor in Rochester at the time, vending from sites close to the first two murder scenes. Bianchi was never charged with the Alphabet murders, and he has repeatedly tried to have investigators officially clear him from suspicion; however, there is circumstantial evidence in that his car was seen at two murder scenes. Bianchi had denied committing the murders and has also attempted to get his name removed from the police investigators’ lists in Rochester. He remains under suspicion; however, he is not the only suspect.