One month later, a few days before a 20-band “Save the Masque” benefit at the Elks Lodge No. 99 near MacArthur Park, a 10th name was added to the death toll. Police found 20-year-old Silverlake resident Cindy Hudspeth on February 17 in the trunk of her orange Datsun, which had tumbled 50 feet down an embankment off the Angeles Crest Highway. “We can see she is a Strangler victim,” an investigator told the press.
After that, something unexpected happened. March came and went without another body. Then April. Then May. As the year drew to a close, police had yet to encounter another murder that fit the profile.
Had something spooked the killers? Were they simply biding their time before striking again? The Hillside Strangler Task Force still didn’t have any suspects. It was beginning to look as though they might never figure out who was behind the slayings. Then they got a phone call.
In January 1979, the police chief of Bellingham, Washington, a waterfront city 21 miles south of the Canadian border, contacted the task force with some crucial information. The bodies of two young women, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, had been found in the trunk of Mandic’s car, deep ligature marks around their necks. Police already had a suspect in custody. He’d been a security guard at the grocery store where Mandic worked, and he’d offered the women $100 each for a supposed house-sitting job from which they’d never returned. Notably, he’d lived in Los Angeles until the previous year.
The suspect’s name was Kenneth Bianchi, a handsome and charismatic 27-year-old originally from Rochester, New York, where he’d been born to a 17-year-old alcoholic sex worker and raised by adoptive working-class Italian Catholics. A variety of behavioral issues were evident from a young age: compulsive lying, incontinence, passive-aggressive personality disorder, and poor academic performance belied by above-average intelligence. After high school, he’d bounced around between menial jobs while trying, unsuccessfully, to break into law enforcement. With no career prospects and a history of petty theft, Bianchi had sought a new beginning in the mid-’70s in Los Angeles, where he used fake credentials to pose as a psychologist and began relationships with two women. One of them became pregnant with Bianchi’s son but spurned his marriage proposal and moved north to be near her family in Bellingham, which is what brought Bianchi there in 1978.
After learning about Bianchi from his counterparts in Washington State, Dudley Varney picked up the phone and called his boss. “We’re going to Bellingham,” he said.
Connections to the LA victims became apparent. Bianchi had lived for six months in the same Glendale apartment complex as Kristina Weckler. He’d also lived at 1950 Tamarind Avenue, the apartment complex to which Kimberly Martin had been dispatched by her call-girl agency. Around the corner stood the bus stop where King had waited after her acting class.
Members of the task force took Bianchi’s fingerprints. Back in LA, Varney was waiting for an elevator when a colleague bounded up to him with the news that they’d matched the prints to one of their crime scenes: “We got him!”
As Varney suspected, Bianchi had not been working alone during the killing spree. He confessed he’d committed the crimes with his adoptive older cousin, Angelo Buono, a minor crook with a record of abusive behavior toward women who ran a car upholstery business in Glendale. To nail Buono, prosecutors offered Bianchi life with the possibility of parole, no death penalty. He agreed to testify against his cousin, who maintained he was innocent and that Bianchi was a pathological liar. Evidence gathered by detectives suggested otherwise—they found fibers on two victims that matched those in Buono’s home.
Interrogations of Bianchi unspooled the stories of 10 young women in and around LA who’d shared the misfortune of encountering a pair of twisted men between October 1977 and February 1978. It turned out there’d almost been 11. Posing as undercover vice cops, Bianchi and Buono had stopped Catharine Lorre one evening near the former Max Factor building just off Hollywood Boulevard. Bianchi aborted the plan after rifling through his intended target’s wallet and realizing she was the daughter of the late actor Peter Lorre (who himself played a serial killer in Fritz Lang’s M). “I had two photographs depicting my father and myself together,” Lorre later testified, recalling that one of her would-be captors had remarked, “Hey, this really is Peter Lorre’s kid!”
Buono wasn’t wrong in depicting his cousin as a liar who couldn’t be trusted. Bianchi had led a double life, after all. He’d even conjured supposed alternate personalities during his psychiatric evaluations. It’s impossible to know how honestly Bianchi described each victim’s abduction, rape, and murder. (He would later claim to have invented details under pressure from interrogators.) But his accounts are the closest we have to the truth about how these young women came to lose their lives.
