The Hillside Stranglers

In the autumn of 1977, Los Angeles was already a city of contrasts: film studios, freeways, fading old Hollywood glamour, new music scenes, suburban sprawl, and pockets of poverty sitting uncomfortably beside wealth. It was also a city where women were used to measuring risk in everyday decisions, especially at night. Into that world came a series of murders that at first looked like isolated crimes, then slowly revealed themselves as something far more organised and terrifying. Between October 1977 and February 1978, ten women and girls, aged between 12 and 28, were murdered in and around Los Angeles County. Their bodies were left on hillsides, embankments, roadsides, and exposed patches of land, which led newspapers to give the unknown killer the name that would become infamous: the Hillside Strangler. Only later would investigators discover that the singular nickname was wrong. There were two men.

The killers were Kenneth Alessio Bianchi and Angelo Anthony Buono Jr., cousins by adoption and background. Bianchi was born in Rochester, New York, on 22 May 1951 and later moved to California in 1976, where he lived for a time with Buono. He wanted to be seen as respectable, even attempting to move around the edges of law enforcement and security work, but he was also manipulative, dishonest, and fascinated by control. Buono, born on 5 October 1934, was older, harsher, and already had a history of abusing women. He ran an auto upholstery business from Glendale, a setting that would become central to the crimes. The contrast between them mattered. Bianchi could appear polite and ordinary. Buono projected menace and authority. Together, they became far more dangerous than either image suggested.

Their method drew power from one of the most frightening tricks available in a city already anxious about crime: they pretended to be police officers. Victims were approached in cars, sometimes shown fake badges, and persuaded or forced to comply with what seemed to be an official encounter. This deception was especially effective because it turned a symbol of safety into a weapon. It also complicated the public response. Rumours spread that the killer might be a real policeman, and Los Angeles police were reportedly told not to chase women who ran from them, because those women might be fleeing in panic rather than guilt. In that atmosphere, every unmarked car, every hillside discovery, and every late-night journey became part of a growing civic nightmare.

The First Bodies on the Hillsides

The first known Los Angeles victim was Yolanda Washington, 19, murdered on 17 October 1977. Her body was found near the Ventura Freeway, and investigators noted signs that she had been restrained, sexually assaulted, strangled, and left in a way that suggested the killer was trying to display the crime rather than hide it. At first, police could not know whether Washington’s murder was the start of a pattern or one more violent death in a huge city. That uncertainty did not last long. Judith Ann Miller, 15, was murdered on 31 October and found in La Crescenta. Like Washington, she had been restrained and strangled. The repetition forced detectives to consider the possibility that the same killer was operating across different neighbourhoods.

The third recognised victim, Elissa Teresa “Lissa” Kastin, 21, was murdered on 5 November 1977. Kastin worked as a waitress and dancer, and her case widened the fear because she did not fit any easy assumption about who was being targeted. Jane Evelyn King, 28, was murdered on 9 November. King was an aspiring actress and model with links to Hollywood’s underground punk scene, and her death showed how broadly the danger was spreading through the city’s social worlds. The victims were not all from one background, one race, one profession, or one neighbourhood. Some were sex workers, some were students, some were young women simply moving through ordinary routines. The only constant was vulnerability created by deception, isolation, and the killers’ willingness to exploit trust.

The pattern became undeniable after the murders of Dolores “Dolly” Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, on 13 November 1977. The two girls had been travelling home after visiting Eagle Rock Plaza, and their ages shocked the public even further. They were found days later near Dodger Stadium, and their deaths destroyed any remaining belief that the killer was targeting only adults involved in risky circumstances. Kristina Weckler, 20, an art student, was murdered on 19 November. Lauren Rae Wagner, 18, was murdered on 28 November after being abducted near her family home. By the end of November, Los Angeles was no longer dealing with rumours. It was dealing with a serial murder investigation involving children, students, workers, and young women whose lives had been cut short with terrifying speed.

Two Men, One Pattern: Buono, Bianchi, and the Method Behind the Fear

As the murders continued, investigators focused heavily on looking for a pattern. The victims were often restrained, sexually assaulted, strangled, and then left elsewhere, which suggested that many of the crimes were committed at a separate location before the bodies were dumped. Later evidence and testimony would point to Buono’s Glendale upholstery shop as a key site. A Washington court summary later described a repeated procedure: the victims were often picked up under the pretence of a false vice arrest, transported to Buono’s business, assaulted, killed, and then moved to hillside locations where they were found. That structure mattered because it showed planning rather than impulse. The hillsides were not the crime scenes in the fullest sense. They were stages chosen after the fact.

The impersonation of police officers was one of the most important parts of the crimes. Bianchi and Buono reportedly used fake badges, official-sounding language, and the confidence of men who understood that many victims would comply rather than risk resisting someone they believed had authority. This was especially dangerous in 1977 Los Angeles, where street-level policing, vice operations, and unmarked cars were familiar enough to make the deception plausible. The killers were not relying only on physical force. They were using social obedience as a trap. Once a victim was in the car, the situation changed completely. The fake authority became real captivity, and the ordinary rules of the city disappeared.

The two men also benefitted from how different they seemed. Bianchi, younger and apparently presentable, could pass as helpful, ambitious, and even law-enforcement adjacent. He had worked in security, applied for law enforcement roles, and was familiar with the language and posture of authority. Buono, meanwhile, had the fixed location, the shop, and a record of controlling and exploiting women. Their partnership created a division of roles that made the crimes harder to read from the outside. To witnesses, the men might appear as one younger, one older, one smoother, one rougher. To investigators, those paired descriptions would later become crucial, but during the murders, they were only fragments in a widening maze.

By December 1977, the public fear had become overwhelming. Kimberly Diane Martin, 17, was murdered on 13 December. She had reportedly joined a call-girl agency because she feared working openly while the Strangler panic was underway, a detail that captures the bleak logic of the moment: an attempt to reduce danger still led her into the killers’ path. Cindy Lee Hudspeth, 20, the final Los Angeles victim, was murdered on 17 February 1978. Her body was found in the boot of her car after it had been pushed off a cliff near the Angeles Crest Highway. Then the Los Angeles killings stopped, not because police had solved them, but because Bianchi left California.

The Investigation Widens as the Victims Are Identified

The investigation became one of coordination as much as detection. The killings crossed jurisdictions, involved Los Angeles police, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Glendale police, and other agencies, and produced a flood of tips. A 52-man task force was formed to deal with the case, but the spread of bodies across the city made the work difficult. The press attention was enormous, and every new discovery created more public pressure. Detectives had to separate real connections from coincidences, because at various points more than a dozen murders were suspected of being linked to the Hillside Strangler. Some were later ruled out. That uncertainty mattered. A serial case can grow so large in the public imagination that it begins to absorb unrelated crimes, and investigators then have to fight both fear and false pattern.

Victim identification became central to understanding the case. The known Los Angeles victims were Yolanda Washington, Judith Ann Miller, Elissa Teresa Kastin, Jane Evelyn King, Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Lauren Rae Wagner, Kimberly Diane Martin, and Cindy Lee Hudspeth. Their ages ranged from 12 to 28, and the list reflected the broad sweep of the killings. Two of the victims were children. Others were students, workers, or young women involved in Hollywood-adjacent circles. The case also highlighted how early assumptions about “high-risk” victims can mislead both the public and investigators. The killers did not select victims from one easily defined group. They selected opportunities, then used intimidation, false authority, and isolation.

The break came not in Los Angeles, but in Bellingham, Washington. Bianchi had moved there in 1978 with Kelli Boyd, his partner and the mother of his son. He found security work and again tried to present himself as a man connected to authority. On 11 January 1979, two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic, 22, and Diane Wilder, 27, were murdered after being lured to a house under the pretence of a security job. Their bodies were found in Mandic’s green 1978 Mercury Bobcat. Police quickly noticed problems with Bianchi’s alibi, and physical evidence began to build around him. Carpet fibres, clothing evidence, and other forensic links helped make the Bellingham case strong even before the Los Angeles connection was fully understood.

Once Bellingham detectives contacted California, the pieces snapped into place. Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno, part of the Hillside Strangler investigation, recognised the significance of Bianchi’s California background and address history. Investigators found that Bianchi had lived near locations connected to Los Angeles victims, including an apartment complex where Kristina Weckler had lived. Jewellery found in Bianchi’s possession also appeared to match items worn by Hillside victims. The Washington murders did not merely expose Bianchi as a killer in a new state. They reopened the Los Angeles case, transformed the suspect profile, and revealed that the “Hillside Strangler” had never been one man at all.

Bianchi Breaks, Buono Stands Trial

Bianchi’s legal strategy began with denial, then shifted towards mental illness. In March 1979, he changed his plea in Washington to not guilty by reason of insanity, claiming amnesia and presenting the idea of multiple personalities. Under hypnosis, he produced an alter ego called “Steve Walker”, who supposedly committed the crimes. The problem was that the story unravelled. Investigators later discovered that Steve Walker was the name of a real psychologist whose identity Bianchi had effectively borrowed. Detectives traced the connection through a job advertisement Bianchi had placed in the Los Angeles Times while pretending to seek an associate for a fake therapy practice. Once that deception was exposed, the multiple-personality defence lost much of its force.

Facing the death penalty in Washington, Bianchi made a deal. He pleaded guilty to the two Bellingham murders and agreed to plead guilty to five Los Angeles murders, along with other charges, while testifying against Buono. The Washington court record states that he received two consecutive life sentences for the Washington crimes, then was transported to California to enter guilty pleas to five counts of murder, one count of sodomy, and one count of felony conspiracy connected to murder, kidnapping, or rape. This agreement made Bianchi the prosecution’s central witness against Buono, but it also created a major problem. He was a liar, a manipulator, and a murderer trying to save himself. Any case built around him was immediately vulnerable.

That vulnerability almost destroyed the prosecution. In July 1981, Los Angeles prosecutors announced that they intended to drop the murder charges against Buono, arguing that Bianchi’s credibility was too damaged and the case too weak. Police were furious. The turning point came from Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George, who refused to let the case collapse without scrutiny. He issued a powerful ruling ordering the prosecution to resume the case or allow the California attorney general’s office to take it over. George noted that Bianchi’s account was full of contradictions, but that it was also supported by significant evidence. This included witness accounts of the cousins posing as vice officers and fibre evidence linking victims to material associated with Buono’s shop.

Buono’s trial became extraordinary in scale. Jury selection began in November 1981, and guilty verdicts were returned in November 1983. The case ran for 729 days, heard 392 witnesses, and involved 1,807 exhibits. Bianchi testified for months, and his testimony remained contradictory, but he also gave details that prosecutors argued only a participant could know. In the end, Buono was convicted of nine murders and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The trial was not simply about proving that Buono was guilty. It was about proving that a case could survive even when its most important witness was almost impossibly compromised.

After the Verdicts: The Legacy of the Hillside Stranglers

The Hillside Stranglers case left behind several legacies, some legal, some investigative, and some cultural. First, it showed how serial murder investigations can be hampered by jurisdictional boundaries. The bodies were found in different places, the victims came from different backgrounds, and the early assumptions were unstable. Without the Bellingham murders, Bianchi might not have been tied to Los Angeles when he was. Without Bianchi’s confession and cooperation, Buono might have been far harder to prosecute. And without Judge George’s refusal to accept the collapse of the case, Buono might have avoided murder convictions altogether. The case, therefore, became a grim lesson in persistence, coordination, and the importance of circumstantial evidence when direct eyewitness evidence is limited.

The public legacy was equally strong. The case fed a particular kind of urban fear: the idea that danger could look official, polite, and ordinary. Bianchi and Buono were not strangers leaping from shadows in the simplest sense. They used badges, cars, workplaces, rented homes, and social confidence. The crimes also forced attention onto victims who might otherwise have been treated differently by the press or by the public, especially sex workers and runaways. The full victim list made it impossible to reduce the murders to one social category. Yolanda Washington mattered. Judith Miller mattered. Lissa Kastin, Jane King, Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kristina Weckler, Lauren Wagner, Kimberly Martin, and Cindy Hudspeth all mattered. A factual telling of the case has to keep those names visible, because the nickname belongs to the killers, but the history belongs first to the victims.

The aftermath continued for decades. Angelo Buono died in prison in 2002 at the age of 67. Kenneth Bianchi remained incarcerated in Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, later changing his name to Anthony D’Amato. In 2025, the California Board of Parole Hearings denied his parole after hearing from victims’ relatives and prosecutors, and he was told he would be eligible again in ten years. Bianchi has admitted to five California killings and two Washington killings in legal proceedings, but he has also repeatedly tried to recast or challenge his responsibility. That pattern fits the wider history of the case: confession followed by contradiction, cooperation followed by self-preservation, apparent clarity followed by another attempt to muddy the record.

For Compact Murder, this episode works best not as a catalogue of violence, but as a study of how two offenders exploited trust, how a city reacted under pressure, and how a case nearly collapsed despite the scale of the evidence. It is also a reminder that serial murder investigations are rarely clean stories of sudden breakthroughs. They are built from frightened witnesses, overlooked details, forensic fragments, disputed testimony, and officials willing to keep going when the case becomes politically and legally uncomfortable. The Hillside Stranglers terrorised Los Angeles for months, but the fight to prove what happened lasted years. In the end, the name became infamous, but the real shape of the story is more precise: ten Los Angeles victims, two Washington victims, two killers, one near-failed prosecution, and a city permanently marked by the fear that authority itself could be faked.

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