The Hillside Stranglers

The Hillside Strangler left bodies of five young girls in the hills of L.A. within 30 days. By the end of the streak, they would have raped, tortured, and murdered some 10 women and girls aged between 12 to 28, to the horror of citizens and authorities. The Hillside Strangler was the work of two men, Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono Jr.

The murders came to a stop in February 1978, a nine-year-old boy discovered two of the victims. He was with his friends, searching for buried treasure in the local dump's trash heap, when he saw figures that he told police looked just like mannequins.

This was why he was willing to climb up over filthy mattresses and get a closer view, when he saw two girls, aged 12 and 14, not much older than him. They were stripped naked and left to rot in the trash heap. They had been there in the trash and sun for a week. Their faces were beginning to decay and they were covered in swarms of insects.

The girls' names were Dolly Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, and they wouldn't be the last to die. Before the sun set that night, another body would be found.

Kenneth Bianchi

The killings didn't start until Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono got together in January 1976, when Kenneth moved to Los Angeles from Rochester, New York to live with his cousin. However, Kenneth would later be found responsible for several murders on his own.

Kenneth had a troubled past, his mother was unstable and unable to care for him, so he was adopted. He was an unstable youth and later adult who had difficulty holding down a steady job.

But, with his cousin, he was able to land a money-making scheme that would grow into a murdering spree.

Angelo Buono

The older cousin, Angelo, is believed to have acted as a role model for Kenneth and was able to sway him. He was a child of divorced parents and raised by his mother. But, from an early age, he seemed to have loathed women. Even though he married several times he was an abusive husband.

Angelo had an idea to become pimps first with his cousin, and they planned on bringing in runaway teenagers no one would miss and force them to turn tricks.

The two cousins first took in two teenaged girls named Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears. Then, once they had them in their home, they locked them up and forced them to sell their bodies.

The pair were brutal, they beat up the girls, pimped them, raped them, and beat them. And the more they resisted, the more brutal they were. They locked them up in their rooms and only let them leave when they begged for permission.

Sabra enlisted the help of David Wood, a lawyer, both the women made successful escapes.

"I was tired of getting beat up, tired of all the threats, and tired of engaging in prostitution," Sabra told a jury years later when the men who had tortured her were on trail for murder.

She was lucky to get away, because not long after she escaped, Kenneth and Angelo's violent tendencies got worse.

Their first murder came soon after Sabra and Becky's escape. They were determined to keep their pimping business alive, so they paid a proustite named Deborah Noble for a "trick list" with the names and phone numbers of customers in LA. Deborah shows up to the house with another prostitute, Yolanda Washington, and sold the two a phony list. The cousins soon realized this and wanted vengeance.

They knew where they could find Yolanda, who told them where she often worked.

The Murders

Yolanda's body was found naked on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway on October 18th, 1977. She was tied up with fabric around her neck, wrists, and legs, and she was pinned down. She had been violently raped and her body was then washed clean to remove the evidence and she was left naked on the hill.

Ronald LeMieux, a music store owner, was the last to see her alive. He would later testify that two men flashed police badges and pulled her off the street, handcuffed her, and shoved her into a backseat of an unmarked vehicle.

This would become a trademark for Kenneth and Angelo: pretending they were cops, flashing a fake badge, and telling a woman to come downtown with them. They would then take the woman to Angelo's upholstery shop and make sure that she was never seen again.

Less than two weeks later, they struck again. This time they killed a 15-year-old runaway who was surviving on selling her body on the streets. Her body then turned up on November 1st, dumped in a residential area in La Crescenta.

A waitress named Lissa Kastin was the next to turn up, five days later. She was the first woman who they killed who wasn't a prostitute. On November 20th, the bodies of Dolly Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, and Kristina Weckler all turned up on the same day.

Kristina Weckler's death was particularly troubling, the investigators found that the killers had experimented with injecting her with household cleaners.

Women in LA were living in fear, and one woman, Kimberly Martin, joinng a call girl agency hoping that they would keep her safe. But the agency ended up accepting a call from two men using a payphone and then sent her to her death.

Her body was found on December 14th, 1977, she was nude, strangled, and had electrical burns on her palms. She was only 18-years-old and she was the ninth victim of the Hillside Stranglers.

After this, there was a little more than two months of peace before the killers would strike again for a tenth and last time. They left the body of Cindy Hudspeth in the trunk of her Datsun, only inches away from the edge of a cliff.

In February 1978 the killings suddenly stopped.

The Trail and Sentencing

Kenneth Bianchi left LA just as the killing spree ended. He fell in love and spent too much of his time in LA trying to win over Kelli Boyd to marry her.

Kelli never agreed to marry him, but she ended up having his son. She gave birth to their son, Ryan, days after the last murder. Weeks after she had given birth, Kelli broke up with Kenneth and moved to Washington State in May 1978. Kenneth ended up following her to Bellingham, Washington.

The killer in Kenneth seemed insatiable and on January 12th, 1979, Kenneth kidnapped and murdered two students from Western Washington University.

Without the help from his cousin, he was clumsy about covering his tracks and police ended up catching him the next day.

He killed the women in Washington the same way he had killed the girls in LA and when he was arrested, they found out that he was still carrying his California driver's license. They quickly realized that Kenneth was one half of the Hillside Strangler.

Once he was threatened with capital punishment, Kenneth broke down and told them that Angelo was his partner. During the trial, Kenneth pleaded insanity and stated that he suffered with multiple personality disorder. The court, however, didn't buy it.

Kenneth plead guilty to the Washington murders and five of the murders in California, he aslo testified against his cousin to avoid the death penalty. He ended up receiving six life sentences and Angelo received life without parole. The jury ultimately voted against capital punishment.

Ronald George, the presiding judge, cursed the rules that kept him from sentencing the two to death.

"Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi slowly squeezed out of their victims their last breath of air and their promise for a future life. And all for what? The momentary sadistic thrill of enjoying a brief perverted sexual satisfaction and the venting of their hatred for women," Ronald said, "If ever there was a case where the death penalty is appropriate, this is the case."

Angelo died in prison in 202, and Kenneth continues to live out his sentence. He married a Louisiana pen pal in September 1989. He requested parole in 2010 but was denied.