Angelo buono serial killer

Rodney Alcala 8 Victims during 9 Years. Randy Steven Kraft 16 Victims during 13 Years. Robert Lee Yates 18 Victims during 24 Years. Kevin Smith Serial Killer Stranglers. Kevin Smith Serial Killer Rapists. Peter Vronsky Serial Killers.

William Murray Serial Killers. Back to top. United States. Angelo Buono started his serial killing spree. Angelo Buono ended his serial killing spree. Angelo Buono arrested. Angelo Buonodied. Serial Killer Stranglers. Kevin Smith. Serial Killer Rapists. The Serial Killer Files. Harold Schechter. The Hillside Stranglers. Darcy O'Brien. Serial Killers. Peter Vronsky. Killer Book of Serial Kil Tom Philbin.

William Murray. The Big Book of Serial Ki Jack Rosewood. Couples Who Kill. Carol Anne Davis. American Murder. Serial Murder and Media C Darcy O'Brien in his excellent book, Two of a Kind, summarizes what the forensic psychiatrists had to say: "The Strangler was white, in his late twenties or early thirties, and single, separated, or divorced -- in any case not living with a woman. He was of average intelligence, unemployed or existing on odd jobs, not one to stay with a job too long.

He had probably been in trouble with the law before. He was passive, cold, and manipulative -- all at once. He was the product of a broken family whose childhood was marked by cruelty and brutality, particularly at the hands of women. One unusual twist to the investigation was the arrival in L. Grogan was polite, but unenthusiastic when the psychic wrote in German what they should be looking for:. Months passed and the Hillside Strangler seemed to have retired.

The activities of the task force wound down and detectives began to work on other cases. On January 12, , the police in Bellingham, Washington were told that two Western Washington University students were missing. The two women roommates, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were not the type of people to take off irresponsibly without telling anyone.

When Karen didn't show up for work, her boss became worried. He remembered that she had accepted a house-sitting job in a very wealthy Bayside neighborhood from a security guard friend of hers. Bellingham police contacted the security firm, who in turn called the security guard to ask him about the supposed house-sitting job for one of the company's clients. The security guard claimed he knew nothing about it and had never heard of the two missing women.

The security guard told his employer that he had been at a Sheriff's Reserve meeting the night the two women disappeared. When police found out that the security guard was not at the Sheriff's Reserve meeting as he had told his employer, they decided to contact the security guard directly. They found him to be a friendly young man who had skipped the Sheriff's meeting because it was on first aid, which he already knew.

The police had no indication that the two women had met with foul play. It was very possible that they had just gone away for the weekend and had forgotten to tell Karen's employer. However, Terry Mangan, the former priest who was the new Bellingham police chief, was not comfortable with that explanation.

When he visited the girls' home, he found a hungry cat -- an unusual situation for an otherwise very pampered pet. In their home, he found the address of the Bayside home where the two of them were to house-sit. A close look at the records of the security firm brought up the name of that same security guard in conjunction with the address in which the girls were to house-sit.

Also, police learned that the security guard had used a company truck the night the women disappeared, supposedly take it into the shop for repair. However, the guard never took the truck in for servicing. Chief Mangan was becoming increasingly concerned about the safety of the two missing women.

He asked the Highway Patrol to check on sites that might be used to dump bodies or abandon cars. The next step was for the police to search the Bayside address where the girls were supposed to house-sit.

They found a wet footprint in the kitchen that had been left a few hours earlier, but there was no sign of the girls or Karen Mandic's car. Police found a neighbor who had been contacted by a security guard and asked to check on the house each day except for the night that the girls disappeared.

That night, the guard told her, there was special work being done to the alarm system and he didn't want her to be taken as an intruder. Next, Chief Mangan enlisted the help of the news media, requesting that they describe the missing women and car to their audiences.

Shortly thereafter, a woman called about a car that had been abandoned near her home in a heavily wooded area. Inside the car were the bodies of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Both had been strangled. Other bruises suggested that they had been subjected to other injuries as well. While the missing women were sent to the morgue, Chief Mangan ordered that the security guard be picked up for questioning.

They needed to proceed cautiously since this suspect was a trained security officer. As it turned out, the security guard gave them no trouble whatsoever when they picked him up.

He was a handsome, friendly, intelligent and articulate husband and father by the name of Kenneth Bianchi. Kenneth Bianchi was almost six feet tall and was a trim, muscular man. His dark hair was well groomed and he wore a moustache.

He lived with a long-time girlfriend, named Kelli Boyd, and their infant son. Kelli could not believe that someone as kind and gentle as Kenny could be a suspect in a murder case. Nor could Kenny's employer, who considered him a valuable and responsible member of his staff.

The Bellingham police mounted a first class investigation of all the forensic evidence. They were exceptionally thorough in the handling of every hair and fiber. Pubic hairs fell from Diane Wilder's body as they lifted it from Karen's car. The Bellingham police had a white sheet ready to catch any stray, unattached fibers or hairs than could have easily slipped away. More pubic hairs were found on the steps at the Bayside home. Fibers from the carpets of that home matched the fibers found on the dead girls' shoes and clothes.

Would these hairs and fibers conclusively link Kenny to the murdered girls? The answer would take several days to determine. Meanwhile, the police wanted to keep Kenny under lock and key. This was made easier when they found stolen goods in his home -- items stolen from job sites he had been managing.

Since Kenny had lived in L. Sheriff's Office. Detective Frank Salerno responded to the Bellingham police call. Suddenly everything made sense to Salerno. The addresses of Cindy Hudspeth and Kristina Weckler on East Garfield and the client Kimberly Martin visited on Tamarind matched Kenny's places of residence during the times of the murders.

He lost no time getting to Bellingham to assist the police there in the investigation. He left his partner, Peter Finnigan, to work with Grogan and others on uncovering Bianchi's activities when he lived in L. Piece by piece, the evidence mounted that Kenny Bianchi was at least one of the Hillside Stranglers. The jewelry that was found in Bianchi's home matched the description of jewelry that was worn by two of the victims: Kimberly Martin's ramshorn necklace and Yolanda Washington's turquoise ring.

And the hair and fiber evidence further substantiated his guilt. His biological mother was an alcoholic prostitute who gave him up at birth. Three months later, Frances Bianchi and her husband, a manual laborer in the American Brake-Shoe foundry, adopted him. Darcy O'Brien describes him as a born loser: "Kenny appears to have arisen from the cradle dissembling.

By the time he could talk, Frances knew she was coping with a compulsive liar, and his childhood unfolded as one of idleness and goldbricking. When he was five and a half, Frances became worried by his frequent lapses into trancelike states of daydreaming; she consulted a physician. The doctor, hearing that little Kenny's eyeballs would roll back into his head during these trances, reached a diagnosis of petit mal seizures. But they were nothing to worry about.

He would grow out of them. Despite his IQ of and artistic and verbal gifts, he was a chronic underachiever and his grades were erratic. He was prone to temper tantrums and was quick to anger. Frances took him to a psychologist, who decided that Kenny was overly dependent upon his mother.

With significant financial sacrifice, she sent him to a Catholic elementary school where he did well in creative writing. Bianchi died of a heart attack when Kenny was thirteen and Frances had to go to work to support the two of them. Kenny went to a public high school where he was polite and neat, avoiding all of the social turmoil that caught up so many young people in the late 's. His Catholic education served him here in a twisted way. He was able to confuse ordinary women with the Virgin and could be moved to bitter disappointment, even anger and fury, at their human frailties.

Denying female sexuality even as he was attracted to it, he objected to V-neck sweaters and tight jeans and asked absolute fidelity in return for outwardly absolute devotion. Yet he always dated several girls at once and did not require of himself comparable standards of purity. He married a young woman his age when he graduated from high school in , but neither of them was mature enough to make the marriage last.

Eight months into the marriage, she packed up all of their goods, left him and filed for an annulment. Kenny was crushed. He felt betrayed and used. When he got over the pain, he started going to a community college to take courses in police science and psychology, but did not do particularly well and finally dropped out.

He was rejected when he applied for a job in the sheriff's department. He drifted into a job as a security guard, which allowed him to steal things, which he then gave to his girlfriends.

The stealing caused him to change jobs a number of times and he realized that he wasn't going anywhere in Rochester. Kenny left Rochester in late when he was twenty-six and went to live in Los Angeles.

He started out living with his older cousin, Angelo Buono. At first he was seduced by the uninhibited California culture where sex and drugs were freely available. Eventually, he got tired of that and started to settle down.

His first love was police work, but there were no openings available in the Los Angles Police Department and the Glendale Police Department turned him down. Eventually, he got a job working for a title company and used his first paycheck to get an apartment at East Garfield Avenue in Glendale and a Cadillac sedan, overextending himself financially in the process.

Kenny was never strong on financial responsibility. There were a number of young women who lived in his apartment building. One of them, Kristina Weckler, tried to ignore his advances, but others were more receptive. He moved in with Kelli Boyd, a woman he had met at work. In May of , she told him she was expecting his child. He wanted to marry Kelli, but she was not sure that she wanted to accept the offer.

While Kenny was very kind to her, he had some serious faults. He was very jealous, he was immature and he lied. Kenny lost his job over some pot that was found in his desk, but he was able to get another similar job in downtown L.

He and Kelli moved to an apartment at Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood. As a sideline, Kenny had set himself up as a psychologist with a phony degree and set of credentials that he had fraudulently obtained.

He rented some office space from an unsuspecting legitimate psychologist. Fortunately, very few people came to see him for help. When Kelli found out about the counseling service, she was angry.

During October and December of , the city of Los Angeles was panicked by news of the Hillside Strangler, but this had little effect on the relationship of Kelli and Kenny. When Kenny started coughing and having difficulty breathing, Kelli insisted that he go to a doctor. He told her that he had lung cancer and was going to have to take radiation and chemotherapy to save his life. It was a lie. Kelli was traumatized by the news, but did her best to keep his spirits up.

Kenny started to miss work because he claimed that the therapy was making him ill. One day when he was home sick from work, detectives came to question him about one of the Strangler murders that may have taken place in his apartment building.

The detectives were favorably impressed with Bianchi and did not consider him a suspect. Ken asked to participate in LAPD's ride-along program, which let civilians go along in patrol cars as a kind of community education program. Ken did nothing but talk about the Strangler murders. The relationship between Kenny and Kelli became tense. She would often go to stay with her brother, but would always go back to Kenny. In February, their son Sean was born.

For awhile, things were better between them, but the old problems surfaced once again. Ted Schwartz in The Hillside Strangler summarizes how Kelli viewed the difficulties: "Ken was irresponsible about work and about money. He would goof off, going over to play cards with Angelo after calling in sick.

He owned a used Cadillac, then couldn't make the payments. She had hoped that the baby would cause him to have a sense of purpose, to encourage him to change his ways, but it didn't. Everything was a hustle. People had no depth, no values, no integrity. Ken did. He was a very moral man, yet he was young and easily influenced by others. He desperately wanted approval, and apparently he didn't get it from just doing his job and following the work ethic.

Whatever the case, Kelli realized that they were finished in that city. Kelli went back home to Bellingham to start over. Her parents and old friends were there to help. Ken was devastated by the decision. Once again, his woman abandoned him. Once she was gone, he wrote to her constantly. Finally, she agreed to give him another chance and he drove to Bellingham in May of The police in Los Angeles released a photo of Bianchi to the news media and received a call from a lawyer named David Wood.

Wood had rescued one of two girls, Becky Spears and Sabra Hannan, from Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono who had forced the young women into prostitution by threats and brutality.

Buono was an ugly man in his forties with dyed black hair, poor teeth and a nose that dominated his face. The detectives had a strong hunch that this Angelo character was the other Hillside Strangler. Angelo Buono is an ugly man physically, emotionally and intellectually. He is coarse, vulgar, selfish, ignorant and sadistic. He was also a big hit with the ladies and called himself the "Italian Stallion. He was born in Rochester, New York, on October 5, When his mother and father got a divorce, he moved with Jenny, his mother and his older sister, Cecilia, to the south part of Glendale, California, in His mother supported the family by doing piecework in a shoe factory.

Angelo was brought up Catholic, but neither his religion nor his public education had much impact on him. He remained uneducated throughout his life, spiritually, morally and academically.

Despite his need for sex and the practicality of occasionally being decent to a woman in order to get as much as he needed, he has a deep loathing for women and a desire to humiliate and injure them. He called his mother a "cunt" and a "whore" to her face, but was emotionally tied to her until her death in Even as a fourteen-year-old, he boasted to his friends about raping and sodomizing girls.

It's not surprising that Angelo got in trouble with the law. He was sent to the Paso Robles School for Boys after he was convicted for grand theft auto. His proclaimed hero and role model was the notorious rapist, Caryl Chessman. 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. Showing a. To Angelo he was a heroic combination of guts and brains. Angelo knocked up a girl from his high school girl in and married her. He left her less than a week later. Geraldine Vinal gave birth to Michael Lee Buono in Angelo refused to give her a cent for his support and refused to let the boy call him Dad.

Angelo was in jail again for car theft when Michael was born. In , Mary filed for divorce because of his violence and perverse sexual needs, plus she got tired of always being called a cunt.

Darcy O'Brien recounts a night in their first year together when Angelo tied Mary spread-eagled to the bedposts and raped her so violently she was afraid that he was going to kill her. But Angelo was not a man to be denied. Although he never drank, he beat and kicked her when she failed to please him, and far from caring whether the children witnessed the beatings, he seemed to want them to watch. Angelo again successfully avoided paying any child support and Mary went on welfare to feed the children.

She went to see Angelo about reconciliation, but he handcuffed her, shoved a gun to her stomach and threatened to kill her. That was the last time she thought about reconciliation with Angelo. In , Angelo started to live with a year-old mother of two children named Nanette Campina. With Nanette, he had Tony in and Sam in She was treated just as well as Mary was, but she stayed with him because he made it clear that he would kill her if she didn't.

By , Nanette decided to risk everything to get away from Angelo, who had begun to abuse her fourteen-year-old daughter. Angelo bragged to his friends that he'd raped his stepdaughter and then turned her over to his sons for their pleasure. True or not, Nanette took her children and left the state for good. In , Angelo married Deborah Taylor on a whim, but they never lived together and never got around to getting a divorce.

By , Angelo had built himself a reasonable reputation as an auto upholsterer. He bought a place at East Colorado Street for his residence and his upholstery shop. He had no use for employees, so the new place gave him the privacy to do any horrible thing he wanted.

Through some streak of perversity, young girls were attracted to Angelo. He was cocky, independent, direct and very, very much in-charge. He became a magnet for teenage girls in the neighborhood. In late , when Cousin Kenny arrived, he found Angelo with dyed black hair, gold chains around his neck, a large gaudy turquoise ring on his finger, red silk underwear and a virtual harem of jailbait girls.

Angelo provided a strong role model for the easy-going Kenny. He taught Kenny how to get a whore free by flashing a badge in her face after he got what he wanted. When Kenny was short of money, Angelo came up with the idea of getting some girls to work for them as prostitutes.

Kenny's charm could be used to recruit the girls and Angelo's connections could be used to get the customers. Two teenage runaways, Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears fell under their influence. Once under their control, the girls were forced to prostitute themselves or be subjected to severe physical punishment. They were virtually being held prisoner.

Eventually, Becky happened to meet lawyer David Wood, who was appalled at their plight and arranged for her to escape from the city. When Angelo understood what happened, he threatened David Wood. Wood had one of his clients -- a mountain of a man -- call on Angelo to gently persuade him not to threaten Wood any more. It worked. Emboldened by Becky's escape, Sabra ran away from Angelo and Kenny a short time later.

With his pimping income gone, Kenny missed payments on his Cadillac, which was eventually repossessed. They had to find more teenage girls. Impersonating police officers, they tried to abduct one girl until they found out that she was Catherine Lorre, the daughter of Actor Peter Lorre. Eventually they found a young woman and installed her in Sabra's old bedroom. Also, they bought from a prostitute named Deborah Noble a "trick list" with names of men who frequented prostitutes.

Deborah and her friend, Yolanda Washington, delivered the trick list to Angelo in October of Yolanda happened to mention to Angelo that she always worked on a certain stretch of Sunset Boulevard. When Angelo and Kenny found that Deborah had deceived them about the list, they decided to take out their rage on Yolanda, since they didn't know how to find Deborah Noble.

Now all of Angelo's and Kenny's kills were being immortalized in Kenny's Bellingham jail song. Kenny could be called a lot of bad things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Locked up in the Whatcom County Jail in Bellingham, he had lots of time and motivation to use his gray cells. Already an accomplished liar, he convinced Dean Brett, the lawyer appointed by the court to represent him, he was suffering from amnesia. Brett was so concerned about Kenny trying to commit suicide that he had a psychiatric social worker called in to talk to Kenny.

The psychiatric social worker could not comprehend how such a mild-mannered, considerate person could have strangled two women unless he was suffering from a multiple personality disorder. Kenny got the message and crafted a wonderful scam, using his sprinkling of psychology from college and whatever he gleaned from seeing the movie classic, The Three Faces of Eve, years before. Then Kenny really got lucky.

The movie Sybil, another story of multiple personalities, was being shown on television just before Kenny was to be interviewed by Dr. John G. Watkins, an expert on multiple personalities and amnesia. This was the first step in an insanity defense, so Salerno and Finnegan caught a plane to Washington State. Kenny was very well prepared for his performance.

Shortly after Dr. Watkins believed that he had hypnotized Kenny, Kenny went into his evil persona routine. The next day, January 12th, he was arrested without incident. When Bianchi's photo was broadcast in the media in Los Angeles, the investigators received a call from a lawyer named David Wood, who had helped one of the two girls Buono and Bianchi had pimped escape. He tipped them about Buono, who was also arrested on October 22th Shortly before that, Bianchi had informed the investigators of his cousin's involvement in the murders.

During the two years leading up to the Stranglers' trial, Bianchi formed a relationship with Veronica Lynn Compton , an actress and playwright with an obsession with serial killers, from behind bars.

She sent him a copy of a screenplay, titled The Mutilated Cutter , about a female serial killer she had written, asking for his thoughts on the subject. She grew increasingly fixated with him until he managed to manipulate her into copycatting a Hillside Strangler murder in order to make it look like the killer was still at large, even smuggling out some of his semen out of prison in a rubber glove DNA evidence had no forensic use at the time, but semen could still be analyzed to show what blood type the man who produced it had.

Compton lured a woman to a motel and attempted to strangle her, but was overpowered and arrested. In anticipation of his trial, Bianchi prepared to mount an insanity plead, claiming to have a separate personality named "Steve Walker" who had committed the murders Bianchi had watched the movie Sybil the night before he made the claim.

He was interviewed by multiple people who specialized in multiple personalities and hypnosis, who attempted to find out whether he truly was insane. It was eventually determined that he was faking it he had been inventing more "alter egos" since he was told that it was uncommon for there to only be one extra personality. During the trial, there was a great deal of trace evidence implicating the two; there had been fibers from Buono's upholstery workshop and home on two victims, there was an imprint of a fake police badge on his wallet and there were hairs from rabbits he had raised on another victim.

Bianchi also agreed to plead guilty and testify to his cousin's involvement, though he remained uncooperative throughout the trial. In , both men were found guilty of the murders they had committed and, in spite of the cruelty of their crimes, spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison.

Buono died of natural causes while serving his sentence in at the Calipatria State Prison in California. Bianchi is still serving his sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington and won't be eligible for parole again until The so-called Alphabet murders were a series of murders in Rochester, New York, Buono and Bianchi's hometown, between and The victims were girls of different ethnicities, aged ten-eleven who lived in the town and came from poor Catholic families.

They were raped, strangled, and dumped in the wilderness. One thing that made the case notable was the fact that all three victims had double initials, i. The first victim, C armen C olon, 10, was found in C hurchsville. The second and third victims, W anda W alkowicz, 11 found in W ebster , and M ichelle M aenza, 11 found in M acedon , were killed in After that, the perpetrator appears to have stopped killing.

There have been a few suspects, including a "person of interest" who killed himself six weeks after the murders stopped but was cleared by DNA testing in One of the most notable suspects is Bianchi, who lived in Rochester and worked as an ice cream vendor at the time of the murders.

Though he denies having committed the murders, he remains under suspicion and there is circumstantial evidence against him; his car was spotted at two murder scenes and the third victim had told her father that she was going out for ice cream the day she disappeared.

Another suspect was Joseph Naso , 77, who was arrested in Reno, Nevada in April on suspicion of a number of murders dating back to Some of his suspected victims in California, including R oxene R oggasch and P aula P arsons, had double initials. Another victim attributed to him was also named C armen C olon, like one of the Alphabet murder victims, and was found near Port C osta, California in While he was tried for his six murders, he was ruled out from the Alphabet murders when his DNA was tested against a sample from one of the victims.

Buono and Bianchi initially targeted prostitutes, but later moved up to middle-class women. The oldest victim was twenty-eight years old and the youngest twelve. The two would hunt for victims while cruising around the streets in their car. When they found a suitable victim, they would pick her up, either by soliciting them if they were prostitutes or by pretending to be undercover cops, even carrying fake badges.

Once the victim was in the car, they would drive her to Buono's home and spend several hours raping and torturing them before killing them by strangling them with a garrote, which was their signature weapon.