Hillside Strangler
[1] An unusual twist in the investigation was the arrival in California of a psychic from Berlin; Detective Bob Grogan was politely unenthusiastic when the medium wrote, in German, that the police should be looking for two male Italians who were (possibly) brothers, aged about 35.
After an elderly neighbor of one of the victims witnessed and reported her kidnapping (having heard the words "You won't get away with this"), police had their confirmation that two individuals were involved.
An extensive investigation proved fruitless, until the arrest of Bianchi in January 1979 for the murder of two young women in Washington state, and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case.
Nevertheless, he remained cordial and even developed a brief "friendship" with some of the officers at the Los Angeles Police Department, being invited to several social gatherings and going on patrols with some of them.
It was this history of applying to the LAPD, and his California state ID, that clued-in law enforcement to Bianchi, who had been attempting to hide-out in Washington.
The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of those crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.
On November 1, 1977, police were called to Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta,[8] a neighborhood 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found naked, face up on a parkway in a middle-class residential area.
[9] The girl, who was described as being "small and thin, weighing about 90 pounds and appearing to be about 16 years old",[9] was eventually identified as 15-year-old Judith Lynn Miller, a former student of Hollywood High School.
The stranglers had told her they were ‘undercover’ police officers, handcuffed her, and took her to Buono's Auto Upholstery Shop at 703 E. Colorado St. in Glendale, where she was murdered.
Like Miller before, her body bore five-point (neck, wrists, and ankles) ligature marks and showed signs of having been strangled and brutally raped—but not sodomized, allegedly due to her having hair present on her legs.
[10] At some point in early November 1977,[11] the two men approached 24-year-old Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of actor Peter Lorre—famous for his role as a serial killer in Fritz Lang's film M—with the intent of abducting and killing her.
[13] On Sunday, November 13, 1977, two girls, 12-year-old Dolores Ann "Dolly" Cepeda and 14-year-old Sonja Marie Johnson,[14] boarded an RTD bus in front of the Eagle Rock Plaza on Colorado Boulevard and headed home.
[10] Earlier that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the naked body of 20-year-old Kristina Weckler, a quiet, unassuming honors student at the Art Center College of Design, described by Detective Bob Grogan of the Los Angeles Police Department as a "…loving and serious young woman who should have had a bright future ahead of her".
When found by Detective Grogan, the typical ligature marks were on her wrists, ankles, and neck, and when he turned her over, bruises were observed on her breasts and blood oozed from her rectum.
Unlike the first three victims, there were two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that indicated a drug addict;[16] it was later determined that Weckler had been injected with Windex, a common ammonia-based window, glass and hard-surface cleaner.
In response authorities created a task force—initially composed of 30 officers from the LAPD, the Sheriff's Department and the Glendale Police Department—to catch the predatornow dubbed the "Hillside Strangler".
[15] On November 29, 1977, police found the body of 18-year-old Lauren Rae Wagner, a business student who lived with her parents in the San Fernando Valley,[10] in the hills around Los Angeles's Mount Washington.
[18] Lauren's parents had expected her to come home before midnight, and the next morning, when they found her car parked across the street with the door ajar, her father questioned the neighbors.
[18] On December 14, 1977, the naked body of 17-year-old prostitute Kimberly Diane Martin, which also showed signs of torture, was found on a deserted lot near Los Angeles City Hall.
At the conclusion of Buono's trial in 1983, Presiding Judge Ronald M. George, who later became Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, stated during sentencing, "I would not have the slightest reluctance to impose the death penalty in this case were it within my power to do so.
