VIDEO: The Hillside Stranglers

Kenneth Bianchi, known as the Hillside Strangler, is a serial killer best known for working with his cousin Angelo Buono to commit 15 rapes and murders.

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The two went on a killing spree between October 1977 and February 1978, raping and murdering 10 victims in Los Angeles. They posed as policemen and targeted prostitutes to begin with, moving on to middle-class women and girls. They usually left the bodies on the hillsides of the Glendale Highland Park area.

According to Bio.com and Wikipedia, serial killer Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born on May 22, 1951, in Rochester, New York. Bianchi, whose natural mother was an alcoholic prostitute, was adopted at birth and had a love-hate relationship with women even as a young child. Interested in police work but unable to secure a job, he eventually settled for a post as a security guard.

In 1975, Bianchi left Rochester and moved to Los Angeles, where he lived with his older adoptive cousin, Angelo Buono. Bianchi later moved in with his girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, and had a child. A chronic liar, he set up a psychology practice with a phony degree and told Boyd he was dying of cancer.

Before long, he and Buono teamed up for a spree of kidnappings, rapes and murders that claimed 10 victims, mostly in and around Los Angeles, between October 1977 and February 1978. Posing as policemen, the cousins began with prostitutes, eventually moving on to middle-class girls and women.

They usually left the bodies on the hillsides of the Glendale-Highland Park area, earning the moniker “The Hillside Strangler.” During the four-month rampage, Buono and Bianchi inflicted unspeakable horrors on their victims, including injecting them with deadly household chemicals.

After intensive investigation, police charged cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr., with the crimes. Bianchi had fled to Bellingham, Washington, where he was soon arrested for raping and murdering two women he had lured to a home for a house-sitting job.

Bianchi attempted to set up an insanity defense, claiming that he had dissociative identity disorder and that a personality separate from himself committed the murders. Court psychologists, notably Dr. Martin Orne, observed Bianchi and found that he was faking, so Bianchi agreed to plead guilty and testify against Buono in exchange for leniency.

At the conclusion of Buono’s trial in 1983, Presiding Judge Ronald M. George, who would later become 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.

Ironically, although these two defendants utilized almost every form of legalized execution against their victims, the defendants have escaped any form of capital punishment.” Bianchi is serving a life sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002.

In 1980, Bianchi began a relationship with Veronica Compton. During his trial, she testified for the defense. She was later convicted and imprisoned for attempting to strangle a woman she had lured to a motel in an attempt to have authorities believe that the Hillside Strangler was still on the loose and the wrong man was imprisoned.