Hillside Strangler

The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for a serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nickname originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered on the sides of the Hollywood Hills. The police, however, knew because of the presence of multiple distinct DNA traces and the positions of the bodies that two individuals were killing together, but withheld this information from the press. These two individuals were discovered to be cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were later convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and murdering ten females, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-eight years old.

The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of three prostitutes who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of the city between October and early November 1977, but it was not until the deaths of five young women who were not prostitutes, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to be. There were two more murders in December and February before the Hillside Strangler murders abruptly stopped, an extensive investigation proved fruitless until the arrest of Bianchi in January, 1979 for the murder of two more young women in Washington and the subsequent linking of his past to the Hillside Strangler murders. The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with both Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of these crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.

In January 1976, Bianchi left Rochester and moved to Los Angeles to live with his cousin, Angelo Buono. Buono provided a strong role model for the docile Bianchi, and, when Bianchi was short of money, Buono came up with the idea of getting some girls to work for them as prostitutes. Two teenage runaways, Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears, met Bianchi and Buono and, once under their control, were forced to prostitute themselves. Eventually, Becky Spears happened to meet lawyer David Wood, who was appalled at her situation and arranged for her to escape from the city. Encouraged by Spears' escape, Sabra Hannan ran away from Bianchi and Buono a short time later. With their pimping income gone, they had to find more teenage girls. Impersonating police officers, eventually they found another young woman and installed her in the previous girl's bedroom. Also, they bought from a prostitute named Deborah Noble a supposed "trick list" with names of men who frequented prostitutes. Deborah and her friend, Yolanda Washington, delivered the trick list to Buono in October 1977.