All About Hillside Stranglers Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, and the Victim They Spared Because of Her Famous Father

Yolanda Washington was the first in a series of brutal slayings that plagued the Los Angeles community in 1977. Washington, a 19-year-old prostitute, was found strangled on a Hollywood hillside that October. She had been bound and raped before she was murdered, her nude body dumped on the side of a hill near the Ventura Freeway. Washington’s violent death struck fear in the residents of Southern California, but it was only the beginning.

Two weeks later, the remains of Judith Miller were found in an eerily similar state. Much like Washington, the 15-year-old high school student, who moonlit as a prostitute, was also discovered with ligature marks around her neck, wrists and ankles. She was stripped of her clothing and sexually assaulted before she was killed and dumped on a Los Angeles parkway. By the discovery of the third victim, 21-year-old waitress Lissa Kastin, in early November, police realized they were hunting a serial killer. 

“We had no idea how big the case was going to be,” retired Glendale homicide detective Joe Chester admitted in the TV series The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise. 

As bodies continued to drop, authorities assembled a 52-man task force with officers from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Glendale police, in an effort to capture the killer the media dubbed “The Hillside Strangler.” 

Investigators initially had no idea they were dealing with two murderous cousins—Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi. Buono, a 44-year-old auto upholsterer, and Bianchi, a 26-year-old petty thief, embarked on a months-long murder spree in the City of Angels, targeting girls and young women between the ages of 12 and 28 years, according to police.

Police learned that the victims included runaways, college students, aspiring actresses and prostitutes, of no particular race and with no particular physical features, the Los Angeles Times reported. But the killers’ modus operandi remained the same: bind, rape, strangle and dump the victims’ thoroughly cleaned bodies, many on Los Angeles hillsides within a few miles of each other. 

"The city of Los Angeles just exploded,” retired LAPD homicide detective Bob Grogan said, according to ABC News. “People were panicking that their daughter’s gonna be the next victim.”

Investigators learned Bianchi and Buono would lure their victims into their car by flashing fake cop badges, posing as undercover police officers and gaining their trust. They would then take them to a second location, where the assaults and killings occurred. 

“There were no defense wounds on the victims,” Grogan said in a separate interview on The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise. “These victims went along with the program. They went along with the suspect.”

The perpetrators would then follow through with their routine execution plan: “We believed they used a consistent MO of five-point ligature,” Grogan said, referring to the killers' act before they’d get rid of the bodies, mostly by depositing them on various hillsides within a seven-mile radius in Los Angeles. 

By the time Bianchi and Buono were done wreaking havoc in early 1978, their victim list rose to 10, including Dolores Cepeda, 12; Sonja Johnson, 14; Kristina Weckler, 20; Jane King, 28; Lauren Wagner, 18; Kimberly Martin, 17; and Cindy Hudspeth, 20. 

Stunningly, one woman, Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of Casablanca and M actor Peter Lorre, was spared because of her ties to her famous father, the Times reported. The pair confronted her while she walked home alone one night in 1977. They agreed to let her go after she said she was the famous Hollywood actor’s daughter and pulled a photo of them out of her handbag. 

By February 1978, their reign of terror ended when Bianchi relocated to Bellingham, Wash., with his then-girlfriend. But his blood-thirst followed him to the Pacific Northwest, and soon enough, he was arrested for the murders of two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic, 22, and Diane Wilder, 27. Bianchi worked as a security guard and lured them into a home where he strangled them in January 1979. 

Investigators quickly tied Bianchi to the Los Angeles hillside slayings, and he wasted no time incriminating Buono, who denied any wrongdoing. 

“The only thing I have to say is I haven’t did nothing,” Buono told reporters at the time, according to the Times. “They won’t find nothing ‘cause I ain’t did nothing.”

In fact, there was no physical evidence recovered at Buono’s Glendale home tying him to the crimes, HISTORY.com reported. 

Despite this, following a two-year trial and testimony from more than 400 witnesses, Buono was convicted on nine counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He died from a heart attack at Calipatria State Prison near Palm Springs, Calif., in 2002 at age 67. 

In an effort to avoid the death penalty, Bianchi testified against Buono and pleaded guilty to five of the murders in California, in addition to the two murders in Washington. 

Bianchi, now 74, was sentenced to life in prison. He was denied parole in July and remanded to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Wash., according to CBS News. It was his eighth attempt at freedom. He will be eligible for parole again in 10 years.