by Ian Brady
The police, having traced the killer’s call, next interviewed people at the Hollywood public library. One attractive young woman related that a wild-eyed man of Italian complexion had surreptitiously followed her as she wandered through the library browsing the bookshelves. None of the interviews were considered significant by the police.
A rather curious development occurred, one which the investigating police dismissed as ‘screwy.’ A German citizen from Berlin, who claimed to possess psychic powers, flew all the way to Los Angeles to inform the Los Angeles Police Department that he believed the Hillside Strangler murders were being committed by two Italian brothers. During practically every highly publicised, baffling series of murders, people claiming to have occult capabilities invariably turn up. The interesting aspect of this particular incident was that the psychic either knew or had guessed that two men were involved in the killings, something which the Los Angeles police were still unwisely concealing from the general public. As for the truth or validity of the ‘Italian brothers’ part of the prediction, that only the future would reveal.
I can also speak from experience. The police used a psychic in my case. She, on two occasions, accurately described certain loci. Newspapers published her predictions and visions. After the first prediction I, always overestimating the police on principle — far too generously, as later discovered — put it down to inspired guesswork, or the police applying proactive methodology to force a wrong move. After the second accurate prediction, I began to think in terms of having the psychic source neutralised by a third reliable party from another city. There was no known connection between myself and the third party, but I insisted that he should try to make the killing look like an accident.
I still regarded the predictions as guesswork, but was pragmatic enough to take into consideration the possible psychological and random consequences of such visions and predictions. As they were public knowledge, either the police might start searching for the loci described, or, possibly the greater threat, some member of the public might recognise the loci. Conversely, if none of these possible scenarios was valid and the psychic source was neutralised in a manner eventually discovered to be non-accidental, this might validate the visions and predictions in the eyes of the police, and possibly channel their activities in directions I was trying to deflect them from. There was also the possibility that, if the police were using proactive methods, they might be expecting an attempt on the psychic’s life and be waiting in readiness. So it was Catch-22. I did however suspend a final decision on the proviso that no further accurate predictions surfaced. None did.
In short, at all times I treated the matter from a purely psychological viewpoint, cautioned by personal empirical knowledge of ‘criss-crosses’ — the chance synchronisation of events in time — arguably, in some extraordinary circumstances, a factor of serendipity almost bordering upon the supernatural. After all, if psychic intervention were a reality, it would not only deter most criminals but also lead to widespread chaos and destruction — the mind, with its freedom of thought and action, being the final frontier that man would not tolerate being breached. At least not at the present, relatively primitive stage of human evolution.
There is perhaps a lesson in this for those progressive detectives and FBI agents interested in the art of proactive methodology — and an obvious note of discretion and prudence for ‘psychics’ who make lucky guesses, unaware of the very real potential dangers they could conjure upon their own heads.
No further Hillside Strangler murders took place as celebrations ushered in the New Year of 1978. Then January also passed by with no new victims being added to the list. This unusually long cooling-off period encouraged police to hope that the killers had perhaps exhausted the novelty of their lethal hobby and progressed to some less harmful field of sexual stimulation. They also selfishly speculated that the Stranglers had possibly decided to give Los Angeles a rest and pursue their homicidal recreation elsewhere.
Consequently, the Task Force was beginning to slow down and relax, in relative terms, as their best efforts had produced nothing anyway.
An incident which should have dispelled such wishful thinking — but did not — occurred in early February. An elderly woman schoolteacher reported to the Los Angeles police that she had witnessed two men struggling with a protesting girl, attempting to force her into their car. This scene had taken place in broad daylight.
The elderly lady had possessed the gumption to stop her own car, get out, and demand that the two men desist from attacking the girl. She then described how one of the two men, curly-haired with glaring eyes, had spun round and spat an outlandish warning at her, ‘God will get you for this!’
The two men had then released the struggling girl and driven off at high speed, the indignant man still cursing and glaring back ferociously at the feisty little schoolteacher. Unruffled, the elderly woman had then tried to persuade the girl to go with her to report the matter to the police. The girl was too distressed and just wanted to go home. Again, with what was now appearing to be consummate stupidity, the police casually dismissed the brave schoolteacher as some sort of religious crank and did nothing.
The so-called Special Task Force, obsessed with retaining a ‘secret’ which was not only self-evidently worthless but also counterproductive, had still not even bothered to inform the rank and file of the force that they were hunting two prowling abductors, not one. It must also be assumed that the Special Task Force had not issued general instructions to their foot soldiers to report to them all attempted or actual abductions within the city.
Such a general instruction would not have compromised their precious, ineffectual secrecy, and possibly would have resulted in the two killers being captured much sooner and several lives being saved.
Including that of the next victim, found shortly after the witnessed incident, on 17th February 1978. At first it was taken to be an accident.
An orange Datsun was spotted lodged in the rocks halfway down a cliff below a lay-by on the Angeles Crest Highway near Glendale. When the empty car was hoisted back up to the road and the boot prised open, crammed into it they found the naked body of a twenty-year-old girl later identified as Cindy Hudspeth, a waitress who had worked at the Robin Hood Inn.
The deep marks of restraints that had cut into her wrists provisionally indicated she was another victim of the Stranglers. This was shortly confirmed. Forensic examination revealed that she had been raped and sodomised by two men, one a non-secretor.
Considering the ineptitude and complete lack of progress of the Special Task Force, it came as something of a surprise that months passed without the Stranglers claiming another victim. Apparently the wishes of the Los Angeles Police Department had been granted and the two serial killers had left the city to hunt elsewhere.
Had the Los Angeles Police Department perhaps adopted a revolutionary new policy? That of actually boring the criminals out of the city by offering no competition?
Drop shrewdness, abandon sharpness,
And the robbers and thieves will cease to be.
— The Tao Te Ching
As one door closed in blue-hazed Los Angeles, another opened in the nondescript, sleepy little town of Bellingham in the state of Washington.
Boasting only forty thousand inhabitants, Bellingham was almost a village by American standards, but placed in a strikingly scenic setting, facing forests of pines marching up the ridges of Vancouver Island and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The sort of place to retire to and fish away the remainder of your days in peace. However, the sudden entry of a predatory fish of alien breed put an end to all that tranquility.
Terry Mangan, the police chief presiding over the town, was not unduly worried when one morning the boyfriend of a girl student, Karen Mandic, who was attending Western Washington University, reported that Karen and another girl student, Diane Wilder, had apparently disappeared without trace after telling him they had been offered a ‘house-sitting’ assignment for which
they would receive payment of $100.
They were explained that the empty house they were being paid to occupy and guard for a few hours belonged to some married couple who had gone off to holiday in Europe. The security guard who offered them the paid assignment had told them that something had gone wrong with the alarm system protecting the empty house, and that he did not want to leave the place unguarded while he was checking and repairing the alarms at his workshop in town.
Karen had also told her boyfriend that the man had warned her to keep the house-sitting assignment a secret, as he wasn’t officially authorised to employ people for such security work without first having them checked by head office. The girls would be doing him a personal favour.
Still confident that there was nothing seriously amiss, a few casual preliminary inquiries led police chief Terry Mangan to the Coastal Security Agency, where he spoke to the man who owned the firm, Mark Laurence. It took scant time to ascertain that the security guard employed to monitor the empty house in question was named Kenneth Bianchi, a reliable employee of Italian descent and good reputation.
Mark Laurence was adamant that Kenneth Bianchi did not have the authority to employ anyone at all, even on a part-time basis, and was also positive there was some mistake, as Bianchi was a conscientious individual who lived with a local respectable girl, Kelli Boyd, and had a baby son. Bianchi’s work record was impeccable. He was diligent and hard-working with no history of absenteeism.
So much for respectability; anyone can adopt its intrinsically shallow veneer and structured artifice — indeed, everyone does, except those who are finished with life, or whom life has finished, leaving no advantage to gain from further vain posturing. Only the condemned and rejected experience this truth. The remainder hobble and stumble through life tightly bound by Infernal Circles: family, social, sexual, ethnic, work, educational, moral, legal, religious, etc., etc. — a subconscious hodge-podge of constrictive, confused convolutions from the day they are born till the day they die, their natural spirit intellect stunted and extinguished by existential irrelevancies.
The inscription above the gate to ‘Society’ is not the honest warning carved in stone above Dante’s vision of Hell: ‘Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.’ Rather it is the lethal lie, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work is Freedom), as wrought in iron scroll above the gate to Auschwitz.
Again, capture makes the criminal.
Who is to doom, when the judge himself is dragged before the bar?
— Moby Dick, Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Police chief Terry Mangan questioned the model employee, Kenneth Bianchi, who, with every outward sign of deep sincerity, categorically denied ever knowing Karen Mandic or having offered her a house-sitting job. Bianchi then proffered an apparently perfect alibi, namely that he had been attending a conference of the Sheriff’s Reserve the evening the two girls disappeared. A nice touch of respectable finesse.
Meanwhile the police were conducting a thorough search of the empty house the two missing girls had apparently been paid to house-sit. Everything in the house was found to be perfectly in order. The police regarded this as reassuring, giving reason to hope that the two missing girls had simply planned to run off somewhere and had prepared a cover story for the escapade. The fact that Karen’s car, a Mercury Bobcat, was nowhere to be found, appeared to confirm this theory. However the police routinely issued an All Points Bulletin and had the media broadcast a description of the two missing girls and the car.
That same afternoon, police headquarters received a phone call from a woman who had seen the televised broadcast and reported that she had spotted a Mercury Bobcat apparently abandoned in a nearby lane and, as no one in the immediate neighbourhood of the lane possessed such a car, thought it might be the one the police were searching for.
The abandoned vehicle confirmed the worst suspicions of the police. Detectives raced to the spot. A brief glimpse into the back of the Mercury Bobcat was sufficient. The bodies of the two girls lay entwined on the floor of the car in unmistakable lassitudes of death.
Forensic teams were called in to examine the crime scene and then gently remove the two pathetic corpses for autopsies to be performed. Examination by pathologists revealed that both girls had been sexually molested and brutally strangled.
The police now had no option but to take Karen Mandic’s story about being paid to house-sit seriously. A warrant was immediately issued for the arrest of the prime suspect, Kenneth Bianchi. He was not at home, and when police sped to the offices of the security firm where he worked they learned from Bianchi’s boss, Mark Laurence, that he was out in his truck on patrol.
In his capacity as a security guard Bianchi carried a gun, so the detectives wisely decided that they would have to take him by surprise.
They arranged for Mark Laurence to contact Bianchi by radio and instruct him to check an empty house in the deserted outskirts of town — if police suspicions were correct, they didn’t want innocent civilians to be caught in any crossfire that might ensue. The police had already staked out the house and were waiting for Bianchi when he drove up. He offered no resistance and, in fact, was very amiable and apparently somewhat bemused and amused by the whole scenario.
The reactions of a perfectly innocent man anxious to cooperate and clear matters up, or that of a seasoned serial killer?
You see, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two when image is all that counts. But Bianchi was about to out-act himself.
Under interrogation at police headquarters, Bianchi continued to insist that he had never met either of the two missing girls and had not offered them any house-sitting job. The good-looking suspect was perfectly at ease and composed, answering all questions courteously.
However, to the experienced eye of police chief Mangan, Bianchi was a little too relaxed; a really innocent man would have started to show concern and sweat a little as the determined interrogation by hostile detectives progressed.
The explanation is simple. Bianchi was playing a foreseen role and, paradoxically, his total immersion in projecting an image of innocence was actually protecting him from the very real mental and physical rigours of interrogation. In short, it wasn’t Bianchi who was being interrogated but rather a simulated persona he had previously created for just such an occasion. Like any amateur actor, he was fairly detached and in control of the dialogue. Wooden.
But a method actor would have been more penetrating and adept, actually feeling the pressures of the dire situation he was supposed to be in, and thus visibly reflecting signs of physical and mental stress. Therefore, as a man, Bianchi was simply too good to be true; as an actor, too bad to be convincing. He had mastered the mind and neglected the emotions, mainly because a psychopathic personality possesses few or no genuine emotions in the first instance, other than purely selfish or manipulative. He could not truly experience guilt or innocence, only self, and this psychic vacuum inevitably flawed his whole performance.
Police formally asked Bianchi for permission to search his home. To their surprise he readily agreed. They should not have been taken aback. Bianchi may not have been the best of actors, but he was intelligent enough to know that, being a prime suspect, the police would search his house anyway, with or without his permission.
Tactically, Bianchi had obviously decided it would look better in court that he had readily agreed to the search; it would help to reinforce his projected courtroom assertion that any incriminating evidence found by the police had palpably been planted by them in his absence. Knowing what the police would find, he was already sensibly thinking in strategic terms of being charged and sent to trial, and every tactical point he gained would therefore assist his defence. He might even be lucky enough to entice the police into breaching some legal technicality to his advantage.
The initial police search turned up property Bianchi had purloined in the course of his security work. This gave the police grounds to retain Bianchi formally on a holding charge of grand the
ft, enabling them to continue questioning him and search for more important evidence in connection with the murders. This they eventually found, as Bianchi must have known they would.
First police discovered the keys to the empty Bayside house the two girls had been lured to. Next they found a scarf that had belonged to one of the girls, Diane Wilder. Forensic scientists were called in to conduct a more thorough search.
Meanwhile, forensic examination of the two corpses revealed more damning evidence proving that the girls had been sexually assaulted and murdered in the empty Bayside house. This included fibres from the carpet in the house found on their clothing. Blood stains on Bianchi’s clothing matched that of Diane Wilder. Pubic hairs from the girls were also discovered in the house and on Bianchi.
Witnesses came forward to testify that both Bianchi’s security truck and Karen Mandic’s green Mercury Bobcat had been seen parked outside the empty house on the evening of the murders. So Bianchi had obviously been lying when he stated that he did not know and had never met either of the two girls.
Bianchi was formally charged with the murders.
He next promptly changed his story. He claimed he could not recall anything about the murders, obviously preparing the ground for a plea of insanity. Police began to dig deeply into Bianchi’s past.
When detectives found out that Bianchi had lived in Glendale not far from Los Angeles, they made a routine call to the Los Angles Police Department to inquire if Bianchi had a criminal record there, or if they possessed any relevant information about him.
When word of the telephone inquiry made by the Bellingham police reached Detective Sergeant Frank Salerno, of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, he became immediately alert.
Although the so-called ‘Hillside Strangler’ murders abruptly came to an end a good time since, Salerno had never ceased his personal investigations. As soon as he learned that the Bellingham police were holding a former Los Angeles resident charged with the rape and strangulation of two girls, alarms began to ring. He made immediate arrangements to travel to Bellingham and check out the suspect.
