by Ian Brady
There was something familiar about the name Kenneth Bianchi which kept nagging at his memory. Bianchi was an Italian name. Hadn’t that German psychic insisted that two Italian brothers were responsible for the Hillside Strangler Murders? The very concept of divination was too far-fetched to reasonably contemplate, Salerno decided. No, the name Bianchi held particular significance, if only he could remember what it was. Perhaps sight of the suspect would trigger recollection.
Arriving at Bellingham police headquarters, Salerno sifted through objects collected from the suspect’s house, some of which Bianchi had not been able to account for satisfactorily. Among these were several items of jewelry. Salerno almost immediately identified some of them as having once belonged to victims of the Hillside Stranglers.
There was now little remaining doubt that Bianchi was one of the killers he had been searching for. Relief flooded through Salerno, putting to sleep his apprehension that the Stranglers would recommence their murderous mayhem in Los Angeles, and with it further ridicule of the Special Task Force. Capturing the second Strangler before he decided to do a bit of killing on his own became Salerno’s sudden preoccupation.
The second Strangler would probably stick to proven methodology and was perhaps now looking for or, worse still, had already met and collaborated with a homicidal soulmate who took Bianchi’s place. Or if Strangler two had learned of Bianchi’s capture, he might now be racing for deep cover and permanent safety.
There should have been no real doubt in the minds of the police that, no matter where he chose to go, this dominant partner would kill again when he thought it safe to do so. All factors considered, speed of detection and capture were paramount.
Urgent investigations of the Los Angeles police quickly uncovered that Bianchi’s apparent constant companion had been his cousin, Angelo Buono.
From the pattern of the killings and sites where bodies were dumped, the police should already have been working on the hypothesis that Glendale was probably the Stranglers’ base of operations. Therefore it should have come as no surprise that Angelo Buono owned a house in that district.
Buono’s work consisted of upholstering automobiles. Covert police surveillance and investigations established that Buono, having greying curly hair and an Italian complexion, fit physical descriptions given by witnesses who had seen or narrowly escaped abduction. He also conformed to the projected psychological profile of the dominant partner.
He was seventeen years older and wiser than his twenty-seven-year-old killing companion, had been married four times and sired eight children. He had a wide variety of girlfriends, who testified that he was sexually insatiable and violently sadistic, frequently subjecting them to fellatio and sodomy.
In-depth police investigations revealed that both Bianchi and Buono terrorized a number of young girls into working as prostitutes on their behalf, beat them if they resisted, and apparently enjoyed sexually humiliating them by inflicting enforced sodomy and fellatio. A perfect psychological training ground for two killers whose hallmarks consisted of all these preliminary administrations prior to murdering their victims.
Further, there was also positive evidence that Buono had known one of the murder victims, black prostitute Yolanda Washington.
There was now no doubt in the minds of detectives that Buono and Bianchi were the Hillside Stranglers.
The police were now faced with the problem of how best to persuade Bianchi into confessing to the ‘Hillside Strangler’ murders and testify against his cousin Angelo Buono.
They were cynically certain that moral persuasion would hold no sway, so they relied upon the application of fear and extortion to achieve their end. Bianchi had been charged in the state of Washington for the two Bellingham murders. Washington had a death penalty for murder; California did not. If Bianchi confessed to the murders committed in the Los Angeles area, they would take legal precedence, meaning that if he was tried for those murders instead, he would receive a life sentence.
Bianchi had already devised a more advantageous alternative plan of his own. To be charged only with the two Bellingham killings, for which he would escape death and imprisonment by having himself declared legally insane.
At that point, police were unaware that the personable Bianchi had, at one time in his past, bought some spurious diplomas and set himself up in an office as a psychotherapist as a means of obtaining power over girl patients, then seducing and recruiting them to prostitution. To lend credence to the role of psychotherapist, Bianchi had read enough books to acquire a smattering of psychoanalytic language. In the process he also assimilated symptomatic knowledge of mental illnesses, which would now stand him in good stead in feigning them to save his life.
Bianchi had even been arrogant or foolish enough to use this academic front/effrontery on the Los Angeles Police Department on one occasion. He had smoothly convinced them that he was working on a psychological research project, and obtained official permission to accompany officers on a cruise through the city in a patrol car; and he had helpfully been shown some of the sites where the ‘Hillside Strangler’ had dumped victims.
This element of frivolous risk-taking suggests a secondary, non-affective psychotic side to Bianchi’s psychopathic nature.
Had the more pragmatic and coldly calculating Angelo Buono learned of this dangerous indulgence of ego on the part of Bianchi, it might have cautioned him to kill Bianchi before his idiosyncratic japes attracted unwanted attention and led to their capture.
The mental illness Bianchi had expediently chosen to simulate in his bid to escape execution was that of multiple personality. Meaning his personality was comprised of two or more distinctly contrasting personae, each functioning independently and unconscious of the other.
Bianchi was entering into an area of psychic contention and deception open to all manner of perilous psychological entrapments. In brief, he could have hardly chosen a more treacherous and ominous battleground.
It is not easy pretending to be two-faced whilst pretending you don’t know it. Politicians excluded. Or pretending to possess no memory of unpleasant actions which are perfectly clear in the mind, causing the subjective to constantly play tag with the objective.
If Bianchi did not succeed to some extent in fooling himself, then he would not prevail in hoodwinking others. One little slip and the whole house of cards would collapse. If Bianchi had gathered some knowledge of the psychobiological and psychogenic symptoms he would have to simulate in the case of multiple personality — delusional fugues, sudden headaches, erratic behaviour, conflicting dreams, uncommonly frequent episodes of déjà vu, etc. — this could have made his role harder to orchestrate, especially if he sunk into the part so deeply as to lose sight of the overall multiple image he was trying to create.
In effect, Bianchi was setting out to be the playwright, producer, director, prompter, stagehand and sole performer of diverse, discordant characters who would have to interact with a live, questioning audience. Not even the genius of Orson Welles aspired to such exalted heights of theatre.
On top of this, Bianchi agreed to undergo examination under hypnosis. An expert from the University of Montana, Professor John G. Watkins, was enlisted to perform the task of putting Bianchi into a trance — but not of the drug-induced variety (injection of sodium pentothal, the so-called truth drug), which might have eroded Bianchi’s willpower and endangered his conscious control of the scenario.
Meanwhile, Angelo Buono, though alarmed by Bianchi’s arrest due to his own stupidity, remained contemptuous of the police.
He calculated that they had no substantial evidence against him. He knew Bianchi was engaged in a damage-limitation exercise, the choices being death or captivity in prison or a top-security mental institution, perhaps with some prospect of release at a distant date.
Personally, I’d prefer execution, and the satisfaction of illustrating that the authorities are no better than the criminal when it comes to cold, premeditated killing, no matter how
they trick it out in official finery.
There was a very significant tactical and strategic spin-off from Bianchi’s plan which was worthy of consideration from Angelo Buono’s point of view.
If Bianchi’s scheme to fool the psychiatrists met with success and he was committed to a mental institution, this would automatically mean that he could no longer appear as a witness against Buono, the testimony of a mental patient not being legally admissible in an American court of law. With Bianchi securely tucked away in a lunatic asylum, Buono would be able to breathe easy again, there being no other evidence of consequence at police disposal — not yet, at least.
Buono was therefore understandably confident that Bianchi was too intelligent not to see that, if he confessed to the Hillside Strangler murders, they would throw the key away.
Police were continuing a psychological campaign of overt surveillance against Buono, similar to that used against John Wayne Gacy, in an attempt to break his nerve, but it was not working. Buono remained the detached, scornful psychopath, too icy a specimen to be pressured into panic by such crude methods.
However, had Buono fully comprehended just how slim Bianchi’s chances of deceiving the authorities were, and the concomitant psychic nihilism such defeat would probably engender in Bianchi, perhaps he would have more wisely packed fast and made a run for it, well armed to blow away all obstacles, or his own brains.
In my particular case, captured by surprise, all three guns were perversely in the wrong place at the wrong time, something I shall always regret.
Being too cool can also be a disadvantage, overconfidence blunting intelligent insight and foresight; wishful thinking stultifying an accurate reckoning of perceptible odds, and restraining the instinctive urge for positive remedial action while the initiative is still within grasp.
The enemy increaseth every day;
We, at the height, are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
— Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
There comes a point in most instances of folie à deux when, rightly or wrongly, the tables are turned. As already stated, the pupil has learned much from the master, the master has learned little or nothing from the pupil. Therefore the pupil, combining his own knowledge with that which he has been taught, almost inevitably concludes at some juncture that the synthesis of knowledge has made him superior to his teacher, and this conviction usually erases any former obligation he felt towards the latter.
Yet again, this exemplifies that ‘bloody instruction,’ having been taught, ‘returns to plague the inventor.’ Buono, the teacher of ruthless principles, was now being repaid in the same coin by Bianchi, his former pupil.
The police evidence against Angelo Buono was mounting relentlessly as he waited indecisively in the wings trying to bluff it out.
Beulah Stofer, the elderly neighbour of Lauren Wagner who had witnessed two men bundling her into their car, was now able to identify them as having been Buono and Bianchi. Further, the boyfriend of the prostitute victim Judy Miller was also able to identify Buono as being the final client who had picked Judy up the evening she vanished.
The feisty schoolteacher, who had intervened when she witnessed two men trying to drag a girl into their car in broad daylight, did not hesitate in identifying them as Buono and Bianchi. But, in strictly legal terms, apparently there was still not sufficient evidence for the police to arrest Buono and charge him with the Hillside Strangler murders.
At face value, it is puzzling that the LAPD did not at least take Buono into custody on a holding charge of technical assault and attempted abduction. Doubtless there were obscure legal reasons of some sort which may have jeopardised their main case against him. Perhaps by leaving him free they were still trying to pressure him into making an incriminating dash for cover. For Buono must have been acutely aware that detectives were assiduously digging into every aspect of his background, interviewing practically everyone he had ever had contact with.
Think of the things you yourself wish to hide or are ashamed of, the number of enemies you have accumulated through life who would be only too willing to do you down, and you will perhaps fully appreciate the psychological pressures Buono was having to cope with in addition to guilty fears connected with the murders.
Anonymity is a luxury much undervalued until you lose it.
As predicated by his psychological profile, Angelo Buono did indeed have a criminal record and history of violence. In his mid-teens, shortly after completion of his schooling, he had been in and out of police custody frequently, culminating in a term at a reformatory — which usually ‘reforms’ amateur criminals into professionals.
In a broader sense, Buono’s psyche began to conform to a classic pattern. Deep hatred for his mother had been transformed into a hatred and contempt for the female species in general. He viewed them only as sex objects, violently abusing and sexually humiliating them to assuage his pathological resentment at being weak enough to need them at all. He partly compensated for this by spurning normal sexual intercourse in favour of sodomy and forcing them to perform fellatio.
Each of Buono’s four wives, all of whom had divorced him, in separate interviews testified to Buono’s sexual preferences and violent tendencies. It was also revealed that Buono had seduced one of his fourteen-year-old stepdaughters and one of his teenage natural sons, performing sodomy on them both. The overall developing portrait of Buono was that of a violent paranoid-psychopath with satyric sexual appetites. The murders themselves had already postulated as much, adding stylized homicide and designer sadism to the comprehensive profile.
However, something for citizens to ponder:
Today, over half the world’s governments continue to use torture against their own citizens.
— Amnesty International Report, 1990
As previously suggested, Bianchi may have eventually deluded himself into believing he was superior to his master, Buono, but in reality he was still the weaker and less cunning of the two; some things either can’t be easily learned or naturally assimilated without the subconscious first being reprogrammed by auto-hypnosis.
Bianchi was a natural born follower, superior to Buono in only one fatal area: that of making mistakes. And he was in the process of making his biggest.
His original plan to have himself declared insane, be tried only for the two Bellingham murders, escape the death penalty and be committed to a mental institution, from which he would some day be released, at least held some sense, though a minimal chance of success. However, when police evidence against himself and Angelo Buono reached alarming proportions, Bianchi decided to change his strategy a third time.
He would expediently confess to the Hillside murders through his other personality, his evil alter ego, which he named ‘Steve.’ He would also use ‘Steve’ to place most of the blame for the Hillside murders on Angelo Buono, and the remainder of the blame would be generously accepted by ‘Steve.’ In effect, Kenneth Bianchi himself would be innocent of all but insanity!
It could cynically be posited that Kenneth Bianchi really was insane if he thought such a crazy scheme would succeed. It was one thing to have ‘Steve’ take the blame for ‘Ken,’ but when ‘Steve’ also shielded himself by putting all the blame on Angelo Buono, ‘Steve’ was actually revealing himself not to be the evil alter ego of ‘Ken,’ but Kenneth Bianchi himself. In Jamaica they have a saying: ‘Play fool to catch wise.’ Bianchi was attempting the opposite.
And thus it was through the courtesy of ‘Steve’ that detectives at last heard factual details of the Hillside Stranglers’ murders.
Bianchi, by sacrificing Buono on the altar of his multiple personality
scheme, was meeting with some significant degree of success.
Two eminent clinical psychiatrists were truly convinced that Bianchi was a genuine case of multiple personality.
The police were more skeptical, and had good reason to be, considering that their case against Buono largely depended upon Kenneth Bianchi being judged sane and concomitantly being able to testify against Buono. So they decided to call in a clinical expert of their own choosing, Dr Martin Orme, from the University of Pennsylvania, an acknowledged specialist on hypnosis, who was to decide whether Bianchi was faking or not. (Without wishing to impugn Dr Orme’s professional integrity at any level, clinical experts are by and large in roughly a similar position to that of lawyers, in that they are tacitly obliged to represent the best interests of whoever commissions them, be it the defence or prosecution.)
In my own case, for instance, much of the testimony by ‘experts’ on behalf of the prosecution was so blatantly absurd, contrived and, more to the point, absolutely inaccurate, that, for me, the term ‘expert’ holds no connotation other than hilarity.
In my view, a preliminary but adequately comprehensive analytical study of Bianchi should have resulted in the following psychodiagnostics. There was little doubt that he was of above-average intelligence, but primarily of a reproductive rather than an inspired nature. His ambitions exceeded his intellectual endowments and, perhaps spasmodically cognitive of this affective/effective gap between comprehension and self-attainment, he tended to vault over his inadequacies by ad lib reliance on rationalisations and compulsive self-deception. This alternated with defensive patterns of studied indifference whenever he became conscious that his mechanistic efforts to create a favourable impression were faltering.
