The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  The experience of killing a woman satisfied some sadistic compulsion in both of them. On 31 October 1977 they picked up a fifteen-year-old prostitute named Judy Miller and took her back to Buono’s house at 703 East Colorado. There she was undressed, and taken into the bedroom by Buono. After he had finished with her, Bianchi sodomised her. Then they strangled her, suffocating her at the same time with a plastic supermarket bag. The murder was totally unnecessary since the girl would have been glad to accept a few dollars.

  The next victim was an out-of-work dancer named Lissa Kastin. They stopped her and identified themselves as policemen – a method they used in most cases – then took her back to Buono’s house. There she was handcuffed and her clothes cut off with scissors. Both men were repelled by her hairy legs; so Bianchi raped her with a root beer bottle, then strangled her, while Buono sat on her legs shouting ‘Die, cunt, die!’ (Buono invariably referred to women as ‘cunts’.) Bianchi enjoyed strangling her, and allowed her to lose consciousness and revive several times before killing her.

  A few days later, Bianchi fell into conversation with an attractive Scientology student, Jane King, at a bus stop. When Buono drove up and offered him a lift home, the girl also accepted. Back in Buono’s home they were delighted to find that her pubis was shaven. Because she struggled when being raped, they decided that she needed a lesson. A plastic bag was placed over her head while Bianchi sodomised her, and she was allowed to suffocate to death as he came to a climax.

  The shaven pubis gave them the idea that it would be exciting to rape a child. On 13 November they approached two schoolgirls, fourteen-year-old Dollie Cepeda and Sonja Johnson, twelve, and identified themselves as policemen. The girls had just been shoplifting, and made no objection when asked to accompany the ‘policemen’. In Buono’s house, both were raped, then Sonja was murdered in the bedroom. When Buono came back for Dollie, she asked: ‘Where’s Sonja?’, and Buono told her: ‘You’ll be seeing her soon.’

  When Bianchi had been living in the apartment building in Hollywood, he had been enraged when an art student next door spurned his advances. So Bianchi and Buono called on twenty-year-old Kristina Weckler and Bianchi told her he was now a policeman, and that someone had crashed into her Volkswagen outside. She accompanied them down to see, and was hustled into their car and taken back to Buono’s house, where Bianchi obtained his revenge for the earlier snub. They decided to try to kill her by a new method – injecting her with cleaning fluid – but when this failed, they piped coal gas into a plastic bag over her head, strangling her at the same time.

  On 28 November 1977 they saw an attractive red-headed girl climbing into her car, and decided to follow her. Lauren Wagner was having an affair with a married man, and had just spent the afternoon in his bed. The two ‘policemen’ told her they were arresting her as she pulled up in front of her parents’ home, and she was dragged, struggling, into their car. A dog barked, and a neighbour saw what was happening, but failed to grasp its implications. At Buono’s house, Lauren Wagner pretended to enjoy being raped, hoping that they would allow her to live. They tried to kill her by attaching live electric wires to her palms, but these only caused burns; they were finally forced to strangle her. The next day, Buono obtained the telephone number of the house where the dog had barked by ringing a friend on the exchange, then made the threatening phone call.

  In December, the prostitute Kimberley Martin was summoned by telephone to the Tamarind Apartments, where Bianchi lived, then taken back to Buono’s where she was raped and murdered. Both men agreed she was no good in bed.

  The final Hillside killing was virtually an accident. On 16 February 1978 a girl named Cindy Hudspeth came to Buono’s garage to see about new mats for her car. Bianchi arrived at the same time. The opportunity seemed too good to miss. The girl was spreadeagled naked on the bed and raped for two hours. Then she was strangled, and her body packed into the boot of her Datsun, which was pushed off a cliff on a scenic route. Bianchi had noted the spot some time before when he had been fellated there by a teenage girl.

  Buono was becoming increasingly irritated by his cousin’s irresponsibility, and was anxious to break with him. So when Bianchi’s girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, decided to leave him and go back to her parents in Bellingham, Buono encouraged Bianchi to follow her. Bianchi took his advice in May 1978. He could see that his cousin wanted to be rid of him, and it rankled. He felt like a rejected mistress. This seems to be the reason that, in January 1979, he decided to prove that he was capable of committing murder without Buono’s help. He chose as his victim Karen Mandic, a girl with whom he had worked in a big store. When he learned she was living with a friend, he told her to bring the friend too, but Karen Mandic failed to keep her promise to tell no one where she was going, and Kenneth Bianchi found himself under arrest. In prison, he sent a cautiously worded letter to Buono, indicating that he had no intention of ‘snitching’. Buono’s response was a carefully worded phone call threatening violence to Bianchi’s family if he changed his mind. It was Buono’s biggest mistake. Bianchi would almost certainly have been glad to remain silent if he felt he was protecting his hero. Buono’s response turned hero-worship to hostility, and Bianchi decided to forget loyalty and concentrate on saving his own skin by inventing a criminal alter-ego. That scheme came very close to succeeding; but when it failed, Bianchi had thrown away his last defence.

  Back in Buono’s presence, in the courtroom in Los Angeles, the old hero-worship seems to have reasserted itself, and he decided to go back on his word to help put Buono behind bars. In the event, it made no difference.

  Is it possible that Bianchi was a genuine multiple personality? Judge George criticised psychiatrist John D. Watkins, who first diagnosed Bianchi as an MPD, for ‘incredible naiveté’. Watkins himself remains unrepentant, commenting: ‘The Kenneth personality . . . always smoked filter-tip cigarettes and held them between first and second fingers, palm towards the face. The Steve personality always tore the filters off and held the cigarette between the thumb and first finger, palm away from the face. Bianchi still continues to show the same alternation now in prison, although the law is no longer interested in his true diagnosis.’1

  Yet two pieces of evidence contradict this view. When asked by his employer in Bellingham if he knew Karen Mandic, Bianchi insisted that he had ‘never heard of her’. Yet he had made her acquaintance that summer when both had worked for the same department store. Unless his alter-ego ‘Steve’ was in charge during the whole of his time at the store – in which case ‘Ken’ would have been puzzled by long periods of amnesia – this must have been a lie.

  Again, ‘Steve’ told Dr Watkins that he had first become involved in murder when ‘Ken’ had walked in on Angelo Buono and found him killing a girl. His more detailed confession makes it clear that this is untrue; the first murder (Yolanda Washington) and all subsequent ones involved them both.

  Most multiple personalities – probably all – have experienced severe traumas in childhood, often involving sexual abuse and brutal beatings; investigations into Bianchi’s childhood background revealed none of this; it was normal and affectionate. His allegations of ill treatment by his mother – made to the psychiatrists – proved to be untrue.

  What may be of more significance is that soon after his arrest in Bellingham, Bianchi saw the television film Sybil, based on the case study by Flora Rheta Schreiber, about a girl with fourteen personalities. It was after this that Bianchi’s social worker began to suspect him of being a ‘multiple’.

  Dr Allison later retracted his view that Bianchi was a ‘multiple’; he explained that he had since become a prison psychiatrist, and was shocked to discover that criminals were habitual and obsessive liars, capable of offering as many as half a dozen differing and incompatible views of the same event. Altogether, there seems to be little doubt that Bianchi was faking multiple-personality disorder.

  From the point of view of the study of serial killers, one of the major points to emerge from
the case is that the murders were not primarily sex crimes. Three of the victims were prostitutes, and a fourth had expressed her intention of becoming one. In these instances, rape was obviously unnecessary; the real motive for the crime was satisfaction of the sadistic sense of power that came from torture and murder. The case is an interesting illustration of Hazelwood’s remark that sex crime can service ‘non-sexual needs’ such as power and anger.

  In his book on the Hillside Stranglers Two of a Kind, Darcy O’Brien mentions that while Veronica Compton was in prison she entered into a romantic correspondence with another serial killer, the ‘Sunset Slayer’ Douglas Clark, and that Clark sent her a photograph of a body he had decapitated. It seems clear from her behaviour – her playwriting activities and her attempt at a ‘copycat crime’ – that Veronica Compton belonged to Maslow’s high-dominance group. Her attempts to enter into relationships with mass murderers may be interpreted in the light of Maslow’s observation that even high-dominance women seem to require a male who is of slightly higher dominance. In fact, the case of the Sunset Slayer illustrates such a bizarre relationship.

  On 9 August 1980 the headless body of a man was found in a car park on a street in Van Nuys, a Los Angeles suburb; he had been shot and stabbed to death. A check with the licensing department revealed that the car belonged to a man called Jack Murray, and that his home was not far from the place where he was found. Searching the house, the police found evidence that, until a few months ago, he had lived with a nurse called Carol Bundy. She had now apparently moved in with a man named Douglas Clark. The name struck a chord in the minds of the investigating officers. A few days earlier, an unknown man had telephoned the police to tell them that several recent murders of prostitutes had been committed by a boilermaker named Douglas Clark; but it was only one of many tips. On the other hand, one of the murders being investigated involved the decapitation of a Sunset hooker named Exxie Wilson. Her headless body, together with that of her room-mate Karen Jones, had been found on 24 June 1980 in the area of Studio City and Burbank. Both had been shot. Exxie Wilson’s head had been found in a box dumped in a driveway in Burbank. The hair had been washed and the face had been made-up like a Barbie doll; the mouth contained traces of sperm. It seemed an unusual coincidence that Douglas Clark’s girlfriend should also be associated with a case of decapitation . . .

  Carol Bundy, a good-looking but overweight woman of thirty-seven, was arrested, and under police questioning she stated that Jack Murray had been murdered by her new lover, Douglas Clark. However, Carol Bundy’s nursing supervisor had a different story to tell: that Carol had admitted to her that she had killed Jack Murray; her reason was that Murray was threatening to tell the police that Clark was ‘the Sunset Slayer’. It seemed likely that Murray was the man who had made the phone call about Clark.

  Clark himself was now arrested – a handsome, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties. His story was that he had merely agreed to help Carol Bundy dispose of Murray’s head after she had killed him. (The head was never found.) He alleged that Carol Bundy had blackmailed him into helping her by threatening to show the police a photograph of himself having sex with an eleven-year-old girl.

  Clark insisted that Carol Bundy and her ex-lover Jack Murray were murderers of six prostitutes in the Hollywood area. He also admitted that he had been wearing women’s underwear since he was a child, and that his sexual tastes were ‘kinky’. When police found two guns at his place of work, and a bullet fired from one of them matched a bullet found in Exxie Wilson’s head, it began to seem likely that Clark himself was the man who had been killing prostitutes by shooting them in the head.

  The story that now emerged as Clark and Bundy tried to implicate one another startled even the Hollywood police officers, accustomed to cases involving sexual perversion. Clark, it seemed, was a necrophile, one who enjoys having sexual intercourse with dead bodies. He cruised along Sunset Boulevard until he had found a prostitute who was willing to perform oral sex on him – most Hollywood prostitutes being willing to oblige for a sum of thirty to forty dollars. If the fellatio was successful and he reached orgasm, the girl was usually allowed to go free. If it was unsuccessful, he shot her through the head, then undressed her – keeping her underwear as a masturbation fetish – and had intercourse with the body. Finally, the victims were dumped off freeway ramps or in remote canyons.

  Clark finally admitted that he had been responsible for a stabbing that he had taken place on 2 April 1980. He had picked up a young prostitute outside a Sunset Boulevard supermarket and requested oral sex. While she was engaged in fellatio, he pulled out a knife and stabbed her repeatedly in the back, the head and chest. In spite of this – and an attempt to throttle her – she managed to open the door of the estate car and fell out; Clark quickly drove away. The girl later recovered.

  The bullets linked Clark to at least six murders over a period of four months. The first had occurred on 2 March 1980 when the body of a teenage girl had been found in the Saugus-Newhall area of Los Angeles County; she had been shot to death with a small-calibre pistol. The last was discovered on 30 June 1980: the naked body of a seventeen-year-old runaway named Marnette Comer was found in a ravine near Sylmar, in the San Fernando valley; she had been shot four times through the head, and her stomach had been slit open. (Clark later admitted that this was to hasten decomposition.) On 11 June, two teenage girls had disappeared after a party: fifteen year old Gina Marano and her stepsister Cynthia Chandler. Their bodies were found the next day, dumped in the same manner as the Hillside Strangler victims, off a freeway. They had been shot through the head, after which their bodies had been sexually abused.

  Four days later, a friend of Cynthia Chandler received a phone call from a man who identified himself as ‘Detective Clark’, and told her that the two girls were dead. On 22 June the same man called again, to describe in detail how the girls had been killed and then raped. The caller declared that he had seen the girl to whom he was speaking at the party where he had picked up Gina and Cynthia, ‘and now I want to do the same to you’. He told her he was having an orgasm while he was talking to her. The girl was to identify the voice as that of Douglas Clark. It emerged later that, after killing the stepsisters, Clark had gone back home to fetch Carol Bundy, so she could share in his pleasure; but she was not at home.

  Later that same day, Clark went back to the room of Exxie Wilson, a prostitute from Little Rock, Arkansas, and shot her through the head. After he had decapitated her, Karen Jones returned home. Clark was about to get into his car after placing the head in the boot; he pursued Karen down the street and shot her. Then he went home and placed the head in the refrigerator. Carol Bundy described how he had taken it with him into the shower and used it for oral sex. According to Carol, she then washed the hair and made up the face as an act of bravado. ‘We had a lot of fun with her.’ She admitted that it was she who had dumped the head, in its cardboard box, in the driveway in Burbank.

  It emerged that Carol Bundy had talked to her ex-lover, Jack Murray, about her new paramour’s murders, and it was Murray’s threat to tip off the police that led her to shoot him and cut off his head. (Bullets found in his body came from her gun.) This in turn led to her arrest, and to that of Douglas Clark.

  Carol Bundy told the police that she and Clark had come together because they wanted to co-operate on crimes. He treated her badly, she said, and although he was ‘extremely good in bed’, he was not very interested in normal sex. It had to be ‘kinky’, and he preferred teenage girls. One of his fantasies was to cut a girl’s throat and have sex with her as she bled to death. The furthest he had gone in this direction was to stab the young prostitute as she fellated him.

  At Clark’s trial in October 1982, his lawyer argued that he was insane, while Clark himself insisted – without much hope of convincing the jury – that he had played no part in the crimes. On 28 January 1983 Clark was convicted of killing six girls and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Carol Bundy had origi
nally planned to plead guilty but insane, but at her trial in May 1983 she changed this to a plea of guilty; she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  * * *

  1 Quoted in Open to Suggestion, The Uses and Abuses of Hynposis, by Robert Temple, 1989, p. 394.

  Seven

  The Roman Emperor Syndrome

  CASES LIKE THE Moors Murders, Gallego, Birnie, and the Sunset Slayer, make the reader aware that something very strange is happening to our society. Douglas Clark told the jury: ‘I don’t march to the same drummer you do. If we were all like me, Sodom and Gomorrah might look a nice place to stay.’ It might seem fair comment to say that killers like Clark, Heidnik, Gallego, Birnie, and Brady are a sign that our world is rushing down a Gadarene slope into decadence and ruin. Yet such a verdict might be premature. There is nothing in the career of any modern serial killer that could not be paralleled by equally horrifying events from the past – from the lives of Tiberius, Caligula, Tamerlaine, Ivan the Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Gilles de Rais, Countess Elizabeth Bathory and dozens of others. The historian John Addington Symonds, in a section on ‘The Blood-madness of Tyrants’ in his Renaissance in Italy, suggests that it might be explained in medical terms, ‘a portentous secretion of black bile producing the melancholy which led him [Ibrahim ibn Ahmet] to atrocious crimes’. We can see that this explanation simply fails to go to the heart of the matter. Tyrants become cruel because they are unaccustomed to contradiction, and the least opposition to their ideas fills them with a genuine conviction that the objector deserves to die a painful death. They do not see it as a matter of cruelty, but of righteous anger and just punishment.