Did the Hillside Strangler Serial Killer Actually Act Alone?

Since serial killers are generally driven by singular, deviant compulsions, it’s rare for them to work with accomplices. Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono are the exception to that rule, at least according to the American criminal justice system and The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise, which details the case made against both men in the late 1970s. Accused of killing 10 women in the Los Angeles area—as well as two others in Bellingham, Washington, that were attributed solely to Bianchi—the cousins terrorized the West Coast via a string of sexual assaults and fatal strangulations. The twist of director Alexa Danner’s four-part Peacock docuseries (Aug. 2), however, is the suggestion that one of the two fiends might not have had anything to do with the crimes.

Before it casts doubt on its tale’s outcome, The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise revisits its initial, horrifying stages, beginning with Sheryl Kellison, who as a 17-year-old in 1976 began dating the 24-year-old Bianchi, whom she describes as “just nice and, for me, that was enough.” Shortly after they got together, the area was gripped by fear courtesy of a collection of dead women who turned up in the local hillsides. Yolanda Washington was the first to be found in October 1977, followed by Judith Miller one month later, Lissa Kastin five days after Miller, and two young girls—Dolores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson—a week after that. It was obvious that a serial madman was on the loose, and according to detectives Bob Grogan and Pete Finnigan, law enforcement soon came to believe that because of certain pieces of evidence (such as the fact that the women’s bodies were dumped in a manner that could only be accomplished by more than one individual), they were looking for a pair who were posing as figures of authority (say, police officers) in order to convince their prey to go along with them.

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Marlow Stern

Five more victims—Kristina Weckler, Evelyn Jane King, Lauren Wagner, Kimberly Martin, and Cindy Hudspeth—were discovered in the coming months, at which point the slayings abruptly ended. Despite receiving thousands of clues, the LAPD was at a loss, and only caught a break when in January 1979, two women, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, went missing in Bellingham, Washington, after going to a housesitting job. They were subsequently located in their car, raped and strangled to death, their wrists and necks boasting severe ligature marks. Canny police work led investigators to Bianchi, who was employed as a security guard and was connected to the residence the two women were supposed to visit. When cops learned that Bianchi had also lived in the same L.A. complexes as multiple “Hillside Strangler” victims, he became the prime suspect, and was subjected to numerous recorded psychologist interviews that serve as the prime selling point of Danner’s docuseries.

In those black-and-white videotaped chats, Bianchi denies being the Hillside Strangler while simultaneously attempting to convince doctors that he has multiple personality disorder, and that a different identity—named Steve Walker—was actually responsible for the killings. Bianchi’s intention was to avoid the death penalty with an insanity plea, and yet in the footage on display in The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise, his ruse is so clearly nonsense that it’s amazing anyone ever bought it—including Dr. Ralph Allison, one of Bianchi’s original interrogators who appears in a new interview. When that scheme fell apart, he pivoted to claiming that he had committed the L.A. crimes with his cousin Buono, a car upholsterer with whom he lived and ran a fledgling escort service. This fit detectives’ theory that the Hillside Strangler hadn’t acted alone, and ultimately resulted in Bianchi pleading guilty and testifying against Buono.

If there’s a mystery to The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise, it’s whether Buono had anything to do with the murders in question. At the end of what would be the longest criminal trial in United States history, a jury found him culpable of nine of the 10 Los Angeles murders. Still, via interviews with police officers, attorney generals, defense lawyers, journalists and more, Danner’s series contends that the only real, verifiable link between Buono and the Hillside Strangler victims was Bianchi’s word—and that was so unreliable that even the judge admitted, in court, that the defendant was a chronic liar. Bianchi is such a habitually deceptive and untrustworthy figure that this four-part affair raises at least some uncertainty about Buono’s guilt—a notion exacerbated by the late revelation that, to this day, Bianchi continues to change his story.

What’s apparently not up for debate, however, is Bianchi’s own starring role in these crimes. In the saga’s craziest twist, it’s revealed that during his time in prison, he struck up a correspondence—and then relationship—with wannabe playwright Veronica Compton, convincing her that he was innocent and eventually cajoling her into trying to strangle a woman in a manner identical to that of the Hillside Strangler, which would ostensibly prove that the killer was running free. That unsuccessful plan netted Compton 23 years in jail, and in a new present-day conversation she provides the sort of wonky explanation and justifications (most of them having to do with substance abuse and Bianchi’s exploitative charisma) that one might expect from a person who would deliberately entangle themselves with a lunatic like Bianchi in the first place.

Crime scene photographs and archival TV news broadcasts, as well as the anguished and angry recollections of friends and relatives of the Hillside Strangler victims, round out The Hillside Strangler: Devil in Disguise. If its recap is relatively thorough, though, it stumbles in lucidly explaining prosecutors’ theory about Buono and Bianchi’s partnership, and worse, it features a key omission: Frank Salerno, the renowned LA County detective who led the Hillside Strangler investigation, and who would later go on to earn greater fame by catching Richard Ramirez, as recounted in Netflix’s Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Given his central part in this drama, Salerno’s absence is more than a bit conspicuous and undercuts Danner’s series’ desire to be a definitive account of this nightmare.