Hillside Strangler

The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later discovered to be two, American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles, California, between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered in the hills surrounding the city.^[1]

One unusual twist to the investigation was the arrival in L.A. of a psychic from Berlin. Detective Bob Grogan was polite, but unenthusiastic, when the psychic wrote in German that they should be looking for (a) two Italians, who were (b) brothers, and (c) aged about thirty-five.^[2] It was initially believed that only one person was responsible for the killings. The police, however, determined from the positions of the bodies that two criminals were working together, but withheld that information from the press. The perpetrators were eventually discovered to be cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., who were later convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering 10 women and girls ranging in age from 12 to 28.^[3][4]

The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of two prostitutes who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles in October and early November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not prostitutes, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to prominence.^[5]

There were two more deaths in December and February before the murders abruptly stopped. An extensive investigation proved fruitless until the arrest of Bianchi in January 1979 for the murder of two more young women in Washington and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case.

The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of those crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.