The Hillside Stranglers: Cousins Who Terrorized Los Angeles Under a Badge (1977–1978)

The First Victim

On October 18, 1977, the nude body of Yolanda Washington, 19, a part-time waitress and sex worker, was found on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway in Los Angeles. Her body had been cleaned before being dumped. Faint ligature marks were visible on her neck, wrists, and ankles. Detectives noted the body had been carefully placed. It was the first in a series of murders that would paralyze the city over the following four months.

Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr.

Kenneth Bianchi, 26, was a Bellingham, Washington transplant living in Los Angeles in 1977. Angelo Buono Jr., 44, was his older cousin, a Glendale auto upholsterer with a history of violence against women. The two men had reconnected in Los Angeles, and Buono — who ran a prostitution operation from his upholstery shop at 703 East Colorado Street in Glendale — became the dominant influence in their partnership. Almost all of the murders were committed in Buono's shop, using a ligature — a cord or rope — applied with enough force to kill.

The Method: False Police Badges

Bianchi and Buono's most effective and chilling weapon was not physical — it was institutional. The men obtained police badges and ID cards and impersonated plainclothes police officers, approaching young women on the street, flashing the credentials, and ordering them into their car — which they described as an unmarked police vehicle. The ruse worked repeatedly. Victims who might have resisted or fled a stranger complied because they believed they were in police custody. The men would handcuff the victim and drive to Buono's shop, where the assault and murder would occur. The bodies — always cleaned of trace evidence — were then driven to hillside locations across the city and arranged carefully on the slopes.

Ten Victims, Five Months

Between October 1977 and February 1978, Bianchi and Buono murdered ten women, ranging in age from 12 to 28. Their victims included high school students, aspiring actresses, college students, and sex workers — no single profile or type. The murders caused a moral panic across Los Angeles. Young women were terrified to walk alone after dark and equally terrified to be stopped by what appeared to be police. During the investigation, Bianchi had the audacity to apply for a job with the LAPD and was taken on ride-alongs with detectives searching for him. In a widely reported near-miss, the men confronted Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of Casablanca actor Peter Lorre, while she walked home alone — but released her after she produced a photograph identifying her as Lorre's daughter.

Arrest, Trial, and Sentencing

The investigation stalled until January 1979, when Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham, Washington for the murders of two women there. Investigators linked his fingerprints to the California crimes. Bianchi initially claimed multiple personalities, blaming the murders on an alternate identity named "Steve" — a defense that psychiatrists quickly dismantled. He then confessed and agreed to testify against Buono in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. Buono was arrested in October 1979. His trial, which began in 1981, became the longest criminal trial in American history at the time — running for more than two years, with Bianchi on the witness stand for six months and under cross-examination for four. Buono was convicted on nine counts of murder and sentenced to life without parole. He died of a heart attack in prison on September 21, 2002, at age 67. Bianchi is serving his sentence in Washington State and was denied parole most recently in 2025.

Legacy

The Hillside Strangler case reshaped how the LAPD and law enforcement broadly approached serial investigation — the sheer audacity of the false-badge ruse exposed vulnerabilities in public trust of law enforcement that had not been anticipated. The case is documented in depth by the History Channel, Crime Museum, A&E, and in multiple academic criminology texts. The city's hillsides — once a symbol of aspiration and natural beauty in the Los Angeles imagination — carry, for those who know this history, a different weight.