The Hillside Stranglers

Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono committed the Hillside Strangler murders in Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, killing ten women and girls whose strangled, nude bodies were found posed on hillsides throughout the Los Angeles area. The victims ranged in age from twelve to twenty-eight. The cousins operated a fake modeling agency to lure victims and used fake police identification to stop women on the street, abducting them under the guise of a police stop. The murders caused widespread panic in Los Angeles.

Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, in January 1979 after murdering two more women there. Initially he attempted to fake multiple personality disorder to escape responsibility, a performance ultimately rejected by forensic psychiatrists. When Bianchi agreed to testify against his cousin Buono in exchange for a guilty plea and prison sentence rather than death, the case moved to what became one of the longest trials in California history, lasting over two years.

Buono's trial produced 400 witnesses and 56,000 pages of transcript. Both cousins were convicted of the Los Angeles murders. Buono was sentenced to life without parole and died in prison in 2002. Bianchi, despite his deal, was also sentenced to multiple life terms in Washington state and has been repeatedly denied parole in California, where he has remained in custody. He has continued to generate controversy through requests for release and his manipulation of the parole system.

The Hillside Strangler case was significant in the history of forensic psychiatry for exposing the vulnerabilities of malingered dissociative identity disorder as a legal defense. It also led to changes in how Los Angeles law enforcement responded to missing persons reports after it emerged that some victims' disappearances had not been adequately investigated. The case has been dramatized multiple times and remains a prominent chapter in the history of Los Angeles crime.