The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (17 page)

Bianchi had a girlfriend, Veronica Crompton, who was supposedly writing a play about a female serial killer. She wanted desperately to talk with Bianchi to better understand the mind of a murderer. Bianchi saw his opportunity to manipulate Veronica to his own advantage. He made a startling proposal,
which he told her would lead to him spending his life with her. He asked her to go to Bellingham, the scene of the Ashington murders, and strangle a girl to make it look as if the same man who had killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder had killed her. Bianchi even suggested that Veronica plant semen on the murdered girl. Blinded by love, Veronica agreed. Bianchi was a non-secretor, which meant that in the days before DNA testing, his blood type could not be determined from his semen. Safe in this knowledge, he supplied Veronica with some of his semen in a plastic glove.

Veronica went to Bellingham and, fuelled by drink and drugs, she lured a woman to her motel room for a drink. Veronica lunged at the woman with a cord and tried to strangle her, but the woman was too strong and knocked her over. This brought Veronica to her senses. She aborted the plan and went back to California. On arriving back, she created a hysterical disturbance at the airport and then went on to send the police an audiotape with a letter telling them that they had arrested an innocent man for the Hillside murders and pointed to the recent strangling attempt to prove that the real culprit was still at large. It did not take the police very long to link Veronica to the attempted strangling and the airport disturbance.

By now, the evidence the police needed to corroborate Bianchi’s confession implicating Buono had been obtained. The fibres found on Judy Miller’s eyelid and Lauren Wagner’s hands came from Angelo’s house and upholstery shop. Animal hairs stuck to Lauren’s hands were from the rabbits that Angelo raised. In addition to the imprint of a police badge on his wallet were appropriate puncture marks from where the badge had been pinned. Two witnesses had also positively identified Buono in a photo identification procedure.

Angelo Buono was charged with the murders and a number of connected offences and brought to trial. Before the trial started, the judge agreed to sever the charges in respect of the unconnected offences, allowing Buouno to be tried on just the murder charges.
It was anticipated that during the trial the prosecution would introduce evidence relating to the connected offences.

Bianchi was called to give evidence on 6 July 1981 against his cousin, Buono. He made an effort to convince the court that they should not use his evidence. He stated that he may have faked the multiple personality disorder, but he didn’t know whether he was telling the truth or not when he said that Angelo was involved in the murders. In fact, he didn’t think he himself was involved in any of the killings either. This put the prosecution case in jeopardy and they made an application for the charges against Buono to be dropped. The judge, however, would not agree and believed that there was still enough evidence for a jury to decide.

In spring 1983, Buono finally stood trial. The jury did not begin deliberating until 21 October and, after much discussion, finally came to agreement on 31 October 1983. They found him guilty of the murder of Lauren Wagner. After more deliberation on 3 November, they found him not guilty of the murder of Yolanda Washington. More deliberating took place and they found him guilty of the murders of Judy Miller, Dolores Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, Kimberly Martin, Kristina Weckler, Lisa Kastin, Jane King and, finally, Cindy Hudspeth. Under Californian law at that time, as a ‘multiple murderer’, Buono faced either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. The jury spared him the death penalty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge was not happy. He said: ‘Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi subjected various murder victims to the administration of lethal gas, electrocution, strangulation by rope and lethal hypodermic injection. Yet the two defendants were destined to spend their lives in prison, housed, fed and clothed at taxpayers’ expense, better cared for than some of the destitute law-abiding members of our community.’

On 21 September 2002, at Calipatria State Prison, Angelo Buono, 67, was found dead in his cell. He was believed to have died from heart failure.

At the age of eight, William Bonin (b. 1947) was arrested for stealing car number plates, and he soon ended up in a juvenile detention centre. It was there that older boys sexually abused him. After leaving high school, Bonin joined the US Air Force and served in the Vietnam War as a gunner, picking up a medal for good conduct.

In 1969, after a very brief marriage that ended in divorce, Bonin moved to California. At the age of 23, he was arrested for sexually assaulting young boys. He was imprisoned and released in 1975 but was soon arrested again and imprisoned for raping a 14-year-old boy. David McVicker was hitchhiking when Bonin offered a ride. Bonin asked the boy for sex and pulled out a gun, drove to a remote area and raped him. Bonin then proceeded to choke the boy with his own T-shirt, the same method he would use to kill some of his later victims. However, when McVicker cried out, Bonin released him and apologised for choking him.

The first victim Bonin murdered was named Marcus Grabs, a 17-year-old hitchhiker who was last seen hitchhiking on 5 August 1979. Bonin and a friend, Vernon Butts, picked up Marcus, buggered him and stabbed him more than 70 times. Grabs’s naked body was found a short time later with a yellow nylon rope around his neck. An electrical cord was wrapped around one ankle.

Three weeks after Grabs’s naked body was found, a 15-
year-old
, Donald Hyden, was found dead and mutilated in a rubbish bin near a freeway. Bonin and Butts had struck again. Hyden was raped and strangled with a ligature. His throat had also been slashed and an attempt had been made to castrate him. On 12 September 1979, the body of David Murillo, 17, was found near the same freeway. He had disappeared while riding his bike to the cinema three days earlier. His skull had been crushed. He had also been buggered and strangled with a ligature.

No more bodies were discovered until December 1979, when the body of Frank Fox, 17, was found in a similar condition to
the previous victims, near another freeway. On the morning of 3 February 1980, Bonin and another accomplice, Gregory Matthew Miley, were cruising the highways when they saw 15-year-old Charles Miranda. They picked up the young man, drove around and parked the van. Bonin then buggered the boy and urged Miley to do the same, but Miley was unable to sustain an erection. Frustrated by this, he raped the boy with a blunt object. Bonin then strangled the boy with his own shirt, using a tyre lever to twist the shirt like a tourniquet around his neck. They then dumped the body in a Los Angeles alley, where it was later found. Bonin then suggested they went hunting for another victim. A few hours later, they abducted, raped and killed James McCabe who, aged 12, was the youngest victim.

Between 14 March and 29 April 1980, six other teenage boys went missing. All were found dead near freeways, and all had been murdered in an identical fashion. But now the police got the break they had been needing. A 17-year-old youth, William Pugh, was arrested for stealing a car. He told police that Bonin had boasted he was the Freeway Killer. Bonin was now the prime suspect, but where was he?

On the morning of 2 June 1980, Bonin and another accomplice, James Munro, picked up 19-year-old Steven Wells, who agreed to accompany them back to the apartment they were sharing so they could have sex. Bonin and Wells had sex and Bonin offered Wells $200 if he would allow himself to be tied up. Wells agreed. After Wells was bound, Bonin began to assault him. Munro then supposedly went into another room and allegedly took no part in the murder of Wells that followed. After Wells was killed, both Bonin and Munro took the body and dumped it.

Bonin was now under police surveillance, which paid dividends. On 11 June, they arrested him in the act of assaulting a 15-year-old boy – he had been in the process of buggering the teenager in his van. Tape and rope similar to that used to bind some of the victims was found in the van, as well as a scrapbook of the Freeway Killer stories.

When interviewed, Bonin readily admitted to abducting and killing 21 boys and young men. Police also suspected him of committing up to 15 other murders. He was eventually charged with 14 of the murders to which he admitted. He expressed no remorse and said, ‘I couldn’t stop killing. It got easier each time.’

On 5 January 1982, Bonin was found guilty on all 14 charges and sentenced to death. However, he spent many years on death row before the execution was finally carried out. On 23 February 1996, Bonin was executed by lethal injection. He was the first person to be executed by this method in Californian penal history.

Bonin’s main accomplice, Vernon Butts, was charged with being involved in six of the murders, but he hanged himself while awaiting trial. Gregory Miley and James Munro were given sentences of 25 years to life imprisonment and 15 years to life, respectively, after pleading guilty to being involved in one murder each. Both men are still in prison. Munro has tried to appeal, claiming that he was tricked into accepting a plea-bargain. William Pugh was sentenced to six years for manslaughter.

The bodies of young men and boys continued to be found along the freeways of southern California after Bonin’s arrest, leading police to believe at first that he had other accomplices who were still active. However, these later murders turned out to have been committed by Randy Steven Kraft, who acted entirely separately from Bonin but who happened to have a similar MO. In fact, there was also a third freeway killer, Patrick Kearney, who abducted young men from the freeways of southern California during the 1970s. The three independent killers may have claimed up to 130 victims between them.

In Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday evening, 23 January 1990, pretty 23-year-old Taunja Bennett was to be the first victim of 35-year-old Keith Jesperson (b. 1955), who befriended her in a local bar. After striking up a conversation and plying her with
drinks, Jesperson invited her back to his house, where they had sex. However, following this, Jesperson started arguing with Taunja and started to hit her about the face and head with brute force. He was over twice her size, weighing 240lb. When Taunja attempted to fight back and defend herself against this giant of a man, he placed one of his massive hands around her throat and grabbed a rope with his other hand. Without even taking the time to think about his actions, Jesperson wrapped the rope around Taunja’s neck, pulled it tight and strangled her, watching the life slowly leave her body. When she ceased to struggle and her body became limp, he let her partially naked body slump to the floor. For a man who had just killed another person for the first time, he remained calm. Leaving her at his house, he drove back to the bar and sat around drinking and talking to anyone who would listen to him, presumably to establish an alibi for himself. After a few more beers, Jesperson drove back to the house and placed Taunja’s lifeless body in the front seat of a friend’s car. He drove for a while then found a secluded and dark place to dispose of the body. He pulled her body out of the car and threw it down an embankment, where it was found several days later.

Meanwhile, Jesperson was just a step away from fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a policeman. However, after being initially accepted he sustained an injury and was rejected as a result. This may have been what finally tipped him over the edge and turned him into a vicious serial killer.

Rejected by the police, Jesperson took up work as a truck driver on long-haul journeys. Over a year elapsed until July 1992, when he would kill again. This time, his victim was an unidentified female whose body was found on 30 August, approximately 10 miles over the state border in California. Investigators believed that she had been dead for a number of weeks. She was never formally identified, although Jesperson would later state that her name was Claudia. The following month, the body of Cynthia Lynn Rose, 32, was found along
Highway 99, also in California. She too had been dead for some time and her death was initially listed as a drug overdose.

Instead of keeping a low profile, Jesperson did the complete opposite. He began writing letters to a newspaper in Oregon, claiming responsibility for Rose’s murder as well as others. In one letter, he had claimed that Rose was a prostitute he had picked up and murdered. He signed his letters with a smiling ‘happy face’, which is how he came to be known as the Happy Face Killer. The letters were given to the police but there was no evidence as to who the writer was. However, it wasn’t long before a pattern emerged in the killer’s MO.

Laurie Ann Pentland, 26, became the next victim. Laurie’s body was found in November 1992 behind a shop in Salem, Oregon, 50 miles south of Portland. She had been strangled. Again, there were no leads save for the method used by the killer. In July 1993, another unidentified female body was discovered in California by the side of a truck stop. The woman had been dead for only a couple of days when her body was found and a County Coroner listed her death as a drug overdose. Her case would eventually be reopened and looked at as a murder, after Jesperson wrote another letter to the newspaper as the Happy Face Killer, referring to the victim as a ‘street person’.

On 14 September 1994 in Florida, and again by the side of a busy road, the skeletal remains of what would be known as victim number six were found. Again, the victim was not identified despite extensive police enquiries. It was believed she had been approximately 40 years old at the time of her death. Victim number seven soon followed, 21-year-old Angela Subrize of Oklahoma City, whose body was found soon after that of the previous victim. Many who knew her did not even realise she was missing, as she moved about the country on a regular basis.

Jesperson was soon to make his first mistake. It wasn’t until victim number eight was found that the net started to close on him. This time, he murdered someone he knew instead of a complete stranger. Julie Ann Winningham, 41, from
Washington, was believed to have been murdered on 10 March 1995, just a few miles east of Vancouver. Like the others, she had been strangled and her naked body had been dumped over an embankment alongside a busy road. Julie’s friends and relatives knew that she had been seeing Jesperson and gave the police his details.