The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (31 page)

The skeleton of 45-year-old Cherida Oden Warmley of Garfield was found on 10 October 1998, on a steep, wooded hillside along the Triboro Expressway just west of the former Westinghouse Electric plant in North Versailles. She had last been seen alive over a year before, on 10 June 1997, by her live-in boyfriend. Like the other victims, she had worked as a prostitute in Pittsburgh. Her remains had been thrown over the hillside and had landed just 28 feet from the road. The cause of death could not be determined and she could only be identified from her dental records.

Then on 28 June 1999 the skeletal remains of a young women were found in a vacant house in Wilkinsburg and on 6 October the skeletal remains of 27-year-old Angelique Morgan, a known prostitute and drug addict, were discovered in an abandoned house in Shadyside. The cause of death could not be determined, but police believed she had been killed because she was found under a carpet and a mattress with her sweatshirt wrapped around her head.

Although there is no hard evidence linking the cases, Pittsburgh police Commander Ron Freeman thinks it improbable that so many similar deaths–perhaps as many as 18–would be the work of different people.

Rapid City’s Creek Killings

Eight homeless men were found drowned in a stream that runs through a park in downtown Rapid City, South Dakota, over the course of 16 months in the late 1990s. In a typical year, just one corpse is fished from the creek.

When the first few bodies turned up in the stream on the edge of the Black Hills, police thought nothing of it. As more men died, however, law officers became suspicious. And after 49-year-old Timothy Bull Bear Snr, of the town of Allen on the Pine Ridge Reservation, was found in the creek on 8 July 1999 they realized they had a problem on their hands.

“There’s just too many of them to say it’s coincidence,” said Police Chief Tom Hennies.

Authorities have no witnesses and no motive for the killings. There are no bullet holes, stab wounds or evidence of foul play. Police do not even know where most of the men entered the stream. What investigators do know is that six of the eight dead were Native Americans, and all but one had been drinking heavily just before they died.

The homeless people who live under the bridges along the creek say they believe someone is pushing unconscious or helpless drinkers in the water. Chief Standing Elk says the killers are racist skinheads and that the creek people have banded together to chase some of them away. However, the rumours reported to police include accusations that the “creek people” are being killed by a fellow homeless man, members of a Satanic cult and a big white man on a bicycle. One report even accused a police officer.

Homeless people and others complain that the police are doing little to investigate the deaths because most of the victims are Native Americans. The two men who lead the task force investigating the deaths say they have asked themselves whether they would do anything differently if the dead men had been affluent whites. Chief Sheriff’s Deputy De Glassgow says he believes the investigation is being conducted the same as if all the victims had been white. A $4,000 reward has been offered.

Rochester, N.Y.’s Alphabet Murders

Between 1971 and 1973 a serial murderer terrorized Rochester, New York. He raped and murdered three Rochester girls, before dumping their bodies in nearby towns. These were dubbed “The Alphabet Murders” because, in each case, the victim’s first and last name and the town where their body was found began with the same letter.

The killings began when 11-year-old Carmen Colon disappeared on 16 November 1971. Her body was found 12 miles away in Churchville two days later. Her uncle Miguel was suspected of killing her and remained a suspect until he committed suicide in 1991.

Then about 5.15 p.m. on 2 April 1973, 11-year-old Wanda Walkowicz left her Avenue D home to get a few items for her mother at a delicatessen in Conkey Avenue. She reached the store, bought the groceries and was last seen heading home. She did not make it.

When she did not return promptly, her family and neighbours began searching the streets for her, and when they could not find her, they called the police. At 10.15 a.m. the following day, a New York State Trooper on patrol found Wanda Walkowicz’s body at a rest area off of State Route 104 in Webster, New York, seven miles from Rochester.

“Wanda was a tomboy,” said her sister Rita, who was ten at the time. “She loved to play baseball and ride bikes. She had lots of friends.”

After the murder, the Walkowiczes lived for another five years in the same Avenue D home.

“I was scared to go outside,” said Rita, “but we still had to go to the store and things.”

The final victim was 10-year-old Michelle Maenza, who went missing on 26 November 1973. Her body was found in 15 miles away Macedon two days later. Each girl showed evidence of being raped before death.

Other connections were made. Curiously, C, M and W are the third, 13th and 23rd letters of the alphabet, but no obvious inference can be drawn from that. All three victims were from poor Roman Catholic families in Rochester and were reportedly in trouble at school. This sparked speculation that the three homicides were committed by some sort of counsellor who had access to all three girls. It did not pan out. However, there was another suspect in town that the time. This was serial killer Ken Bianchi who later came to fame as one of the Hillside Stranglers who terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s.

Kenneth Alessio Bianchi was born in Rochester on 22 May 1951. His mother was a 17-year-old alcoholic prostitute who gave him up for adoption at birth. He became the only child of the Bianchi couple. His adoptive father worked for the American Brake-Shoe Factory. His adoptive mother’s sister was the mother of Angelo Buono, his accomplice in the Hillside Stranglings, who was also born in Rochester.

When he was three, his mother took him to hospital because he could not sleep and wet the bed. A doctor noted: “Mother needs help.”

At five, he lapsed into trances, daydreaming with his eyes rolled back, and he was known at school for his inattentiveness. He idolized the Arthurian comic-strip hero Prince Valiant, but did not emulate his idol and become a compulsive liar in early childhood. He was also quick to anger and threw temper tantrums. His mother consulted a doctor again. He was diagnosed with petit mal epilepsy, but the doctor thought he would grow out of it. However the symptoms did not subside. At the age of eight he was treated at a psychiatric centre for mental problems. At nine, due to his inability to control his bladder, his mother forced him to wear sanitary napkins and he was taken to the DePaul Psychiatric Clinic to be treated for “involuntary urination, tics, absenteeism, and behaviour problems”. There he underwent the minor procedures for the urination problem, but his behavioural problems continued. At 11, he was moved from two schools because he could not get along with his teachers. His mother felt the teachers made him nervous, but his IQ was 116 and his teachers thought he was working well below his capacity and he was falling behind in his school work. He was lazy, inattentive and prone to temper tantrums at school and at home.

At 12, he pulled down a six-year-old girl girl’s panties and, at 13, showed no emotion when his adoptive father died. Sent to a high school outside of Rochester, he suddenly changed. He became a clean-cut all-American boy, respectful of elders and dates. But afterwards he joined a motorcycle gang and he got a tattoo that read: “Satan’s Own M. C.” He married briefly at 18 but dated other women throughout the marriage.

At 19, he enrolled at Monroe Community College to be trained to become a police officer. The following year he remarried but his wife left him after eight months. At 20, he wrote to a girlfriend, claiming he had killed a local man. She dismissed this as part of his incessant macho posturing. This was when the Alphabet Murders started.

The following year, his application to join the sheriff’s office was turned down. And by 1973, he was certain police suspected him of the Alphabet Murders. At that time he was working as a security guard and over the next four years he was frequently charged with theft by his employers. He proposed to his childhood sweetheart, but she turned him down because he did not have a steady job. So in January 1976, Bianchi pulled up sticks and moved to Los Angeles, teaming up with his adopted cousin, Angelo Buono, in an amateur white-slave racket.

Born at Rochester in October 1934, Buono came from a broken home. At five, he was transported across the country by his mother. By 14, he was stealing cars and displaying a precocious obsession with sodomy. Sentenced for auto theft in 1950, he escaped from the California Youth Authority and was recaptured in December 1951. Buono hero-worshipped “Red Light” rapist Caryl Chessman, who achieved fame for his literary output on death row. His books became bestsellers. Noted writers, including Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer and Robert Frost, wrote to the governor appealing for clemency and Chessman became a major figure in the campaign to abolish the death penalty that was gaining ground at the time. Nevertheless he went to the gas chamber in San Quentin on 2 May 1960 and died the very moment a fresh stay of execution arrived.

Despite his simian appearance, Buono attracted scores of women. He fathered several children, violently abusing several wives and girlfriends along the way. He also worked as a pimp, recruiting a “harem” of prostitutes through rape and torture.

The sadistic Buono introduced Bianchi to perverse sex and even encouraged Bianchi to sleep with one of his son’s girlfriends. Things seem to be looking up for Bianchi when he took a job with the California Land Title Company and his mother sent him enough money to buy a 1972 Cadillac. He moved out of Buono’s home into his own apartment briefly before he moved in with Kelli Boyd, a girlfriend he met at work, though Bianchi already exhibited a violent temper. He lost his job after marijuana was found in his desk.

In 1977, his applications to join the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles Police Reserves and the nearby Glendale Police Department were rejected. After that he bought a fake psychology degree and credentials and rented an office space from a legitimate psychologist, but he did not get much business. Then he faked cancer as an excuse for not working. Meanwhile Kelli became pregnant. Bianchi proposed. She turned him down but they continued to live together.

Bianchi then decided to go into the prostitution racket with Buono. They bought a list of Johns from Deborah Noble and her friend 19-year-old Yolanda Washington, a part-time waitress and prostitute who worked on Sunset Boulevard. The list turned out to be fake and Yolanda disappeared on 17 October 1977. Her naked body was found on a hillside near Universal City several days later. A cloth was tied around her neck and she had died of strangulation. The post mortem showed she had sex with two men before she died, but as she was a prostitute this was not considered significant.

Bianchi had long cherished an ambition to be a cop and fell in line with Buono’s suggestion that they emulated Caryl Chessman, who had impersonated a policeman so that he could rob and rape his victims. But this couple would go further than Chessman, who never murdered. Armed with fake badges, they would stop female motorists or nab prostitutes, then subject their victims to an ordeal of rape, torture, sexual humiliation and brutality, before garrotting them.

On 31 October, police retrieved the body of 16-year-old Judith Miller. Wrapped in a tarpaulin, it had been dumped in a flowerbed in La Cresenta, a residential neighbourhood north of downtown Los Angeles. There were marks of ligatures on her ankles, wrists and neck. The slim teenager had been trussed up, raped and strangled.

Twenty-one-year-old Hollywood waitress Elissa Kastin was abducted on 5 November, raped, strangled and sodomized. Her naked body was found near a Glendale Country Club and showed ligature marks similar to those on Judith Miller’s body. Three days later, 28-year-old aspiring actress and model Jane King was kidnapped, raped and smothered. Her body was dumped on an off-ramp of the Golden State Freeway, where it lay undiscovered until 22 November.

So far, the police had not taken much notice of these crimes as the victims were considered to have lived a high-risk lifestyle. But then the killers turned their murderous attention on young girls. On 13 November 1977, classmates at junior high Dolores “Dollie” Cepeda, aged 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, disappeared after they got off their school bus. A week later a nine-year-old boy cleaning up trash found their naked bodies in Elypsian Park. The schoolgirls had been raped and there were ligature marks on their bodies. In picking these young girls, was Bianchi reliving the Alphabet Murders?

That same day, 20 November, the naked body of 20-year-old art student Kristina Weckler was found by hikers on a hill near Glendale. She had been sexually assaulted and had ligature marks on her inner arms and neck. Bianchi later recounted Kristina Weckler’s last moments: “She was brought into the kitchen and put on the floor and her head was covered with a bag and the pipe from the gas stove was disconnected, put into the bag and then turned on. There may have been marks on her neck because there was a cord put around her neck to make a more complete sealing.” Bianchi and Buono kept her in there for 90 minutes before she died of asphyxiation.

By the time the decomposing body of Jane King was recovered on the 22nd, female residents of Los Angeles were in uproar. Then on 29 November, the police found the naked body of 18-year-old Lauren Wagner. Again she had been strangled and there were ligature marks. But this time there were electrical burns on her palms that indicated she was tortured.

A task office of 30 officers was established. The police now knew that they were looking for two suspects, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, including one prospective victim – the daughter of 1940s screen villain Peter Lorre – who had managed to escape the stranglers’ clutches.

On 9 December, prostitute Kimberly Diane Martin – who worked under the name “Donna” – answered her last call-out in Glendale. The following morning her naked body was found on a hillside in Echo Park. Then on 16 February 1978, a helicopter spotted an orange Datsun that had run off a cliff in Angeles National Forest. In the trunk was the naked body of 20-year-old Cindy Hudspeth. She had been raped and her body showed the marks of ligatures.