How A Hillside Strangler Nearly Went Free

Summary

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Crimes of the Times: How A Hillside Strangler Nearly Went Free

Host: Christopher Goffard (L.A. Times Studios)
Date: June 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this gripping episode, LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard revisits the notorious Hillside Strangler case, focusing on the near collapse of the prosecution against Angelo Buono. Through firsthand accounts, legal twists, and lessons learned, the episode reveals how a deadly partnership, a flawed investigation, and a judge’s audacious intervention changed the course of Los Angeles criminal justice history.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Hillside Strangler Case: Setting the Stage

• Timeframe & Crime Wave:
  From October 1977 to February 1978, Angelo Buono and his cousin Kenneth Bianchi raped, tortured, and murdered at least ten women and girls in Los Angeles County, deliberately inciting public terror.
  (07:11)
• Victims included runaways, aspiring actresses, prostitutes, and students—lured by the cousins’ use of fake police badges and their pose as vice officers. (07:36)

2. Psychological Profiles & Modus Operandi

• Kenneth Bianchi:
  Sociopathic, compulsive liar, master manipulator, once posed as a cop, psychologist, and sex therapist with fake diplomas.
  • Frank Salerno: “He’s a sociopath, he’s a pathological liar. He doesn’t know what he’s gonna say when he wakes up in the morning. He just makes it up as it goes.” (01:51)
• Angelo Buono:
  Blue-collar, streetwise, violent, manipulative, self-styled "ladies man" with a dark past as a pimp. (00:48)
  • Salerno: “Buono was, you know, the hammer. Buono was a street wise guy.” (02:11)

3. The Investigation: Chaos & Breakthroughs

• Task Force Struggles:
  The sheer magnitude led to chaos rather than cooperation among agencies. Information was scattered, computer databases were underutilized, and detectives from multiple divisions failed to collaborate. (11:00 – 12:40)
  • Salerno: “Investigation by committee doesn’t work... and this task force proved it.” (12:01)
• Missed Clues:
  Bianchi’s name surfaced numerous times but was overlooked due to data entry inconsistencies and fragmented records. (15:29 – 16:28)
  • Daryl Gates (LAPD, quoted): “Our computer software could not collate all the information fed into it. And Bianchi’s name was spelled differently each time.” (16:10)

4. The Legal Drama: Case Nearly Derailed

• Shaky Star Witness:
  Bianchi’s plea deal (to avoid the death penalty) made him the prosecution’s key witness against Buono. But his credibility crumbled as his accounts constantly shifted. (24:00 – 25:54)
  • Goffard: “Bianchi’s shifting stories gave prosecutors cold feet. His inconsistency amounted to what Assistant District Attorney Roger Kelly called the self immolation of his own credibility.” (25:54)
• Prosecutorial Hesitation:
  District Attorney Roger Kelly publicly stated he would not put Bianchi on the stand, citing credibility concerns. Talks of dismissing all murder charges left detectives outraged and fearing that Buono would walk free. (02:55, 03:51)

5. Judicial Intervention: Judge Saves the Case

• The Turning Point:
  Superior Court Judge Ronald M. George rejected the DA’s motion to drop the case, delivering a detailed and scathing 36-page ruling. He insisted there was enough corroborating evidence, refusing to let “10 bodies... get swept under the carpet.” (28:07)
  • Judge George: “Normally, like most judges, I would not second guess a prosecutor’s evaluation... but I felt I had not only a right but a duty to do so.” (28:49)
  • Judge George: “I wanted it to be very clear in terms of the fact that I was not acting arbitrarily, but that I was acting under authority of law.” (29:38)

6. The Trial & Aftermath

• Record-Setting Trial:
  With the Attorney General’s office taking over, Buono’s trial became the longest in US history at the time: 729 days, 392 witnesses, 1,807 exhibits. He was convicted on nine counts of murder. (30:22)
• Consequences:
  Buono died in prison (2002). Prosecutors faced career fallout and political blowback for almost letting a serial killer go. (30:50)
• Missed Opportunities & Lessons Learned:
  Poor coordination and follow-up allowed preventable murders, a critical lesson for law enforcement.
  • Salerno: “What you learn from investigation by committee really doesn’t work. The clue that’s going to break the case is generally always there, but it’s overlooked or not handled properly.” (31:54)

7. Legacy: Impact on Future Cases

• Reforms in Task Force Operations:
  The failures prompted a new approach for the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez) investigation: only experienced homicide detectives were included, and communication was prioritized. (32:20 – 33:39)

  • Salerno: “Instead of having any detective from an outlying station... we use nothing but homicide cops in the Night Stalker case, they know they’ve got to be really thorough... So we learned that you’ve got to keep everybody that’s involved in the case up to date as to what we’re looking for.” (32:34)

• Current Status:
  Kenneth Bianchi remains incarcerated, recently denied parole for the eighth time. (33:39)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Christopher Goffard, opening narration:
  “Today, the story of the Hillside Stranglers and the prosecution that almost never happened.” [00:00]
• Frank Salerno, on the letdown of the DA’s decision:
  “It was a big disappointment, to say the least... a lot of work had gone into it.” [03:51]
• Judge George, on his unprecedented ruling:
  “I was not supposed to be merely a rubber stamp for the district attorney, but that I had to conclude that a dismissal would be in the interest of justice. There was sufficient evidence to warrant, if not require, the district attorney to go forward with the prosecution...” [28:49]
• Salerno, on lessons learned:
  “Every murder is a learning experience because they’re all different... historically, what you learn from investigation by committee really doesn’t work.” [31:54]
• Salerno, reflecting on the Strangler–Night Stalker connection:
  “In a way, yeah, without a doubt. We put those balances and checks in so that we hopefully wouldn’t overlook something that’s so obvious.” [33:23]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 – 05:06: Setting the stakes—background on the suspects, the impending collapse of the case, and the courtroom tension.
• 07:11 – 10:41: Crime details, victim profiles, the height of public terror.
• 11:00 – 13:43: Task force formation, challenges with inter-agency coordination, public paranoia.
• 14:16 – 17:15: The Bellingham break: Bianchi arrested in Washington, key clue connections, investigative missteps.
• 18:00 – 21:38: Bianchi’s insanity defense, manipulation, and plea deal exposed.
• 24:00 – 25:54: The crisis point: Bianchi’s unreliable witness status, DA’s withdrawal from prosecution.
• 28:07 – 29:38: Judge Ronald M. George’s decisive ruling detailed.
• 30:22 – 31:54: Outcomes of the trial and repercussions for prosecutors.
• 32:20 – 33:39: Lasting lessons—how the case shaped future police protocols.

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Episode Takeaways

• The Hillside Strangler case nearly collapsed due to systemic failures—shoddy inter-agency cooperation, poor evidence handling, and prosecutorial caution.
• Judge Ronald George’s intervention was unprecedented, forcing the justice system to proceed and setting a legal milestone.
• The trial set records for length and complexity but ultimately delivered justice.
• The failures and hard-won lessons led to improvements in future high-profile investigations, notably the Night Stalker case.
• The episode underscores the crucial need for collaboration, communication, and courage within the justice system when confronting evil—so history does not repeat itself.

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Transcript

[Christopher Goffard]

This is an LA Times Studios podcast. Chris Goffert here at LA Times Studios. Thanks for joining us on Crimes of the Times. Today, the story of the Hillside Stranglers and the prosecution that almost never happened. Tell us what you think in the comments below. In July 1981, homicide detectives who had been working the Hillside Strangler case gathered in a Los Angeles courtroom in anticipation of disaster. One of the two men implicated in the murders was Angelo Buono, a 46 year old car upholsterer from Glendale. He was a wiry, foul mouthed little man, a high school dropout with an air of swagger and an Italian flag flying from his house. He had been a pimp and fancied himself a ladies man. Now Bono was in custody awaiting trial, charged with the murders of ten women and girls. But a week earlier, the district Attorney had announced that he had no stomach for the case. The trouble was that the state star witness was Bono's cousin, Kenneth Bianchi. He was a slippery 30 year old con man whose nickname was Slick Kin and had been Bono's partner in the murder spree. Bianchi had already pleaded guilty to five of the LA murders, plus two in Washington State and and was serving a life term. He had been an aspiring cop with a Hollywood apartment and a glib patter that reminded people of a used car salesman. He was a skillful liar who at various times had successfully posed as a cop, a psychologist and as a sex therapist. He had a closet full of fake diplomas. Can you give me like a thumbnail psychological profile of this guy?

[Frank Salerno]

Yeah, he's a sociopath, he's a pathological liar. He doesn't know what he's gonna say when he wakes up in the morning. He just makes it up as it goes.

[Christopher Goffard]

Frank Salerno is a retired homicide detective from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and was one of the leads on the Hillside Strangler Task force.

[Frank Salerno]

You know, the guy's a con man of the twosome. He was the front guy, the talker. Buono was, you know, the hammer. Buono was a street wise guy.

[Christopher Goffard]

In court testimony, Biangi had admitted that Bono had been his accomplice during the LA killings. But his stories kept shifting. He would put his cousin at the scene of the murders one day and recant the next.

[Frank Salerno]

I believe they got too close to him because every time you talk to Bianchi, he'd tell you a different story. I think they just talked to him too much and he kept changing stories and he didn't think a jury Would buy it.

[Christopher Goffard]

A week earlier, the deputy district attorney on the case, Roger Kelly, had announced, quote, I would not put someone on the stand who is not credible. The judge had posed a question to the prosecutor. Did he intend to file similar charges against Buono later? No, the prosecutor said, we have no reason to believe that new evidence will come to light. The case had dominated headlines for years. It had cast a pall of fear over Southern California in a way that few murder cases ever had. Thousands of women had been frightened to go outdoors during the height of the terror in late 1977. They were buying guns, getting guard dogs, wondering what the monsters looked like. And now the DA's decision to drop the 10 murder counts meant that one of the killers would likely do a little time on pimping charges, maybe three years, and then go free.

[Frank Salerno]

It was a big disappointment, to say the least. A lot of lot of work had gone into it. A lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of resources.

[Christopher Goffard]

The DA could not dismiss the case unilaterally. Superior court judge Ronald M. George had to approve the move. In such cases, a judge almost always goes along with a DA's decision to scuttle the charges. It was hard to think of a case, much less one this serious, in which it hadn't gone that way. So Salerno and his partner Pete Finnegan, who had spent years building a case against Buono, went into the courtroom that day expecting that they would essentially watch a serial killer escape punishment.

[Frank Salerno]

I mean, we were pissed off thinking that that was going to happen, but our hands were tied. We'd done everything we could do. The day that Judge George was going to make his decision, we all went to court. We're sitting back there and starts talking about the motion and what he'd found and this and that, and he's halfway through with it. Two thirds, Pete and I look at each other and we say, I don't think he's going to dismiss this. The way he's talking

[Christopher Goffard]

today on crimes of the times, the case of the hillside stranglers and the prosecution that nearly didn't happen. I'm Christopher Goffard.

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[Christopher Goffard]

From October 1977 to February 1978, Angelo Buono and his younger cousin Kenneth Bianchi raped, tortured and killed a series of girls and women across Los Angeles county and left their bodies to be found in ways designed to taunt police and maximize public terror. The bodies had been stripped of clothing with cord marks on the necks and limbs and dumped on hillsides to lure their victims back to Bono's house in Glendale. The cousins posed as vice officers and flashed fake badges. Their targets included runaways and aspiring actresses. Some were waiting at bus stops, some were working as prostitutes. Some were college students. Frank Salerno got involved when he was called to the murder of Judy Miller in October 1977. She was a 15 year old runaway.

[Frank Salerno]

They told me that they had a young nude female whose body had been dumped up in the La Crescenta area the county. She appeared to have been placed at the location. I immediately saw a ligature mark around her neck and I saw ligature marks on her ankle. It was a Jane Doe but turned out to be Judy Miller. But took us 10 days to get her identified. We had a one of our graphic artists come in and do a drawing of her. And we released that to the media and we got a good response on that. Got a lot of call ins, most of them that had any idea who she might be only had the first name, Judy, no last name, and that she was from the Hollywood area and hung around Hollywood Boulevard. We eventually got her identified by talking to the young runaway kids that hang out and still hang out on Hollywood Boulevard.

[Christopher Goffard]

There were indications that Miller's body had been carried to the scene and dumped rather than dragged, which suggested that at least two people had been involved.

[Frank Salerno]

Whoever was carrying the back part of her or their legs tripped or caught his foot on this curbing that was covered in this ground cover and it was tufted up. That was just a theory, okay.

[Christopher Goffard]

Other women in their teens and early 20s were found dead under similar circumstances over the next few weeks. But the panic did not become widespread until the third week of November 1977. That's when four victims were found during a one week stretch. Two of them were Highland park girls, ages 12 and 14 who were last seen at the Eagle Rock Plaza. An Eagle Rock woman wrote in the Times that the killer has made us all wretched with fear and reported a conversation she overheard at a grocery store. Where is everybody? At home watching TV to see if they know the girl who just got killed.

[Frank Salerno]

I refer to it as the week. That was a matter of a week. We had four more victims. That's pretty much when it started taking off. The media really got involved, a lot of publicity, and we were off and running.

[Christopher Goffard]

It's hard to trace the origins of the name, but it became official late that year as the Los Angeles Police Department launched the Hillside Strangler Task force. By early 1978, with at least 10 known victims, the staff had grown to 162 cops, including Glendale officers and sheriff's deputies, with a 24 hour tip hotline. Daryl Gates, the former LAPD chief, described the scene in his memoir, Chief inside Parker Center. We were in disarray, choking on tips, leads and clues, he wrote. We had in time, more than 10,000 clues, 4,800 parolees to check out and 120,000 fingerprint cards to run for comparison. The LAPD had use of a relatively new weapon, a computer into which clues were inputted. But it was haphazardly managed and investigators scattered among the agencies. Not all of them homicide detectives, but robbery and burglary detectives were not reliably sharing information with one another. Frank Salerno was one of the detectives spearheading the sheriff's department's efforts. How Smoothly and efficiently did this giant task force work together? I mean, in terms of collating clues, sharing information. You're smiling.

[Frank Salerno]

Let me tell you something, okay? There's no doubt investigation by committee doesn't

[Ronald M. George]

work

[Frank Salerno]

and this task force proved it.

[Christopher Goffard]

The computer could collect data, but it couldn't collate it and cross reference it in useful ways.

[Frank Salerno]

So all it did was it made giant printouts of all the suspects that were called in. We ended up, or should say LAPD did. Ended up, you know, with a half inch book of nothing but names of possible suspects that were called in on clues, vehicles that were calling. So there was really no coordination whatsoever.

[Christopher Goffard]

Since there was widespread suspicion the strangler might be a cop, the LAPD ordered its officers not to chase female suspects. If a woman runs from you, we said, don't chase her, Gates would write. Understand that she may be panicking, thinking that you're him. Serial killers almost always worked alone. But there might be one homicidal maniac or several. The Times reported an LAPD commander said there may be as many as four or five sets of stranglers. With panic pervasive and pressure to close the case mounting, the LAPD arrested a Beverly Hills handyman in connection with the murders. A jailhouse snitch had implicated him, but they were forced to release him three days later, accompanied by a humiliating public apology from Gates. Then, in spring 1978, the LA killings inexplicably stopped. Nearly a year passed without more bodies. Detectives rotated back to their old assignments.

[Frank Salerno]

By that time there was no doubt in our mind that we were looking for two people, not, not one. So that was another strange thing with the. The murder. Stop stopping is why did it stop if there were two? You know, were both of them in custody? Did one kill the other? Who knows?

[Christopher Goffard]

In mid January 1979, the phone rang at the LA County Sheriff's Department. It was a call from police in Bellingham, Washington where 27 year old Kenneth Bianchi was in custody in the rape and strangling of two local college students. He had been working as a rent a cop.

[Frank Salerno]

My partner and I, Finnegan and I were off that day. We had taken the day off and I got a call at home from Louis Danoff, one of our investigators. And Louis said that he had received a call from the Bellingham Police Department in Washington that they had a double murder, two young females, that they had a suspect in custody, that he had a California driver's license and they asked him to run a background on him. I gotta throw this in. Bellingham said they had called LAPD and there were no homicide detectives and they called Glendale PD and there were no homicide detectives working. So we got the magic phone call.

[Christopher Goffard]

Bianchi's driver's license was 1950 Tamarind Avenue in Hollywood. Alert LA detectives remembered that a strangler victim, 18 year old escort Kimberly Martin, had been abducted from that location. Another of Bianchi's former addresses in Glendale was an apartment complex where a second victim, a 20 year old art student named Christina Wechler, had lived. A third victim had lived across the street. Bianchi's name, it turned out, had surfaced multiple times during the investigation. At one point, he had even agreed to take a polygraph test, but no one had followed up. In his memoir, former LAPD chief Daryl Gates would write, our computer software could not collate all the information fed into it. And Bianchi's name was spelled differently each time. It continues to haunt me today that I didn't personally go over every detail.

[Frank Salerno]

We pulled LAPDs printouts and we looked under suspects and the name Bianchi, Kenneth Bianchi was listed I think five times as a suspect. We found out that Bianchi had been a LAPD reserve applicant. Failed that that meant its prints were on file, but the prints were never checked against any, any of the cases. We finally, we had a suspect. So I called Bellingham to see what their where they were in their investigation. Two young girls had been talked into this little scenario where they babysit a house and then they were found murdered.

[Christopher Goffard]

One of Bianchi's former neighbors remembered him as, quote, a friendly, well mannered, nice young man. When reporters learned his cousin Angelo Bona was his suspected accomplice, they drove to Buono's home in Glendale, but found him a surly subject. You guys blowed up the story too goddamn much. Bono said, goodbye and get off my property. A few months later, still free but under tight surveillance, he was ready to share a few bitter thoughts. Bono said, the only thing I have to say is I haven't did nothing. They won't find nothing because I ain't did nothing. He complained that the attention had dried up referrals to his auto upholstery business. The phone don't ring anymore. Nobody comes in as a businessman, I'm dead. As for his younger cousin, he didn't even know him that well. He insisted he had let him stay with him briefly as a favor to his aunt, and the association had meant nothing but grief. Bono said, we didn't have nothing in common. Now I wouldn't do no more favors for anybody, even the Pope. Can you tell me a little bit more about the dynamic between these two guys, Bianchi and Buono? Would it have happened if it were just one of them, or did it require both of them working together to create some kind of homicidal dynamic?

[Frank Salerno]

Well, I think it was both of them, without a doubt. I've been asked that question a lot over the years. Who is the worst of the worst? They were both just terrible human beings and just hit it off. Both of them were psychopaths. Bono actually was a pedophile. We had learned of his involvement for quite a few of the local high school girls that would stop by his shop. He was into violent sex. One guy will tell you this, one guy will tell you another. I don't really know. The best way I can describe it is Bianchi was the frontliner. He was a talker. He was the one, you know, that came across as the guy next door. And Bodo was just the opposite.

[Christopher Goffard]

Up in Washington State, Bianchi was busy convincing psychiatrists during videotaped interviews that he suffered from multiple personality disorder.

[Frank Salerno]

They started sending down tapes, videotapes of those interviews, and they'd call us over to the DA's office and the primary investigators and the DA would sit there and listen and watch this demonstration that's going on. They were so poorly done and such bad acting. I wrote in my notebook, this is a case of bad acting. Bull. I mean, it was that. It was just so apparent what was going on, and it was hard to believe that a doctor was buying into this.

[Christopher Goffard]

To take Bianchi's shtick seriously was to believe an alter ego named Steve Walker had done the crimes. The basis for an insanity defense. Detectives discovered that Steve. Steve Walker was the name of a real psychologist whose credentials Bianchi had stolen to pass himself off as one. Bianchi had duped the psychologist into sending him his school transcripts. How had he done this? By placing a help ad in the LA Times. Pretending to be a therapist who was seeking an associate for a fake practice, detectives went to the newspaper's office, hunkered over the microfiche machine for weeks, and found the ad. It exposed Bianchi's multiple personality ruse. In a case with no shortage of weirdness, a woman who said she loved Bianchi, Veronica Compton, tried to strangle a cocktail waitress to make it appear the real Strangler was still loose. She went to prison for it. In no time, Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Washington murders and five of the LA murders. He agreed to testify against his cousin. Bianchi made the deal to spare himself

[Frank Salerno]

the death penalty and he would get life sentences and that he would do his time in California, not Washington, and that he would testify against Buono truthfully. And that was the deal.

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[Suzy Exposito]

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[Ronald M. George]

Genre Defining Artists the reason I was

[Frank Salerno]

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[Christopher Goffard]

We'll center voices from our communities while also giving you the hottest takes.

[Frank Salerno]

LA to me also feels like a

[Christopher Goffard]

very brancho place because this isn't just another culture show, it's the Delos podcast. At various times, more than a dozen LA murders were attributed to the Stranglers or some mistakenly, Los Angeles prosecutors prepared to try angelo bono for 10 of them, but their star witness was increasingly capricious. Sometimes Kenneth Bianchi insisted he and Buono had taken turns strangling victims. Other times, he claimed not to have been present at all or to have watched Bono do it.

[Frank Salerno]

The problem was For Bianchi is what he told us originally, that we were able to go out and cooperate so he could change his story as much as he wanted. But we were able to show, he said this, that's true. He said this, that's true. For example, the fibers in Wagner's hand, where they taped her hands together and tried to electrocute her. The fibers, okay, came from a chair that Bianchi said. Every girl was placed in the chair with her, with her hands behind their back. Well, we took the chair when we arrested Bono in a search warrant. And in the chair, towards the back where the cushion dips down, a tuft of the same fibers was found. So we could show that what Bianchi told us happened. That's where the fibers were and that's how they ended up on Wagner's hand. He told us about injecting Wechler with Windex on her hip. We knew there was an injection mark, but we didn't know what it meant. He told us on Weckler that they tried to gas her by taking a flexible gas pipe, putting up her neck and putting a bag, a plastic bag over her head. He told us a great deal of things that only the killer would know.

[Christopher Goffard]

Nevertheless, Bianchi's shifting stories gave prosecutors cold feet. His inconsistency amounted to what Assistant District Attorney Roger Kelly called the self immolation of his own credibility. He told the press it would be unethical to rely on a witness he considered a liar. He said the case is in trouble. And so it was no surprise when he announced in July 1981 that his office, under District Attorney John Van de Camp, was dropping the murder charges against Bono. The office would pursue pimping charges, but even if convicted, at most Bono would get a few years. Cops were furious. Gates, in his memoir, derided Kelly as a weak kneed prosecutor who feared damage to his reputation if he lost on such a large stage. An attorney who preferred hat cases. Sure things with all the T's crossed and the I's dotted. Sometimes, Gaetz wrote, a prosecutor has to take a chance. It was Superior Court Judge Ronald George who saved the case. He spent more than an hour reading aloud a scathing 36 page ruling ordering the District Attorney's office to, quote, vigorously and effectively resume the prosecution or else he'd give it to the Attorney General's office. George wrote, quote, this court would be abdicating responsibility for it to permit the District Attorney to abort this massive and costly three and a half year investigation and prosecution. Given the people's case on the present state of the record, George wrote. While he called Bianchi's account a morass of contradictions, he said there was nevertheless a great deal of evidence to corroborate his claims, which he said prosecutors had unaccountably glossed over. For example, there was the account of Catherine Laurie, daughter of the late actor Peter Lorre, who said the cousins had posed as vice cops while trying to abduct her in Hollywood in 1977.

[Frank Salerno]

She identified Bianchi, and she subsequently identified Buono. So there were so many things that you looked at that he told us that only the killer would know.

[Christopher Goffard]

Prosecutors were stunned by George's ruling, and the defense flabbergasted. I've been practicing law for 15 years, and I've never seen anything like this happen before, said Gerald Chaliffe, one of Bono's attorneys. It was a decision the judge was proud of, later telling a reporter, 10 bodies don't just get swept under the carpet. I reached out to the retired judge who went on to serve as Chief justice of the California Supreme Court for 14 years. He told me, normally, like most judges, I would not second guess a prosecutor's evaluation of his or her own case, but I felt I had not only a right but a duty to do so.

[Ronald M. George]

I felt that, given the circumstances, that I was not supposed to be merely a rubber stamp for the district attorney, but that I had to conclude that a dismissal would be in the interest of justice. There was sufficient evidence to warrant, if not require, the district attorney to go forward with the prosecution, absent some unusual circumstance that would be recited to me, and none was. Now, you spent the better part of an hour reading out your ruling to the court, didn't you? I did. And because it was a very unusual thing to deny a district attorney's motion to dismiss his own case, and I wanted it to be very clear in terms of the fact that I was not acting arbitrarily, but that I was acting under authority of law. And that demanded, in my view, a detailed explanation of why it would be in furtherance of justice for the court to take the unusual step of refusing on its own motion to dismiss the DA's own case. And that's why I went through the evidence in some detail.

[Christopher Goffard]

The DA's office withdrew from the case, and the Attorney General's office prosecuted Bono. It became the longest murder trial in American history, a record that still holds. From jury selection in November 1981 to nine guilty verdicts in November 1983. It ran for 729 days, with 392 witnesses and 1,807 exhibits. Bianchi testified for months. And although his testimony was riddled with contradictions, he supplied details only one of the killers would have known, like the use of cleaning fluid to inject one of the victims. Bono got a life sentence. He died in prison in 2002 at age 67. For prosecutors who had tried to scuttle a winnable case against a serial killer, the notoriety was unkind. Kelly, a downtown veteran, was transferred against his will to the Compton branch. His former boss, Van de Camp, carried a political albatross. It was an error, he acknowledged, admitting he had wrongly assessed the strength of the evidence. But Democrat and Republican rivals cudgeled him with it during his failed run for governor in 1990. One of the painful lessons of the Strangler case is that some of the murders could have been prevented if task force detectives had shared information with each other and followed up on leads in their possession.

[Frank Salerno]

Every murder is a learning experience because they're all different. Historically, what you learn from investigation by committee really doesn't work. You know, the clue that's going to break the case is generally always there, but it's overlooked or not handled properly. So for me personally, it was a great learning experience. When the Night Stalker came along

[Christopher Goffard]

in 1985, the LA Sheriff's Department and the LAPD launched the Night Stalker Task Force to catch the serial killer later identified as Richard Ramirez. Salerno helped run the sheriff's side of it.

[Frank Salerno]

Instead of having any detective from an outlying station or subdivision follow up on clues, we use nothing but homicide cops in the Night Stalker case, they know they've got to be really thorough in what the hell they do and document. So we learned that you've got to keep everybody that's involved in the case up to date as to what we're looking for. So if they read that one clue or they go out, talk to somebody, there's that thing there that'll trigger, hey, we're onto something.

[Christopher Goffard]

You talk about the Hillside Stranglers case as a kind of precursor to the Night Stalker. It was training for how to catch Richard Ramirez.

[Frank Salerno]

In a way, yeah, without a doubt. We put those balances and checks in so that we hopefully wouldn't overlook something that's so obvious.

[Christopher Goffard]

Bianchi is now 74. He remains locked up at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State. And last year, the California Board of Parole hearings denied him parole for the eighth time. Pete Finnegan, the retired detective, attended the virtual hearing and told me he saw no difference in the pathological, lying sociopath that he began studying in 19.

[Ronald M. George]

Sam.

[Christopher Goffard]

When you hear the name Cheech Marin, you probably think one thing.

[Frank Salerno]

I made my first record when I was five. It was. It was a Mexican song.

[Christopher Goffard]

Welcome to season two of Making Los Angeles, the show where we get to know the people who helped define this city, like Alex Cohen.

[Suzy Exposito]

And I vowed, I'm like, I'm never coming back to this godforsaken city.

[Christopher Goffard]

And then, sure enough, here you are.

[Frank Salerno]

Yeah, here I am.

[Christopher Goffard]

I'm Glenn Gritzner. Tune in to the latest episode of Making Los Angeles. Wherever you get your podcasts.