Hillside Strangler

Yolanda Washington happened to mention to Buono that she always worked on a certain stretch of Sunset Boulevard. When Bianchi and Buono found that Deborah Noble had deceived them about the list but were unable to find her, they decided to take out their rage on Washington. Her naked body was found on October 17, 1977, on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, and Detective Frank Salerno of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department was called to the scene.[6] It was determined that the corpse was cleaned before being dumped; faint marks were visible around the neck, wrists, and ankles where a rope had been used. The victim had also been raped.[2]

On November 1, 1977, police were called to Alta Terrace Drive in La Crescenta,[7] a neighborhood 12 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found naked, face up on a parkway in a middle-class residential area. The homeowner had covered her with a tarp in the early morning hours to prevent the neighborhood children from viewing her on their way to school.[6] Ligature marks were on her neck, wrists and ankles, indicating to police she was bound and strangled. The body had been dumped, indicating she was killed elsewhere.[6]

Detective Salerno also found a small piece of light-colored fluff on her eyelid and saved it for the forensic experts. A coroner's report further detailed that she had been raped and sodomized.[6] The girl, who was described as being "small and thin, weighing about 90 pounds and appearing to be about 16 years old",[6] was eventually identified as 15-year-old Judith Lynn Miller, a former student of Hollywood High School, runaway and occasional sex worker.

Miller was last seen alive on October 31, 1977, talking to a man driving a large two-tone sedan on Sunset Blvd next to Carneys Express Limited. The stranglers told her they were undercover police officers, handcuffed her, and took her to Buono's Auto Upholstery Shop at 703 E. Colorado Street in Glendale where she was murdered.

Five days later, on November 6, 1977, the nude body of another woman was discovered near the Chevy Chase Country Club, in Glendale. Like Miller, she bore five-point (neck, wrists and ankles) ligature marks and of having been strangled and brutally raped, but not sodomized.[6] The woman was identified as 21-year-old waitress Elissa Teresa "Lissa" Kastin, who was last seen leaving the restaurant where she worked the night before her body was discovered.[8]

Kastin was also a professional dancer for the all-female dance troupe The L.A. Knockers and, unlike the two previous victims, was not a prostitute, drug user or runaway. The stranglers followed Kastin after she was seen driving home from work, pulled her over on the street she lived on, presented a fake police badge, and told her that they were detectives. They then handcuffed her and told her they needed to take her in for questioning.[8]

At some point in early November 1977,[9] the two men approached 24-year-old Catharine Lorre Baker, the daughter of actor Peter Lorre — famous for his role as a serial killer in Fritz Lang's film M — with the intent of abducting and killing her. However, when they found a picture of her sitting on her father's lap among her identification, they let her go without incident, fearing the murder of a celebrity's child may attract an unusually high amount of police and press attention. Lorre did not realize who the men were until they were arrested, at which point she recalled that two men flashing L.A. police badges had approached her in the past.[10]

Dolores Cepeda (left) and Sonja Johnson

On Sunday, November 13, 1977, two girls, 12-year-old Dolores Ann "Dolly" Cepeda and 14-year-old Sonja Marie Johnson, boarded an RTD bus in front of The Eagle Rock Plaza on Colorado Boulevard and headed home. The last time they were seen was getting off the bus on York Boulevard and N Avenue 46 and approaching a two-tone sedan which reportedly had two men inside. Their two corpses were found by a nine-year-old boy who had been treasure hunting in a trash heap on a hillside near Dodger Stadium on November 20, 1977.[11] Both of the girls' bodies had already begun to decompose. It was determined that they had been strangled and raped.[8]

Earlier that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the naked body of twenty-year-old Kristina Weckler, a quiet honors student at the Art Center College of Design deemed by Detective Bob Grogan of the Los Angeles Police Department to be a "loving and serious young woman who should have had a bright future ahead of her",[11] on a hillside between Glendale and Eagle Rock. When found by Grogan, ligature marks were on her wrists, ankles and neck, and when he turned her over, bruises on her breasts were obvious and blood oozed from her rectum. Unlike the first three victims there were two puncture marks on her arm, but no signs of the needle tracks that indicated a drug addict.[12] It was later revealed that Weckler had been injected with Windex, a hard-surface cleaner.[8]

On November 23, 1977, the badly decomposed body of 28-year-old Evelyn Jane King, an aspiring actress who had gone missing on November 9, was discovered in bushes[13] near the Los Feliz off-ramp of the Golden State Freeway.[11] The severity of decomposition prevented determination as to whether she had been raped or tortured but she had been strangled like the others. In response authorities created a task force — initially composed of 30 officers from the LAPD, the Sheriff's Department and the Glendale Police Department — to catch the predator now dubbed the "Hillside Strangler".[11]

Lauren Rae Wagner

On November 29, 1977, police found the body of eighteen-year-old Lauren Rae Wagner, a business student who lived with her parents in the San Fernando Valley,[8] in the hills around Los Angeles's Mount Washington. She had ligature marks on her neck, ankles and wrists. There were also burn marks on her hands indicating she was tortured.[14] Lauren's parents had expected her to come home before midnight, and the next morning when they found her car parked across the street with the door ajar, her father questioned the neighbors.[14]

He found that the woman who lived in the house where Lauren's car had been parked saw her abduction. This woman stated that she saw two men: one was tall and young, the other one was older and shorter with bushy hair.[14] She also stated that she heard Wagner cry out, "You won't get away with this!", during her abduction.[14]

On December 14, 1977, the body of 17-year-old sex worker Kimberly Diane Martin, which was naked and showed signs of torture, was found on a deserted lot near Los Angeles City Hall. Martin had previously joined a call girl agency because she feared exposing herself on the streets with the Strangler on the loose. The killers happened to place a call to her agency from a Hollywood Public Library pay phone and she was the call girl who was dispatched. When the police investigated the apartment she had been dispatched to, they found it vacant and broken into.[15]

The body of the final Hillside Strangler victim was discovered in Los Angeles on February 17, 1978, when a helicopter pilot spotted an orange Datsun abandoned midway down a cliff on the Angeles Crest Highway.[8] Police responded to the scene and discovered the nude body of the car's owner, twenty-year-old Cindy Lee Hudspeth - a student and part-time waitress - in the trunk. Her corpse again showed ligature marks, and she had been raped and tortured. She had been strangled and her body placed in the trunk of her car, which was then pushed off the cliff.[15]

Hudspeth's murder had initially been unplanned. Bianchi had arrived at Buono's upholstery shop at closing time on February 16 to discover Hudspeth in the company of Buono, discussing upholstery work she wished him to perform on her car. The two men had a private discussion, opting to make her their next victim.[16]