Hillside Strangler

The Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later discovered to be two, American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles, California, between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered on the wooded hillsides surrounding the city. The perpetrators were identified as cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr.

All except one of the murders were committed in Buono's upholstery shop in Glendale, California. The victims, who ranged in age from 12 to 28, were raped, sodomized, beaten, and sometimes tortured, before being strangled to death with ligature. Their corpses were then cleaned and dumped naked across wooded hillsides in Los Angeles. Buono and Bianchi impersonated police officers to lure their victims from nearby locales, then drove them to Buono's upholstery shop to be raped and killed.

The murders began with the deaths of two prostitutes who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles in October and November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not prostitutes, but those who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to prominence. The murders caused a moral panic among young women who were terrified to go out after dark, as well as being pulled over by police. There were two more deaths in December 1977 and February 1978 before the murders abruptly stopped. An extensive investigation proved fruitless until Bianchi's arrest in January 1979 for the rapes and murders of two more young women in Bellingham, Washington, and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case.

In order to avoid the death penalty, Bianchi named Buono as the other perpetrator of the Hillside Strangler killings and agreed to testify against him, leading to Buono's arrest in October 1979. Bianchi pleaded guilty to five of the murders, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole, two consecutive terms for the Washington murders and five concurrent terms for the California murders. Bianchi is currently serving his sentence at Washington State Penitentiary and was denied parole twice in 2010 and 2025, respectively. Buono pleaded not guilty and was convicted of nine of the murders in November 1983 before being sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in January 1984. Buono died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002, at age 67 while serving his sentence at Calipatria State Prison.