04-18-2013, 09:19 PM
Wonderland
Kenny could be called a lot of bad things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Locked up in the Whatcom County Jail in Bellingham, he had lots of time and motivation to use his gray cells. Already an accomplished liar, he convinced Dean Brett, the lawyer appointed by the court to represent him, he was suffering from amnesia. Brett was so concerned about Kenny trying to commit suicide that he had a psychiatric social worker called in to talk to Kenny.
The psychiatric social worker could not comprehend how such a mild-mannered, considerate person could have strangled two women unless he was suffering from a multiple personality disorder. Kenny got the message and crafted a wonderful scam, using his sprinkling of psychology from college and whatever he gleaned from seeing the movie classic, The Three Faces of Eve, years before.
Then Kenny really got lucky. The movie Sybil, another story of multiple personalities, was being shown on television just before Kenny was to be interviewed by Dr. John G. Watkins, an expert on multiple personalities and amnesia. This was the first step in an insanity defense, so Salerno and Finnegan caught a plane to Washington State.
Kenny was very well prepared for his performance. Shortly after Dr. Watkins believed that he had hypnotized Kenny, Kenny went into his evil persona routine. It was Steve Walker -- Kenny's supposed alter ego -- who killed the girls in Los Angeles with his cousin, Angelo. Steve also made Kenny strangle the two women in Bellingham.
Despite Kenny's preparations, he slipped up a number of times when he was pretending to be Steve and referred to Steve as "he" when it should have been "I." Salerno picked up these slips immediately, but Dr. Watkins did not seem to notice.
Dismayed that Dr. Watkins was completely falling for Kenny's act, Salerno called Grogan to tell him what was going on. Grogan answered, "Okay, I got a great idea. The judge says to Bianchi, 'Mr. Bianchi, I tell you what I'm going to do. I am going to let Ken off. Ken is acquitted. But Steve gets the chair.'"
Distressing as it was for the detectives to watch Kenny create this insanity defense, it did have the advantage of implicating Angelo.
Later, Salerno presented a photo lineup to Markust Camden, the man who had seen Judy Miller get into a car the night she died. He picked out Angelo from the photo lineup immediately, but did not recognize Kenny. The only downside to this positive identification was that Markust had checked himself into a mental hospital for depression -- something that a defense lawyer would use to try to discredit Markust's testimony.
Grogan had a similar experience when he showed the photo lineups to Beulah Stofer, the woman who had seen Lauren Wagner abducted. She selected Bianchi and Buono right away.
When Bianchi's lawyer indicated that Dr. Watkins's testimony would be the basis for Kenny filing a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, the court brought in additional expertise. Dr. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist who was expert on the subject of multiple personalities, talked with Kenny.
Dr. Allison was even more taken in than Dr. Watkins was by Kenny's now-practiced performance. According to Darcy O'Brien, Dr. Allison seemed to be frightened by the threatening persona of Steve that Kenny created for him.
Salerno thought the name of Kenny's evil persona sounded familiar. In going through Kenny's papers, they found it. Thomas Steven Walker was the name on a letter Bianchi had signed to apply for a California State University diploma that he would use to fraudulently offer psychological counseling services.
The prosecution had no intention of letting Kenny get away with his insanity defense. Dr. Martin T. Orne, a major authority on hypnosis, was called upon to determine if Kenny was faking. Dr. Orne had developed procedures by which he could determine whether a subject was actually hypnotized or was just pretending to be. Kenny's responses to three out of four tests proved that he was faking.
Dr. Orne had another little trap for Kenny. He told Kenny that there might be a problem with the diagnosis of multiple personalities. "That's pretty rare for there to be just two [personalities]," Dr. Orne told him. Usually, there were three and often, many more than that. "Dr. Orne wanted to establish that Kenny was reacting to cues and clues thrown out by doctors. If Kenny was faking multiple personality disorder, he would find a way to invent a third personality." (O'Brien)
Not one to disappoint the doctor, Kenny had been listening closely and quickly invented a new persona named Billy. Soon there were two new additional personalities to please Dr. Orne. Kenny's head was getting crowded.
The prosecution also brought in Dr. Saul Faerstein to interview Kenny. Faerstein did nothing to coddle Kenny and Kenny became worried that his performance was not playing to a receptive audience this time.
When Dean Brett presented the findings of Drs. Watkins and Allison to support Kenny's insanity defense, the prosecution brought forward Drs. Orne and Faerstein, both of whom stated that Kenneth Bianchi was competent to stand trial.
"The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office offered Kenny a deal. If he pled guilty to the Washington murders and to some of the Hillside stranglings, he would get life with the possibility of parole and he would be able to serve his time in California, where the prisons were supposedly more humane than in Washington. In return, Bianchi was to agree to testify truthfully and fully against Angelo Buono. For Bianchi, the choice was between death in Washington or life in California." (O'Brien)
Kenny agreed. Now the Los Angeles detectives got a crack at him to see if he would provide credible testimony. A number of investigators, including L.A. County deputy district attorney Roger Kelly, participated in the interviews. They all hoped that the interviews would produce information that would help convict Angelo. In California at that time, a person could not be convicted only on the testimony of an accomplice. However, if other evidence confirmed the accomplice's testimony, it could be used for conviction.
Kenny described how he and Angelo pretended to be policemen. They had fake badges to support that charade. With the victims who were prostitutes, it was surprisingly easy for them to convince the victims to get in the car. The "nice" girls were much harder to manipulate.
An important moment in these interviews came when Salerno asked Kenny what type of material was used to blindfold Judy Miller. Kenny thought it was foam that Angelo used in his auto upholstery business. The little piece of fluff that Salerno had found on the dead girl's eyelids could be just the kind of corroborating evidence they needed to nail Angelo.
Salerno also found out that the hillside dump sites for the victims was selected because Angelo was familiar with that area since one of his girlfriends had lived around there. The investigators also learned about their attempt to pick up Peter Lorre's daughter.
Kenny went on and on, describing each murder in detail as though it was cocktail conversation. There was no remorse and any concern about the victims as human beings. He answered the mystery of the long, torturous death of Kristina Weckler by gas asphyxiation. This murder was so horrible that even Kenny didn't want to talk about it. "She was brought out to the kitchen and put on the floor and her head was covered with a bag and the -- pipe from the newly installed stove, which wasn't fully installed yet, 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 with a bag and tied to make more complete sealing." It took about an hour and a half of suffering before she died.
Eventually, the reality of his situation dawned on him and Kenny looked to place the blame on someone else. His lawyer, armed with the evidence against him, convinced Kenny that he had no choice but to admit his guilt and accept punishment.
Kenny was ordered to serve two life sentences in the state of Washington. He was immediately transferred to California where he was sentenced to additional life terms. He was looking at thirty-five years in California prisons and additional time in Washington.
Angelo was arrested on October 22, 1979, shortly after Kenny described his cousin's involvement in the crimes. Bob Grogan had the pleasure of arresting Angelo. Later, they found Angelo's wallet, which clearly showed the outline of the police badge he had used to get his victims to cooperate with him.
But the prosecutorial environment in California was going against bringing Angelo to trial. The DA had dropped the five California murders charges against Bianchi so that he no longer had the threat of the death penalty hanging over him. There was less incentive for Kenny to cooperate.
Also, Kenny was becoming unmanageable. The police in California hated him and made it clear. Kenny could not accept their disapproval and started to make up stories to exculpate himself. He dreamed up a second man who was responsible for the killings.
Eventually, he started to feel guilty for implicating Angelo. He began to change his story about Angelo's involvement. His credibility as a witness against Angelo was virtually destroyed.
Very much in the back of Kenny's self-serving performances was the prisoner code -- death to informers. If acting like a nut case allowed Angelo to go free, Kenny wouldn't be targeted as a "snitch." Whereas if his testimony put his cousin in jail, Kenny's existence in prison would be jeopardized.
As bizarre as Kenny's state of mind was, it did not compare with that of his creative girlfriend, Veronica Compton. She was supposedly writing a play called The Mutilated Cutter about a woman serial killer. She wanted desperately to talk to him to understand better the mind of a murderer.
Veronica fell in love with Kenny immediately.
Kenny saw opportunity in this relationship. He made a startling proposal -- one that could, if successful, grant him the freedom to spend his life with her. If she could just go to Bellingham and strangle a girl to make it look like the same man who killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Maybe even plant semen on the murdered girl.
It was one hell of a favor to ask, but Veronica agreed immediately.
Kenny was a nonsecretor, which meant in the days before DNA testing that his blood type could not be determined from his semen. Kenny packed Veronica off to Washington with a fresh load of his semen in a plastic glove.
Once Veronica got into this project, it was a bit more intimidating than it seemed in the planning. When she arrived in Bellingham, she had to build up her courage with large amounts of alcohol and cocaine.
Finally fortified, Veronica lured a woman into driving her to a motel and coming into the room for a drink. Veronica lunged at her with a cord and tried to strangle her, but the woman was too strong and threw Veronica over. In a rare lapse into rationality, Veronica decided it was time to go back to California.
But rationality did not overstay its welcome and Veronica, when she arrived at the San Francisco airport, distinguished herself by creating some kind of hysterical disturbance. To make matters irreparably worse, Veronica sent a letter and tape to the Bellingham authorities telling them that they had arrested an innocent man and pointed to the recent strangling attempt to prove that the real culprit was still at large. It did not take terribly sophisticated police work to link the police report of the woman Veronica tried to strangle with the photo of the lady who created the disturbance in the airport that same afternoon.
With Veronica's future assistance compromised, Kenny love for her cooled overnight. Veronica got the message and quickly found herself a new beau -- imprisoned serial killer Douglas Clark, who made Kenny seem like a Boy Scout. Douglas, who usually beheaded his female victims after he tortured them, sent Veronica a valentine with a photo of a headless female corpse.
This spontaneous gesture of affection from Clark inspired in Veronica a great passion. She wrote to Clark, "I take out my straight razor and with one quick stroke I slit the veins in the crook of your arm. Your blood spurts out and spits atop my swelled breasts. Then later that night we cuddle in each other's arms before the fireplace and dress each others wound with kisses and loving caresses." Kenny's loss was Clark's gain.
Now both Kenny and Veronica were in jail.
Kenny could be called a lot of bad things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Locked up in the Whatcom County Jail in Bellingham, he had lots of time and motivation to use his gray cells. Already an accomplished liar, he convinced Dean Brett, the lawyer appointed by the court to represent him, he was suffering from amnesia. Brett was so concerned about Kenny trying to commit suicide that he had a psychiatric social worker called in to talk to Kenny.
The psychiatric social worker could not comprehend how such a mild-mannered, considerate person could have strangled two women unless he was suffering from a multiple personality disorder. Kenny got the message and crafted a wonderful scam, using his sprinkling of psychology from college and whatever he gleaned from seeing the movie classic, The Three Faces of Eve, years before.
Then Kenny really got lucky. The movie Sybil, another story of multiple personalities, was being shown on television just before Kenny was to be interviewed by Dr. John G. Watkins, an expert on multiple personalities and amnesia. This was the first step in an insanity defense, so Salerno and Finnegan caught a plane to Washington State.
Kenny was very well prepared for his performance. Shortly after Dr. Watkins believed that he had hypnotized Kenny, Kenny went into his evil persona routine. It was Steve Walker -- Kenny's supposed alter ego -- who killed the girls in Los Angeles with his cousin, Angelo. Steve also made Kenny strangle the two women in Bellingham.
Despite Kenny's preparations, he slipped up a number of times when he was pretending to be Steve and referred to Steve as "he" when it should have been "I." Salerno picked up these slips immediately, but Dr. Watkins did not seem to notice.
Dismayed that Dr. Watkins was completely falling for Kenny's act, Salerno called Grogan to tell him what was going on. Grogan answered, "Okay, I got a great idea. The judge says to Bianchi, 'Mr. Bianchi, I tell you what I'm going to do. I am going to let Ken off. Ken is acquitted. But Steve gets the chair.'"
Distressing as it was for the detectives to watch Kenny create this insanity defense, it did have the advantage of implicating Angelo.
Later, Salerno presented a photo lineup to Markust Camden, the man who had seen Judy Miller get into a car the night she died. He picked out Angelo from the photo lineup immediately, but did not recognize Kenny. The only downside to this positive identification was that Markust had checked himself into a mental hospital for depression -- something that a defense lawyer would use to try to discredit Markust's testimony.
Grogan had a similar experience when he showed the photo lineups to Beulah Stofer, the woman who had seen Lauren Wagner abducted. She selected Bianchi and Buono right away.
When Bianchi's lawyer indicated that Dr. Watkins's testimony would be the basis for Kenny filing a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, the court brought in additional expertise. Dr. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist who was expert on the subject of multiple personalities, talked with Kenny.
Dr. Allison was even more taken in than Dr. Watkins was by Kenny's now-practiced performance. According to Darcy O'Brien, Dr. Allison seemed to be frightened by the threatening persona of Steve that Kenny created for him.
Salerno thought the name of Kenny's evil persona sounded familiar. In going through Kenny's papers, they found it. Thomas Steven Walker was the name on a letter Bianchi had signed to apply for a California State University diploma that he would use to fraudulently offer psychological counseling services.
The prosecution had no intention of letting Kenny get away with his insanity defense. Dr. Martin T. Orne, a major authority on hypnosis, was called upon to determine if Kenny was faking. Dr. Orne had developed procedures by which he could determine whether a subject was actually hypnotized or was just pretending to be. Kenny's responses to three out of four tests proved that he was faking.
Dr. Orne had another little trap for Kenny. He told Kenny that there might be a problem with the diagnosis of multiple personalities. "That's pretty rare for there to be just two [personalities]," Dr. Orne told him. Usually, there were three and often, many more than that. "Dr. Orne wanted to establish that Kenny was reacting to cues and clues thrown out by doctors. If Kenny was faking multiple personality disorder, he would find a way to invent a third personality." (O'Brien)
Not one to disappoint the doctor, Kenny had been listening closely and quickly invented a new persona named Billy. Soon there were two new additional personalities to please Dr. Orne. Kenny's head was getting crowded.
The prosecution also brought in Dr. Saul Faerstein to interview Kenny. Faerstein did nothing to coddle Kenny and Kenny became worried that his performance was not playing to a receptive audience this time.
When Dean Brett presented the findings of Drs. Watkins and Allison to support Kenny's insanity defense, the prosecution brought forward Drs. Orne and Faerstein, both of whom stated that Kenneth Bianchi was competent to stand trial.
"The Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office offered Kenny a deal. If he pled guilty to the Washington murders and to some of the Hillside stranglings, he would get life with the possibility of parole and he would be able to serve his time in California, where the prisons were supposedly more humane than in Washington. In return, Bianchi was to agree to testify truthfully and fully against Angelo Buono. For Bianchi, the choice was between death in Washington or life in California." (O'Brien)
Kenny agreed. Now the Los Angeles detectives got a crack at him to see if he would provide credible testimony. A number of investigators, including L.A. County deputy district attorney Roger Kelly, participated in the interviews. They all hoped that the interviews would produce information that would help convict Angelo. In California at that time, a person could not be convicted only on the testimony of an accomplice. However, if other evidence confirmed the accomplice's testimony, it could be used for conviction.
Kenny described how he and Angelo pretended to be policemen. They had fake badges to support that charade. With the victims who were prostitutes, it was surprisingly easy for them to convince the victims to get in the car. The "nice" girls were much harder to manipulate.
An important moment in these interviews came when Salerno asked Kenny what type of material was used to blindfold Judy Miller. Kenny thought it was foam that Angelo used in his auto upholstery business. The little piece of fluff that Salerno had found on the dead girl's eyelids could be just the kind of corroborating evidence they needed to nail Angelo.
Salerno also found out that the hillside dump sites for the victims was selected because Angelo was familiar with that area since one of his girlfriends had lived around there. The investigators also learned about their attempt to pick up Peter Lorre's daughter.
Kenny went on and on, describing each murder in detail as though it was cocktail conversation. There was no remorse and any concern about the victims as human beings. He answered the mystery of the long, torturous death of Kristina Weckler by gas asphyxiation. This murder was so horrible that even Kenny didn't want to talk about it. "She was brought out to the kitchen and put on the floor and her head was covered with a bag and the -- pipe from the newly installed stove, which wasn't fully installed yet, 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 with a bag and tied to make more complete sealing." It took about an hour and a half of suffering before she died.
Eventually, the reality of his situation dawned on him and Kenny looked to place the blame on someone else. His lawyer, armed with the evidence against him, convinced Kenny that he had no choice but to admit his guilt and accept punishment.
Kenny was ordered to serve two life sentences in the state of Washington. He was immediately transferred to California where he was sentenced to additional life terms. He was looking at thirty-five years in California prisons and additional time in Washington.
Angelo was arrested on October 22, 1979, shortly after Kenny described his cousin's involvement in the crimes. Bob Grogan had the pleasure of arresting Angelo. Later, they found Angelo's wallet, which clearly showed the outline of the police badge he had used to get his victims to cooperate with him.
But the prosecutorial environment in California was going against bringing Angelo to trial. The DA had dropped the five California murders charges against Bianchi so that he no longer had the threat of the death penalty hanging over him. There was less incentive for Kenny to cooperate.
Also, Kenny was becoming unmanageable. The police in California hated him and made it clear. Kenny could not accept their disapproval and started to make up stories to exculpate himself. He dreamed up a second man who was responsible for the killings.
Eventually, he started to feel guilty for implicating Angelo. He began to change his story about Angelo's involvement. His credibility as a witness against Angelo was virtually destroyed.
Very much in the back of Kenny's self-serving performances was the prisoner code -- death to informers. If acting like a nut case allowed Angelo to go free, Kenny wouldn't be targeted as a "snitch." Whereas if his testimony put his cousin in jail, Kenny's existence in prison would be jeopardized.
As bizarre as Kenny's state of mind was, it did not compare with that of his creative girlfriend, Veronica Compton. She was supposedly writing a play called The Mutilated Cutter about a woman serial killer. She wanted desperately to talk to him to understand better the mind of a murderer.
Veronica fell in love with Kenny immediately.
Kenny saw opportunity in this relationship. He made a startling proposal -- one that could, if successful, grant him the freedom to spend his life with her. If she could just go to Bellingham and strangle a girl to make it look like the same man who killed Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Maybe even plant semen on the murdered girl.
It was one hell of a favor to ask, but Veronica agreed immediately.
Kenny was a nonsecretor, which meant in the days before DNA testing that his blood type could not be determined from his semen. Kenny packed Veronica off to Washington with a fresh load of his semen in a plastic glove.
Once Veronica got into this project, it was a bit more intimidating than it seemed in the planning. When she arrived in Bellingham, she had to build up her courage with large amounts of alcohol and cocaine.
Finally fortified, Veronica lured a woman into driving her to a motel and coming into the room for a drink. Veronica lunged at her with a cord and tried to strangle her, but the woman was too strong and threw Veronica over. In a rare lapse into rationality, Veronica decided it was time to go back to California.
But rationality did not overstay its welcome and Veronica, when she arrived at the San Francisco airport, distinguished herself by creating some kind of hysterical disturbance. To make matters irreparably worse, Veronica sent a letter and tape to the Bellingham authorities telling them that they had arrested an innocent man and pointed to the recent strangling attempt to prove that the real culprit was still at large. It did not take terribly sophisticated police work to link the police report of the woman Veronica tried to strangle with the photo of the lady who created the disturbance in the airport that same afternoon.
With Veronica's future assistance compromised, Kenny love for her cooled overnight. Veronica got the message and quickly found herself a new beau -- imprisoned serial killer Douglas Clark, who made Kenny seem like a Boy Scout. Douglas, who usually beheaded his female victims after he tortured them, sent Veronica a valentine with a photo of a headless female corpse.
This spontaneous gesture of affection from Clark inspired in Veronica a great passion. She wrote to Clark, "I take out my straight razor and with one quick stroke I slit the veins in the crook of your arm. Your blood spurts out and spits atop my swelled breasts. Then later that night we cuddle in each other's arms before the fireplace and dress each others wound with kisses and loving caresses." Kenny's loss was Clark's gain.
Now both Kenny and Veronica were in jail.