In Cold Blood E-Book

OJ Modjeska

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A collection of three true crime titles by OJ Modjeska, now available in one volume!
Ace In The Hole: A glamorous Hollywood actress and playwright seeks the insights of a notorious serial killer. But what starts as research for her new play quickly spirals into a twisted obsession as she underestimates the killer's charm. Love and madness intertwine, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, as the killer challenges her devotion in a deadly game mirroring her own play. From the author of 'Gone: Catastrophe In Paradise' and the acclaimed 'Murder by Increments' series, Ace In The Hole uncovers an astonishing true story of obsession and deception in American true crime history.
Happy Land - A Lover's Revenge: Step into the harrowing aftermath of one of the deadliest fires in American history. As the annual Punta Carnivale celebrations turn into a horrific inferno, 87 party-goers perish in a matter of minutes, trapped and suffocated before the flames even reach them. But this devastating disaster is no accident. In this gripping true story, detectives uncover the chilling truth: an arsonist with a sinister motive is behind the tragedy. Happy Land reveals the dark underbelly of violence against women and the plight of the vulnerable, reminding us of the consequences of societal indifference. Prepare to be shaken by this haunting tale, which sheds light on a forgotten chapter of New York's history.
A City Owned: In the twisted underbelly of Los Angeles, a series of gruesome crimes shocks the city. As the police investigation unfolds, a chilling realization dawns: the perpetrator may be one of their own. Amidst the chaos, an arrest provides a breakthrough, but the suspect claims no memory of the crimes. Is he a mentally ill man tormented by a sinister alter ego, or is there something more sinister at play?

Leseprobe

IN COLD BLOOD

A COLLECTION OF TRUE CRIME

OJ MODJESKA

CONTENTS

Ace In The Hole

Letter to Kenneth Bianchi from Veronica Compton

Foreword

Preamble

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Postscript

Happy Land — A Lover’s Revenge

Foreword

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Postscript

A City Owned

Foreword

I. Panic

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

II. A City Owned

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

III. Fresh Ground

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2023 O.J. Modjeska

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

ACE IN THE HOLE

THE BAD ROMANCE BETWEEN A LEGENDARY KILLER AND A HOLLYWOOD PLAYWRIGHT

LETTER TO KENNETH BIANCHI FROM VERONICA COMPTON

Ken,

You don’t know me but I would like to visit you. My name is Ver Lyn. I am a playwright and I am currently writing a fictional play entitled The Mutilated Cutter. The story is about a female mass murderer.

[The opening to the letter playwright Veronica Compton sent to serial killer Kenneth Bianchi in prison]

FOREWORD

VERONICA

This novella is based on real events that took place in Los Angeles, California, and Washington State in the late seventies and early eighties. At the center of the story are two arrestingly strange individuals who fell into an unlikely romance: Veronica Lynn Compton, then a Hollywood actress and playwright, and infamous serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, best known—along with his cousin Angelo Buono—as one of the Hillside Stranglers.

The Hillside Stranglers are notorious entries in the true crime hall of fame. They raped, tortured and strangled ten women in Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, dumping their naked bodies on suburban streets and beside freeways in the hills north of Los Angeles, terrorizing the city over a five-month period. Veronica Compton, by contrast, is hardly known. The story of her relationship with then incarcerated Kenneth Bianchi has long been a mysterious footnote in the larger story of the Hillside Stranglers.

I wrote this piece with a view to finally telling that story in comprehensive detail. A truncated version forms a chapter of my book Killing Cousins, the second volume in the two-part series Murder by Increments, about the Hillside Stranglers. Some readers approached me after reading that book and expressed interest in the Veronica Compton/Kenneth Bianchi episode, suggesting that they would like to know more about it. Within Murder by Increments, I didn’t have space to explore the story in detail, but I agreed that it was perhaps deserving of its own treatment. I was hardly surprised by my readers’ comments because it really is one of the most bizarre true tales I have come across in my many years of research in criminal topics.

Why? First of all, one truly wonders how it was that Veronica Compton, a glamorous and educated member of the Hollywood elite, not only got entangled with a serial killer like Bianchi, but herself ended up in jail due to her involvement in some seriously demented criminal schemes. The curiosity of the situation is compounded by the fact that since her release from prison in 2003—she served twenty-two years—Compton has been an apparently normal and functional member of society. Superficially, this case bears a resemblance to others in which women typify the serial killer “groupie” archetype, where female perpetrators don’t just fall in love with murderers but are themselves essentially violent and unhinged. Such claims were made about Veronica, but there is a counter-narrative too: that she is an essentially normal woman who was led astray by the psychologically damaging effects of her Hollywood lifestyle, and the influence of Bianchi—an influence which she later described as almost supernatural in its power and intensity.

The woman at the heart of this case is in so many ways an enigma. Born in 1956, Compton was the daughter of a Mexican immigrant father and a white Caucasian mother, with the sultry looks you would expect to result from such a union—and, as one of her erstwhile Hollywood peers was quoted as stating, “a body you would kill for”. Her beauty gained her much attention in the Hollywood hills where she grew up, with the result that she easily found modeling and acting work. But her father, Armando Campero, was a political cartoonist and muralist, so Veronica also grew up steeped in the values of culture and education. She mixed with politicians, lawyers and judges, attended the theater and read the classics. And while she was earning money from her acting and modeling, her true passion was a more intellectual pursuit: writing for the stage and screen.

In many ways, Compton thus embodied the contradictions of life as experienced by so many Hollywood women: she was simultaneously an object—the target of the male gaze, a projection of fantasy—and a creator, with the tension between both poles pulling her in opposite directions. The story of her involvement with Bianchi, the devastating consequences of that relationship, and her journey back to civilian life is similarly illustrative of these universal dilemmas of female experience. The crux of her relationship with Bianchi, this author feels, is aptly expressed in a chilling quote attributed to Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino: “The pain of being treated like a mere object. And a sense that this pain could turn into pleasure.”

Whatever Veronica’s physical charms, her chief characteristic at the time she met Bianchi was a steely determination to rise to the top of her field. She was beyond ambitious and hungry for success, and her desire to make it as a writer led her straight to Bianchi. She decided, quite reasonably, that if she could gain access to him, she could capitalize on his notoriety to create an explosive script in the horror genre.

However driven and intelligent Veronica was, and however seemingly privileged, the situation behind closed doors was rather different. As you will learn in the following pages, her life up until the time she met Bianchi was characterized by a beyond-average measure of struggle, suffering and unhappiness; she experienced things that a young person of her station in life should never be expected to endure.

It seemed that these adversities fed into her ambition, but her youth and instability made her prone to recklessness. Veronica was only twenty-four at the time, but so intent was she on leveraging Bianchi’s fame for her own purposes that she wrote to him several times while he was in prison.

When her initial letters failed to elicit a response, she sent him a photograph of herself, which is now known as the most readily available image of Veronica Compton on the internet.

The simple black and white image is intentionally provocative. Veronica is wearing a nightgown, which appears to be wet—possibly she has just emerged from a night-time dip in a swimming pool—and her body shows through the translucent material. She holds in her hand a mysterious object, possibly a small bottle, maybe containing alcohol. Behind her are some sumptuous-looking drapes, suggestive of her lifestyle of glamor, wealth and privilege.

The picture raises so many questions, and presumably did so in the mind of Kenneth Bianchi; one senses that it was surely Veronica’s design. What kind of woman goes swimming at night in her nightgown? Who took the photograph—a lover perhaps? Or was there some kind of party going on, hence the alcohol and the raucous and eccentric behavior?

And most of all, what kind of woman not only appears in such a picture, but is bold enough to mail it to a documented rapist and murderer, convicted of the most grisly and horrific crimes?

On face value, without knowledge of the context, the image is simply an attractive photograph, with a sensual, seductive vibe. Once we know that it was mailed to Bianchi, however, it takes on additional meanings.

We have to ask, who was this woman? What was she about? What was her intent?

PREAMBLE

KEN

The year was 1980, and serial killer Kenneth Bianchi, one half of the murderous duo the Hillside Stranglers, was locked up in the Los Angeles County jail awaiting the outcome of preliminary hearings in the upcoming trial of his cousin and accomplice, Angelo Buono. At the conclusion of their Los Angeles rampage in February 1978, Ken fled to Bellingham, Washington, ostensibly to be with his common-law wife Kelli Boyd and their baby son Ryan—but really to get away from Angelo, who had threatened to kill Ken after the two had a rather serious falling out. The tenuous but optimistic little family—Ken, Kelli and Ryan—were reunited in January 1979, but torn apart again a short time later, because apparently upstanding family man Ken hadn’t quite left the itch to kill behind in Los Angeles. Succumbing to his urges, he raped and strangled two more women in Bellingham, and this time—without the assistance of his cannier and more restrained partner-in-crime—he was immediately caught and arrested.

The hearings were being held merely to establish whether there was enough evidence to warrant a trial against Angelo. On this matter, Ken himself was fairly indifferent. His punishment had already been decided as part of his plea agreement. He agreed to testify against Angelo on the Los Angeles murder charges in exchange for being spared the death penalty in Washington, where he had committed the two final murders, those of young co-eds Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Those onerous charges included five life terms for the Los Angeles murders, one life term for conspiracy, and an additional five-year term for sodomy.

A trial simply meant he would have to endure the tedium of months or years in a courtroom, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, trying not to fall asleep, or perched for hours in a witness box. And Ken still wasn’t entirely comfortable with ratting his cousin out on the stand while they came face-to-face in the court. Ken was scared to death of Angelo.

But that was about the limit of Ken’s concern and discomfort. Instead, he was still ruminating about what had gone down back in Washington. He wanted the charges in the murders of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder revoked because that was when all the trouble had started. It was like a domino effect; his arrest in Washington had blown the case open in Los Angeles. He had confessed to the killings of the co-eds, but only because they had threatened him with the death penalty, and then the cops and prosecutors from Los Angeles had stitched him up: they told him the only way he could live was to confess to the Los Angeles murders too, and testify against Angelo.

Bianchi appeared before the Los Angeles Superior Court on Saturday morning, October 20, 1979.

Yes, I did, he said quietly as prosecutor Roger Kelly asked him if he killed each of five victims during the six-month killing spree in Los Angeles.

But Kenneth Bianchi, a confirmed liar known even for astoundingly elaborate stories and excuses on the stand, would surely never truly admit to anything. It would be more accurate to say that he was just playing the game, the dirty game orchestrated by the American justice system. And he was playing their way, but only for this particular round.

He had already confessed to five of the Los Angeles killings, but in his mind, that was just a minor obstacle. He could claim those confessions had been made under police pressure—in fact, within his mind, capable as it was of distorting and rationalizing any inconvenient fact away to his benefit, they indeed had been! The pigs had forced his hand. He also held a belief, underlined by a more robust accounting of reality, that hard evidence couldn’t be conclusively tied to him. The cops and attorneys were acting like they had him in the palm of their hand, but he knew that the physical descriptions supplied by witnesses were only that: descriptions.

Bianchi, like many serial killers, was practiced in the art of camouflage. He had changed his hair a lot over the years, at times wearing it short and curly, and at others long and straight. He would go with or without his mustache, seemingly at his whim, but there was always a purpose behind everything he did. How could these so-called “witnesses” be sure the man they saw was actually Ken? All their worthless statements showed was that a man who maybe looked like him had been seen (somewhere). So, if he could somehow retrospectively clear himself of the Washington murders, then he might be clear of the Los Angeles murders too—and he would be vindicated, and freed, and maybe even grow rich from a big book deal (or even better, a movie) about an innocent man’s victimization by the justice system.

There were those who thought Ken was simply crazy and delusional. He had continued to insist, despite hard evidence connecting him to the murders of the Washington co-eds, that he never had anything to do with it. Was he out of his mind, or just a habitual liar like most sociopaths?

His patterns of denial were so entrenched that the social workers and shrinks in Washington were convinced he was suffering amnesia for the time period of the murders there. Defense psychiatrists John Watkins and Ralph Allison placed Ken under hypnosis, and an evil alter personality “Steve” emerged and claimed responsibility for the killings. From there, they concluded he suffered MPD, Multiple Personality Disorder. Ken and his defense team claimed that Steve, who lurked inside him, killed the girls—not him.

But it had been a long, tough row to hoe since then. For Ken, there had been moments of optimism, real moments of hope—times when he thought freedom was on the horizon. The MPD theory, at first, seemed like it might be his way out. The defense psychiatrists said he was crazy—and who was he to argue, if it meant he might get out of jail?

But soon, it was a matter of one step forwards, two steps back. The prosecution’s psychiatrists conducted their own tests and experiments on Bianchi, and concluded that he had faked being hypnotized, and orchestrated the whole MPD diagnosis so as to escape the death penalty.

And then, the Los Angeles cops discovered that Steve Walker, Ken’s evil alter personality, was the name of a real living person—a person who had responded to an ad Ken placed in the paper years back for a psychologist job, just so Ken could obtain a legitimate testamur and transcripts to doctor for his purposes. Given that, it was unlikely Steve Walker was a real alter personality; he was a cooked-up entity Bianchi had performed for his own benefit. The whole thing, they now claimed, had been a hoax.

Truth be told, Ken’s situation was starting to look very grim indeed. His legal position suddenly seemed hopeless. He was trapped—he had already used and abused every last available exit strategy, and now found himself standing at the vending machine of justice with no coins left in his pockets.

The defenses of denial, amnesia, and finally, MPD had all failed. He had tried to get his mother Frances and his ex-girlfriend Angie Kinneberg to supply him with alibis. He’d tried to get Angelo on board, to collaborate to get themselves out of this now thoroughly unpleasant legal bind, but Angelo had grown fed up with Ken’s bullshit years ago and now refused to communicate with him at all. All overtures to his former idol were met with a stony wall of silence and contempt.

So what the hell was he supposed to do now?

But no matter what, he wouldn’t give up. He would never give up. He was an innocent man, and it would all be proven in the end.

With the arrival of some curious letters at his cell, a new opportunity was about to land in his lap. He couldn’t yet be sure (they were just letters after all), but his instincts—razor sharp as they always had been—were giving him a good feeling about these missives and their eccentric author.

Unbeknownst to her, Veronica was one of several women lining up to visit Ken in jail since his handsome face with its empty blue eyes had appeared on television and in newspapers in connection with the Hillside Strangler case. Due to his dangerousness, Bianchi had been installed in the high-security wing of the Los Angeles County Jail and yet, during set hours, he was allowed unlimited visitors. He enjoyed plenty of those, along with phone calls, tear-stained letters and dirty panties.

There were many women excited by the prospect of meeting Ken Bianchi. It was a phenomenon that shocked the hell out of his defense attorney, who had never before witnessed such female fervor directed towards a proven rapist and killer. Of course, Ted Bundy had his fan club, as did the Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, but that all happened later.

In time, such women’s psychopathology would be given a scientific name: hybristophilia. Hybristophilia is one of countless paraphilias, or abnormal and/or extreme sexual desires; in this case attraction to someone who has committed some outrageous or extraordinary crime, often violent and well outside society’s norms. The theory went that serial killers, whatever their many faults may be, are classic alpha males who tend to attract women because such men were good at protecting women and their offspring from other male predators throughout evolutionary history.

If Kenneth Bianchi assumed that Veronica Compton was a hybristophile, a serial killer groupie, he was in for a surprise, and was about to get more than he bargained for.

But then again, so was she.

CHAPTER1

There was plenty that Veronica didn’t know about Ken, but there was a thing or two that Ken didn’t know about Veronica either. Like the fact that she had already been watching him from afar for quite some time, and she didn’t just have sex on her mind.

The young playwright was trying to make it big in Hollywood and had just secured a contract with Intercontinental Films to write eight screenplays. Her latest stage play—Night Symphony—had already been performed around town. The play received mixed reviews, but Veronica was undeterred. She hammered furiously away at her typewriter at night, fueled by endless lines of cocaine. By day she took method acting classes with the venerable Lee Strasberg (for those not in the know, Dustin Hoffman and Marlo Thomas are graduates of Strasberg’s prestigious acting Master Class).

Veronica’s motto was “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Success in Hollywood for newcomers is assured only by back-breaking hard work. Hard work and being seen—anywhere and everywhere. To that end she attended all the “in” nightclubs clubs around town, like Pip’s and Sergio’s. She wore the latest fashions and made sure she showed her ample breasts to good advantage. She didn’t have it all, but she was on her way. She had an office in Beverly Hills, a personal secretary, and spent her weekends on a company yacht with her producers in Marina del Rey.

Veronica was one of the cool young things—a Hollywood power-player in the making. She was definitely going places and she didn’t have any time to waste getting there. When women had started turning up dead by the sides of freeways and suburban streets back in 1977—Ken and Angelo’s first victims—her fertile imagination was seized by the most magnificent idea: an incendiary plot for a new play in the horror genre.

The first victims had been prostitutes, their bare, violated bodies placed bizarrely, provocatively, for all to see. Then, the victim profile changed. Good girls, middle-class girls, suburban teenagers. Suspicions soon emerged that the perpetrators were posing as cops to lure their prey, or were even rogue officers themselves. The city suddenly assumed panic mode.

Women were too scared to leave their homes. They carried dog whistles and concealed weapons when they braved the outdoors.

Was Veronica scared when the naked, strangled bodies of women popped up, one after another, with escalating speed, reaching a fever pitch the Thanksgiving week of November 1977? Maybe a little. But Veronica wasn’t really like most women. It would be more accurate to say she was fascinated. There was a real story here.

In Hollywood, horror was the hot ticket genre in the late seventies, and Veronica had been absolutely hypnotized by the Hillside Strangler killings. Then, in 1979, she saw Ken Bianchi plastered all over the evening news, confessing in court to the murders of the two co-eds in Bellingham. This was her first look at the man not only convicted of two slayings in Washington, but the prime suspect in the Los Angeles Hillside murders.

He didn’t strike her as a bad guy. Actually, she was strangely touched by his tearful performance. And he was good-looking, sexy even.

She had since been following the developments in the Los Angeles case and just knew she had to meet this Kenneth Bianchi. She called the Hillside Strangler taskforce and told them she was looking for a copy of the tape of Ken’s interviews with the psychiatrists in Washington—strictly for research purposes, of course.

In the back of her mind, she was hoping for the outcome that exactly eventuated. The taskforce didn’t want to be bothered with this Hollywood crackpot and her dumb research project. They suggested she contact Ken directly, and gave her his booking number and postal details in prison.

Veronica deliberated for days about the best way to approach Ken, the letter she would draft, and how she could best exploit her words.

Meanwhile, she rationalized that her desire to meet him was entirely a matter of doing research for her play. She was, after all, a serious artist. Her work had covered a range of topics, including politics, murder, history and psychological drama. The diversity of themes was bridged only by a certain darkness and morbidity, but she always undertook detailed research on her field of study. Part of being a real writer was doing all the groundwork and getting the “primary sources”. She read up on criminology and forensics, talked to detectives and doctors, and researched serial killers. She had a big file at home stuffed with news clippings relating to the Hillside Strangler case and the murders and hearing in Washington. The file was indexed by date and she had underlined passages from the clippings and articles with a view to better understanding her “subject”.

There were other motives beyond lust and fame. A major one was financial. The appearance of success was somewhat superficial, and not fully reflected on the balance sheet, which was unsurprising given that a lot of Veronica’s money went straight up her nose. She might have had an office in Beverly Hills, but her actual living quarters in Carson were embarrassing. She was still living in a trailer, just as she had after she first left home.

She really needed the money she hoped the play’s success would bring her. She also hoped to cash in on Bianchi’s notoriety by interviewing him for an article to be released at the same time as the play.

As much as she believed she was in control of the process with Bianchi, the reality was a bit different. Veronica’s lustful and dark predilections, many commentators have asserted, were already shown by her involvement in the Los Angeles S&M club scene. Arguably, they said, her involvement with a serial killer was an extension of that preoccupation and behavior. Ken was into putting girls’ heads in plastic bags and binding them with rope; well, so was she—she was just “enjoying” it from the other side of things.

This author will not necessarily be drawn into making such inferences. Involvement in sex clubs is and has for a long time been part and parcel of the career ascension ladder for many women in Hollywood, especially actresses. Such is not always enjoyable or even consensual. The scene is one where neophytes are groomed and exploited into seeing their value in what they can do for male power players in Hollywood, all in exchange for money and “favors”—much like the good old “casting couch”. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant in these communities, just as it is in the realms of sex work and pornography. Up-and-comers medicate away their woes with cocaine and booze as a way to ward off the pain of confronting the reality of what they are doing to themselves and each other, just to get themselves out there.

Certainly it would appear this was the case for Veronica, for as serious as she might have been about her career, her aura of bohemian privilege concealed a personal condition of chronic disarray and, on many analyses, abject misery. She was a chronic cocaine abuser and alcoholic. Large quantities of scotch smoothed the edges of her coke benders, and helped her sleep afterwards, along with downers such as Quaaludes. She also fancied the hallucinogen PCP (Angel Dust) occasionally, to keep things interesting.

But drugs and alcohol were not the limit of what troubled Veronica’s mind. All the intoxicants, she claimed, helped her forget a past filled with physical and sexual abuse. The abuse started very early on and came at the hands of a succession of men, first her father and brother, and then various others who weren’t first-degree relatives but whom she had nonetheless trusted for one reason or another.

Compton’s later interviews document a truly astounding background prior to meeting Bianchi. She mentioned being committed to an asylum, being used by a prostitution ring posing as a modeling agency, extensive surgeries for breast and cervical tumors, sidelines as a madam and compulsive Baccarat player in Las Vegas, participation in an international drug smuggling operation, and through it all, countless rapes and beatings by her father, her brothers and her many lovers and boyfriends.

I had run away from home repeatedly. I had become a narcotics addict and dealer. I had lived on the streets… and, in a gated mansion.

A woman with a past like Veronica’s is well-prepped to fall into the snare of a sociopath. She had known little in her intimate relationships other than degradation and abuse; what more perfect lover than one who can recreate the same expectations, the same trauma?

Ken Bianchi was a rapist and a hater of women. He didn’t just rape and beat them though, he killed them. The sad truth is that many serial killers are just garden variety abusers who take their abuse to the utmost extreme—murder. They find that they enjoy killing, and they keep doing it.

Veronica rounded out the shocking history of abuse in a characteristically excusatory manner:

Molestation began at five. I was raped at twelve. I was trying to “fit in” and got into a car with a teenager from my neighborhood. A slick kid, fancy car. He coerced me into taking drugs with him, then he raped me. That was my first introduction to “intimacy”. My brother tried to become “head of household”. I can’t blame him for his abuse—he only had my father to model. I kept my feelings to myself. I went to finishing school. I went to live with my father in the Hollywood Hills. It was a grand life, but incredibly dysfunctional.

As she later explained, by the time she met Ken she had done and seen a lot, and made and lost vast sums of money. She was still hopeful, she had a fire in her belly, but she was also utterly exhausted, broken and haunted by a sense of false gains and real losses.

Along this tortured journey, she had also managed to give birth to a child, a little boy. The father of Veronica’s son was a boxer, whom she had married to save her reputation after becoming pregnant. He was wealthy, but what Veronica had assumed was “family money” was actually a result of his involvement in a Mexican drug ring. He was caught and imprisoned shortly after they were married.

Meanwhile, Veronica had started dating Nathan Shappell, the CEO of Shappell Industries, a major California real estate development company. Unfortunately, Nathan was married and was going back and forth on whether to leave his wife to start a legitimate union with Veronica. Veronica, naive as many women are, believed Nathan when he told her wanted to be with her—and yet, he disappointed her over and over again.

Veronica, while holding it together on the outside, was truly struggling; raising a son alone while her husband was in jail, trying to convince an apparently loving but ultimately self-interested man of her devotion, and walking the fine line between medicating her torment with drugs and being completely overwhelmed by her addictions.

She was a Hollywood woman though, and she was driven to be somebody. To her mind that meant money and fame.

Ken was going to be her ticket to the big time.

CHAPTER2

Veronica’s new play,The Mutilated Cutter, was inspired by the Hillside Strangler killings, but with a creative twist. The lead character was a solo female serial killer, not a man or a team of two guys. But, like Ken and Angelo, this murderer was a hater and killer of women. She kidnapped the girls, tortured them—mutilating them with a knife—and strangled them.

But the perp had come up with a neat trick to throw the police off. She took a syringe and injected semen into the women’s vaginas after they were killed. This way, the cops would assume it was a male killer they should be looking for.

The play’s gestational concept had appeared, as we have seen, when the Hillside killings began in 1977, and it was now into its fourth year of development. Veronica had completed many other plays in much, much shorter time frames, but this one, she just couldn’t finish. It had become an obsession for her, one that went on and on and on. She knew this particular play had to be her masterpiece, the creation that she would be remembered for. It had to be perfect. And once an assignation with Ken was within view, she finally knew why she couldn’t finish it. She needed him. It would never be all that it could be without the kind of authentic inside detail that Ken’s input would provide.

I knew I might have to rewrite after talking with him. I was trying to capture what I defined as the “pathos” of the serial killer.

Thrilled with all the possibilities, but equally nervous that she might never receive a reply, she penned a letter to Ken and posted it to the Los Angeles County jail. After all her deliberations, she went with something short, to the point and professional. She was a writer after all, and this was about work.

Ken,

You don’t know me but I would like to visit you. My name is Ver Lyn. I am a playwright and I am currently writing a fictional play entitled The Mutilated Cutter. The story is about a female mass murderer.

The letter was signed “Veronica Lyn Compton, pen-name Ver Lyn”. Enclosed with it was a draft of the author’s play.

Ken perused the manuscript, not having much else to do as he whiled away the hours in his cell.

How strange! And how interesting. It seemed to be about the murders he had committed with Angelo. But with a female as the killer.

Nobody will ever know for sure how Ken received Veronica’s play, except in the utilitarian sense it was ultimately applied. Ken was a reader, and fond of books, as the police discovered when they raided the home he shared with Kelli Boyd in Bellingham. However, they realized in the end that his interest in books was mostly related to his propensity for researching his way out of legal jams. He read books about MPD, police science and psychology.

It is possible though that since he ultimately dismissed Veronica as “trash”, he thought her play was as well. Ken could never respect anything made by a woman. Surely he was flattered that someone had thought his life’s work worth writing a stage play about; it fed his narcissistic passion for celebrity. But he didn’t care at all for the substitution of a female in the role of the male principal character; it struck him as a cheap gimmick, some kind of trendy allusion to feminism. Above all, he was being eclipsed as the agent in his own drama—by a woman, no less. That was unacceptable. It ruined the effect as far as he was concerned, and that is the likeliest explanation for why Ken ignored Ver Lyn’s letter.

Veronica was initially perturbed by Ken’s lack of response. But without him she was now convinced The Mutilated Cutter could not proceed. She had to keep trying. She had to hit on the thing that would make him respond. So she kept writing letters to Ken, and eventually she enclosed a photograph of herself. And finally, she had his attention. It was disappointing to her that once again, she had to objectify herself to get what she wanted from a man. Who she really was, what she had to say, wasn’t nearly enough. But she reasoned that in this circumstance, the ends had definitely justified the means.

She was a sexy, buxom brunette. Exotic. In the photograph, she wore a transparent nightgown that showed her nipples. It looked like she’d been swimming in her nightgown before the picture was taken.

This woman seemed a little wild. Ken relented and invited Veronica to come and see him in prison.

* * *

When the big day arrived, Veronica took extra time and care with her make-up and put on the most revealing dress she could find in her closet.

Ken was not disappointed. Apart from a slightly porcine nose, Veronica was really very beautiful.

They gazed at each other, smiling, across the thick glass that was there for Veronica’s protection from a convicted mass killer and rapist.

“What do you think?” Veronica asked excitedly, waiting nervously for Ken’s approval.

“It’s wonderful!” Ken enthused. “I liked what you did there, with the female in the role of the murderer…”

There is no way of knowing what prompted Ken to revise his opinion of Veronica’s play, but it is probable that Ken had reread the script and already been struck by the idea he hoped would secure his freedom.

In fact, Ken was far less interested in Veronica than the central idea of her play. It tied in with a theory about the murders that he already fervently believed, which was that somebody other than himself was responsible. That person might even be a woman. Ultimately though, their gender didn’t matter; what was important was that they could be shown to be still active, still out there killing people, while they had the wrong man—Ken—locked up in prison.

The idea of injecting semen into the bodies was particularly interesting to him. Maybe “that person” could even go out and kill someone, and put his semen in the victim’s body, while he was still safely in prison? Wouldn’t that prove they had the wrong guy?

“I’ve done a lot of work on it,” Veronica said. “A lot of in-depth research.”

“Oh, come on…” Ken said, smiling. “It’s very realistic, very true-to-life… I think you are just like me.”

There was a glitter in his hard blue eyes. Veronica felt her pulse quickening. She didn’t know what she was feeling—terror, or intense attraction.

Veronica realized that Ken thought she had written from experience and was herself a murderer. He wasn’t really taking seriously the possibility that she had only got in touch with him to do research for her play; she was obviously a serial killer groupie, one of those crazy bloodthirsty broads who want to hook up with a male alpha killer.

Well, he was wrong about that. Or was he? Veronica wasn’t crazy and she wasn’t a killer. But if she was honest with herself, her motives were not entirely pure. But that was the problem. She was having a very hard time being honest with herself.

Whatever, she thought. She decided to play along.

I told Ken I had killed someone, but he was the first person to know. It would have to be our secret.

She later explained this tactic away by saying that she wanted Ken to think she was like him, so that he would keep talking to her.

I didn’t care what he believed. I wanted his help to make the play a financial success. I thought I was using him. I didn’t realize he was a far better manipulator than me.

Despite this exchange, in which Ken had insinuated that they shared something very special because they were cut from the same murderous cloth, Ken insisted to her that he hadn’t actually killed any of the girls in Los Angeles or in Bellingham. They totally had the wrong guy. The cops were lazy. They just wanted to point the finger at someone to take the pressure off themselves. They had taken so long to solve the case and they still hadn’t solved it. It was embarrassing to them—someone had to take the fall.

“I confessed under duress! The cops and the criminal justice system stitched me up… and now… I’ll never see my son again.”

Veronica’s boy was close to Ryan’s age. Another point in common. The more she and Ken talked about the pain of separation from one’s children—a pain that she could most certainly relate to, as there had been times when the boxer ex-husband had tried to keep her from her kid—the more she found herself sympathizing with him.

Veronica probably was not yet aware of just how seamlessly Ken could go from being one thing to another. He was an incredible chameleon. The man that sat before her, of course, was the one he wanted her to see.

So pathetic, sitting there in his prison garb, so pale and listless. Crying about his son. He had lost so much weight. This skinny pale man didn’t seem big or strong enough to choke the life out of a woman with his bare hands. Despite what she knew about him, about his verified history as a rapist and killer, he tugged on her heartstrings, just like his repentant blubbery before Judge Kurtz in the courtroom in Washington when she saw him on TV.

And this is where the confusion and cognitive dissonance began to set in. Those who have been trapped in a relationship with sociopathic or otherwise character-disordered individuals will tell you from hard-won wisdom that such is the first sign that something is actually very, very wrong.

But Veronica was yet to obtain such painful schooling. Her ordeal was only just beginning.

* * *

After the first meeting with Bianchi, she went home, and in her own words, “followed the routine”: she made herself a drink, snorted a line of coke, and started writing up some loose notes for the article based on her interview with Bianchi.

But at some point, she realized she was overcome by a strange, dreamy feeling. Her concentration was diverted from her task.

I put it down to being high.

It’s possible that her feelings towards her “subject” were already morphing into something else, something she would identify at the time as love, but later would describe using terms such as “illusion”, “mirror”, “hallucination”.

She eventually believed that Bianchi had some kind of almost paranormal power—to completely take over her mind.

It was like a hypnotic state. I fell in love. I fell in love with an illusion… He’s extremely charismatic, manipulative, charming… and he trapped me in his mirror game.

* * *

It seemed that each had something the other wanted. Veronica was artistic, educated and well read, her letters peppered with quotes from various stalwarts of English literature: Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Pope and Dryden. She was an elite, and that made her desirable.

Ken told her that he envied her knowledge of literature, and he was probably being honest, since he had always coveted higher qualifications and a better position in society than his aptitudes and diligence could gain him. Though highly intelligent, Ken had been an academic underperformer throughout school and dropped out of his psychology and police science college courses before he could finish. Those who knew him put it down mostly to laziness and a belief that he deserved to succeed without effort. He didn’t feel inspired to complete his studies because he was only gaining a C average. But Veronica possessed the intellectual gifts, culture, and knowledge that he himself would have liked to have; it seems likely that there was an element of envy and resentment in his feelings towards her elite status that fed into his ultimately very cruel actions towards her.

As for Veronica, she coveted the aura of pure, mesmeric power that emanated from Bianchi. Despite appearances, she had really had so little of that herself throughout her life. An unconscious desire was perhaps forming: to take some of that raw power into herself, as if by osmosis.

Of course, it never actually works out that way.

Veronica sent Ken books to read, Strindberg and Ibsen, and he wrote her clumsy but not uncreative poems. Eventually they were speaking daily on the phone and exchanging many personal letters and tapes. In a short space of time, the interaction had subtly shifted well beyond a professional engagement.

During visits, she gazed dreamily, longingly, at the perfection of the elegant white hands that had tightened so many nooses. At the flawlessness of his unfeasibly straight nose. At the intensity of his hard blue eyes, described by author Chris Berry Dee who himself visited Bianchi in prison as “the eyes of a shark,” with an aside that “they were terrifying. There was nothing in there!”

Then one day she was roused from sleep by the jarring shriek of the telephone.

It was Ken. He sounded anxious and distraught.

These early morning calls would become a familiar pattern.

I tooted some cocaine, poured a triple scotch, and told him to tell me his troubles.

“It’s my mother. I think she’s dying.”

“My God. What happened?”

“Oh, she’s been sick for a while. But with my arrest, and going to prison, it’s been too much for her. It’s tipped her over the edge. I think this is really it now!”

Actually, Frances Bianchi was not sick at all, but Ken rambled on tearfully to Veronica about how she so badly wanted to believe in Ken’s innocence, and he wanted—no, needed—for her to have some peace of mind before she died.

Would Veronica call Frances and tell her that she knew Ken was innocent and that she was going to help him prove it? Would she—could she—please just do that for him?

“I don’t know, Ken…”

“Relax, Veronica! Pour yourself a drink.”

Ken was hoping he could use anybody on the outside that was in his corner—including Frances and Veronica—to influence the press. Veronica didn’t realize it, but the request was the first test of just how far she would be willing to go to get him out of jail.

When Veronica learned that Frances wasn’t actually sick, she was furious. She stormed into the Los Angeles County Jail to confront Ken on his lies.

The glass separating visitors from inmates meant that communications could only be heard through the two-way telephones installed for the purpose. Bianchi, after hearing Veronica’s outburst, sank to his hands and knees, with tears in his eyes, and mimicked begging for forgiveness.

Charmed by his apparent contrition, Veronica immediately excused him.

In future, Ken wouldn’t need to resort to such undignified performances on a regular basis. Veronica became more and more compliant, and rarely would she ever again try to challenge Ken on his deceptions.

How did it go down?… Well, basically over the next few months, ounces of cocaine, free-based, PCP, Quaaludes, gallons of scotch, hundreds of Talwins and tranquilizers later, I was eaten alive and had become the extension of the Hillside Strangler.

Such was the turnaround that Veronica did indeed contact Frances and even made several visits to the home she shared with her second husband. They had relocated to California so Frances could be nearer Ken in his time of need.

One evening Veronica and her son even scored an invite to dinner, which they gratefully accepted. Veronica introduced herself as Ken’s new girlfriend and told Frances that new evidence would soon come to light that would prove Ken was innocent, and that he would be released in a matter of months.

Ken certainly had his reasons for being so confident he would soon be freed, outlandish though they were—for now, he didn’t share them with Veronica.

She believed she was falling in love with Ken, and told him that she would be willing to die for him.

It seems Ken took this statement quite literally.

He had so much confidence in his scheme that he placed a call to the sister of his ex-partner Kelli Boyd to ask if she could recommend a good lawyer to look after some real estate matters. He wanted to sell Veronica’s trailer and buy a nice comfortable home they could settle into once he was out of prison, which thanks to Veronica’s “support”, he surely would be.

As for Kelli herself, Ken had long since stopped calling her and trying to get her to change her mind about him. That damn woman was so stubborn. What was all his effort worth? She didn’t love him, never had. Time to move on with someone new… “If someone leaves a hole in your life, fill it with something better,” as they say.

The phone call to Linda, Kelli’s sister, would ensure Kelli found out about it. Ken probably could have got a referral to a property lawyer from any number of people—he interacted with lawyers on a regular basis after all—but he wanted to take the opportunity to rub Kelli’s nose in his new relationship.

CHAPTER3

The early steps of the plan were easiest. It might have even been considered fun. Ken warmed Veronica up by giving her the fun part first.

One reason Ken was so insistent that he was innocent of the murders in Los Angeles was that he had an alibi. He had been seeing a woman back then. On the nights he was allegedly killing women, he was going on dates, buying this woman wine and dinner and flowers. He loved women! See how they just had him so wrong?

“I told the cops I was with a woman, a woman in her twenties with dark brown hair, who met me in Universal City. They didn’t believe me, but they might if… see, you could be that woman, Veronica. You are in your twenties. You have dark brown hair.”

Ken blabbered on excitedly. On one level Veronica registered that what he was saying didn’t actually make sense. But she listened anyway.

With her writing skills and her clever imagination, she could help him develop this genius alibi for the times of the Los Angeles murders. Ken and Veronica would document a relationship that had existed between them when the murders were going on, cooking up some convincing evidence that they had met up for dates and sex the nights the murders occurred.

Just how convincing did it have to be? Well, that’s where he needed her. He needed her smarts and her research skills. He needed her. He needed her. All this vacuous flattery directed at Veronica and her extraordinary talents succeeded admirably, and she particularly took note of that last part and ran with it.

At Ken’s instruction, Veronica went to the public library and researched newspaper articles for the dates on which the murders happened. He wanted her to find out about the weather conditions, movies that were playing those days, and any major events that were going on. They were creating memories for a love affair that hadn’t existed, and those memories had to be as realistic and true to life as possible.

Ken gave her samples of his handwriting and had her practice his signature so they could fake receipts from their “dates”. For these they would bribe bartenders; they also planned to bribe witnesses who would claim that they had been seen together.

The conspiracy was developed along the lines of a play rehearsal. Ken and Veronica imagined the scenes of a real love affair and then recreated them so they could be remembered effortlessly for the benefit of the police. Clothing, locations and dialogue were all included.

Perhaps Veronica’s favorite part of the process was where each discussed intimate details of their bodies so they could “recall” identifying marks (moles, freckles and so on). All this was such familiar and enjoyable territory for her. They were writing a beautiful story together. Not just writing it, but living it! She was well and truly in her element. And Ken knew that all this play-acting was stoking the fires of romance so that he could get her in just the right spot for her to do exactly what he wanted.

In my ever-diminishing rationale, I accepted the role of creative playmate. It was a game, it was all a fantasy—it was just a man in jail, locked behind towers and steel, we exchanged only words, ideas, fantasy—no more. What a story. What a book. A story, not real life.

* * *

Ken was happy to work on as many as angles as possible to get himself out of trouble as far as the California murders were concerned. Another idea he had—given his preparations for his participation in the upcoming trial of Angelo—was to simply make it appear that Angelo Buono had committed those killings alone. This, after all, was a simple reversal of the stance that Angelo’s defense team were taking—their position being that Ken had committed the murders by himself, and Angelo was the poor innocent bystander who had somehow been unfairly tarnished by association.

Ken gave Veronica sketches of Angelo’s house in Glendale. How about she go over there and break in? He wanted her to obtain samples of the rug. Fibers from the rug had been shown to match those found on one of the victim’s eyelids. Or she could pull up some dirt from under the house to imply an object had been buried, then removed. This “evidence” was known to the police and the killers, but not the public at large. If it was placed at the scenes of subsequent crimes, crimes that had occurred while he was in prison, the police would have to think Angelo alone was responsible. Or maybe Angelo and some other accomplice, but not Ken.

Veronica surely should have realized at this point that Ken had moved well off the topic of her project, and that she was getting mixed up in some seriously illegal and dangerous schemes. But she persuaded herself that she wasn’t actually going to follow through with anything. She would play along to keep Ken talking to her so she could finish her play.

The problem with this rationale was that the play wasn’t really going anywhere. This was supposed to be a professional engagement of mutual benefit, but all her time and energies were now absorbed in the task of assisting Ken with his legal predicament.

He wasn’t doing anything for her at all. There were plenty of idyllic-sounding promises of what might be down the road, however.

Veronica’s explanation for getting involved in the scheming, or one of them, is that she was losing her mind.

Veronica had been taking more and more cocaine. Whenever Ken met any resistance to his plans, he told her to snort another line, and pretty soon she would be compliant again.

As the days passed it became apparent to her that something was truly wrong with her physically, perhaps mentally. She began suffering from panic attacks. She was jittery, anxious, and sleep was almost impossible to come by. Perhaps naively, she did not relate these problems to her drug use. She claims she didn’t understand the possible long-term consequences of cocaine abuse.

Her life was assuming the pattern of indignity familiar to so many coke addicts. She barely ate, because she was never hungry. Her voluptuous body was slowly hollowing out into a cadaverous shell. If it ever occurred that she could manage to force some food down, she wouldn’t be able to taste it because her nasal passages were so congested. Her nose bled intermittently and sinus pain would turn into hideous migraines. Comedowns were unbearable and not to be countenanced; they were to be warded off swiftly by any means possible, whether it be yet more coke, or downers such as Scotch and Talwins. Uppers to get going in the morning. Downers to rest at night. Over and over again in an endless loop.

There was perhaps one final chance to pull back from the brink of insanity. Veronica checked herself into the Good Samaritan Hospital for tests, but was not entirely truthful with staff there about her drug consumption. Hence, they never uncovered the true cause of her growing mental instability.

The week she spent sequestered in hospital was enough to clear her system, and she improved, and was released—but then immediately started back on the drugs again.

Soon, the downers—no matter how strong or how many—had little effect.

Now she began to have seizures, see hallucinations, hear voices and was unable to sleep at all.

Hello, amphetamine psychosis.

My mind was a mishmash. I needed a drink, a pill, a drug to stop the nagging dread that ruled over my life. I needed rest but there was none, only voices that spoke gibberish, only visions of monsters and dark foreboding imagery that spun wildly out of control.

* * *

Everything was sliding away. At work, when she went in, she tried to act like things were cool. She got into the habit of walking around with earphones and a Walkman, to drown out the voices in her head.

Her friends and associates did not reach out to her; they started actively avoiding her. Her beauty and fashionable attire was mostly a memory. She was thin and disheveled, with unbrushed hair, wearing the same clothes days in a row. Who was this hobo?

Worse, Veronica had begun to imagine that she was stalked by a shadowy presence that she called, for lack of a better term, the Boogie Man. The Boogie Man was almost certainly a hallucination or delusion brought on by Veronica’s heinous drug abuse and consequent psychosis; but to her, he was very real—and he was everywhere. Under the car seat, in the closet, under her bed, outside the shower…

She was gradually losing all ability to reason with herself or distinguish reality from fantasy, and as a result, she was unable to dismiss the creeping entity as any product of imagination and grew increasingly terrified.

When in a state of psychotic delusion, it is normal for drug users to experience hallucinations that are projections of their internal psychic states. In Veronica’s case, Ken had dominated the landscape of her mind for so long that it is reasonable to assume that the Boogie Man was essentially a projection of Ken and his barely disguised malicious and controlling energies. Ironically, Veronica began to imagine that Ken was her only defense against the monster behind the door.

As the surrealistic world fused with the disorganized voices, their combined power found higher ground where energies were under their control. My own mind became more and more vacant as the thoughts of others were gathered. Life was purposeless; all was magic. There were no choices in life, only the passive sleep of an abducted consciousness. With weak eyes and a soul battered to complete helplessness, I was carried from one visual and audial [sic] horror to the next. I had no power whatsoever to halt the taking of the familiar world. It was being taken from my eyes, ears and body, and nobody had answers to what was wrong…

Ken told her he could help her, but only if he was released from prison. And the only way he was going to be freed was if she helped him carry out his plan. She had to follow all his instructions and do exactly what he told her.

Ken had been in frequent contact by phone, mail and recorded tapes from the time they met. As the months passed, he stepped it up. He kept tabs on Veronica and made sure he always knew where she was and what she was doing.

The Boogie man wasn’t stalking her—he was. He made sure that he was omnipresent in her life, while others were gradually relegated to the sidelines. With Ken taking up all her time, and the obvious fact that she couldn’t share the details of the life she was now leading with others, she had nowhere else to go.

Veronica’s world had shrunk. In her madness and isolation, there was only Ken, the Boogie Man and herself. And such was exactly Ken’s design. The more he kept her from others, the more he could fill her head with his thoughts, and the more complete would be his control over her.

Now, as the destruction of her mind was accomplished, Veronica began to imagine that Ken, too, was following her (in the real, three-dimensional world that is). The logical part of her brain, or what remained of it, knew that was impossible—he was safely locked up in prison. But now she thought that she heard his voice on the radio, that he spoke to her through walls from other rooms, and that he knew her every move and thought.

In retrospect Veronica came to understand that part of the psychotic illness was the illusion of a telepathic bond with him. This bond she would come to regard as the classic “betrayal bond” (sometimes known as a traumatic bond) that tends to occur in relationships with sociopaths or narcissists—understood as a type of toxic and compulsive connection that occurs when someone develops an intense attachment to a person or an addictive process that is destructive to them. But in this instance, due to her perilous mental condition, the connection was rendered in full hallucinatory hypercolor.

In a diary note recorded in July 1980, Veronica wrote: Ken is everywhere, he knows my every move. He follows me. On the company yacht at sea, the radio transports his voice. At the Beverly Hills Hotel Polo Lounge, the phone is brought to my table. At the office up the road on Robertson Boulevard, the phone rings as I enter the reception room. At my father’s home, he meets me, then later driving home in the limousine, he’s on the car phone. Says he’ll call me at home in half an hour. More booze, more cocaine, more pills. There is nowhere he can’t find me. There is nowhere to get away to and to what end anyway. To meet my lunacy alone? More pills, more cocaine, more booze. The doctors know that I’m losing control but they haven’t locked me up. What’s happening? What is right? What is wrong? What is good or bad? I don’t know. I don’t know anything but Ken and Ken is God.

Now the time was perfectly ripe for Bianchi to implement the second part of his plan.