Free Couples Who Kill by Carol Anne Davis Page B

police badge scam, only to find she had a famous father. They let her go – and she was able to identify them.
    There were also several sexual assault charges because he’d raped and beaten the two girls he’d kept as prostitutes. Both took the stand and told of the regular abuse they’d endured at his hands.
    The defence countered that Angelo Buono was innocent, and that Ken Bianchi had committed all twelve of the murders. But Angelo had been seen helping to abduct Lauren Wagner and various incriminating fibres had been found in his home and workplace. He’d been obsessed with sodomy since he was a teenager, and almost all of the victims had been sodomised.
    The defence rightly pointed out that many people enjoy bondage and anal sex, but that, of course, wasn’t the point – the point was that Angelo’s couplings weren’t consensual. His aim had been to cause his victims maximum humiliation and pain before they died.
    After two long years of listening to the evidence, the jury retired to consider their verdict. They went out on 21st October 1983 and returned the following month, on 14th November, to convict him of nine of the murders. He was found not guilty of murdering prostitute YolandaWashington. (Ken Bianchi had carried out the strangling during that particular crime.)
    The sentencing was passed the following year, on 1st April 1984, when he was sentenced to nine life terms with no possibility of parole.
An unlikely alibi
    In June 1980, Ken received a letter from a beautiful aspiring playwright called Veronica Lynn Compton. As the child of a political cartoonist, she’d had a cultured background, mixing with politicians and judges. But she’d claim that she was first sexually assaulted at the age of five and was a frequent child runaway. She married and had a child in her teens but was now divorced from her son’s father. Age twenty-two, she was living in a trailer park and taking amateur acting roles, blotting out the pain of her past with an increasingly dangerous cocktail of cocaine and alcohol.
    A friend suggested that she write to Ken Bianchi as he could help her with her crime writing, so she watched him on television, feeling compassion when he broke down in tears. For the next year she visited or called him daily and they were soon writing poetry to each other and declaring their undying love.
    Veronica sent Ken one of her plays in which a female serial killer plants sperm in one of her victims to confuse detectives. It occurred to Ken that if she did this with
his
sperm the authorities would assume that the Bellingham killer was still out there and he’d be released. (Bizarrely, he seems to have forgotten that he’d also been found guilty of five out of the ten Hillside Strangler deaths.)
    His new girlfriend agreed to the plan and smuggled outa sample of his semen, sealed within the finger of a rubber glove and hidden in the spine of a book.
    She now disguised herself with sunglasses and a wig, using a cushion under her clothes to look pregnant. She travelled to Bellingham’s university campus and befriended a woman called Kim Breed in a bar. Kim kindly gave Veronica a lift back to her hotel room and Veronica begged her to come in and keep her company as she’d been deserted by the baby’s father. Kim agreed to have a drink in Veronica’s room. According to Veronica, she persuaded the woman to indulge in light bondage, telling her that she wanted to take photos to play a prank on a friend. The somewhat drunk young woman agreed to this too.
    But Ken Bianchi’s paramour suddenly took a cord from her bag and wrapped it around Kim’s neck, pulling tightly. Fighting for her life, Kim managed to grab hold of the would-be killer’s arms and flip her over so that she crashed to the floor. Veronica attacked her again, then broke down crying, saying that ‘he’ had made her do it. Kim tried to find out who ‘he’ was, but the younger woman simply sobbed the same phrase over again.
    Kim fled, her