Kenneth A. Bianchi, one of two men convicted of murdering the so-called “Hillside Strangler” who terrorized Los Angeles in the 1970s, lost his recent bid for parole on Thursday 46 years after Byrds.
The California Parole Trial Board has decided to refuse Bianchi’s parole after hearing testimony from prosecutors and several victims from opposition. The panel determined he should be eligible for parole again in 10 years, officials said. Behind the bar, Bianchi, now 74, changed his name to Anthony Damato two years ago,
Bianchi has been at the back of a bar in Washington, most recently since he and his cousin and crime partner Angelo Buono Jr. were arrested in 1979 in connection with the murders of 12 women in Los Angeles and Washington.
The two men pretended to be police officers, seducing the victims of Eagle Rock’s bus bench, an apartment on Tamarind Terrace in Hollywood, and rape, torture and murder, and abandoning the bodies on the hillside of the city.
Bianchi agreed to cut off the plea agreement, which holds the possibility of parole, and testify against Buono.
Bianchi pleaded guilty to five California murders and one conspiracy in October 1979, involving murder, tricking and raping. He later pleaded guilty to the murders of two Washington people. He is sentenced for all murders at Walla Walla State Prison in southeastern Washington, but is entitled to a California parole hearing.
Buono, a Glendale home decor, was found guilty in late 1983 after two years of trial for the murder of nine Hillside stranglers. Buono was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He died in a California prison in 2002.
In January 1979, Washington police detectives arrested Bianchi as the primary suspect in the stranglehold murder of two Western Washington University students, Karen L. Mandick and Diane A. Wilder, two university students at Washington University. He would admit to those murders and then reveal his involvement in multiple murders in Los Angeles
Despite his pleas and confessions, Bianchi has long argued that he has pleaded with his innocence. Bianchi argued that his confession and guilty plea was forced by “hypnotic manipulations” and that the facts of his confession were not consistent with physical evidence.
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