Hillside stranglers biography of william hill
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How the Hillside Strangler case helped make L.A. ‘serial killer capital of America’
Los Angeles has been called many things: City of Angels, Tinseltown, La La nation. But it also gained a name for a decidedly less glamorous distinction in the 1970s and 1980s: Serial Killer Capital of America. In the decades between the 1969 Manson Family murders and the 1989 conviction of Richard Ramirez, a.k.a. the Night Stalker, there were so many serial murders to keep track of that traumatized Angelenos needed a flow chart to keep up. There was the Skid Row Stabber. The solnedgång Strip Killer. The West Side Rapist. The Toolbox Killers. The Grim Sleeper. The Freeway Killer. (“He” ended up being three killers who committed a string of separate murders.) During this period, more than 20 serial killers were reportedly operating simultaneously in Los Angeles.
A four-part true crime docuseries premiering Tuesday on Peacock focuses on one of the more notorious cases to rise out of that dark era. “The Hill
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The Mind of a Murderer, Part I
Introduction
JUDY WOODRUFF: Good evening. I'm Judy Woodruff.
As unpleasant as it is to hear, mass murders are on the rise in this country. The Justice Department says that in the gods decade there have been at least 30 mass killers...and that each of them murdered at least six people.
These gruesome numbers raise disturbing questions. What sort of man is Charles Manson...or Son of Sam? Are they insane? That's sometimes the defense if they come to trial...and it's one that is increasingly controversial.
Tonight on FRONTLINE, a remarkable event. For the first time, you can journey with psychiatrists as they try to get inside the mind of a mass murderer--Kenneth Bianchi, the man who came to be known as the Hillside Strangler.
Bianchi looked like an all-American boy, but he was involved in the murders of at least ten women in Los Angeles, and two more in Washington State. After his arrest, Bianchi took on the behavior of a multiple personality-
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Killer Concepts
More than 20 “Hillside Strangler” projects and five “Night Stalker” scenarios have been pitched to the three TV networks over the years--and all were rejected as too violent and bloody for the small screen, according to network sources. Until now: NBC has finally green-lighted TV movies about each of the real-life serial murder cases.
Fries Ent. will begin filming “The Hillside Stranglers” in January; Leonard Hill Films has “Trackdown,” about the hunt for the stalker, in pre-production.
The heroes in both are tough L.A. cops, despite the fact that Kenneth Bianchi--later convicted in the strangler case--was arrested by Bellingham, Wash., authorities there in 1978; and Richard Ramirez, facing trial in the stalker case, was captured by a group of angry East Los Angelenos in 1985.
Sgt. Bob Grogan, the LAPD detective who spent seven years bringing to trial Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono (also convicted of multiple murders in the case), will be the central charac