The Hillside Stranglers

“A deeply disturbing book—cool, ironical, and ferocious.” —Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French   For several weeks in the fall of 1977, Los Angeles was held hostage by fear as the body count of sexually violated, brutally murdered young women escalated. With increasing alarm, newspapers headlined the deeds of a serial killer they named the Hillside Strangler. More than a year later, the mysterious disappearance of two university students near Seattle led to the arrest of a security guard—the handsome, charming, fast-talking Kenny Bianchi—and the ghastly discovery that the strangler was not one man but two. Like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, Darcy O’Brien weds the narrative skill of an award-winning novelist with the detailed observations of an experienced investigator to bring the story of Bianchi and his sadistic cousin, Angelo Buono, to the page. Based on hundreds of hours of recorded testimony from one of the longest and most controversial criminal court cases in American history, The Hillside Stranglers is a true crime tour de force.