The Hillside Stranglers ─ The Inside Story of the Killing Spree That Terrorized Los Angeles

“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. 

Darcy O’Brien (1939–1998) was born in Los Angeles, California. He is a bestselling author of eleven works of fiction and nonfiction, including the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novel A Way of Life, Like Any Other, based on his experiences with his movie-star parents, George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill; The Hidden Pope, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; The Hillside Stranglers, which became a bestseller and was made into an NBC TV movie; and Murder in Little Egypt, winner of the Edgar Award. O’Brien’s knowledge of the field of criminal justice made him a frequent speaker and panelist on television and radio, and he published numerous articles in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among others.