Everyone agrees that Angelo A. Buono Jr., 45, is one of a kind. The question is, what kind? Is he the man who, with Bianchi, forged a partnership in mass murder?

Or is he the independent, gentle, hard-working craftsman with a prankish streak his friends recall?

Some of Buono's friends in wealthy, conservative Glendale don't recognize any part of him in Bianchi's description. "Angelo was a very, very kind person who always helped people out," said neighbor Irene Wardle, who : was touched when Buono remembered her last - birthday with a personalized cake and an affectionate card. . - "Angelo is one of the finest people I know," said Bill Keeley, owner of an antique shop across Colorado Boulevard from Buono's home and business, where nine of the murders allegedly occurred. Salesmen who serviced Buono's "Stumble Inn," a beer bar that flourished in 1976-77 before jokes about the "Strangle Inn" caused it to fold, found him a jolly customer and gathered there weekly over a cool one to chat with him. "He was a friend in need," said Phil Wick, who has known him since grammar school. "This is very hard for me to believe...Murder? No way."

Born Oct. 5, 1934, in Rochester, N.Y., to the former Jennie Sciolino and Angelo Buono Sr., Buono came to California with his mother and elder sister in 1942 after his parents' divorce, settling near Glendale. He attended St. Bernard's, a small parochial school, and was conspicuous among his classmates only because of a slight speech impediment. He dropped Out before completing high school.

He developed an abiding interest in car restoration in his youth, and took up the upholsterer's knife and sewing machine as a young man. As an upholsterer or "trimmer," his work was exemplary. "He was fast and good; he was totally and physically into his work," former employer Bert Brownstein said. "He was just totally oblivious to the rest of the world. He wouldn't know the name of the president or the governor or the mayor. He's in his own world. He's an artist. He is actually capable of improving the upholstery Work in a Rolls Royce. ' Buono wasn't registered to vote nor was he active in community affairs, other than his $96-a-year Glendale Chamber of Commerce membership. With his mother's financial help, he opened Angelo's Trim Shop in 1975. Offering high-grade custom work, it prospered. He bought the property and three Glendale-area residences.

Bianchi, who lived with Buono for several weeks in 1975, before he was thrown out or left depending on who's telling the story, was impressed both by Buono's craftsmanship and his manic cleanliness. "There are two things that don't fit into what kind of a person he is," Bianchi said in a jail interview. "One is the excellent job he does in his line of work. And two, he is so...meticulous. He has people coming in to vacuum all the time. He probably cleans his whole entire house about four times a week." "He would do a brake job and he wouldn't get dirty; I don't know how he did it,’’ Brownstein said.

Accounts of Buono's prankishness, obtained from various interviews by Gannett News Service, tend to the bizarre: Paying a streetwalker $20 to dance topless in an auto upholstery shop full of straight customers.

Offering to hold the coat of a drunk friend who was threatening to jump off a cliff (he didn't).

Drenching a man's new car with gasoline and holding a match over it until the owner came across with a $5 loan.

Buono had other idiosyncrasies: a house with no interior doors, no kitchen and no food; a hobby of raising angora rabbits in hutches behind his shop; a boxful of pornographic photographs of women he'd dated, which he would show to casual visitors. And, always, several young girls around the house.

Court records show that Buono has been married three times, although an employer said he spoke of "four or five" marriages and claimed 10 children as deductions.

(Source: The News-Messenger Fremont, Ohio 18 Jan 1980, Fri • Page 5)

Angelo Anthony Buono Jr. was born Oct 5, 1934, in Rochester, N.Y., second child and only son of the former Jennie Sciolino and Angelo Buono Sr. The marriage of his mother, the daughter of immigrant Italian parents, ended in divorce in 1942. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Buono brought her family Angelo and his sister, Cecelia, two years his elder to Southern California. Buono, from small boy to young man, lived in a neatly kept house on La Clede Ave. in the Atwater section of Los Angeles, just a block or so south of Glendale. Buono, family members say, quit school before entering high school and as a teenager already had an abiding interest in restoring old cars. He worked as an auto upholsterer in Beverly Hills, Hollywood, West Hollywood and Glendale before starting his own business in the latter city in 1975. According to friends of Buono who have remained close to him over the years, his most memorable trait, as a younger man at least, was that of a "hell-raiser" and "lady's man." Said one man for whom Buono worked for 11 years as an upholsterer in Hollywood in the late 1950s and 1960s: "He was a crazy bastard, I can tell you that. Not mean. Just crazy. And did he ever love women! There were always nine or 10 of them on the string . . . . "

The former employer, who was interviewed by The Times several months before Buono's arrest, asked that his name not be used, and said he was convinced Buono could never kill anyone. "Sure," the employer said, "he raised a lot of hell and sowed a lot of wild oats, even while he was married and had five kids at home. But he was honest. I could trust him with anything I had. Right now (before Buono's arrest), I'd still trust him with my life." The ex-employer recalled that, as a younger man, Buono frequently approached women he did not know on the street and asked them for sexual intimacy. "He'd just walk up to them and ask," the one time employer chuckled. "He figured nine out of 10 times he'd get his face slapped. But, the 10th time ..." The former employer said Buono was "always a soft touch as far as women were concerned. He was always taking them out, buying them clothes and then he'd be broke. "He'd leave here (the upholstery shop) on a Friday with over $200 in his pocket and, by Sunday morning, he'd be at my place broke and needing to borrow $50 to give to his wife. "But he'd always grin and say, '. . . but I had a helluva time.'' Buono's former boss said the strangler suspect often loaned his car to women he barely knew and once, while working on a young woman's auto in the former employer's shop, rigged the vehicle's right front wheel so it would fall off after a few blocks, thereby forcing the woman to return to the shop for assistance.

"Buono's always had more women running after him than he knew how to handle," the ex-boss had said. "He's not the kind of guy who would have to kill anybody for what he wanted. Family members have told The Times that, despite the early divorce in the Buono family, Angelo and his sister, Cecelia, saw their father frequently after they moved to the Los Angeles area and remained close to him until his death a few years ago. As a boy, with his mother providing the family's sole financial support (she did piecework for a local shoe cobbler), Buono went to work selling newspapers and mowing lawns. He was especially close to his mother, family sources told The Times, and called or visited her frequently, especially during the woman's 3-year battle with the cancer that ultimately took her life on Jan. 31, 1978. A family spokesman said the family, in later years, had acquired some moderate property investments and that Buono's mother had assisted him financially in setting up his own business in Glendale. In later years, both family and friends said they had noticed apparent "changes" in Buono, especially after he acquired his own business. "He's grown up a lot," was the way his former employer in Hollywood put it. "He joined the Chamber of Commerce (in Glendale) and he worked like a dog to make a go of that shop." However, since last April, shop owners along E. Colorado St. in Glendale have told The Times the number of cars seen at Buono's upholstery shop had declined sharply.

(Source: The Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, California 20 Oct 1979, Sat • Page 33)

One evening they (Bianchi & Buono) called a prostitute to come to the apartment but, instead of paying her, they stole her money. When her black pimp made threatening telephone calls and generally harassed him, Buono lost his nerve and demanded police protection. The threats finally stopped.

Sabra Hannan moved into the house of Angelo Buono. The modeling jobs were not true. Kenneth Bianchi asked her if she had ever thought of engaging in prostitution. Sabra reacted angrily, but after a beating and being forced to perform various sexual acts, surrendered. Buono told her that if she ran away, she would be “a dead cat.” Sabra was the first of his prostitutes. The two cousins took the role of pimps. They liked to think of themselves as super men who were born to use women. Buono used his shop to cover up his company of prostitutes, forcing Sabra Hannan and another girl named Becky Spears to work for him. At first the two girls worked in the back room, but later they reached an agreement with the owner of “Foxy Ladies Outcall,” a prostitute phone service, owned by J.J. Fenway, for the girls to visit clients in their own homes.

A teenage prostitute who said she worked for confessed Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono for fear rather than money, told a Grand Jury she believed the two had connections to the Mafia and to local police departments. "If I rode in a car with Angelo and he saw a pretty girl, he would write down the license plate and run it and find out where she lived," Sabra Hannan said in a grand jury transcript made public Tuesday. "Through his friends in law enforcement," she was asked by the prosecutor. "Yes," Miss Hannan replied. Another witness. Rebekah Spears, who was 15 at the time she said Miss Hannan recruited her to work for Bianchi and Buono, recalled: "They told me they were backed by the Mafia. They referred to them as "the boys.'" Both women said that Buono had told them he would kill them, cut off their limbs and ship them out of the state in a box if they disobeyed him. Miss Hannan told the grand jury that she was tricked into prostitution. She said Bianchi had offered to help her find a modeling job, that he had paid for her plane flight to Los Angeles from Texas, and that Buono had given her $100 for clothes. "They told me. I've been there for a year now and 1 owed them a plane ticket and $100 and either way I would have to do it," said Miss Hannan. She said she lived in Buono's house in Glendale where he has an upholstery shop.

"He told me that he had friends in the law enforcement and if he was to do something ..like it was legal if somebody came into your home and you shot them while they were in the house, that he could get away with it." She said that Bianchi had beat her with his hands and a wet towel and both women said they were sexually abused by Buono when they were living in his house. Miss Hannan said she was taken by Bianchi and Buono to a paper recycling factory in Cudahy where she was told to commit acts of prostitution with several men. She said the factory belonged to two brothers, Dennis and Carl Abajian. She identified a former Huntington park police chief, a Bell city councilman and a former chief deputy to county supervisor Pete Schabarum as being at the stag party. All the men testified before the grand jury. They all denied having sexual relations with anyone at the factory and most denied any knowledge about such activity by each other. However, Carl Abajian, who was appointed by Schabarm to a county commission, said he heard rumors about such activities the next day and told Buono not to bring girls to his factory again. But he said that during the visit he was outside showing antique cars to Bianchi'. Warren Schmuki, Schabarurn's former chief deputy, said he too had once discussed antique cars with Bianchi, when he brought his car to Buono's shop for a minor repair. He said Bianchi noticed the county sticker on his car window and wanted one for an antique car he planned to display. Schmuki said he talked to Bianchi for three minutes and sent him the county sticker. Asked repeatedly by Deputy District Attorney Roger Kelly if he would do the same for anyone who talked to him for three minutes, Schmuki replied 'no.' But he had difficulty explaining why he had done it for Bianchi. He said he received nothing in return, not even a "thank you." Police believe Bianchi used the sticker on his car to make his victims believe he was a law enforcement official. Bianchi has admitted killing five young women, and has agreed to testify against Buono in connection with 10 Hillside Strangler murders and in connection with charges the Grand Jury brought after hearing the testimony. The Grand Jury charged Buono with pimping, pandering, attempted extortion, sodomy, and unlawful sexual acts with a minor.

(Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel Santa Cruz, California 16 Apr 1980, Wedn • Page 23)

When Becky Spears fled, Buono mailed a dead cat to her Arizona home, according to Sabra Hannon, 19, who also escaped to a hiding place in Wisconsin. Although Glendale's police department didn't make a single arrest for prostitution in 1978, Buono's activity as a pimp was common talk in local bars. Acquaintances describe Buono as a mean man when crossed, and habitually arrogant one calling him "a swaggering, defiant type".

(Source: The News-Messenger Fremont, Ohio 18 Jan 1980, Fri • Page 5)