LOS ANGELES -- A former prostitute testified that she fled the state and remained in hiding almost two years for fear that accused Hillside Strangler Angelo Buono Jr. might continue beating her.
Sabra Hannan, 21, told a Superior Court jury Wednesday that she went to Wisconsin because she was 'tired of getting beat up, tired of all the threats and tired of engaging in prostitution' for Buono and confessed Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi.
'I was worried about Angelo finding me,' she said.
Miss Hannan, who lived in Buono's Glendale home for about three weeks in mid-1977, said she was virtually a prisoner who had to get Buono's permission to leave the house.
'Ken (Bianchi) beat me two or three times,' once with a wet towel, she told the jury.
Miss Hannan said she refused to return to California until a lawyer assured her that Bianchi had been arrested for murder in Bellingham, Wash., for the strangulation slayings of two coeds.
The lawyer, she said, also assured her that Buono was under police surveillance as a murder suspect for several months before he was arrested at his home in October 1979 and charged with the sex, torture and strangulation murders of 10 girls and young women.
Under cross-examination by attorney Gerald Chaleff, Buono's court-appointed defense counsel, Hannan testified she had never engaged in prostitution before she met Buono and Bianchi, or after she left Los Angeles.
Buono is on trial for life and could face the gas chamber if convicted of first-degree murder in the series of strangulations that terrorized the Los Angeles area from October 1977 to February 1978.
Bianchi earlier pleaded guilty to five of the murders and the two in Washington and agreed to testify against his adoptive cousin, Buono, in a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty.
