LOS ANGELES -- Confessed Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi, who earlier testified he made up his disputed multiple personalities, said today he feels an obligation to testify against his accused accomplice.
Bianchi, who pleaded guilty to seven murders, told the jury he would have agreed to testify against his cousin, Angelo Buono, even if prosecutors had not made a deal permitting him to escape the death penalty.
'Even without the deal, I would still come forward,' Bianchi said. 'There are things I have experienced and witnessed.'
Asked by prosecutors if those experiences related to murder, Bianchi said, 'Yes, and other things.'
Testifying Monday in Buono's murder trial, Bianchi, 31, said he made up his multiple personalities at the urging of his former lawyer and a social worker who were trying to establish an insanity defense for the sex killings.
Eventually he came to accept the other personalities in himself, saying they were 'as real as your dreams.'
'I was told if a true multiple personality emerged, it would solidify the defense of not guilty by reason of insanity,' Bianchi testified. 'When I was asked to produce these personalities, I gave them names. They were just names floating around in my head.'
Bianchi, supposedly under hypnosis, had told psychiatrists in Bellingham, Wash., that he had an evil alter-ego named Steve Walker. In those taped conversations he also named Buono as his accomplice in the so-called Hillside Strangler killings of 1977-78.
Bianchi later made a deal with prosecutors to escape the death penalty, agreeing to testify against Buono while pleading guilty to the California killings and two in Washington.
Buono, 47, is charged with the series of 10 sex slayings of young women whose bodies were found strewn along Los Angeles area hillsides. He faces the gas chamber if convicted.
Defense lawyers claim Bianchi's testimony is about the only case the prosecutors haveand that Bianchi is nothing but a pathological liar who is trying to take his cousin down with him.
'He does whatever he wants as long as it suits his purpose,' defense attorney Gerald Chaleff said.
