The Stranger Next Door

There is a moment, in the telling of certain stories, when you realize that evil doesn't always announce itself. It doesn't always wear a strange face or carry a warning. Sometimes it moves into the neighborhood, takes a job, waves hello from the driveway, and the people around it never feel the cold underneath the smile.

In January of 1979, in the quiet, rain-softened city of Bellingham, Washington, police officers arrived at a house on Baird Road that was supposed to be empty. A security company had reported something wrong — a car left running in the garage, lights on inside, and no sign of the two young women who were supposed to be there doing a routine job. What the officers found when they entered that house would shake a small college community to its core, and it would connect, in ways nobody in Bellingham had yet imagined, to a terror that had already consumed Los Angeles for more than a year.

But to understand what was lost, you have to know who was there first — who those two young women were before any of this happened.

Karen Mandic was twenty-two years old, a senior at Western Washington University, and by every account of the people who knew her, she was the kind of person who made a room feel warmer simply by walking into it. She had grown up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and had come to Bellingham with the particular ambition of a young woman who believed she could build something meaningful out of her life. She was studying and working, the way so many students do, threading together part-time jobs and coursework and the ordinary, hopeful business of becoming. Her boyfriend, Steve Hardwick, described her as full of life — genuinely, unselfconsciously joyful. She had friends. She had plans. She had a future that was, by every right, hers to live.

Diane Wilder was twenty-seven, also a Western Washington student, and she and Karen had become close enough that when a job opportunity came up, Karen thought of Diane first. Diane was quieter, perhaps, more reserved by the accounts of those who knew her, but no less alive, no less real, no less deserving of every year she should have had. The two women had the easy, particular intimacy of genuine friendship — the kind you build over shared meals and late nights and the small confidences that accumulate into something solid.

On the evening of January 11, 1979, both women believed they were going to do something perfectly ordinary. They were going to house-sit.

The man who had arranged it was named Kenneth Bianchi. He was thirty-one years old, and he had been living in Bellingham for only a few months, having relocated from Los Angeles in the spring of 1978. He presented himself well. He was handsome, pleasant, well-spoken — the kind of man who inspired easy confidence. He worked as a security guard for a company called Whatcom Security, and he had cultivated, in his short time in the city, the reputation of someone solid and dependable. He had a girlfriend, Kelli Boyd, and a young son. He attended a citizens' crime prevention program. He applied, at one point, for a position with the Bellingham Police Department.

What nobody in Bellingham knew — what Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder had no possible way of knowing — was that Kenneth Bianchi had left Los Angeles carrying the weight of something monstrous. Back in Southern California, between October of 1977 and February of 1978, ten women and girls had been found strangled and left on hillsides across the Los Angeles area. The press had given the unknown killer a name: the Hillside Strangler. Investigators had not yet publicly established that the murders were the work of two men — Bianchi and his older cousin, Angelo Buono — but the killings had terrorized a city, and then they had stopped. Bianchi had moved north.

So when he approached Karen Mandic through their shared connection to Whatcom Security and told her he needed someone to house-sit a residence in the Baird Road area while an alarm system was being installed, she had no reason to see anything other than what he presented: a straightforward job, a few hours, a little extra money. Karen told her boyfriend, Steve Hardwick, about the arrangement. She mentioned Bianchi's name. She was not alarmed, and why would she have been? She took the job, and she called Diane.

On the evening of January 11, the two women drove together to the house on Baird Road. They were expected. Bianchi had made sure they would be there alone.

When Karen didn't come home that night, Steve Hardwick grew worried. He contacted police. The following morning, January 12, 1979, officers located Karen's car — still running — in the garage of the Baird Road property. When they entered the house, they found Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. Both women had been strangled. Both had been sexually assaulted. The house, which was supposed to be the site of an alarm installation, showed no evidence that any such work had ever been scheduled.

The investigation moved quickly, in part because Karen Mandic had left behind something investigators would later describe as invaluable: she had told her boyfriend the name of the man who arranged the job. Kenneth Bianchi. Within hours of the discovery, detectives were looking hard at him.

Bianchi, for his part, initially played the cooperative witness. He expressed shock. He offered to help. He gave investigators a story — an alibi of sorts — suggesting he had been elsewhere and knew nothing of what had happened. But the holes appeared almost immediately. There was no alarm installation scheduled at the Baird Road house. Records from his employer confirmed it. Physical evidence collected at the scene was submitted for analysis. And the name he had given Karen Mandic, his own name, had already reached police through Steve Hardwick before investigators even began formally questioning him.

On January 12, 1979, the same day the bodies were found, Kenneth Bianchi was arrested.

What followed his arrest is one of the more remarkable — and, in retrospect, darkly instructive — chapters in the history of forensic psychology in American criminal proceedings. Bianchi's defense team put forward a claim that would, for a time, generate genuine debate and national media attention: they argued that Kenneth Bianchi suffered from multiple personality disorder, and that a separate personality within him — a personality he did not control and could not be held responsible for — had committed the murders. Under hypnosis, Bianchi produced what appeared to be an alter personality, one he called "Steve Walker," who claimed responsibility for the killings. Several mental health professionals who examined him early in the process believed the presentation was genuine.

But the prosecution brought in their own experts, and among them was Dr. Martin Orne, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania who was one of the foremost authorities on hypnosis in the world. Dr. Orne had a specific and methodical approach to testing Bianchi's claims. He told Bianchi, in the course of an interview, that genuine cases of multiple personality disorder almost always involved more than two personalities. Shortly thereafter, Bianchi produced a third personality. It was, Dr. Orne later testified, exactly the response of someone faking — someone who had done just enough research to simulate a condition but who could be led by suggestion in ways a true sufferer could not. Dr. Orne concluded that Bianchi was malingering, skillfully and deliberately, but malingering nonetheless.

Other experts, including psychologist John Watkins, who had initially supported the multiple personality diagnosis, were challenged by these findings. The prosecution's case against the disorder defense was further strengthened by evidence that Bianchi had studied psychology texts and had actually assumed the identity of a real person — a man named Thomas Steven Walker, whose credentials he had fraudulently obtained — when applying for a psychology position in California years earlier. The "Steve Walker" alter that appeared under hypnosis bore, not coincidentally, the name of the man whose identity Bianchi had once stolen.

There was also this: in the weeks after his arrest, Bianchi attempted to arrange for the murder of a key witness, and investigators uncovered efforts by him to implicate another man entirely — to frame someone else for the Bellingham murders. These were not the actions of a man lost in dissociative fog. They were the calculated maneuvers of someone who understood, with perfect clarity, what was at stake and what he stood to lose.

The multiple personality defense collapsed. And with it, Bianchi's options narrowed to a single door.

In October of 1979, Kenneth Bianchi pleaded guilty to the murders of Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder. He also pleaded guilty to five of the Hillside Strangler murders in Los Angeles County. As part of his plea agreement, he agreed to testify against his cousin, Angelo Buono, in the Los Angeles prosecutions. The deal allowed him to avoid the death penalty, which California still carried on the books. He was sentenced to life in prison in Washington, with additional life sentences to follow from California. Under the terms of the agreement, he would serve his time in a Washington state facility rather than in California's prison system.

The trial of Angelo Buono in Los Angeles was one of the longest criminal trials in American history at that point, running from 1981 to 1983. Bianchi testified, but his cooperation was, as prosecutors and investigators noted at the time and afterward, incomplete and self-serving. He contradicted earlier statements. He minimized his own role when it suited him. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office actually moved at one point to dismiss the charges against Buono, in part because they expressed doubts about whether Bianchi's testimony was reliable enough to carry a conviction. The judge refused to grant the dismissal, and the case proceeded. In November of 1983, the jury found Angelo Buono guilty on nine counts of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and died in prison in 2002.

Kenneth Bianchi has remained incarcerated. He has come before the Washington State Board of Prison Terms and Paroles — later restructured as the Indeterminate Sentence Review Board — on multiple occasions over the decades, and he has been denied parole each time. In those hearings, the record reflects the persistence of the board's determination that he represents an ongoing danger and that the gravity of his crimes remains undiminished by time or presentation. He has, over the years, given interviews, written letters, maintained correspondence with various individuals on the outside, and at different points appeared to cultivate a particular version of himself for public consumption. None of it has moved the board.

He remains in the custody of the Washington Department of Corrections.

The house on Baird Road is still there, presumably, in a city that has gone on living and growing and changing the way cities do. Western Washington University is still there. Students still arrive every fall with their ambitions and their friendships and their perfectly reasonable belief that the future is open and theirs to claim. And somewhere in the ordinary life of that campus and that city, there is a silence where Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder should have been — where they would have been, had one man not been what he was.

What is worth sitting with, perhaps, is not the spectacle of Bianchi's deceptions — the fraudulent credentials, the fabricated personalities, the attempts to redirect blame onto an innocent man. Those things are documented, adjudicated, part of the permanent record. What is worth sitting with is the simpler, harder truth underneath all of it: that Karen Mandic left a name. She told her boyfriend who had offered her the job. It was such a small, ordinary act — the kind of thing you do without thinking, letting someone know where you'll be for the evening. And in doing it, she gave investigators what they needed to find the truth, even though she was not there to see it found.

There's something in that worth honoring. Not just the tragedy of what happened, but the fact that even in the worst of it, the truth was not entirely extinguished. It traveled, quietly, the way truth sometimes does — from one person to another, across a phone call, into a police report, into a courtroom, into the permanent record of what happened and who was responsible.

Karen Mandic was twenty-two years old. Diane Wilder was twenty-seven. They were students and friends and people who said yes to an ordinary evening that turned out to be anything but. Their names are on the record. They are not forgotten. And in whatever way it matters — in the way that accountability, however imperfect and however delayed, can offer something that isn't quite closure but is at least the absence of denial — the man responsible has spent every year since 1979 answering for what he did to them.

That is the record. That is what stands.