Los Angeles - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1998: The Trunk Murderess Dies on the Exact Anniversary of Her Own Surrender

Winnie Ruth Judd earned the tabloid name the Trunk Murderess after she shot two friends in Phoenix, Arizona, then packed their bodies into steamer trunks and shipped them by rail to Los Angeles in 1931. When the trunks began to leak, she walked into a Los Angeles police station and gave herself up.

Convicted of murder in 1932, she was declared insane and spent much of the next four decades confined to an Arizona mental institution, escaping it several times before finally being paroled in 1971. She died in Phoenix on this day in 1998, aged 93, exactly 67 years to the day after she had first surrendered to police.

Portrait of Winnie Ruth Judd convicted of murdering two nurses 1932

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Arizona California Los Angeles Mental Illness Murder Phoenix Prison Trial USA

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1979: The Hillside Strangler Was Two Men: Kenneth Bianchi Named His Own Cousin to Save Himself

Kenneth Bianchi confessed to being the Hillside Strangler, but he did not go down alone. To save himself, he named his older cousin, Angelo Buono, as his accomplice, and on this day in 1979 Buono was arrested in Los Angeles.

The betrayal inverted everything investigators assumed about the case. It was Buono, not Bianchi, who turned out to be the predatory sexual sadist and driving force behind their partnership, having first drawn his younger cousin into crime years earlier by suggesting they go into business together as pimps. That shared criminal history curdled into a killing spree, and when the pressure of capture came, it was Bianchi who broke family loyalty to shift the blame onto the man who had led him there.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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Arrest Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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1977: The Hillside Stranglers Claim Their First Victim in Los Angeles

Nineteen-year-old Yolanda Washington was last seen getting into a car near a Los Angeles intersection one October evening in 1977. The next morning her body was found on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, the first known victim of the killers soon dubbed the Hillside Stranglers.

Her killers were cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who had lured her with the promise of a ride before attacking and strangling her. Washington, who worked as a waitress and sometimes turned to sex work, was the opening victim in a killing spree that would terrorise the city for months before the cousins were finally caught.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer Unsolved USA

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1995: “If It Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit”: O.J. Simpson Walks Free

O.J. Simpson, the former football star, stood accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman outside her Los Angeles home in June 1994. The trial became a media spectacle, dominating television and public debate across the United States and beyond. The defense seized on a single moment: prosecutors had Simpson try on the bloody glove found at the scene, and it appeared too tight to fit. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran turned the moment into a rallying cry, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and on October 3, 1995, the jury returned a not guilty verdict after less than four hours of deliberation.

If It Doesn't Fit, You Must Acquite — If It Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquite

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Acquittal Los Angeles Murder Scandal Trial USA

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