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Crime Junkie

SERIAL KILLER: The Hillside Strangler from Los Angeles

This episode was originally released in August 2019, and is one of seventeen episodes from the archives we’ll be bringing you every Thursday, now through top of next year... for good reason! ;) We highly recommend you listen to each episode and follow us on Instagram @crimejunkiepodcast so you're the first to know what's coming next! <3
Duration
53m
Broadcast on
07 Nov 2024
Audio Format
other

This episode was originally released in August 2019, and is one of seventeen episodes from the archives we’ll be bringing you every Thursday, now through top of next year... for good reason! ;) We highly recommend you listen to each episode and follow us on Instagram @crimejunkiepodcast so you're the first to know what's coming next!  <3

Between October of 1977 and February of 1978, a serial killer terrorized women in Southern California, known as the Hillside Strangler. Originally preying upon sex workers in Los Angeles, this offender began to target young women regardless of race or background, before simply vanishing for good. It wasn’t until a year later that police were able to link a separate crime to this spree, and from there, began to track down the culprit or, in this case, culprits…

 

Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: crimejunkiepodcast.com/serial-killer-hillside-strangler/ 

 

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Crime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat.

Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Hi, crime junkies, Brit here, and if you're a midwesterner like me, I can guess you're probably craving the sunshine, too. We are officially getting into chile territory here, and a little jaunt over to California for some quintessential Los Angeles sunshine would do me some justice. But not nearly like the type of justice we've seen over the last few decades of prolific cases in California, because the 70s and 80s in California were absolutely terrifying. There weren't just one or even two serial killers, but a handful of them, some which took decades to identify like the Golden State Killer, and others, while they were caught within a short window of time from when they started committing their crimes, managed to cause just as much devastation, kind of like the case I'm going to reshare with you today. Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brit. And you guys know that on our show, we are big into personal safety, and we've given you several rules to follow to help keep yourself safe. One of those rules is to remain skeptical of everyone all the time, your coworkers, your neighbors, even figures of authority, because you never really know anyone ever. This rule has come into focus throughout several of our episodes, but this rule is perhaps best exemplified in today's story, which is one of the scariest crime sprees that maybe you've never heard of. This is the story of the Hillside Strangler. [MUSIC] Our story begins on October 18, 1977, when a detective is called out to a crime scene just outside of Los Angeles, California, along the Ventura freeway, the body of a young woman had been abandoned just off the freeway, and she appeared to have been brutally murdered. As the detective examined her body, he quickly spotted the marks around her neck, her wrists, and her ankles. It was clear that she had been bound with a rope before being strangled, and this was later confirmed by a coroner to be her cause of death. The coroner also determined that the victim had been raped before her death. More than the ligature marks or cause of death, there was something that stuck out. The victim had been thoroughly cleaned by the killer prior to being dumped along the freeway, indicating to the police that this was a premeditated crime, not an impulsive one. This victim would later be identified as Yolanda Washington, a sex worker that lived in the region. She'd been killed at another location and then dumped along the side of the road, but with almost no physical evidence, there was little that police could do. They didn't know why Yolanda had been targeted or even where she was originally killed, and they had no idea that this was just the beginning of the largest and longest case of their careers. You see, Yolanda was the first victim of this killer, but she was not the last, not by a long shot. Less than two weeks later, on November 1st, 1977, police were called out to La Crescenta, a suburb about 12 or so miles north of Los Angeles. There, in the middle of a residential neighborhood, police found the body of a young woman laying face up and completely nude. Actually, when the police got there, the body had been covered up, but that was only because the body had been found first by the home owner whose driveway that she was in. And he had covered the body up with a tarp so that children on their way to school and others headed to work wouldn't have to see it.

Transcription truncated.

This episode was originally released in August 2019, and is one of seventeen episodes from the archives we’ll be bringing you every Thursday, now through top of next year... for good reason! ;) We highly recommend you listen to each episode and follow us on Instagram @crimejunkiepodcast so you're the first to know what's coming next! <3