Couples Who Kill by Carol Anne Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

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    Sadly, the marriage was not a success. His young wife wanted to party but Ken wanted her at home with him every night. Rather than talk the situation through, he withdrew emotionally and she turned to her mother forcomfort. She also started to date other men. Everyone could see that divorce was inevitable – everyone except the daydreaming Ken.
    One night he came home from work to find that she’d left him, stripping the apartment of its furniture and all of her possessions. The teenage boy went into shock. When he recovered he was extremely angry and hurt: he’d tried to be a loving husband and potential family man but now had to reinvent himself.
    For a while Ken tried academia, enrolling in college and taking courses in politics and in police work. But he failed to get the high grades he expected and soon dropped out. He now settled for casual work, becoming everything from a bar man to an ambulance driver. Feeling increasingly frustrated at the difference between his dreams and his reality, he flitted from job to job.
    Sensing that he was desperate for a change of scene, but possibly wanting to keep him attached to the family, his mother made arrangements for him to move to Glendale, California to stay with his older cousin, Angelo Buono. He’d met Angelo occasionally when he was a young boy, but the two branches of the family had since drifted apart. In January 1976 Ken arrived in Glendale and moved into his cousin’s neat little home.
Angelo (Tony) Buono
    Angelo was born on 5th October 1934 to Jenny and Angelo Buono senior in Rochester, New York. (Jenny was Frances Bianchi’s sister, so they had both grown up in the same impoverished family. Jenny had had to cope with an increasing number of brothers and sisters as their parents’ religion forbade birth control. Eventually the Sciolinofamily comprised eight children and her exhausted parents found it hard to cope.) Jenny and Angelo already had a five-year-old daughter Cecelia by the time that Angelo junior came along, but the marriage was an increasingly unhappy one, with Angelo senior – a security guard – given to long, sullen silences and Jenny finding fault with everything and everyone.
    When Cecelia and little Angelo were ten and five respectively, the Buonos separated and Jenny Buono took the children to Glendale. There she found poorly paid piece-work in a shoe factory. She had lots of boyfriends and would take Angelo along with her to their houses and make him wait outside whilst she had sex with them. He soon figured out what was going on and hated her for it.
    It was difficult for Jenny to support all three of them on a small wage and (Angelo would later allege) she often offered sexual favours in exchange for goods and services. By his early teens he was calling his mother ‘a whore and a cunt.’ His early experiences ensured that he had no respect for women and by the age of fourteen he was being sadistic towards his girlfriends and made it clear that he wanted anal rather than vaginal sex.
    Young Angelo couldn’t control their financial problems or his mother’s behaviour – but he could control how neat his surroundings were. As such, he became compulsively clean and tidy, using external order to help counter the chaos of his inner world.
An early criminal record
    By sixteen Angelo – who could barely read or write – had dropped out of high school and stolen a car. He was sent to the California Youth Authority but soon escaped.Rearrested in December 1951, he was sent to the tougher Paso Robles School For Boys. There, he heard the other boys talk avidly about gangsters, seeing them as heroes who beat the system rather than as the bullies they actually were.
Angelo’s first marriage and first son
    When Angelo was twenty he got his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Geraldine pregnant and reluctantly married her. But he walked out after a week and never returned. By the time of the birth he was back in prison on a further car theft charge.