Peter LoGreco serves as showrunner and director of The Hillside Strangler on MGM Plus, a groundbreaking docuseries that marks the first time in over 40 years that both the detectives who hunted the killer and the convicted killer himself have told their stories on camera. The four-part series examines one of Los Angeles’ most notorious serial killer cases from the late 1970s, featuring unprecedented access to Kenneth Bianchi, who has never before spoken directly to media about his claims of innocence. LoGreco discusses the painstaking process of gaining trust, centering women’s voices in the narrative, and examining how this case forever changed homicide investigations.
We’ve heard rumblings of this story over the years. Why this story and why now?
The American public loves a true crime story, and the Hillside Strangler is one that still haunts people to this day. If you talk to anyone who was a native of LA at the time, there’s this element of mythological power to this case. It was a serial killer case that really terrorized the city as a whole. There wasn’t a single woman or young girl in the city who really felt safe because there was no more for the killer. It was very random. People didn’t know who to watch out for, what to watch out for, where not to go.
More importantly, we have the opportunity to speak with Kenneth Bianchi, who ended up being one of the convicted killers. Ever since his arrest, basically within months, he started to question his own guilt. He started to talk about the fact that maybe he’s innocent. So we have this very complicated combination of, is there something going on mental health-wise with this guy? Did the cops get the wrong guy? It’s a question that while he’s brought it up, he’s never spoken about directly in the media and he is doing that now.
Kenneth Bianchi has never spoken on camera to the media before until now. How did you get access to him?
It was a journey. I have to give credit to one of our executive producers, Tim Walsh. He originally worked on the Night Stalker project and met Frank Salerno, the detective involved with the case. That turned him on to the fact that the Hillside Strangler was such an interesting and complicated case. Over two or three years, Tim began reaching out to Kenneth. There was also a journalist from Great Britain who developed a rapport with Ken Bianchi and agreed to speak to the prospective team.
For me, it took a good four or five months of very gentle conversations via email, then via phone with Ken to bring him to the point where he would trust us. We were always very honest that Frank Salerno and his partner, Pete Finnegan, who were the LA Sheriff’s Detectives involved with the case, were going to tell their side of the story. What people want is an opportunity to have their voice heard. I think what we wanted to do was give Kenneth that opportunity and he fortunately trusted us. We’ll leave it to the audience to decide how they feel about where things landed with the case.
Give us an overall synopsis of what this case is.
This story is about a case that arose out of a very specific place, Los Angeles, in the late 1970s. This was a place quickly becoming what unfortunately became known as the serial killer capital of the country. Women were being killed. At first they thought it’s prostitutes and runaways, but then very quickly saw it’s students, young girls, a waitress, an aspiring dancer.
It was the first case that got national attention that was given a name, a brand, and really became a real-life horror movie. Not only was it terrifying because the victims were random, but because it happened so intensely over five months. There was a week in which four bodies were found in the city.
We look at the world where this happened. Los Angeles in the 1970s and early 80s is a portrait of how police looked at violent crimes, how they looked at crimes against women, how women saw this as one of the first early opportunities to speak up against how victims were portrayed. There’s a really interesting thing we try to do, which is foreground women’s voices. There were two women in particular who were young activists who staged protests, talking about the fact that this was indicative of a larger phenomenon of violence against women that had to be addressed differently.
Frank Salerno is known as a legendary detective. What surprised you most about who he is off the record?
What was most surprising about Frank is that he is such a feeling, sensitive, sweet human being. He really took on the case on an emotional level and was committed to every single victim, every victim’s family member, and did everything he could to bring the people who committed this crime to justice, almost to the detriment of his own mental health.
I’ve worked with a lot of cops in the past, and usually there’s a hard-edged intensity and a wall around that. But Frank is the sweetest, kindest guy on the inside. We had the opportunity to talk to one survivor and other people involved with the case. They all speak about how the person that kept them anchored, the person that held them together was Frank. If it weren’t for Frank, they wouldn’t have been able to testify or survive the process.
Frank also captured the Night Stalker. How did this case shape modern homicide investigations?
Frank’s single biggest regret from the case is that because there were a bunch of different agencies and different police involved, clues were missed in the investigation. There may have been the chance that they could have caught the killers before 10 women in LA were killed, let alone two additional women in Bellingham, Washington, had they focused in and really communicated and focused on expertise versus numbers.
He talks about how it shaped a different understanding of how to approach these crimes, which is going deep, understanding psychology, looking at clues that you don’t necessarily think on the surface are the clues you should be paying attention to and avoiding just throwing everything at this. That doesn’t work.
Even for true crime fans who think they know everything about the Hillside Strangler, what will surprise them most?
The thing that’s most unique about the way we’ve treated the case is that this version of the story is as much about the world in which this occurred and maybe even more so the techniques that were used to elicit a confession and prosecute the case. This was the longest criminal murder trial in US history, still is. It was two and a half years that Angelo Buono, his co-conspirator, was on trial. Other shows have given that short shrift. We really spent time digging into all of the techniques that were used that brought Kenneth Bianchi’s testimony into question. There’s a courtroom drama to this series as much as there is a serial killer investigation.
What do you think this story asks of us as a society about violence, women’s safety and how we remember the victims?
Understanding that this was a crime about violence against women, crime of rage and anger. I think it’s too often that serial killer victims who are sexually assaulted are looked at as victims of sex crimes. Ultimately, a sex crime is a violent crime. Really centering the voice of women and what a woman’s experience is as someone in a community experiencing an ongoing crime wave, we have to understand that there’s an ongoing level of anxiety and fear that one lives with just for being a woman.
I remember when I first met my wife, she gave me this talking to about being in a parking garage at night and understanding that when you’re a woman alone in certain situations, fear and looking over your shoulder is just the reality. This is that amplified by many times. We can tell a very interesting and entertaining story, but we also try to show that foregrounding women’s voices gives us a sense that this continues to persist to this day.
The other piece is our understanding of mental illness. There’s a whole component of this story we go deeply into about where Kenneth Bianchi really was from the standpoint of his own mental health during the crimes and after his arrest. Some very questionable, controversial techniques were used. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty, but it does put the process into question. We now have more sophisticated points of view on mental health, but still struggle with what we do when there’s mental illness at work with someone committing serious crimes.
If you had to describe this series in one word, what is it and why?
Enlightening.
Where do we watch it?
Hillside Strangler is dropping on MGM Plus, which is a premium streaming service offered on Amazon Prime, as well as Apple and Hulu. It dropped on the 18th of January, 2026 and then each following Sunday for three weeks after that. It’s four episodes total.
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