Sonoma County-born consultant, author Joseph Rodota launches true crime podcast about the Hillside Strangler

His father was a renowned Sonoma County civil servant for whom a popular trail is named. But Joseph Rodota Jr. has forged his own path.

After graduating from Montgomery High School and Stanford University, the younger Rodota went on to a distinguished career as a political appointee and consultant. He’s written a book about the Watergate Hotel and a play about America’s first celebrity psychic. Now 62, Rodota has made his first foray into the genre of true crime.

Tuesday marked the release of the first episode of his podcast, “Hillside: The Investigation and Trial of the Hillside Strangler,” available on Apple Podcasts. In the project he revisits a series of 12 murders that took place in Southern California and Washington State in the late 1970s.

Along with the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders and Night Stalker killings of the mid-1980s, the crimes committed by cousins Angelo Buono, Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi — the Hillside Stranglers — were among the most chilling and notorious of the past half-century. Using badges to impersonate police officers, Bianchi and Buono abducted, raped and killed their victims, who ranged in age from 12 to 28.

Why on earth would a political consultant feel compelled to revisit that investigation?

Rodota, as it happened, had a connection to the case, having done a deep dive on it decades earlier, in the service of Pete Wilson.

The year was 1989. Wilson was running for governor of California, and he needed an opposition researcher. Rodota had recently returned to the Golden State after serving four years as President Ronald Reagan’s deputy director of public affairs.

Rodota was an early practitioner of the dark art of opposition research. His experiences in that arena provided grist for his first podcast series, Oppo File. Before working in the Reagan White House, he’d dug into the backgrounds of the Gipper’s potential 1984 opponents.

Hired by the Wilson campaign, Rodota trained his sights on his new employer’s likely Democratic opponent, John Van de Kamp, who as Los Angeles District attorney 8 years earlier made headlines when he sought to have a court dismiss 10 murder charges against Buono, one of the accused killers.

The case could not be won, two of Van de Kamp’s prosecutors had told him. But a judge denied the DA’s motion to dismiss the case. A team of prosecutors from the state took it over, and won.

Seeing that blunder by Van de Kamp as a giant Achilles' heel, Rodota set about “trying to figure out what had happened, and when it happened.”

To that point, none of the fallout from his decision to dismiss the case had stuck to Van de Kamp. “Basically, he’d distanced himself from the decision by palming it off on his deputies,” recalled Rodota.

But Van de Kamp lost in the Democratic primary to Dianne Feinstein. His research on the murders suddenly moot, Rodota ended up donating some 30 boxes of materials to the Hoover Institute archives at Stanford University.

He retrieved those files in 2019, then spent the next three years interviewing more than 40 people connected to the case, including detectives, friends and families of the victims, defense attorneys and prosecutors, journalists, and the presiding judge.

Rodota also unearthed new documents from archives and private citizens — including the family of the late Daryl Gates, chief of the Los Angeles Department at the time of the murders. Following a lunch, during which the family members concluded “they trusted me,” Rodota recalled, they presented him with two grocery bags full of Gates’ personal files and handwritten notes relating to the case.

Immersing himself in that 40-year-old investigation, Rodota noticed that the stories were usually told by men. “This was 1977, ’78 — most of the prosecutors, the senior investigators, were guys,” he said. “It was a male profession.”

In the books and articles he read, “very rarely did you hear a woman’s take on the case.”

That didn’t sit well, said Rodota, considering that “these were the murders of 12 women.”

He found and spoke with a cohort of women involved in the case but largely ignored by history. One of them was forensic investigator Michele Kessler, who would go on to work for the prosecution in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. She remembers, in one podcast, clambering down hillsides to gather evidence while wearing nylons and a skirt.

Kessler recalled that one of the victims had a hairstyle “almost exactly like hers,” and what it was like to be a female, investigating the murders of young women, at a time when women in Los Angeles were gripped with fear.

He spoke with Elizabeth Baron, a former runway model who was inspired to become a lawyer while watching the Watergate hearings. As a member of the prosecution team, Baron handled the most important pretrial motion of the case, going toe-to-toe with a battery of psychiatrists and psychologists to convince the judge that Bianchi was not, as he claimed, a multiple personality.

“She went on to become a judge,” said Rodota. “She’s a brilliant woman.”

About halfway through this 3-year project, “an incredible thing happened,” he said. The daughter of one of the victims reached out to Rodota, taking the podcast in a dramatic, unexpected direction.

Asked to be more specific, Rodota smiled, and demurred. “I don’t want to give away the story.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.