The Hillside Strangler Case and Hollywood’s Punk Rock Revolution

"The energy here is so hopeful but also so doomed.”

I’m pleased to share my latest for Vanity Fair, which is online now and landing soon in the magazine’s thirtieth annual Hollywood Issue:

It’s about the Hillside Strangler case that struck terror into the heart of Los Angeles in the fall of 1977. It’s about the massively influential Hollywood punk scene that exploded in a legendary venue called the Masque during that same timeframe. (The Germs, the Go-Go’s, X, the Screamers, the Bags, the Weirdos—I could go on and on.) And it’s about how those two plot lines collided in the murder of Jane King, an aspiring actress and familiar face at the Masque whose tragic fate echoed that of the Black Dahlia. There are splashes of Old Hollywood, Hollywood Babylon, Hollywood Boulevard, and the Church of Scientology. Plus cameos ranging from William Randolph Hearst and Peter Lorre, to Walter Winchell and Geraldo Rivera, to Stevie Nicks and Beck. O.G. L.A. punk legends like Pleasant Gehman, Belinda Carlisle, Rick Wilder, Alice Bag, Kid Congo Powers, K. K. Barrett, and Trudie Arguelles-Barrett abound. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and reporting it over the past year, including a pilgrimage in November to the famous basement that was once the Masque, and is now a storage/video-shoot space for World of Wonder Productions.

»CLICK HERE to read the piece, which is also available in spoken-word form (by a professional voice actor, not me, thank God) on The New York Times’ audio app. Scroll down for some scorching images that appear in the collage above. (Credits: Jules Bates/ArtCenter College of Design; Herb Wrede courtesy of Trudie Arguelles-Barrett; Michael Yampolsky, Ruby Ray, Bibbe Hansen.)

Jane King, 1949-1977:

And for those of you who have made it this far, the accompanying soundtrack: