Alice Bag: The Punk Rock Scene That Soundtracked a Serial Killer

In 1977, punk rock took root in Los Angeles just as a prolific serial killer began to terrorize the city. For months, the bodies of young women were being discovered on hillsides – including one woman who was a regular at an underground punk club in Hollywood where seminal L. A. bands like The Bags cut their teeth. Listen to hear how the story of the leader of that band, Alice Bag, overlaps in terrifying and unexpected ways with the story of the infamous Hillside Strangler, who had L. A. gripped with fear for over a year. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at disgracelandpod.com/membership https://disgracelandpod.com/membership. Visit www.disgracelandpod.com/merch https://cms.megaphone.fm/organizations/c83125d2-8508-11ed-bd28-ff0aff7ee233/podcasts/efca2ef8-85f9-11ed-8fe3-bb208936046f/episodes/d117e93e-5e36-11ef-8745-5373bae4c0ff/www.disgracelandpod.com/merch to see the latest Disgraceland merch! Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTER https://mailchi.mp/doubleelvis/disgraceland-email-newsletter Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/disgracelandpod/ YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@disgracelandpod X https://twitter.com/disgracelandpod (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/491024204626127/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:13Jake Brennan?

  This episode contains content that may be disturbing to some listeners. Please check the show notes for more information.

• 2:20Jake Brennan?

  Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis.

• 2:35Jake Brennan?

  This is a story of how punk rock took root in Los Angeles, just as a prolific serial killer began to terrorize the city. It's a story of an underground punk club where seminal LA bands like The Germs and The Bags got their start. And it's also about one of the regulars at that club, a regular who turned up dead, strangled and dumped on a freeway off-ramp near Griffith Park. It's a story about the murders of many young women, 10 to be exact, all of them killed within the span of four months. The murders sent Los Angeles into a paranoid frenzy, and it fortified the community of

• 3:17Jake Brennan?

  punk rockers who found strength in numbers and the guidance of one of their protectors, Alice Bag of the Bags. Like many in the LA punk scenes circa 1977, Alice Bag made great music. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called "Unpleasant Valley Sunday MK2." I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to "You Light Up My Life" by Debbie Boone. And why would I play you that specific slice of Pat Boone Descendant cheese? Could I afford it?

• 4:01Jake Brennan?

  Because that was the number-one song in America on November 23rd, 1977. And that was the day that 28-year-old Jane King, a regular at LA's underground punk shows, was found dead, causing the local media to finally take notice of a killing spree that had been going on for weeks. This is the story of Alice Bag and of Los Angeles punk rock being born in the shadow of the Hillside Strangler. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgrace Land.

• 5:04Jake Brennan?

  There's a quote, often attributed to Dorothy Parker, that goes, "Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city." Which is kind of funny, because yes, although LA is defined by its sprawl, you don't typically think of the city having an identity crisis. Los Angeles has long been pitched as the glitzy, glamorous, sun-kissed flipside to New York City's gritty, mean streets. Los Angeles is home to Hollywood after all, and if you've gone Hollywood, you've leveled up, big-time'd us all, and sold out. New York had Television and The Talking Heads, and LA had Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan. New York had The Velvet Underground, and LA had the fucking Eagles, man.

• 5:49Jake Brennan?

  And in the late 1970s in LA, the titans of the entertainment industry, the big three, that's music, movies, and pornography, cavorted, canoodled, and did tons of blow at some of the chic-iest and freakiest nightclubs in the entire country. Spots like The Paradise, and The Starwood, The Seven Seas, and The Kit Kat. Most of these clubs were owned by the notorious LA crime dude Eddie Nash, where one could get down to a soundtrack of disco and what we now lovingly refer to as yacht rock. But what if you rejected the hedonist offerings that Eddie Nash and his ilk were serving up on silver platters?

• 6:30Jake Brennan?

  What if you were allergic to the dulcet tones of Captain and Tenille and Al Stewart? What if your platonic ideal of Los Angeles was not a room full of herbs doing the disco duck, but instead was a collective of others, misfits, weirdos, outcasts? All of them brought together by something that wasn't plastic or artificial, but by something that was real, cultivated by real people, not by phony rock stars. They didn't want you to have this. And by "they," I mean the ones running this town. Warner Brothers, Paramount, CBS. Eddie Nash didn't want you doing your own thing. Eddie Nash wanted you doing his thing.

• 7:12Jake Brennan?

  Eddie Nash wanted you partying in his clubs and buying his overpriced and shitty watered-down drinks and snorting his cocaine, especially on his turf. Because the misfits, the weirdos, the outcasts, they set up camp just down Hollywood Boulevard from The Seven Seas, Eddie Nash's super macho, super hetero hotspot.

• 7:34Jake Brennan?

  Walk past Musso and Frank's, bang a riot on a North Cherokee, and then let the smell of cigarette, stale beer, and sweat guide you down an alley and into the basement directly below the Pussycat Porn Theater. This is where the other LA was happening. A room and a scene that you had to protect at any cost, even if it meant kicking the shit out of Tom Waits in front of the entire staff of the Troubadour to prove that you weren't fucking around. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My point is that the punk scene of Los Angeles in the late 1970s was different and strange and unlike anything you've been led to believe about the sprawling city. And because it was different and because it was strange, it was identified by the status

• 8:18Jake Brennan?

  quo as dangerous. And because of that, as I said, it had to be protected at all costs.

• 8:27Jake Brennan?

  Alicia Armandaris had been preparing her whole life for this moment. She wasn't born a protector, she was made one. The gangs of East LA weren't under any obligation to step in when Alicia's father beat her mother with his belt in front of the entire neighborhood and then dragged her back to their cockroach-infested house by the hair. It was Alicia who stepped in. It was Alicia who got between her father, the abuser, and her mother, the abused. Protection was necessary. Protection was life or death. Protecting yourself was another matter entirely. The urge to assimilate with white culture tugged at Alicia like a magnet. The desire to be called not Alicia, but Alice.

• 9:09Jake Brennan?

  These small concessions, they start to add up, stripping a person of their own identity and Alicia of her rich Chicanah heritage. But the bullies at school pushed her too far. They mocked how she looked and how she talked. She was heavier, she had darker skin, she pronounced words funny, and whatever they could find, they attacked her with it. She had no choice but to protect herself. Words were no good. Words never won a battle. It had to be skin on skin. It was fist on face. Protection was a contact sport. It was violent. The bully that Alicia shoved up against the wall had a pen in her teeth when it happened, and the blood splurded fast, but Alicia's hand pushed the pen into the back of the

• 9:54Jake Brennan?

  girl's throat. From that day, Alicia even had the respect of some of the hardest, most violent gangs watching the streets of East LA.

• 10:06Jake Brennan?

  Alicia Arundharis not only had the respect of the gangs, she had self-respect. She didn't have to assimilate. Punk rock taught her that. Punk rock gave her permission to be herself, even if that looked and sounded different from what most everyone else in L.A. was doing. So when she began hanging out in Hollywood, gravitating to like-minded misfits, weirdos, and outcasts, it was only natural that she did so as the punk rock scene's resident protector. Only now, she wasn't Alicia anymore. She was Alice. Alice Douchebag, that is, or more simply, Alice Bag, protector of the punks and leader of the Bags, one of the seminal bands at the heart

• 10:50Jake Brennan?

  of L.A.'s late '70s counterculture. The Bags made loud, fast, take-no-prisoners rock and roll, just as their song titles like "We Will Bury You" and "Disco's Dead" can attest. And though you won't find the Bags on any tastemaking lists like Rolling Stone's recent 100 Greatest Punk Albums of All Time, at this very brief moment in time, in this very specific scene, they were a guiding light. Alice Bag's onstage charisma and energy were infectious, as was the way in which she easily morphed into an alter ego. Every L.A. punk in 1977 was becoming someone else. It was a rite of passage. Jean-Paul Bean became Bobby Pin, and then Darby Crash,

• 11:35Jake Brennan?

  co-founder of The Germs, along with his friend George Ruthenberg, who is now going by Pat Smear. And there was Helen Keller, Donarrea, Jane Drano. And in 1977, all these newly christened punks were hanging out in the basement of a building in Hollywood at a small club that welcomed their eccentricities.

• 11:58Jake Brennan?

  The punk rock club known as The Mask was a former bomb shelter. It was opened in the summer of 1977 by a Scottish transplant named Brendan Mullin. There was little ventilation, no dress code, anyone was welcome. On any given night, it would not be unusual to see leather jackets, black gloves, blue eyeshadows, spray-painted shirts, white fruit-of-the-loom tank tops, polyester button-downs from Sears, studded belts, dye-jobs, flat tops, crew cuts, mohawks, and Bags. Alice Bag and her band, The Bags, wore paper bags over their heads. That was their thing. They didn't have an Arturo Vega curating their image like the Ramones did back in New York,

• 12:40Jake Brennan?

  so they had to get creative with self-styling. Alice, bassist Patricia Morrison, aka Patricia Delicia, guitarist Janet Coontz, and Giza X, and drummer Joe Nanini used markers and scissors to decorate them. The Bags, both the band and the cheap image they brought to The Mask's tiny stage, were a statement. A middle-finger thrust in the face of the Hollywood establishment, the bullies, the Eddie Nashes, the big business of Hollywood, they were all put on notice. Alice Bag and her band were the first line of protection against corporate rock and disco cheese. But the real threat that Alice Bag was up against was not, in fact, Captain and Tenille, or Al Stewart,

• 13:23Jake Brennan?

  or even Sean Cassidy or the fucking Eagles. It was the darkness and the danger that The Mask and the L.A. punk scene's open-door policy let in, right under all of their noses. A darkness and danger capable of just about anything, even murder.

• 13:45Jake Brennan?

  Jane King was a 28-year-old aspiring actress doing what she did every Wednesday night after her acting class. She was sitting on a bench at the corner of Franklin Avenue and North Bronson, waiting for the bus to take her back to her apartment in West Hollywood. It was just after 11:00 P.M. The lateness of the hour did not faze her, neither did the footsteps that she could now hear approaching where she sat, all alone. She hadn't heard about the sex workers whose bodies had been discovered in different locations over the last month. No one had heard about it. And the papers didn't run stories on dead sex workers. So Jane King didn't tense up when those footsteps approaching from afar became louder, until the owner of those footsteps,

• 14:29Jake Brennan?

  a man around Jane's age, was standing right next to her. Another night, another pair of feet belonging to another random dude heading in her general direction. It wasn't weird. It was usual, actually. It was the norm. Jane was beautiful. She was tall, blonde. And she got this sort of attention all the time, even at The Mask, the punk rock club just a mile and a half away which she was known to frequent, sometimes with her ex, Rick Wilder, the singer in the Berlin Brats. Some would say that Jane, with her classic good looks, seemed out of place in a punk venue hanging out with outcasts. But then, that was the point. Everyone was out of place in L.A.'s punk underground. The man was handsome.

• 15:14Jake Brennan?

  He struck up a conversation. And moments later, a Cadillac pulled up and stopped. And behind the wheel was the man's cousin. They asked Jane if she wanted a ride home. She hesitated. That's when the handsome man flashed a badge: LAPD. Jane had nothing to worry about, they said. Jane reconsidered. It was late, and she was tired. And these two seemed normal. And they were cops. Or so they said. So she thanked them and accepted their offer, climbing into the caddy's backseat. Jane King would never make it back to West Hollywood. Instead, she would wind up in Glendale at a bungalow belonging to the handsome man,

• 15:57Jake Brennan?

  a man named Kenneth Bianchi. But soon, when the papers finally did start reporting on the seemingly connected murders of young women around Los Angeles, the public would know Bianchi by another name: The Hillside Strangler.

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• 17:40Jake Brennan?

  In the fall of 1977, months after the arrest of David Berkowitz, aka New York City's Son of Sam, fear hitched a ride out west. Los Angeles now had its own serial killer to contend with.

• 17:55Jake Brennan?

  Down in Los Feliz, investigators were pulling Jane King's body from the bushes near an off-ramp on the Golden State Freeway. The manner of death, the strangulation, the ligature marks, sexual assault, it was the same thing the cops had seen in the recent murders of 19-year-old Yolanda Washington, 15-year-old Judith Miller, and 21-year-old Lisa Caston. Murders which had all occurred within the span of the last few weeks. But it was the discovery of Jane King's body on November 23, 1977, coming just days after three more female victims had been found, including a 12- and 14-year-old, that caused the press to finally take notice.

• 18:38Jake Brennan?

  The news of The Hillside Strangler's growing murder spree sent Los Angeles into full panic mode. Sales of firearms skyrocketed. Self-defense classes sold out. Not since the Manson murders some eight years prior had the city been so on edge. In L.A.'s punk underground, quite literally underground, at The Mask, the latest music reflected the state of affairs happening in the city at large. It was as loud as the headlines that announced the next Hillside Strangler's victim. It was as relentless as the fear and paranoia that was gripping L.A. in its constrictive hands. And it was violent, not out of malice or hate, but because violence as a reaction was just another word for protection.

• 19:25Jake Brennan?

  On stage, Alice Bag was in her element. Mic in hand, paper bag over her head. Something came over her at this moment, as it always did. She was being controlled by something outside of herself. Some antiquated force deep in the bones of human history. A force that she couldn't see or even explain, but which no one here in the space beneath North Cherokee and Brendan Mullins' punk rock club The Mask could ever possibly deny. Alice Bag was chaos. Alice Bag was defiance. Alice Bag was safety in a red t-shirt, bright green stockings and heels. Get behind her. Follow her. She'll protect you. The memories were top of mind.

• 20:09Jake Brennan?

  Her father violently lashing out at her mother. The kids at school who tried to keep her quiet and afraid with their own violence. White Fence, Vario Nuevo Estrada. Little Valley, the Tucano gangs who saw a kindred spirit in her eyes. The same gangs who claimed another innocent victim caught in that day's explosive crossfire. L.A. was a violent place, and punk rock was the child of violence. Rock and roll was Link Ray, writing an instrumental that sounded so much like a bloody teenage brawl that it was banned from the radio. It was Dave Davies taking a switchblade to his guitar amplifier and slashing it from end to end. It was Jerry Lee Lewis lighting his piano on fire,

• 20:51Jake Brennan?

  daring Chuck Berry to step onto the smoldering stage. Tonight's stage was barely a stage. Standing just a few inches off the ground, it was merely a suggestion of the dividing line between performer and audience. A defining characteristic of the communal aspect of the punk and hardcore scenes. The lack of separation was underscored when Bobby Pitt of The Germs drunkenly surged forward and grabbed at Alice's face. He wanted that paper bag. He wanted to rip it off her head, to shred it. The music, the speed and the volume of it, the ferocity of it. It did things to a person. Not least of all, to Alice Bag. Alice welcomed Bobby Pitt's attack.

• 21:36Jake Brennan?

  It made her feel like a little girl again, clinging to her mother's leg, inserting herself between her two parents, staving off a fatal blow to the head. Bobby Pitt's shock of violence reminded Alice that she was a protector. It was September 10, 1977, The Bag's first gig at The Mask. Members of The Germs and The Weirdos were there in attendance. Perhaps alongside members of X, or The Plimsolls, The Motels, or The Alley Cats. Maybe The Zeros, or The Screamer's, or The Tupperwares, or even The Nuns from up north in San Francisco, or The Dills from down in Carlsbad. Alice's then-boyfriend, Weirdos drummer, Jeffrey Avicovich, aka Nicky B.,

• 22:20Jake Brennan?

  for once not having to fill in for The Bags, rotating roster of players, looked on as Alice did battle with Bobby. And before long, Belinda Carlisle, aka Dotty Danger, one-time drummer for The Germs, would be watching from the wings wearing nothing but a giant black trash bag decorated with pins. The next year, when Belinda ditched the Dotty Danger alter ego to co-found The Go-Go's, Alice couldn't help but feel like she'd missed an opportunity. She'd always wanted The Bags to be an all-female group, something like The Runaways. In fact, before The Bags were The Bags, Alice, Patricia, and their friend Marlene had auditioned for The Runaways' infamous manager, Kim Folli. And the notorious Svengali

• 23:05Jake Brennan?

  was assembling another female rock band. More young, impressionable minds that he could manipulate and exploit. But Alice was not exploitable. She was not just another piece of clay from Kim Folli to mold, nor was she Cherie Curry or Joan Jett. And I'm not saying that she was better than those two Runaways. I'm just saying that she couldn't even figure out all the chords to a single Runaway song. Alice was built different. She was wired different. She was where she was supposed to be. Part of a counterculture that she'd been protecting since even before she played her first show. A counterculture that wanted to be seen, even if they spent their nights hidden underground. A counterculture that welcomed anyone,

• 23:48Jake Brennan?

  even dudes as members of The Bags. Dudes like Bobby Pitt, who eventually got what he wanted when he ripped the paper bag from Alice's head while she performed onstage. The Bags' shows became increasingly violent. Fights amongst the crowd were commonplace. Noses broken and mouths bloodied, all of that. And sure, a lot of it was kids, punks, disenfranchised youth working out deep-seated issues of anger and frustration with their particular lot in life. But this was Los Angeles in 1977, and there was a deranged killer on the loose. A killer who had taken the lives of seven women already, including Jane King, who'd been a regular at The Mask. But what else could one do

• 24:33Jake Brennan?

  besides seek refuge deep underground, where Alice Bag and her small, yet mighty, army had your back? By the time the 10th body was found, it was beginning to look like there was more than one hillside strangler. A witness had reported seeing two men drag 18-year-old college student Lauren Wagner from her car on the evening of November 28, 1977. The same witness also said that the men appeared to be "police officers." That last detail ramped up the already heightened sense of paranoia in the city. Because of it, women in Los Angeles were told they no longer had to pull over their vehicles for a police cruiser. Instead, they were instructed to drive themselves home,

• 25:17Jake Brennan?

  where they could call the police and verify that the cruiser trying to pull them over was, in fact, an actual cop. I swear to God, this actually happened. The following morning, November 29, as this new rule for female drivers was put into place, Lauren Wagner's body was found dumped on the west side of Mount Washington. Tension was at a fever pitch. The city's sex workers, in particular, they were on high alert. It wasn't safe to walk the streets anymore. Escort work was much safer. And so, it was through an escort service that 17-year-old Kimberly Martin was connected with her latest client. She left her Sunset Boulevard apartment

• 26:01Jake Brennan?

  and made her way to the address in Hollywood that she'd been given. When she arrived, she was a bit taken aback. First, by the fact that the place looked empty, as though no one actually lived there. And second, that there was not one man waiting for her as she had expected, but two men. The blood-curdling screams that followed fell on deaf ears. The next morning, December 14, Kimberly Martin's nude and strangled body was found on a hillside in Silverlake, where on a clear, smogless day, you could see all the way to Los Angeles City Hall.

• 26:40Speaker 06

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• 26:47Speaker 05

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• 27:00Speaker 07

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• 28:20Jake Brennan?

  Brendan Mullen had been thinking a lot about Jane King in the weeks since her murder back in November of 1977. The fact that she frequented his club made all this Hillside Strangler boogeyman bullshit strike way closer to home than it would have otherwise. It was also impossible not to think about the killer's latest victim, Kimberly Martin, about how the neighbors had heard her scream in that empty Hollywood apartment but didn't do anything about it at the time. Mullen's club, The Mask, was not empty like that Hollywood apartment, but it would be all too easy for someone to overwhelm a woman down here in the shadows, away from the throng,

• 29:01Jake Brennan?

  and for the women's subsequent shrieks to be drowned out by an ear-splitting performance by the Germs or the Bags. And so Brendan Mullen came to think about the protection of the community that gathered nightly at his punk rock club. Yes, Alice Bag was formidable. Yes, Alice Bag was loyal. And yes, Alice Bag standing in the pair of heels she bought at Fredericks of Hollywood. Well, she was also tall. But with a serial killer still at large, everyone would feel a little safer if there was some added muscle and menace to keep an eye on things. This is how Brendan Mullen came to hire a 6'4", 350-pound security guard.

• 29:45Jake Brennan?

  The guard was called Tiny, a nickname meant to inject a little levity into the whole situation, and it did. But Tiny's presence was a nightly reminder of the threat that continued to loom over every facet of everyday life, including nights out at the punk rock club where letting your guard down and giving yourself over to the music was never meant to be an overture to getting yourself killed. The Hillside Strangler, or Strangler as the cops and the press now assumed, were on everyone's worried mind in Los Angeles as 1977 gave way to 1978. The punk rockers were no exception. And there was even a short-lived band on the scene at the time, F Word, which had begun

• 30:28Jake Brennan?

  performing a new song called "Hillside Strangler." Protection was paramount, and there was strength in numbers, and best to stick together and ride out the crime wave as a group. So, one by one, many of the mass regulars moved into the nearby Canterbury Apartments, and they did so for three reasons. One, the Canterbury was only a block from The Mask. Two, the rent was dirt cheap. And three, the building's manager did not look upon punk culture with the same kind of disdain and disgust as many others did. These weren't shiftless layabouts. Alice Bag, for one, worked a day job as a trainer at Jack LaLanne's Gym in Montebello. So Alice, her boyfriend Nicky Beat, Belinda Carlisle, Belinda's soon-to-be bandmate Jane

• 31:13Jake Brennan?

  Widlin, aka Jane Draino, and all kinds of the usual suspects you'd catch at Brendan Mullen's club on any given night were now populating every floor of the nearby Canterbury Apartments. But life at the Canterbury wasn't all light. Darkness was creeping in, just like the darkness had been creeping into The Mask and into just about every neighborhood in Los Angeles proper for months. One of Alice's roommates was shooting up Dilatid and was about to move on to heroin. Later, she would convince Alice to shoot junk with her, but at the moment, this was as close to the drug as Alice would let herself get. If the needle itself didn't scare you, there was the specter of addiction.

• 31:57Jake Brennan?

  And then, after addiction, came the debts. Alice's other roommate owed money to dealers, who were keen to get paid by any means necessary. Every knock now elicited a high, strong response. On the other side of that door could be a friendly face, someone from one of the bands you were on the bill with later that night, or it could be one devil or another coming to get his due. But it wasn't the devil that came for The Mask, it was the city of Los Angeles. On January 14, 1978, fire marshals shut down the punk club for code violations, something about poor ventilation and lack of egress, in other words, lack of protection. It was a time of change.

• 32:41Jake Brennan?

  Giza X and Joan Anini were fired from The Bags. Johnny Nation and Ricky Sticks were hired as their replacements. At a Bags gig in San Francisco, Sid Vicious, in town with Sex Pistols, stumbled onstage and draped his junky arm around Alice's neck. In doing so, he gave the L.A. upstarts the UK's ringing endorsement. But it was a story told by someone who would soon date a different bassist in a different UK punk band that reminded Alice Bag why she felt the need to protect this little scene that was feeling more and more fragile at every turn. In 1979, San Francisco-based Pearl E. Gates, aka Pearl Harbor, would release her self-titled

• 33:24Jake Brennan?

  debut album with her band, Pearl Harbor and the Explosions. Shortly thereafter, she would perform Wanda Jackson's "Fujima Mama" onstage with The Clash in Tokyo, and before long, marry the band's bass player, Paul Simonin. But before all that, there was Pearl's story as told to Alice Bag, and it went something like this. Pearl Harbor was leaving the whiskey on the Sunset Strip, and as she walked along the sidewalk, she could hear a car slowly following her from behind. She shot a glance over her shoulder. Two men, one behind the wheel and another riding shotgun. Her pulse in her feet quickened.

• 34:07Jake Brennan?

  The car lurched forward, and the brakes squealed. The driver jumped out. He was wearing a policeman's uniform. Pearl thought of what she happened to be wearing, and then it all made sense. Her miniskirt, her fishnet stockings, total punk provocation, and no doubt this copier had mistaken her for a sex worker. She tried to explain, but it was of no use, and she was manhandled into the back of the unmarked car. Then, they were off. The driver couldn't keep his mouth shut. He told Pearl she was a cheap whore, a slut, and they would teach her a lesson. Now Pearl really began to panic. She knew they were going to kill her. She could hear it in their voices, and she begged them not to do it. She begged them to stop the car and let her out.

• 34:52Jake Brennan?

  "Please, just, please, just stop." Pearl Harbor couldn't be so sure when the unmarked car pulled over to the side of the road and the two men finally let her go. Seconds had long since turned into minutes and minutes into hours, but later, when she told this story to Alice, and then even beyond that, when it was revealed that the two men driving around Los Angeles and strangling young women often posed as police officers, clarity came fast. Pearl Harbor was positive that she had taken a ride with the Hillside Stranglers and lived to talk about it.

• 35:28Jake Brennan?

  Ten other women in Los Angeles wouldn't be so lucky, including a 20-year-old waitress named Cindy Hudspeth. The orange Dotson was found some 50 feet down an embankment off the Angeles Crest Highway due north of downtown LA. Stuffed inside the trunk, police found the body. It was February 17, 1978, one month since the fire marshal had shut down The Mask and two months since the last victim of the Hillside Stranglers had been discovered. The previous afternoon, the Dotson was tooling around Glendale with Cindy Hudspeth in the driver's seat. She'd worked her ass off to afford the Dotson. She earned the money.

• 36:10Jake Brennan?

  She made the down payment, and for the first time in her life, she had her own vehicle, her own apartment, and a newfound sense of freedom.

• 36:19Jake Brennan?

  It was close to quitting time when she pulled into the upholstery shop in Glendale. The idea was to get a quote on some work to customize the Dotson's interior, make the car more her own. She found the owner, a man in his 40s. He was helpful, even though it was obvious that he was annoyed that she walked in just as he was about to close up. But his mood changed when the door to the shop swung open and another man walked inside. This guy was younger, 20-something. It was obvious that the two men knew each other. Cindy had no idea that they were cousins. She also had no idea that these were the same two men who had given Jane King a ride home when she was waiting for her bus late one night some three months prior.

• 37:04Jake Brennan?

  Furthermore, she did not know their names, Angelo Buono Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi. She was unaware that Buono's little upholstery shop was more than an upholstery shop. It was hell. It was a shop of horrors, where unspeakable crimes were being carried out against young women, week after week and month after month. Sexual assault, torture, strangulation, murder. Cindy Hudspeth would never drive her orange Dotson again. Instead, she would take her last breath here in the upholstery shop, and at that moment, Buono and Bianchi would claim their tenth victim.

• 38:08Jake Brennan?

  For 10 months following the murder of Cindy Hudspeth in February 1978, Los Angeles held its collective breath. 10 months, waiting for the Hillside Stranglers to strike again. But there were no more bodies for the public to gossip about. And there were no more clues or leads for the cops to follow. There was only fraught anticipation, endless dread, and an increasingly false sense of security. You were either on constant lookout for a new and improved way to protect yourself, or you were slowly lulled into the idea that there was nothing left to protect. Alice Bag was going through a similar crisis of faith. The violence that had been building up at Bag's shows was now spilling into her personal life.

• 38:53Jake Brennan?

  Soon, she and Nikki Beat would break up. A split punctuated by a metal belt buckle which Alice used to strike Nikki in the face. Things weren't quite that extreme yet, but they were getting there. Someone was setting fires in the Canterbury. The Mask was scrambling to find a new location for the small but muddy punk community to call home. And one of the newest members of the Bags, either Johnny Nation or Ricky Sticks, was stealing from the rest of the group. So Johnny and Ricky were out, and once again Nikki was sitting in as the Bags drummer. And it was this lineup that soon got the call up to perform at a music industry institution. No punk band had ever played Doug Weston's Troubadour, the venue on Santa Monica Boulevard

• 39:38Jake Brennan?

  that had launched the careers of Elton John, Jackson Brown, and the fucking Eagles. In 1978, the Bags were the first punk band to grace the Troubadour's stage. And they would also be the last for some time. Alice wasn't surprised to see singer-songwriter Tom Waits in the crowd at the Troubadour. Word around town was that Tom, like many a player in the Los Angeles music ecosystem, had an interest in Alice's group, the Bags. Perhaps a perverse interest, but an interest nonetheless. The attention was flattering, but it was also kind of meaningless, too, because why would it matter whether Tom Waits liked them or not? How would it help a loud, fast, and violent punk group to make nice with a guy who was

• 40:22Jake Brennan?

  on the same record label as Linda Ronstadt, Judy Sill, and Warren Zevon? But there was Tom, straight from the corner of Heartbreak and Vine, Front Row, Pork Pie Hat, Lung Dart, Four Sheets to the Wind, Tom Travert style. Alice was almost impressed that he'd actually made it. But Nikki Beat was not impressed in the least. Nikki Beat had caught another word around town. This one in which Tom Waits fancied Alice for himself and declared Nikki a dipshit. So before the Bags began their unprecedented set, Nikki Beat grabbed the microphone, looked first row sitting Tom Waits in the eye, and called him an asshole and a cunt. And then the Bags started playing. The Troubadour was pandemonium.

• 41:06Jake Brennan?

  People hanging from the rafters, glasses and chairs tossed wildly in the air. And the place was trashed. When the punks weren't biting the hand that fed them, they were gnawing it off at the wrist. And after the show, it became clear what was going to happen next. Alice watched Troubadour's staff hustle everyone out, everyone except for the Bags, Tom Waits, and a couple of the street smart, street tough people that he was rolling with. Tom Waits and his guys surrounded Nikki Beat. It wasn't clear to Alice who threw the first punch. But once cooler heads prevailed, once Tom and Nikki were pulled off of each other, Doug Weston had already come to his inevitable conclusion. The Bags would never play his club again.

• 41:49Jake Brennan?

  And neither would any other LA punk band, for that matter. At least not for a long, long time. The grand social experiment of the Bags at the Troubadour reinforced Alice Bag's reluctance to compromise her artistic values or to assimilate just for the sake of being part of a more popular club. Besides, there are all these people in the punk scene, people just like her, the misfits, the weirdos, the outcasts. And they needed her. Tom Waits did not need her. But as the months wore on, it became obvious that Alice needed to protect herself above all else. There were more bands from more clubs, like Madame Wong's, which blacklisted the Bags for causing a riot.

• 42:33Jake Brennan?

  There was more fallout, like when filmmaker Penelope Spheres captured the LA punk scene in the excellent documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization. A doc which preceded the breakup of the Bags when former band member Patricia Morrison tried to block its release by claiming she owned the copyright to the Bags name. This is why the Bags are accredited in the documentary as the Alice Bag Band, but I digress. And of course, there were more drugs. Specifically, the aforementioned heroin, which was creeping back into Alice's life when she joined a new band called the Castration Squad along with her roommate. That roommate being the one who finally convinced Alice to shoot up.

• 43:15Jake Brennan?

  So in order to save herself from self-destruction and any collateral damage sustained by the oncoming implosion of the LA punk scene, a scene which splintered into the emerging genres of new wave and 80s pop, Alice Bag left the Canterbury, left the punks, and went home to her parents' place in East LA. In 1984, Alice Bag earned her bachelor's degree in philosophy and began teaching kindergarten. That was the same year that one of the two Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi, was sentenced to life in prison. Five years earlier, in January 1979, Bianchi had finally been caught and placed under arrest for the murders of two young women in Bellingham, Washington.

• 43:58Jake Brennan?

  At the time, it had been nearly a year since the Stranglers' last victim was discovered. Bianchi confessed to the Washington murders, as well as some of the LA murders. But his confession came with the admission that he'd done so with the help of his adoptive cousin, Angelo Bueno Jr. Bueno was also eventually sentenced to life, just months before Bianchi. And then, it seemed, LA's long nightmare was over. However, a new nightmare was just beginning. Because as the Hillside Stranglers were being walked out of the courtroom and into a prison where they'd live out the rest of their days, another force of evil took to the streets of the City of Angels. A six-foot-tall man with eyes as black as his hair ambled through the streets of LA

• 44:43Jake Brennan?

  with the devil's business on his brain. Soon, the city would realize that it was once again being held in the grip of a homicidal maniac. Because evil, just like punk rock and just like rock and roll, is repetitive by nature. There is a cycle. LA takes in these people, and they are recycled out for the next coming wave. And there go the Bags, and here comes Black Flag. And there go the Hillside Stranglers, and here comes Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is DisgraceLand.

• 45:24Jake Brennan?

  All right, guys, thanks for checking out this DisgraceLand episode on Alice Bag. Hit me up and let me know what other foundational artists from seminal underground scenes should we know about. Alice Bag, obviously. Not a household name by any stretch, but super important to the scene that she came from. Give us other examples. 617-906-6638. Voicemail and text, you might hear your answer on the next after-party. Or you can hit me up on the socials at @disgracelandpod or email me [email protected].

• 46:06Jake Brennan?

  Here comes some credits. DisgraceLand was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis, the Exactly Right Network, and iHeart Podcasts. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a DisgraceLand All-Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com/membership. Members can listen to every episode of DisgraceLand ad-free. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @disgracelandpod, and on YouTube at youtube.com/AtDisgraceLandPod. Rock or roll.

• 46:51Speaker 07

  He's a bad bad man. Your computer isn't just a machine. It's where your family's memories, your work, and your private life all live. One click on the wrong link, one hidden download, and all of it is exposed to threats you never even see coming. Kids downloading games, emails that look legitimate, ads that promise something free. Every day brings a dozen small risks, and it only takes one to open the door. And once something gets in, it doesn't just affect one file or one folder. It can reach everything connected to that device.

• 47:35Speaker 07

  Photos, passwords, everything you thought was safe. Protecting your family online starts with protecting the device they use every day. Don't leave it to chance. Go to superantispware.com and secure your PC now. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast, the true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed them. What? I could talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.