A handful of law enforcement teams in California are working with an AI-powered investigative analysis platform called Closure, which can generate leads from terabytes of potential video, audio and digital evidence.

In the 1980s, I sat in the same Los Angeles courtroom day after day for two years, covering what was to become the longest criminal trial in U.S. history at the time. I was a crime reporter, and it was the trial of Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono, the accused Hillside Stranglers.

It was a notorious case. In the 1970s, the city of Los Angeles was paralyzed because a serial killer (or killers) was on the loose, raping and killing 10 girls and young women. The killer would leave their bodies on hillsides around the region.

The LAPD assigned more than 165 officers to sift through 10,000 tips and 120,000 fingerprint charts. It wasn’t until Bianchi slipped up in Washington state, where he had killed two women, that the case began to crack. 

But the case was very complex and relied on circumstantial evidence. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Presiding Criminal Courts Judge Ronald George was outraged and ordered a review of the evidence. In a very rare and unusual move, it was assigned to the California State Attorney General’s Office instead. 

The trial featured 392 witnesses and 1,807 pieces of evidence. In the end, the AG got Buono and Bianchi convicted for all ten murders. But it took two long years. Those two serial killers almost walked free if not for a courageous judge who later became the presiding judge of the California Supreme Court.

When I think back on that unusual case, I can only imagine how the new AI-powered tool Closure could have helped. It could have condensed all that evidence — many of it handwritten during the early stages of computers — within hours instead of weeks. Read how Closure is helping to solve local crimes.

– Judy Farah, editor 

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