Richard Chase

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Trenton Chase kept a calendar on the wall of his apartment in Sacramento, California. On the dates of two murders in January 1978, he had written a single word: Today. He had written the same word on forty-four other dates through that year.

  Chase became known as the Vampire of Sacramento and the Dracula Killer. Between December 1977 and January 1978 he killed six people, convinced he needed their blood to stay alive. A senior investigator with 28 years in law enforcement called the killings the "most grotesque slayings" he had ever investigated.

  This documentary follows a man whom doctors, parents and police had all met long before he fired a shot. How does a boy from a Sacramento family end up in front of that calendar? How does a man twice diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic end up living alone and off his medication? And when a jury finally weighed his mind, what did it decide, and what did Chase himself say about what he had done?

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• 2. A Sacramento Childhood

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  Richard Chase was born in Sacramento on the 23rd of May 1950, the first of two children of Richard Edgar and Beatrice Lorene Chase. His only sibling, a sister named Pamela Lee, arrived in October 1953. The family followed the Presbyterian faith, but the household was far from calm. Their father frequently beat both children, and the parents argued constantly.

  Beatrice suspected her husband of being unfaithful and of trying to poison her. She sought psychiatric treatment on at least two occasions in the early 1960s. The couple separated in 1964, and the children stayed briefly with relatives in Los Angeles before the parents reconciled.

  By the age of ten, Chase showed three behaviors that doctors link with later violence: cruelty to animals, fire-setting and bedwetting. Together they are known as the Macdonald triad. He also had a rich fantasy life centered on power and a selfish, inconsiderate streak. Yet over sixty children came to one of his birthday parties, and school and friendships were not yet badly affected.

  From 1964 to 1968, Chase attended Mira Loma High School. Classmates saw him as a loner, though he kept a small circle of friends, many of them known around campus as "acid-heads." By his mid-teens he used marijuana and LSD heavily and drank often. He collected a minor record for possession and theft, and the court ordered community service. With an average IQ of 95, he mostly earned C, D and F grades. He still graduated on the 6th of June 1968, and his parents gave him a Volkswagen.

  Chase began dating in 1965 and soon discovered he was impotent. One former girlfriend recalled that they could not have sex the first time they tried. His repeated failure helped end that relationship in 1966. Not long after, drunk at a friend's party, he broke down in tears and told his friends about it.

  Seven months after his eighteenth birthday, Chase saw a psychiatrist who specialized in adolescent problems. He wanted to discuss his impotence and the tension at home. The doctor suggested the problem might come from extreme suppressed anger, possibly aimed at women in general.

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• 3. Descent

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  In 1969, while enrolled at American River College, Chase took a job as an administrative assistant at Retailers Credit Association. It lasted several months and was the only job he ever held for any real length of time. Over the next two years he drifted through other jobs. Poor work habits and drug use ended each within weeks.

  In 1970, Chase moved into an apartment on Annadale Lane with two young women, Cyd Evans DeMarchi and Rachel Statum. His parents sent him $50 a month toward the rent. Within three months the women left. He was usually high, was suspected of dealing marijuana, and often walked naked in front of female visitors. He also barricaded himself in his room so that no one could "sneak up" on him.

  Statum's brothers and their friends then moved in. They had a rock band, and Chase kept interrupting rehearsals to play the conga, despite his poor musical ability. They resisted, argued with him, and eventually left too. Unable to afford the rent alone, Chase went back to his parents' house. He dropped out of college in 1971, and in December of that year Sacramento police arrested him for marijuana possession.

  His parents separated in June 1972 and divorced six months later. His father, convinced the trouble came from laziness and bad values rather than illness, kept telling his son to "straighten up" and "get a job." During a quarrel in late 1972, Beatrice tried to call the police. Chase grabbed the phone, struck her across the head with it, and ran off over a fence. She was told she could press charges and chose not to.

  A lone trip to Utah in 1972 ended in an arrest for drunk driving. Back in California, Chase told his parents he was "quite ill" from being gassed in a Utah jail and planned to sue. His father, who had bailed him out, talked him out of it.

  By early 1973, Chase was obsessed with his health. That summer he cut pictures of human organs out of a copy of Gray's Anatomy and pasted them on his bedroom walls. He believed he was trying to work out what was wrong with him. Around 1973 he called an ambulance and asked for a stretcher. The paramedics found no emergency and suggested a psychiatric evaluation.

  His sister had grown afraid of him and avoided being alone with him. His mother heard him mutter things like "Stop bothering me!" and arranged for him to see two doctors. Unhappy with their conclusions, Chase went to a doctor named Donald Ansel, who found no physical illness. Ansel judged that Chase had a "psychiatric disturbance of major proportion."

  In May 1973, Chase moved to Los Angeles to live with his paternal grandmother. His uncle, who worked at a school for mentally disabled children, got him a job as a school bus driver. Chase was fired for neglecting the bus's maintenance and letting it run low on oil. After that he stayed in bed all day and roamed the house at night. He refused his grandmother's cooking, complained of heart and stomach pains, and sometimes stood on his head to send blood to a painful head. She also heard him ask himself, "Richard, are you a good boy?" and answer, "Yes, you're a good boy." She bought him a plane ticket back to Sacramento.

  On the 1st of December 1973, Chase walked into the emergency room of American River Hospital in a manic state. He shouted that his blood had stopped flowing, that he could not breathe, that his head was changing shape, and that his pulmonary artery had been stolen. Doctors found nothing physically wrong and admitted him to the psychiatric unit.

  Dr. Irwin Lyons described him as "tense, nervous and wild eyed" and as a "filthy, disheveled, deteriorated and foul-smelling white male." Staff diagnosed chronic paranoid schizophrenia, while allowing that heavy drug abuse might be the cause. Two days later, Beatrice confronted the ward staff, and Chase was discharged against medical advice. Lyons wrote that she was "highly aggressive, hostile and provocative," calling her "the so-called schizophrenogenic mother."

  Beatrice later said that for about two years she worked with her son, making sure he took his medication, avoided drugs and alcohol, ate better and kept clean. Richard Chase Sr. would later dispute those claims.

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• 4. The Blood Delusion

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  By late 1975, Chase had slid back into heavy drug use, and from early 1976 his mind deteriorated fast. He held oranges against his head, believing his brain would absorb vitamin C. He became sure his body was not making enough blood. He also believed his skull bones had come apart and were slowly drifting, and he once shaved his head to watch them move.

  Beatrice again heard him talking to himself. She said he could barely sign his name. He ordered her to stop controlling his mind and later accused Pamela of the same. In about February 1976, during a phone argument with his father, Chase tore his mother's phone from the wall. His parents decided to find him a place of his own.

  In March 1976, Chase moved into an apartment on Cannon Street. He lived on welfare and parental help, and his father paid the rent and visited weekly to play chess. Soon afterward Chase began drinking animal blood, convinced it would replace his insufficient, contaminated supply. He bought rabbits from a nearby farm and ate their raw flesh and entrails. He also blended the intestines and blood with cola, believing it would stop his heart from shrinking. When his father asked about the live rabbits, Chase said he was eating them. His father, long used to his son's strange remarks, did not look into it.

  On the 26th of April 1976, Chase was committed for the second time. His father found him on the floor, vomiting and shaking, complaining of a "bad rabbit" he had eaten. At American River Hospital, Chase had in fact injected rabbit's blood into his veins. He told staff the rabbit had battery acid in its stomach. He was again diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic and held for seventy-two hours of assessment. He admitted he needed to drink blood because his circulation had failed and his body was "falling apart."

  On the 19th of May, he was moved to Beverly Manor Psychiatric Hospital in the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael. Staff again found severe schizophrenia. Because he did not respond to antipsychotic drugs, doctors concluded his illness came from long-term drug abuse. Several times staff found him hidden in bushes with blood around his mouth and a decapitated sparrow or other small bird nearby. On another occasion two birds with broken necks lay outside his window. He blamed a shaving cut for the blood.

  By summer 1976, psychotropic drugs were helping. By mid-September, notes said he had not mutilated a bird or asked for blood to drink for some time. He had joined group activities for over two months. Doctors felt they could do no more, and on the 29th of September they released him into his mother's custody. His parents held a conservatorship reviewed each year, and staff urged that he stay on his medication.

  Chase then moved to an apartment on Watt Avenue. His mother paid the rent on the first of each month, and both parents shopped for his groceries. Beatrice at first made sure he took his pills. She came to feel the drugs only made him "easier to handle" and that he no longer needed them. Without asking his doctors, she weaned him off, and by January 1977 he was taking nothing. His delusions soon returned, and he accused her of poisoning him with dish soap.

  The old fear of a shrinking heart came back, and Chase moved from birds and rabbits to dogs. He stole some and bought others. He answered newspaper advertisements for free dogs, promising unwanted pets a stable home. In autumn 1977 he answered an ad for Labrador puppies and talked the seller into two for the price of one. His mother suspected he had killed her own two dogs, but he denied it.

  By spring 1977, Beatrice was complaining about the filth in his apartment, and Chase barred both parents from entering. Neighbors heard shouting and banging. He was sometimes seen leaving with his mouth hanging open and carrying large boxes. When he met old school acquaintances, he talked only about events from long ago and skipped the years between.

  Chase grew tired of the conservatorship and wanted independence and a vacation. His parents let it expire in the summer of 1977, though his mother kept paying his rent and bills. She gave him $1,450 saved from his benefits and bought him a bus ticket to Washington, D.C. Three weeks later he was back, having paid $800 in Colorado for a 1966 Ford Ranchero.

  On the 3rd of August 1977, officers of the Bureau of Indian Affairs arrested Chase on the Pyramid Lake reservation in Nevada. They found blood smeared over the Ranchero's seats and panels, along with a .22-caliber rifle and a .30-30 Marlin Model 336. A plastic bucket held a raw liver, and a pile of men's clothing was stained with blood. Chase himself was crouched naked on a rock ledge about half a mile away, covered in blood. He first insisted the blood had seeped out through his skin. He then changed his story, saying he had shot a deer in Colorado "sometime in May" and stripped to wash in the lake.

  Four days later, laboratory tests showed that the liver and the blood came from a cow. No charges were filed. Chase returned to Sacramento with his Ranchero. His rifles did not come back with him.

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• 5. Seventeen Days

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  On the 2nd of December 1977, Chase bought a .22-caliber Stoeger Luger pistol for $69.99, lying about his history of mental illness. He collected it on the 18th. Neighbors heard shots from inside his apartment. He had bought a first box of fifty rounds and a second on the 26th, so he likely fired at least fifty shots in those eight days.

  On the evening of the 27th of December, Chase fired at the wall of a house as he drove past. At about 6:30 p.m. he fired into the kitchen window of another nearby home. No one was hurt, though one bullet tore through the hair of a woman named Dorothy Polenske.

  Two days later, on the 29th, Chase killed Ambrose Edward Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer and father of two. Griffin had come home from grocery shopping with his wife, Carol, and was walking back to his car for more bags. Carol heard two "popping noises," then her husband's scream. One round hit a tree and the other struck him in the chest. She thought he was having a heart attack. He died in a hospital emergency room, and police saw only a random, motiveless crime, possibly a thrill killing.

  Two weeks later, Chase tried to enter the home of a woman who was alone. Her doors were locked, so he walked away. On the 10th of January 1978, he bought three more boxes of ammunition. A week afterward he set fires in two apartments near his own, believing the tenants were spying on him. On the weekend of the 21st and 22nd, he went rock-hunting with his father and visited his mother. Both parents later said he seemed calm and pleasant.

  On the morning of the 23rd of January, Chase entered an unlocked, empty house and escaped through a window when the owners came home at 10:40. They found missing $16, binoculars, a knife, a cassette player and a stethoscope. Chase went home, picked up his gun and swapped a blue jacket for an orange ski parka.

  That day he broke into a house on Tioga Way and shot Teresa Lyn Wallin, who was 22 and three months pregnant. She had stepped out of her kitchen with a bag of trash and met him inside her unlocked back door. He shot her three times, the last at close range to her left temple. He then used a butcher's knife from her kitchen drawer to mutilate her body. He took a yogurt cup from the trash bag and drank her blood. Her husband, David, found her shortly after 6 p.m. and ran screaming from the house. Nothing had been stolen, though some body parts were missing.

  Four days later, on the 27th of January, Chase parked his car at a shopping center and walked to the Merrywood Drive home of Evelyn Elizabeth Miroth. She was 36, divorced, and the mother of three. Four people in the house were shot to death. Her 52-year-old friend Daniel James Meredith was shot twice in the head in the hallway. Her six-year-old son Jason Bradford Miroth was also killed, as was her 22-month-old nephew David Michael Ferreira, who was shot in his crib. Evelyn herself was shot above the right eye.

  Chase mutilated Evelyn's body with kitchen knives and drained her blood into a green plastic bucket. He drank it from a coffee cup. He later told police that he was in a semi-conscious state, so the exact order of events is unclear.

  The interruption came from a six-year-old neighbor named Tracy Grangaard. By prearrangement, she knocked to ask whether Jason was ready for a family day trip into the Sierra Nevada. Chase told police this startled him, so he "took the baby and split." He drove off with Ferreira's body in Meredith's Ford station wagon and left it in the lot of an apartment building on Marconi Avenue. He carried the child's body to his own apartment nearby, then went back for his car.

  At the apartment, Chase decapitated the toddler, took organs, and drank his blood. Ferreira's partly mummified body was found on the 24th of March, hidden in a cardboard box in an alley between a church and a supermarket. The spot was about three-quarters of a mile from Chase's home.

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• 6. The Hunt and the Arrest

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  Within days of the Wallin killing, a Sacramento-based FBI special agent named Russell Vorpagel brought in Robert Ressler, a profiler based in Virginia. Together they drew up a portrait of the killer. They expected a white man aged 25 to 27, single, unemployed and a classic loner. He would be undernourished, with a long history of drug use, and suffering from paranoid psychosis. They called him a markedly disorganized offender whose illness had probably begun around age fifteen and worsened over eight to ten years. He would look dirty and disheveled, they said, and evidence would be found at his home. They also expected him to strike again until caught.

  On the 27th of January, the Miroth bodies were found. A neighbor named Catherine Belli had been told by Tracy Grangaard's mother that Evelyn was oddly absent. Belli told a friend, Nancy Turner, who went to the back door and found it open. Inside she found Meredith's body and ran for help. Two men in a Salvation Army truck called the sheriff, and officers began arriving at 12:43 p.m. The first to reach the house was Ivan Clark.

  Investigators linked the killings to the Wallin murder almost at once. The mutilation, the missing blood and the short distance between the scenes pointed to one man. The killer had also left complete handprints and shoe imprints in Evelyn Miroth's blood. Meredith's station wagon was found nearby with the door ajar and the keys in the ignition, which suggested he lived within a mile.

  More than sixty officers went door to door within a half-mile of the station wagon, carrying the updated profile and a composite drawing. Two witnesses had seen the wagon but could not describe the driver. Then, on the 28th of January, a woman named Nancy Holden called police. She had gone to high school with Chase.

  Holden said a man in an orange ski parka had approached her at a shopping center near the Wallin house shortly before midday on the day of that murder. She did not recognize him until he asked whether she had been "on the motorcycle when Curt was killed." She said no and asked who he was. He answered "Rick," and she realized it was Richard Chase.

  She was shocked by how emaciated and disheveled he looked. There were bloodstains on him, his eyes seemed sunken, and a thick yellow crust ringed his mouth. When he followed her to the parking lot and asked for a ride, she said she was married, locked her car and drove off as he tried the passenger door. A small park separated that parking lot from the Wallin home. Chase is believed to have met Teresa Wallin minutes later.

  A check of motor vehicle records turned up a Richard Trenton Chase on Watt Avenue, less than a block from the abandoned station wagon. His record showed a 1973 arrest for carrying a handgun and a short spell in 1976 when he was listed as missing from American River Hospital. Shortly after 5:40 p.m., three detectives went to question him.

  Chase would not open his door and hung up on a detective's call. Police staged a ruse, with one officer pretending to leave while two waited on either side of the entrance. Chase came out holding a box of bloodstained rags. After a brief chase and scuffle, he was subdued and his pistol was taken. He shouted that he had "done nothing." On the drive to the station he said: "My apartment's a lot cleaner, isn't it? I didn't do anything in my apartment except kill a few dogs."

  The box he threw at an officer held a bloodstained green plastic bucket, a diaper pin and pieces of a toddler's brain. A warrant search that evening found a twelve-inch butcher's knife and bloodstained rubber boots in his trunk. In the apartment, the walls, floors and ceiling were heavily stained with blood, and the kitchen held a bloodstained blender and a hatchet. Dishes in the refrigerator held human body parts, and a plate with brain tissue sat on his bed. Several knives in the kitchen had been stolen from the Wallin house.

  Throughout the late afternoon and evening, detectives questioned him repeatedly. He freely admitted killing animals and drinking their blood, but denied the murders. Shown the physical evidence, he said, "My parents didn't bring me up that way. I wouldn't do anything like that." Then he claimed police were framing him.

  That evening he was charged with the murders of Wallin, Meredith, Evelyn and Jason Miroth, and the kidnapping and murder of David Ferreira. Sheriff Duane Lowe told reporters there was enough physical evidence to conclude the toddler was dead. Ballistic tests then tied Chase's pistol to Ambrose Griffin's death, adding a sixth murder charge. On the 28th of February, a grand jury indicted him on eleven counts, including robbery and several counts of mayhem.

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• 7. Sane or Not

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  Two psychiatrists hired at the request of the district attorney's office examined Chase before his indictment. At first he refused to talk to them, then agreed. He described his crimes in a detached tone and said he had killed to replace his contaminated blood. He told them his mother had been poisoning him with "doses of dish soap" and that his father, while "easy to get along with," did not care. Asked about paranoia, he replied: "There seems to be enough evidence that proves that I don't think I'm suffering from any delusions or persecution, but that I am really persecuted."

  In June 1978, Chase complained to the assistant district attorney that prison officials were putting "volatile acid" and "venereal diseases" in his food. He demanded an angiogram to measure his body's decay. The request was denied, but a judge ordered an examination for brain or stomach tumors. That pushed the trial back from November 1978 to January 1979.

  Two court-appointed psychiatrists, Martin Bremer and Leland Silva, each judged Chase competent to stand trial. Both found he understood the criminality of his acts and was sane under California law. Bremer thought the killings came from a wish to escape "intolerable distress" caused by delusions of being poisoned. Silva diagnosed a paranoid, antisocial personality disorder rather than schizophrenia. He noted a "distinct shift in Chase's manner" whenever legal topics came up.

  The trial opened in Palo Alto on the 2nd of January 1979 before Superior Court Judge John Schatz. Prosecutor Ronald Tochterman, assisted by Albert Locher, said he would seek the death penalty and prove the murders were "purposeful and calculated." He cited a psychiatrist who concluded that Chase "was capable of not killing people. He had that choice." Defense attorney Farris Salamy entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. He hoped to win a verdict of second degree murder, which carried life imprisonment. Of his client, Salamy said: "He suffers from an insidious psychosis that keeps a man from thinking. I think he did want blood, and whatever he had to do to get it, he did!"

  The prosecution called almost 100 witnesses and entered 250 exhibits. These included the pistol linked to all six deaths, Meredith's wallet and credit cards found on Chase, and the knives taken from the Wallin house. Tochterman traced a progression. Chase bought a gun, practiced with it, shot Griffin from a distance, then entered occupied homes with a loaded gun and rubber gloves. To the defense claim of insanity, he replied: "The mere fact there is a pat psychological explanation does not mean these were not crimes in law."

  On the 29th of March, Chase took the stand. He admitted the killings but said he could not recall every detail. He claimed he never saw Griffin, and that on the day of the Wallin murder he wandered in a "semiconscious" state, though he remembered drinking some of her blood. He said he had first planned to shoot an old acquaintance he thought had become a political revolutionary, but changed his mind and entered the Miroth house instead. He said he could not remember mutilating Evelyn Miroth, though it was possible. About refusing prison food, he said he feared catching "a worse case of cancer" than he already had.

  The trial lasted four months. Closing arguments came on the 3rd and the 4th of May 1979. Salamy stressed a decade of documented mental decline with little adequate treatment and again asked for second degree murder. Tochterman called the murders "sheer sexual sadism motivated by a literal blood lust." He conceded Chase "had and has" mental problems but pointed to the planning and the efforts to avoid detection as proof of legal sanity.

  After six hours of deliberation over two days, the jury convicted Chase of six counts of first degree murder. The sanity phase began on Monday, the 14th of May. Psychiatrists for both sides testified again, and the jury took sixty-five minutes to find him sane at the time of the crimes. Three days later, it returned a death verdict.

  One month later, Judge Schatz upheld the verdict, finding that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating ones. As the sentence was read, Chase shouted: "But they brainwashed me! There's a conspiracy and I'm still being poisoned here." He was ordered to San Quentin prison within ten days. His sentence was automatically appealed to the Supreme Court of California.

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• 8. Death Row

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  At San Quentin, Chase was one of eighteen other men on death row, and he repeatedly asked staff for fresh blood, human or otherwise. His requests were refused. Other inmates taunted and threatened him, and prison officials said some tried to talk him into suicide.

  Soon after his arrival, Chase agreed to meet Robert Ressler face to face. He admitted the killings but said he did them to save his own life. The blood and organs had eased his "condition" for a time without curing it, he said. He planned to appeal on the ground that he had been dying. His life was threatened by soap-dish poisoning, he explained, since the bar of soap in his dish felt "gooey" instead of dry. His blood was slowly turning to powder, and the powder was consuming his body. Telepathy had told him to kill, he said, adding: "So you see, Mr. Ressler, you see very clearly that the killings were in self-defense."

  Chase said he had picked his victims at random on dates chosen in advance. A locked door meant he was unwelcome, and an unlocked one was an invitation. Before the interview ended, he handed Ressler a plastic cup holding part of a packaged macaroni and cheese dinner. He called it proof that staff were poisoning him and asked the FBI lab in Quantico to test it. Ressler agreed.

  Prison psychologists then had Chase moved temporarily to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, which housed the criminally insane. He stayed four months. Ressler backed the move. He had opposed sending Chase to San Quentin at all and believed he belonged in permanent institutional care. Chase returned to San Quentin in April 1980, judged stable.

  By late 1979, Chase was writing often to Ressler and to FBI agent John Conway. He said he needed to go to Washington, D.C., to perfect his appeals. He also wanted to share what he knew about UFOs that had spoken to him by telepathy. In his telling they were now causing airplane crashes and were tied to antiaircraft weapons used against the United States. In his last letter to Ressler, he said radar could detect the UFOs and show that they followed his movements. They were, he wrote, "stars in the sky at night that light up through some type of controlled fusion reaction machines."

  At 11:05 a.m. on the 26th of December 1980, Chase was found dead in his cell. He lay on his stomach with his legs hanging off the bunk and his head turned into the mattress. A guard had last seen him alive at 7:45 a.m., when breakfast was served. The autopsy found he had died about an hour before he was found, from an overdose of fifty-milligram Sinequan tablets. The drug was prescribed for depression and hallucinations. He had taken thirty-six times the recommended dose, and he had hoarded the pills in secret for two to three weeks. His heart showed no abnormalities.

  Beside his bunk, in a cardboard box, staff found four sheets of handwritten paper. Two held a graph-like drawing whose squares were filled with an unknown cryptographic code. The other two carried a message saying he might take some pills that could stop his heart.

  In 1987, the film Rampage, directed by William Friedkin and starring Michael Biehn, drew on a novel based directly on his life. Five years later, Sacramento detective Ray Biondi wrote about the way Chase died. He noted the irony that Chase had ended up poisoned after all, by his own hand. Then he added: "Now, frankly, I was just relieved he was gone."

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