Richard Ramirez

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Ramirez was an American burglar, sex offender and serial killer who terrorized Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. A California judge, upholding nineteen death sentences against him, said his deeds showed "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Between April 1984 and August 1985, Ramirez killed at least fifteen people, almost always in homes he entered after dark. Before the public knew his name, the press called him the Night Stalker. Police mounted one of the largest manhunts in California history to find him. How does a boy from El Paso, Texas, end up at the center of that search? Which small clues finally gave him away? And what happened when he at last stood before a jury?

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• 2. Roots in El Paso

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  On the 29th of February 1960, in El Paso, Texas, Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born. He was the youngest of five children of Mexican immigrants Mercedes Muñoz and Julián Tapia Ramirez. His father worked as a railway laborer and was a violent alcoholic, prone to rages that ended in beatings for the household. The family was Catholic. By the age of 10, Ramirez was already smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol.

  Psychiatrist Michael Stone later described Ramirez as a "made" psychopath rather than a "born" one. Stone said Ramirez was knocked unconscious, and nearly died, several times before the age of six. In Stone's account, those injuries led to temporal lobe epilepsy, aggression and hypersexuality. Stone also said a schizoid personality disorder left Ramirez indifferent to his victims' suffering and beyond treatment.

  At 12, Ramirez came under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel "Mike" Valles, a soldier in the U.S. Army who had served in the Vietnam War. Valles had become a killer and rapist during that service, and he boasted of gruesome war crimes. He showed Ramirez Polaroid photographs of Vietnamese women he had raped and killed. Ramirez later said from prison that the pictures and stories fascinated him rather than repelled him. Valles also taught him stealth and kill tactics.

  To escape his father's temper, Ramirez began sleeping in a local cemetery. His father sometimes tied him to a crucifix there overnight as punishment.

  Shortly after turning 14 in 1974, Ramirez started using LSD frequently, and he and Valles bonded over drugs and alcohol. That was also when he developed an interest in Satanism and the occult. His sexual fantasies began to fuse with graphic violence, including bondage, murder, mutilation and rape. At night he hunted coyotes, rabbits and birds in the El Paso desert with his father's .22 rifle. He often cut the animals open afterward and fed the entrails to the family dog.

  While still in school, Ramirez took a job at a local Holiday Inn, where he used a master key to steal from sleeping guests. The job ended after he attempted to rape a woman in her room and her husband caught him. Charges were dropped because the couple lived out of state and would not return to Texas to testify.

  On the 4th of May 1975, when Ramirez was 15, he was present as Valles shot his second wife, Jesse, in the face during an argument. Ramirez later said the killing was not traumatic in any ordinary sense but fascinating. Afterward he grew sullen and withdrawn, and turned increasingly to burglary and drugs. A court found Valles not guilty by reason of insanity, attributing the shooting to post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service.

  Ramirez left Jefferson High School in the ninth grade, shortly before the school year ended in 1977. Former teachers and classmates remembered him as "essentially a troublemaker" known for truancy, and said other students bullied him. He had moved in with his older sister Ruth and her husband Roberto, an obsessive peeping tom who took Ramirez along on his night-time outings. When Valles was released from the mental hospital in 1977, he sometimes joined them.

  In 1982, at age 22, Ramirez moved to California for good, and cocaine soon became his drug of choice. He committed thefts and burglaries to pay for it. He lived like a drifter between San Francisco and Los Angeles County until he was finally jailed.

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• 3. The Tenderloin Basement

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  On the 10th of April 1984, nine-year-old Mei Leung and her eight-year-old brother were searching for a lost one-dollar bill in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. Ramirez approached the girl and told her to follow him into the basement of her apartment building to look for it. There he beat, assaulted and killed her.

  For a quarter of a century, nothing tied that crime to him. That changed in 2009, when his DNA was matched to a sample taken at the scene. In 2016, officials disclosed that a second DNA sample pointed to another suspect, believed to have been present at the killing and a juvenile at the time. Authorities have not named that person or brought charges, citing a lack of evidence.

  Two other deaths sit at the edge of the case. Patty Elaine Higgins, 32, was killed in her Arcadia home on the night of the 27th of June 1985. Her body was discovered on the 2nd of July, when she failed to show up for work. Ramirez was charged with her murder and a burglary, but the charges were eventually dropped for lack of concrete physical evidence.

  On the 20th of February 1985, sisters Christina Caldwell, 58, and Mary Caldwell, 70, were found stabbed to death in their Telegraph Hill apartment in San Francisco. A statement Ramirez made to an investigator makes him a suspect in that double murder. In prison, he openly bragged to a prison officer and other inmates that he had killed "more than 20 people".

  Two months after Mei Leung died, in June 1984, the string of Los Angeles home invasions that frightened the region began.

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• 4. A Pattern Emerges

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  On the 28th of June 1984-79-year-old Jennie Vincow was found murdered in her apartment in Glassell Park, Los Angeles. She had been stabbed repeatedly as she slept. Ramirez had removed a mesh screen to climb through an open window, and his fingerprint stayed on it. This second known killing set his template: extreme brutality, plus burglary before or after, mostly to feed his drug habit and pay his rent.

  Nine months of silence followed. Then, on the 17th of March 1985, Ramirez shot 22-year-old Maria Hernandez in Rosemead as she pulled into her garage. Inside the house, her 34-year-old roommate, Dayle Yoshie Okazaki, ducked behind a kitchen counter. Ramirez waited for her to peek over it and shot her once in the forehead. Within an hour he pulled 30-year-old Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu from her car in Monterey Park and shot her twice. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.

  Two killings and an attempted third in a single day drew extensive coverage. Reporters described a curly-haired attacker with bulging eyes and wide-spaced, rotting teeth. They dubbed him the "Walk-In Killer" and the "Valley Intruder". The Night Stalker label had belonged to an unrelated killer active in the same area from 1979 to 1981. Ramirez's crimes so overshadowed that man that he was renamed the Original Night Stalker, and he was later identified as Joseph James DeAngelo.

  Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, several kinds of knives, a machete, a tire iron and a claw hammer. He strangled victims by hand and, once, with a ligature. He stomped at least one woman to death in her sleep and tortured another with a live electrical cord. He seemed to enjoy degrading survivors, and especially those he chose not to kill.

  Satanic imagery ran through the attacks. On the 29th of May 1985, in Monrovia, he attacked 83-year-old Mabel "Ma" Bell and her disabled sister, 81-year-old Florence "Nettie" Lang. He used lipstick to draw pentagrams on the walls of both bedrooms. The women were found two days later, alive but comatose. Bell died in the hospital on the 15th of July, and Lang died in August.

  In the Monterey Park home of 63-year-old Sophie Dickman, Ramirez stole her jewelry and told her to "swear on Satan" that he had taken everything of value. In Diamond Bar, he made Sakina Abowath "swear on Satan" that she would not scream, after killing her husband Elyas in his sleep. Ramirez had been closely following news coverage of his crimes, and after the Abowath attack he left Los Angeles for San Francisco.

  On the 18th of August 1985, he entered the home of 66-year-old Peter Pan and 62-year-old Barbara Pan. He shot Peter in the temple as he slept. He then beat and sexually assaulted Barbara and shot her in the head, leaving her for dead, though she survived. On the bedroom wall he scrawled a pentagram in lipstick, along with the words "Jack the Knife".

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• 5. Narrow Escapes

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  At about 2 a.m. on the 27th of March 1985, Ramirez entered a home just outside Whittier that he had burglarized a year earlier. He killed 64-year-old Vincent Charles Zazzara in his sleep with a gunshot to the head. The shot woke Zazzara's wife, Maxine, who was 44. Ramirez beat her, bound her hands and demanded to know where the valuables were.

  While he ransacked the room, Maxine freed herself and pulled a shotgun from under the bed. She did not know it was unloaded. She pulled the trigger just as he turned around. Furious, Ramirez shot her three times, then took a grim keepsake from the scene that he kept in his apartment until his arrest.

  In July 1985, in Sierra Madre, Ramirez broke into a home and struck 16-year-old Whitney Bennett with a tire iron as she slept. He searched the kitchen for a knife without success and tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. He said he was startled by electrical sparks from the cord. When the girl began to breathe, he fled, believing Jesus Christ had intervened to save her. Closing the wounds to her scalp took 478 stitches.

  On the 6th of August 1985, in Northridge, Ramirez crept into the bedroom of Chris Peterson, 30, and Virginia Peterson, 27. He shot Virginia in the face and Chris in the neck. Chris fought back and dodged two more shots in the struggle, and Ramirez escaped. Both survived.

  On the 24th of August 1985, Ramirez drove a stolen orange Toyota 76 miles south of Los Angeles to Mission Viejo. At the Romero home, 13-year-old James Romero III was awake. He had stepped outside to fetch a pillow from a locked truck and heard a rustling noise, which he took for an animal. Later, working on his minibike in the garage, he heard footsteps. He saw a stranger through his bedroom window and woke his parents, and Ramirez fled. James ran outside and noted the color, make and style of the car, along with a partial license plate number. The family called police believing the boy had chased off a thief.

  With that attack aborted, Ramirez broke in through the back door of Bill Carns, 30, and his fiancée, Inez Erickson, 29. He woke Carns by cocking a .25-caliber handgun and shot him three times in the head. Ramirez identified himself to Erickson as the "Night Stalker", beat her, bound her with neckties and demanded cash and jewelry. Before leaving, he told her, "Tell them the Night Stalker was here." Erickson untied herself and went to a neighbor for help. Surgeons removed two of the three bullets from Carns's head, and he survived.

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• 6. Sneakers and a Fingerprint

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  After the Zazzara killing, police matched the bullets found there to those from earlier attacks and concluded that a serial killer was at large. In the flower beds outside, investigators photographed and cast footprints left by a pair of Avia sneakers. The shoe became the most important physical clue in the case.

  Lead detectives Frank Salerno and Gil Carrillo traced the sneakers through their manufacturer. Only six pairs existed in men's size 11½ across the United States. Five had been shipped to locations in Arizona, and one had gone to a shoe store in Los Angeles. It followed that the one pair of that size and kind in California belonged to the perpetrator.

  When ballistics and shoe print evidence from the Los Angeles scenes matched the Pan crime scene, San Francisco's mayor, Dianne Feinstein, shared the information at a televised press conference. She included the caliber of the gun. Detectives were infuriated, because they knew the killer would be watching the news. Ramirez was indeed watching, and that night he dropped his sneakers over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge. He stayed in the area a few more days before heading back to the Los Angeles area.

  Inez Erickson gave investigators a detailed description of her attacker, and police also had a cast of a footprint from the Romero house. On the 28th of August 1985, the stolen Toyota was found abandoned in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Ramirez had tried carefully to wipe the car clean, but police lifted a single fingerprint from the rear-view mirror. It was positively identified as his.

  Police described him as a 25-year-old drifter from Texas with a long rap sheet of arrests for traffic and illegal drug violations. The identification was called a "near miracle". The fingerprint system had only recently been installed, and it held only the prints of criminals born after the 1st of January 1960. Ramirez was born just two months after that cutoff.

  On the 29th of August 1985, officials released to the media a mug shot from his 1984 arrest for auto theft. At the police press conference, they announced: "We know who you are now, and soon everyone else will. There will be no place you can hide."

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• 7. Hubbard Street

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  On the 30th of August 1985, Ramirez took a bus to Tucson, Arizona, to visit his brother. He did not know he had become the lead story in virtually every major newspaper and television news program in California. His brother was not home, so Ramirez returned to Los Angeles early on the morning of the 31st of August. Police officers were staking out the bus terminal in case the killer tried to flee on an outbound bus, and he walked right past them.

  Ramirez entered a convenience store in East Los Angeles. A group of elderly Hispanic women there fearfully identified him as "el matador", Spanish for "the killer". Then he saw his own face on the front page of the newspaper La Opinión, under a headline calling him "Invasor Nocturno", or "Night Invader". He fled the store in a panic.

  After running across the Santa Ana Freeway, Ramirez tried to carjack an unlocked Ford Mustang. Residents Faustino Pinon and Jose Burgoin pulled him out. He ran across the street and tried to take car keys from Angelina De La Torre. Her husband, Manuel De La Torre, saw the attempt and struck Ramirez over the head with a fence post.

  A group of more than ten residents, including Jose Burgoin's sons, chased Ramirez down Hubbard Street in Boyle Heights. They caught him, restrained him and beat him. At around 8 a.m., police received a call about a disturbance in the area with few other details. Officers arrived on Hubbard Street and took a severely beaten Ramirez into custody. Jury selection for his trial would not begin until July 1988.

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• 8. Trial and Aftermath

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  Jury selection began on the 22nd of July 1988. At his first court appearance, Ramirez raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail Satan!" On the 3rd of August 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that jail employees had overheard him planning to shoot the prosecutor with a gun smuggled into the courtroom. A metal detector was installed outside, and everyone entering was searched intensively.

  On the 14th of August, the trial was interrupted when juror Phyllis Singletary did not arrive. Later that day she was found shot to death in her apartment. The jury feared that Ramirez had directed the killing from his cell and could reach other jurors. It was ultimately determined that he was not responsible. Her boyfriend had shot her and later killed himself with the same weapon in a hotel. The alternate juror who replaced her was too frightened to return home.

  On the 20th of September 1989, Ramirez was convicted of all forty-three charges: thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries. During the penalty phase, on the 7th of November 1989, he was sentenced to death in California's gas chamber. He told reporters, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland." The trial cost $1.8 million, making it the most expensive murder trial in California history until the O. J. Simpson case surpassed it in 1994. Ramirez never expressed remorse for his crimes.

  While awaiting trial, Ramirez reportedly met actor Sean Penn. Penn had been jailed for 33 days in 1987 for reckless driving and assault of an extra on the set of the film Colors. He claimed to have received a letter from Ramirez as a fellow inmate. He wrote back that he had no sympathy and hoped Ramirez died in the gas chamber.

  By the time of the trial, Ramirez had fans who wrote him letters and visited him. Beginning in 1985, Doreen Lioy wrote him nearly seventy-five letters. He proposed to her in 1988, and they married on the 3rd of October 1996 in California's San Quentin State Prison. By the time of his death, Ramirez was engaged to a 23-year-old writer.

  On the 7th of August 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld his convictions and death sentence, ending his first round of state appeals. It denied his request for a rehearing on the 7th of September 2006. More appeals were still pending when Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma on the 7th of June 2013, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California. He was 53, and he had also suffered from chronic substance abuse and chronic hepatitis C. His body went unclaimed, so it was cremated.

  In 2021, Netflix released Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, a documentary built from first-person interviews, archival footage, newly shot reenactments and original photography. Years earlier, the 2013 song "Richard Ramirez Died Today of Natural Causes" by Sun Kil Moon, on the album Benji, had reflected on how unsensational his death was compared with the fear his crimes once caused.

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