Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, Los Angeles would be terrorized by
Speaker 1: a series of brutal rapes and murders.
Speaker 2: The panic had swept the county.
Speaker 3: I was enormous.
Speaker 4: People didn't know if they were going to live to
Speaker 4: see the next morning.
Speaker 1: Men, women, the elderly, and children were all in the
Speaker 1: sadistic killers' sites.
Speaker 5: Their final hours were at the hands of someone who
Speaker 5: was laughing as he tortured and raped and killed them.
Speaker 1: A serial murderer who broke all the rules.
Speaker 6: The suspect is used guns, knives, tie irons.
Speaker 3: I knew how vicious and violent he really was.
Speaker 1: The attacker, christened a knight Storm, would go down as
Speaker 1: one of history's most heenous killers.
Speaker 7: I think he is the worst. I think he would
Speaker 7: be number one on a monstrous there.
Speaker 1: But who was the night Stalker?
Speaker 8: He was friendly and he was nice, charming as how
Speaker 8: I would describe.
Speaker 1: Him, and was he born to kill?
Speaker 9: He just had this evil look in his eye, as
Speaker 9: if he were possessed.
Speaker 1: The seventeenth of March nineteen eighty five, and Gil Correo,
Speaker 1: a young homicide detective with the La County Sheriff's Department,
Speaker 1: was called to an incident in the Mead.
Speaker 3: District Sunday evening, ten forty at night. Carl comes in,
Speaker 3: very typical. Okay, Gill, you got one dead, one wounded,
Speaker 3: and I'm just going to work another routine, mundane Murderkreo.
Speaker 1: Didn't yet know it, but this murder would be anything
Speaker 1: but routine.
Speaker 3: We entered the location on Village Lane. Dale Okazaki was
Speaker 3: lying on her back in the kitchen. She had sustained
Speaker 3: a gunshow wounded the head.
Speaker 1: Thirty four year old Dale Okasaki had been unloading groceries
Speaker 1: when a man entered her apartment and executed her where
Speaker 1: she stood.
Speaker 3: I can still see her today.
Speaker 1: Dale's flatmate, twenty two year old Maria Hernandez, had also
Speaker 1: been shot at point black range, but had survived. She
Speaker 1: didn't recognize her attacker, and nothing had been taken from
Speaker 1: the property.
Speaker 3: We just had our work cut out for us. We
Speaker 3: didn't know if there was an angry boyfriend who was
Speaker 3: a home invasion robbery gone away, what it was.
Speaker 1: Detectives then learned that the killer had struck again.
Speaker 2: It occurred about a half hour later. It was in
Speaker 2: the same general area of town and the same gun.
Speaker 1: Was used in nearby Monterey Park thirty year old law
Speaker 1: student se Lan Yu had been driving home when another
Speaker 1: driver forced her to stop, then shot her twice in
Speaker 1: the chest at close range.
Speaker 10: Almost immediately, we were aware that we had some sort
Speaker 10: of a series. He's going not knowing just how big
Speaker 10: it was going to get or grow.
Speaker 1: The nature of the crimes was not typical of a
Speaker 1: serial killer.
Speaker 11: The overwhelming majority of serial sexual murderers kill up close
Speaker 11: and personal, manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, multiple stab wounds, blunt
Speaker 11: force trauma.
Speaker 3: Very very rarely.
Speaker 11: Did they shoot somebody because it's too cold and too impersonal.
Speaker 1: On the morning of March twenty seventh, the bodies of
Speaker 1: sixty four year old Vincent Tzara and his forty four
Speaker 1: year old wife Maxine were discovered in their home in
Speaker 1: the Pleasant suburb of Whittier. The same gun had been
Speaker 1: used the behavior at the crime scene. The significantly different
Speaker 1: Vincent Zarah had been shot as his snacks, Maxine had
Speaker 1: been shot and stacked and pieced, and the killer had
Speaker 1: taken a gruesome souvenir.
Speaker 10: The woman's eyes were gouged out, not to be found.
Speaker 12: Many serial murderers take souvenirs from people that they kill.
Speaker 12: Whether it's a piece of flesh, piece of jewelry, something
Speaker 12: it is a concrete reminder. It's something they can see,
Speaker 12: something they can hold on to, something that says, wow,
Speaker 12: you did this.
Speaker 1: On April the fifteenth, two weeks after the murder and
Speaker 1: mutilation of the Cazarees, the killer appeared to have struck again.
Speaker 1: Linda Martinez was called to process the crime scene at
Speaker 1: the home of William and Lillian Doy, a couple in
Speaker 1: their mid sixties.
Speaker 9: There were casings on the living room floor. Mister Douy
Speaker 9: was still in his bed and he had been shot.
Speaker 9: Missus Douy's room was next to the master bedroom. She
Speaker 9: was an invalid, so she had her own room. She
Speaker 9: had been sexually assaulted. It always is distressing to go
Speaker 9: into a crime scene.
Speaker 1: William Doy had been quickly dispatched with a gun shot
Speaker 1: to the head. Sixty three year old Lillian had been
Speaker 1: restrained with thumbcuffs, beaten, terrorized, and raped, but the killer
Speaker 1: had let her live.
Speaker 12: It was unusual for a serial murderer to have two people,
Speaker 12: shooting one and acting like a serial murderer with the
Speaker 12: other one.
Speaker 3: Men he was killing because they were the obstacle to
Speaker 3: get to his lust the women.
Speaker 12: It was an issue of control, It was an issue
Speaker 12: of not being overpowered. What husband or man would lay
Speaker 12: there and not intervene in trying to keep his partner
Speaker 12: from being attacked.
Speaker 1: Despite the many inconsistencies, detective guilt Career suspected that just
Speaker 1: one man was responsible for all of the crimes.
Speaker 3: I felt very strongly was a serial killer going on.
Speaker 3: Back at the time, there were two renowned psychologists, one
Speaker 3: from New York and one from locally here in the
Speaker 3: West Coast, from UCLA that essentially said that we were
Speaker 3: full of hot air, that one man was not capable
Speaker 3: of performing what we were ledging.
Speaker 1: Six weeks later, in the leafy city of Monrovia, two sisters,
Speaker 1: both in their eighties, were discovered in the home they shared.
Speaker 1: One had been raped, both had been severely beaten with
Speaker 1: a hammer. Here, again, there was something new.
Speaker 11: There was a whole aspect of the occult.
Speaker 10: There were some pentagrams, some things written on the wall,
Speaker 10: there were some markings on the body.
Speaker 1: The crimes appeared related, but defied the current theories regarding
Speaker 1: serial murder.
Speaker 12: When I was first contacted about the murders, police were baffled.
Speaker 12: They had no idea who was doing this, how it
Speaker 12: was happening. They wondered what type of a person would
Speaker 12: have done this. I mean, was it a maniac? Was
Speaker 12: it a group of people, because don't forget in California
Speaker 12: they had Charles Manson, who with his cult went out
Speaker 12: murdering an awful lot of individuals. But my impression was
Speaker 12: that it was a single individual. It was someone who
Speaker 12: was not insane, who was not showing outrageous behaviors, and
Speaker 12: that he was probably young. He was probably either Caucasian Hispanic,
Speaker 12: but he was certainly not a standout in his community.
Speaker 1: The press would dub the mystery Killer the night Stalker,
Speaker 1: and those who had known him would never have suspected
Speaker 1: what he was king.
Speaker 13: He was an ordinary kid, no different than the rest
Speaker 13: of us.
Speaker 8: Friendly, and he was nice, and and he was so funny.
Speaker 8: He was so funny. He would always have me laughing.
Speaker 1: And the night Stalker's reign of terror had only just begun.
Speaker 1: Man eighty five, and the night Stalker had only just
Speaker 1: begun a series of crimes that would both sicken and
Speaker 1: terrify the residents of California. Preying on the unsuspecting citizens
Speaker 1: of their homes. He took glee in rape, murder and mutilation.
Speaker 1: As the crimes escalated, detectives raced to try to identify
Speaker 1: who was responsible for the shockingly vicious accounts. Who was
Speaker 1: the night stalker. Richard Ramirez was born in nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: the last of five children to Mexican immigrants living in
Speaker 1: the Texan border town of El Paso.
Speaker 5: El Paso was a town of about half a million people,
Speaker 5: and across the Rio Grande was Siola Vuarez, which had
Speaker 5: one point five million people, about triple the size of
Speaker 5: El Paso. It's a heavily Hispanic population.
Speaker 8: It was basically a very quiet town allah, a very
Speaker 8: quiet place to live.
Speaker 1: Ramirez had a humble upbringing, typical to his neighborhood as
Speaker 1: a low income neighborhood.
Speaker 3: But it was nice.
Speaker 5: It had green grass in front and the house was painted.
Speaker 5: It wasn't shabby, but it was quite small.
Speaker 8: We were like lower class people, and everybody used to
Speaker 8: just hang around together at night. We would all play
Speaker 8: games all that. Neighborhood kids would get together up until
Speaker 8: everybody parents started calling them in for dinner.
Speaker 1: Richard's father was hard working and strict with his children.
Speaker 5: He was very much what I would classify as as
Speaker 5: someone from Mexico who had come up, come to El
Speaker 5: Paso and had scratched out a living here. He worked
Speaker 5: for the railroad. It's a hard scrabble when you're a
Speaker 5: first generation immigrant to learn a new language and try
Speaker 5: to scrape told in a new country.
Speaker 1: The young Richard Ramirez appeared no different from his friends
Speaker 1: and neighbors.
Speaker 8: They were all very nice, normal neighborhood family, just like mine.
Speaker 13: He was an ordinary kid, just like the rest of us.
Speaker 13: We went to school, minded our manners, did what we
Speaker 13: had to do, but no different than the rest of us.
Speaker 8: He was friendly, and he was nice, and and he
Speaker 8: was so funny. He was so funny. He would always
Speaker 8: have me laughing. We used to play this game called
Speaker 8: kick the can, and he was the fastest runner, so
Speaker 8: we always wanted to be on his team.
Speaker 1: Richard's friend Patricia found him kind and caring.
Speaker 8: If we wanted to take a short cut to school,
Speaker 8: we had to cut through this really tough neighborhood, and
Speaker 8: he always used to wait for me sitting on a
Speaker 8: little pony wall, and then he would walk me to school.
Speaker 8: It was always safer to be in twos, I guess.
Speaker 1: But by the time he turned ten, it appears all
Speaker 1: was not well with Richard Ramirez.
Speaker 8: He used to.
Speaker 14: Sit in back of me in fifth grade, and I
Speaker 14: remember that he would poke me in the back, and
Speaker 14: every time he would poke me, I would jump up.
Speaker 14: And so that time that he kept poking me and
Speaker 14: poking me, I turned around very upset, and I said, hey,
Speaker 14: you know, slop stop, stop, And I remember him like
Speaker 14: slumping over and then I'm just hitting the floor on
Speaker 14: the side.
Speaker 13: He would have seizures. You know, he would be shaking.
Speaker 13: You know, we knew he was sick.
Speaker 1: Ramirez was diagnosed with epilepsy, a condition that would affect
Speaker 1: him for much of his school life. As Ramirez approached
Speaker 1: his teens, he grew distant to his father and began
Speaker 1: to look up to his cousin, Mike, a Vietnam veteran
Speaker 1: who boasted of many atrocities while in service.
Speaker 12: The cousin kept multiple mementos of his time in Vietnam,
Speaker 12: and he pulled out this box and showed all of
Speaker 12: these photographs of the women he was raping or the
Speaker 12: heads he was cutting off. It was a fascination. It
Speaker 12: wasn't recoiling in horror. It was like, Wow, look what
Speaker 12: you've done.
Speaker 1: At the age when his sexuality was being formed, Ramirez
Speaker 1: was exposed to images of rape, torture, and murder.
Speaker 11: These individuals are in their fantasy lives from early adolescents,
Speaker 11: and in some regards some respects, their fantasy life is
Speaker 11: more real to them than reality. Their fantasy lives are
Speaker 11: filled with sadistic aggression where there's a fusion of sex aggression.
Speaker 1: Ramirez later claimed that his cousin Mike, gave him a
Speaker 1: front row view of his brutality.
Speaker 12: He watched this cousin shoot his.
Speaker 1: Wife after a petty argument at their apartment. Mike shot
Speaker 1: his wife in the face, killing her instantly.
Speaker 12: And it stuck with him. Not in the sense of
Speaker 12: it was a bad thing, not in the sense that
Speaker 12: how could you do something so horrendous? I mean being
Speaker 12: sick to your stomach. He was fascinated.
Speaker 15: The fantasies of those that had committed serial crimes have
Speaker 15: been very carefully studied by the staff of the FBI
Speaker 15: Behavioral Science here over the years. The fantasies start very
Speaker 15: learned life and oftentimes our result of some incident that
Speaker 15: triggers these thoughts, and once the fantasies become sexualized, it
Speaker 15: becomes extremely dangerous because they start fantasizing but events of rape, torture, mutilation.
Speaker 13: I did not notice anything strange of him until we
Speaker 13: were in high school and he was no longer part
Speaker 13: of my clique kind of thing. That's when I noticed
Speaker 13: that he was different and he had changed, didn't no
Speaker 13: longer say hello that kind of thing. I noticed that
Speaker 13: he would hang out with boys that did drugs.
Speaker 5: A lot of second generation immigrants sometimes get involved in gangs,
Speaker 5: and some of the thinking is that they see that
Speaker 5: their parents have come to America and have worked really,
Speaker 5: really hard and have very little to show for it.
Speaker 5: And there's some people think that there's a disillusioning on
Speaker 5: their part, like why play by the rules if this
Speaker 5: is what you end up with, which is what my
Speaker 5: parents had, And I suppose you could say that that
Speaker 5: might have been a factor in the rebelliousness of Ricky Ramirez.
Speaker 1: Ramirez became interested in hard rock and Satanism.
Speaker 7: A lot of kids, high school kids, for instance, were
Speaker 7: dabbling in this and they would give it their own
Speaker 7: little touches, and being high school kids, the brain's still
Speaker 7: developing they're developing. A lot of them got in trouble
Speaker 7: and what the wrong way. We did have some kids
Speaker 7: that kill their parents and things like that.
Speaker 1: Ramirez dropped out of school and began living on the
Speaker 1: fringes of society, sometimes sleeping in the local cemetery.
Speaker 7: Right from the get go, Richard stole anything that was loose,
Speaker 7: in anything that he could pry loose. I mean, his
Speaker 7: neighbors started calling him didros fingers and they call him
Speaker 7: Ricky Rabon, Ricky the thief.
Speaker 1: After the attempted rape of a guest in an El
Speaker 1: Paso hotel, Ramirez moved to California.
Speaker 12: He became a cocaine and alcohol addict. He lived in
Speaker 12: what's called skid row in Los Angeles, which is a
Speaker 12: pretty scruffy area. I mean, there are people doing everything
Speaker 12: and taking everything, and homelessness is not an unusual thing.
Speaker 12: You live in what's called a flop house, where you
Speaker 12: go and flop to get off your high or to recover. Now,
Speaker 12: did the drugs affect his brain functioning? Did it affect
Speaker 12: to the way he saw the world. Probably, But it
Speaker 12: wasn't causitive. It didn't need to make him kill. He
Speaker 12: was already primed.
Speaker 1: Rimirez lived day to day making guns, using prostitutes, stealing combs,
Speaker 1: breaking an injury.
Speaker 7: So he would go out in the suburbs where often
Speaker 7: they did not lock their doors at night, even they
Speaker 7: didn't lock their windows.
Speaker 3: This was like heaven for him.
Speaker 7: This is exactly what he was looking for, and he
Speaker 7: would go through the unlocked doors and unlocked windows. Sometimes
Speaker 7: he would go on and burglarize when nobody was home
Speaker 7: at night, and then he got bolder and bolder and bolder.
Speaker 11: The vast majority of burglaries are for material gain. These
Speaker 11: are usually drug people who want to get some money
Speaker 11: to buy drugs, and they might do it with a
Speaker 11: friend or a partner and so on.
Speaker 3: But there are a small.
Speaker 11: Group of burglars that are sexually motivated, where the burglary
Speaker 11: itself is motivated by an urge to look sexual stimulation
Speaker 11: through looking. And since about fifty percent of burglaries occur
Speaker 11: in the evening, when the victim is likely to be home,
Speaker 11: it's very easy to see the progression from voyeurism to
Speaker 11: break an entry to sexual assault or the sexual murder.
Speaker 1: By May nineteen eighty five, Richard Ramirez had killed at
Speaker 1: least eight times and his violent home invasions were about
Speaker 1: to escalate, plunging the people of Los Angeles into panic.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, Los Angeles County was in the
Speaker 1: grip of a vicious serial killer. Ordinary citizens were no
Speaker 1: longer safe in their homes as the mysterious killer, christened
Speaker 1: the night Stalker, raped, murdered, and mutilated in the name
Speaker 1: of Satan. The dreadful and indiscriminate crimes caused a wave
Speaker 1: of fear.
Speaker 4: Everybody was scared. Everybody in the County of Los Angeles
Speaker 4: and southern California were scared to death.
Speaker 2: Gun seals seriously went up, vast increase in gun seals.
Speaker 2: During the summer of eighty five. People were keeping their
Speaker 2: windows closed.
Speaker 4: It was a very, very hot summer. I would not
Speaker 4: open the windows at night. We sweltered in our house
Speaker 4: every night because I was afraid somebody would come in
Speaker 4: and kill me.
Speaker 1: And still the violent attacks continued. In Burbank. On May thirtieth,
Speaker 1: a forty one year old woman was raped while her
Speaker 1: twelve year old son was locked cuffed in a closet.
Speaker 1: She was allowed to live. On the twenty seventh of June,
Speaker 1: the body of a twenty eight year old teacher was
Speaker 1: found in Arcadia. She'd been sodomized and her throat slipped.
Speaker 1: On July the second, again in Arcadia, a seventy five
Speaker 1: year old woman was found dead. She'd been beaten, her
Speaker 1: throat cut, and her home ransacked. Detective Gil Carrier was
Speaker 1: convinced just one man was at work, but the facts
Speaker 1: flew in the face of received wisdom.
Speaker 3: Here he was crossing all the gamuts and the only
Speaker 3: consistency was his inconsistency in the way he was committing
Speaker 3: his crimes.
Speaker 2: What the FBI was telling us is that serial killers
Speaker 2: tend to operate in the same way. That will use
Speaker 2: the same weapon and over the same method of operation.
Speaker 2: But there were different weapons used. There were two separate
Speaker 2: guns that were used throughout these events. There were knives
Speaker 2: used and a couple of on a couple of the occasions.
Speaker 2: There were bludgeons used on a couple of occasions. These
Speaker 2: are all differences in the method of operation.
Speaker 1: On July the fifth, the night stalker targeted a quiet
Speaker 1: suburban street in Sierra Madred. He entered the bedroom of
Speaker 1: sixteen year old schoolgirl Withney Bennett.
Speaker 10: You talk about a nightmare her parents awakened her crying
Speaker 10: and coming down the hall, they find her in her
Speaker 10: bedroom on the floor covered in blood. The suspect had
Speaker 10: entered the house, confronted her in bed while she was asleep,
Speaker 10: and beat her with a tire iron and tried to
Speaker 10: strangle her and left her for dead. Four feet of
Speaker 10: sutures ended up in her head. Took to close the wound.
Speaker 10: As you work, these cases are your law enforcement. For
Speaker 10: a long period of time. You see a lot and
Speaker 10: it has to have an effect on you. I know
Speaker 10: it takes its toll somewhere down the line, I've seen it.
Speaker 1: The seventh of July was another in a long run
Speaker 1: of swelteringly hot nights.
Speaker 3: I'm home alone. It's first time that I've ever slept
Speaker 3: with my gun on the nightstand.
Speaker 9: Everybody was afraid and pretty much kept their doors locked,
Speaker 9: windows locked. But the night was so hot, and our
Speaker 9: summer was so hot, so here I had the doors open.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the night, Detective Career awoke, convinced
Speaker 1: the night stalker was in his own house.
Speaker 3: I woke up, I was sweating, I was nauseated, and
Speaker 3: I got my gun and I cleared my house as
Speaker 3: if I was looking for Burtlar. All of a sudden,
Speaker 3: the phone rang. I scared the Bejesus out of me,
Speaker 3: and it was my desk telling me to call my
Speaker 3: friend Linda.
Speaker 1: In the early hours, crime scene investigator Linda Martinez had
Speaker 1: to work with a start.
Speaker 9: About three o'clock in the morning. My friend said, someone's
Speaker 9: calling your name. Somebody's yelling for you.
Speaker 1: Linda's neighbor was crying out for help.
Speaker 9: Well, I went to the back fence and then called
Speaker 9: across the street to the lady calling me and asked
Speaker 9: her what was wrong, and she told me that she
Speaker 9: had been bobbed and raped and she was handcuffed to
Speaker 9: her bed. Once I heard her voice, I knew it
Speaker 9: was him.
Speaker 3: Sophie Dickman, a lady in her sixties, had been sexually assaulted.
Speaker 3: She was raped, and.
Speaker 1: Detective Career recognized all the hallmarks of a night stalker attack.
Speaker 3: I learned that he had verbalized words, words that were
Speaker 3: common that we had heard in the past. Words he
Speaker 3: had spoke there, where's the money, where's a jewelry? Shut
Speaker 3: up bits. There was no doubt in my mind we
Speaker 3: were dealing with the same guy.
Speaker 1: His suspicions were confirmed by the discovery in a nearby
Speaker 1: home of the sixty one year old Joyce Nelson, beaten
Speaker 1: to death with a blunt object. The night stalker had
Speaker 1: struck in one night, and he would repeat the trick
Speaker 1: just two weeks later, on the twentieth of July, first
Speaker 1: shooting Max and Layla Nading at their home in Glendale
Speaker 1: before moving on to Sun Valley.
Speaker 10: We had a couple that lived in a home.
Speaker 3: The male had been.
Speaker 10: Executed in a sleep where the woman had been sexually assaulted,
Speaker 10: and there was a young boy there that also had
Speaker 10: been assaulted.
Speaker 1: Ramirez had again dispatched the husband as he slept. He
Speaker 1: had repeatedly beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated the mother, demanding
Speaker 1: that she prayed to Satan for her life, and then
Speaker 1: raped her eight year old son.
Speaker 7: It was not enough just to murder or to rape.
Speaker 7: He had the torture, and he loved to terrorize him.
Speaker 7: He would make him say Hail Satan.
Speaker 11: Humiliation of victims is very, very typical in serial sexual homicide.
Speaker 11: This is arousing to them. This reassures the offender that
Speaker 11: they are in such complete control that they can degrade
Speaker 11: and humiliate the victim any way. They want nothing could
Speaker 11: be more stimulating for an individual with this deviant sexual
Speaker 11: arousal pattern.
Speaker 1: No one was able to predict or prevent the knight
Speaker 1: Stalker's crimes.
Speaker 7: It's typical of serial killers to choose people who put
Speaker 7: themselves at risk somehow, like male or female prostitutes, like hitchhikers.
Speaker 7: But these other people, they were living their normal lives.
Speaker 7: They weren't doing anything at all that should have brought
Speaker 7: this down on him, and the panic escalated.
Speaker 4: The publicity of the killings was like a drum beat.
Speaker 4: The more killings, the more publicity, the more fair.
Speaker 3: Hello.
Speaker 6: My name is Detective Guiltreo with the Los Angeles County
Speaker 6: Sheriff's Department. Assigned a homicide bureau and the Sheriff's Department
Speaker 6: it's currently conducting an investigation in this series of homicides
Speaker 6: and sexual assaults that occurred in Los Angeles County.
Speaker 3: I knew how vicious and violent and how vile he
Speaker 3: really was, and there was an enormous amount of pressure
Speaker 3: to stop before he hurt anybody else, even more so
Speaker 3: before he heard somebody in my own family.
Speaker 4: People were buying guns, people were buying guard dogs, people
Speaker 4: were scared to death.
Speaker 6: The suspect is used guns, knives, tire irons, as well
Speaker 6: as his own shod foot to inflict serious injury to
Speaker 6: several victims in the past.
Speaker 4: Nobody knew who it was, nobody knew where he was
Speaker 4: going to hit. People didn't know if they were going
Speaker 4: to live to see the next morning. It was really,
Speaker 4: really scary.
Speaker 1: And then a shocking twist, it was.
Speaker 10: Very obvious that our killer from southern California had now
Speaker 10: struck in the city of San Francisco.
Speaker 1: On the seventeenth of August, the night stalker had shot
Speaker 1: another couple in their home, leaving a Satanic symbol on
Speaker 1: the wall. A week later, he struck fifty miles south
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles, shooting the husband and sexually assaulting the wife,
Speaker 1: forcing her to swear her love for Satan. With the
Speaker 1: killer on the move, detectives were now working night and
Speaker 1: day to try to catch him before he struck again.
Speaker 16: Since the last taping, which was August thirteenth, nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 16: the suspect in this case, currently under investigation, is committed
Speaker 16: two more homicides.
Speaker 3: I have the pressure of the world on me. I
Speaker 3: need to save not only my immediate family, my wife,
Speaker 3: my mother and my kid, everybody but the citizens of
Speaker 3: Los Angeles County. There's an animal going out there. I
Speaker 3: have to solve it.
Speaker 16: The vehicle used in this crime was a nineteen seventy
Speaker 16: six Toyota station Wagon. If the vehicle is found abandoned,
Speaker 16: contact Sergeant Frank Salerno or Detective Gil Correo.
Speaker 3: My wife found my thirteen year old daughter crying in
Speaker 3: the bedroom and she said, what's wrong? And she said nothing.
Speaker 3: And my wife said, no, something's wrong. What is it?
Speaker 3: And she said, I just wish this rover. I just
Speaker 3: want my dad back.
Speaker 1: Detective Career didn't yet know it, but before the end
Speaker 1: of the month he would be face to face with
Speaker 1: one of history's most heenous serial killers. By August of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, the night Stalker had killed at least thirteen,
Speaker 1: terrorized Los Angeles County, and pushed investigators to their limits.
Speaker 1: Now he appeared to be on the move, and detectives
Speaker 1: feared he'd be even harder to catch.
Speaker 10: Where we'd had him localized in Los Angeles County, now
Speaker 10: all of a sudden, he's in the city of San Francisco.
Speaker 10: That was of great concern.
Speaker 1: But by the end of the month, a number of
Speaker 1: important leads finally came together.
Speaker 3: We actually threw informants that identified him. We knew where
Speaker 3: he hung out, he knew we loved, He liked drugs,
Speaker 3: and he used to hang around the skin Row area.
Speaker 10: At the same time, there was a fingerprint recovered on
Speaker 10: the rear view mirror of a stolen car that the
Speaker 10: killer had used, and they made Richard Ramirez off that fingerprint.
Speaker 10: The sheriff of La County, the chief of police of
Speaker 10: La City, the chief of Glendale decided that they were
Speaker 10: going to release the picture of the killer, Richard Ramirez
Speaker 10: to the press.
Speaker 8: Immediately when they showed him, I told my husband, Oh
Speaker 8: my god, look that's Richie. That's Richie. But that was
Speaker 8: so weird because I can't comprehend him doing something like that,
Speaker 8: not with his personality.
Speaker 15: We were.
Speaker 13: He shook knew what I knew of him as a child,
Speaker 13: and I was just shocked. I was just shocked.
Speaker 1: On the morning of the twenty ninth of August nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty five, Richard Ramirez arrived in Los Angeles after visiting
Speaker 1: a brother in Arizona.
Speaker 7: Ricky walked into the nearest convenience store to buy some candy,
Speaker 7: and he noticed people were looking at him, and then
Speaker 7: when he would look at them, they'd look away, of course,
Speaker 7: And as he was waiting for his change, he looked
Speaker 7: at the newspapers on the counter, and every paper there
Speaker 7: were four or five of them, then from La and
Speaker 7: from the area, and every paper had his pictures photograph
Speaker 7: and then one woman she said, it's him al matador,
Speaker 7: which is killer in Spanish.
Speaker 1: Didn't he evens.
Speaker 3: Bend and saying So he started running through yards, across
Speaker 3: over fences. He climbed about a nine foot sound barrier wall.
Speaker 3: As he went through yards, people were calling in. They
Speaker 3: were calling a look to the Los Angeles Police Department, saying,
Speaker 3: somebody's coming to my yard. I have a prowler. Members
Speaker 3: of the Law Center's police apartment were already on his trail.
Speaker 3: They were following the nine to one one calls. So
Speaker 3: he running east in the northeasterly direction and made it
Speaker 3: all the way to Hubbard Street. He tries to use carjack.
Speaker 3: Female resident.
Speaker 17: She screams, we were actually still asleep.
Speaker 3: We heard a bang, then a scream. We went out here.
Speaker 17: We noticed a tall, dark, skinny guy running and my
Speaker 17: dad right behind him. He just came running as fast
Speaker 17: as we can to assist my dad and the neighbors.
Speaker 3: Richard has been running for about two miles.
Speaker 17: Pretty much caught up to him about here and tackle
Speaker 17: dump right here up against this fence.
Speaker 3: Citizens come out and surrounded and he.
Speaker 17: Was right here, sitting down right here. He was bleeding
Speaker 17: because one of the neighbors had hit him with a
Speaker 17: fence post right over the head. He was perspiring and
Speaker 17: huffing and puffing, and very looked very tired and scary.
Speaker 17: He looked very scary. Actually. People just started coming out
Speaker 17: with the newspapers and saying, that's the killer, mytones, that's
Speaker 17: just you know, nice docor Greg.
Speaker 1: From there is in custody. Officers would now come face
Speaker 1: to face with the killer for the first time.
Speaker 9: When I saw him, he just had this evil look
Speaker 9: in his eye. He just looked so sinister, as if
Speaker 9: he were possessed.
Speaker 13: He just looked evil.
Speaker 3: I remember playing with his anxiety level, trying to make
Speaker 3: it go up and come down. I wanted to see
Speaker 3: what I could do to raise it or lower it.
Speaker 3: And Richard was almost to the point of hyperventilation. His
Speaker 3: head was down on the table and he's going and
Speaker 3: for a millisecond, Just for a millisecond, I'm becoming somewhat nervous.
Speaker 3: I knew that this guy was into Satanism, and all
Speaker 3: of a sudden when he starts hyperventiling, and I'm saying
Speaker 3: to myself, if this guy starts levitating, I'm out of here.
Speaker 10: This is a guy that although at times there were
Speaker 10: photographs taken of him that he looked like, you know,
Speaker 10: wild man, He's not somebody somebody would point out and say,
Speaker 10: there goes that crazy sob because he just doesn't come
Speaker 10: across that way.
Speaker 3: He was much more intelligent that I envisioned people think
Speaker 3: of him as a crazy man. I didn't think he
Speaker 3: was crazy. He was much much more articulate than most
Speaker 3: murder suspects that I've interviewed.
Speaker 1: Ramirez revealed he was well schooled in murder.
Speaker 3: The impression I.
Speaker 10: Got from him was that he was well read, even
Speaker 10: though he had dropped out of school I think after
Speaker 10: the ninth grade or so thereabouts. He was very interested
Speaker 10: in murder and killing and passed serial killers because he
Speaker 10: had done a lot of reading on it.
Speaker 3: He could tell you everything about serial killers. From the
Speaker 3: time the Romans fed the Christians of lions, the modern
Speaker 3: day serial killers. When we took him to his first
Speaker 3: cell and he found out that that was the cell
Speaker 3: that Angelo Bono, who was part of the Hillside Strangler duo,
Speaker 3: that's the cell he was in. He was excited.
Speaker 1: The night Stalker had petrified California and haunted detectives Sealerno
Speaker 1: and Carreo for five months. Now he was finally behind bars.
Speaker 3: I remember seeing my mother and a couple of my
Speaker 3: sisters and they came up and we all just started.
Speaker 3: I start crying. It was over. I said, it's okay.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty nine, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of
Speaker 1: thirteen murders and thirty attempted murders, rapes, and sexual assaults.
Speaker 1: He was sentenced to death. So what drove the knight
Speaker 1: Stalker to his ultimate destiny as one of history's most
Speaker 1: savage serial murderers? Were the lessons he learned in his
Speaker 1: upbringing to blame? Or was Richard Ramirez born to kill?
Speaker 10: I don't see anything in his upbringing there was any
Speaker 10: more unusual than a lot of people.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 10: A lot of successful people have gone through help being
Speaker 10: raised and come out just fine. This could be a
Speaker 10: case and It probably is a case of when he
Speaker 10: was conceived, he's a bad seed. No matter how he
Speaker 10: was raised, he was destined to do what he did.
Speaker 7: A lot of people grow up poor and a lot
Speaker 7: of people are abused in the childhood. They don't all
Speaker 7: grow up to do the things that Richard Ramirez did.
Speaker 2: It does not appear that he was abused as a
Speaker 2: child or deprived or there there's certainly no evidence of
Speaker 2: that was presented.
Speaker 3: So how did he grow up to do these things?
Speaker 11: The best way to look at it is from a
Speaker 11: biopsychosocial approach, but with a heavy emphasis on neurobiology, whether
Speaker 11: it's hormonal, chemical, electrical, brain damage, some combination of facts
Speaker 11: plus psychosocial stressors. Abuse never helps many many things have
Speaker 11: to go wrong in order for one of these individuals
Speaker 11: to be created.
Speaker 12: Richard Ramirez was born to kill. He began his life
Speaker 12: in the way everybody does, seemingly normal. Something happened in
Speaker 12: that gene that he has, something that was added on
Speaker 12: to by the experiences that he had in his environment
Speaker 12: and childhood. It's like a recipe. You have a basic thing,
Speaker 12: you add to that recipe, You add to that recipe,
Speaker 12: and finally you have the born killer.
Speaker 3: Nature or nurtured. I don't believe anybody is born with
Speaker 3: the entema. You know, this comes about from something they've learned,
Speaker 3: they've seen, and they've decided to do. Richard had the
Speaker 3: liberties to do whatever he wanted to do and was
Speaker 3: a drifter early on in age. And when you couple
Speaker 3: that with narcotics activity, the drugs, you know, then that
Speaker 3: definitely causes problems in the mind. And I don't think
Speaker 3: anybody is born like that. They learned, they see, and
Speaker 3: they do