EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (18 page)

Richard Ramirez

The Night Stalker

Ricardo Leyva, aka Richard Ramirez, loved his cousin Mike. He was older and had even fought in Vietnam. He had killed people and tortured them. He had raped women. And he had the photographs to prove it. Killing made you feel good, Mike told him on one of the days when they would sit smoking pot and drinking beer. You have power over others, you feel like a god. Richard listened in awe, taking it all in.

Mike would take him hunting in the desert at night and would show him how to kill things. One day, however, Mike’s wife nagged him one time too many about getting a job. He pulled a gun and shot her in the face, killing her. The teenage Ricardo was in the room and witnessed it. He was covered in the dead woman’s blood. Mike was found to have killed her while temporarily insane and was sent to a secure hospital.

Not long after that, the epileptic Ramirez, youngest in a family of five, began to go off the rails, smoking marijuana to excess, the habit funded by theft and doing nothing with his young life. He had dropped out of school aged fourteen, embracing a diet of junk food that had rotted his teeth, giving him chronic halitosis that would be recalled with horror by many of his later victims. Ramirez would become one of the most horrific and frightening of serial killers, the devil-worshipping nightmare known as the ‘Night Stalker’, a bogey man who gave a serious boost to sales of alarm systems in a terrified California in the 1980s.

He had been born in El Paso in Texas in 1960. He was a quiet boy and his parents seemed decent enough. Behind closed doors, however, his father’s temper would sometimes explode, resulting in a beating for one of the children. Ramirez was so afraid of his father that he would hide in a local cemetery, occasionally staying there all night. It is also possible that he was abused by a male teacher. He was not a popular boy, set apart somewhat by his epileptic seizures. He had to stop playing football as a result and coupled with his thin, girlish appearance, it forced him into being a loner. In 1978, he left it all behind when he moved to Los Angeles but life still proved difficult for him. In his first few years, he experienced several run-ins with the law, for possession of dope and car theft.

Somewhere along the road, he had become fascinated by Satanism. His father blamed his penchant for marijuana, but he loved satanic rock music, especially Australian heavy metal outfit AC/DC’s song
Night Prowler
from the album Highway to Hell. The words to this song were like a prediction of what was to come.

Not much is known about his first few years in Los Angeles. He graduated from simple theft to breaking and entering homes to steal whatever valuables he could get his hands on. There is speculation that he might have lingered a little longer than necessary in some of the homes he burgled, perhaps even photographing the inhabitants as they slept.

The first time he killed was on 28 June 1984. Jennie Vincow lived in Glassel Park and he was able to get into her house through an open window. He slashed her throat so badly that she was almost decapitated. He also stabbed her frenziedly and sexually assaulted her before ransacking her apartment and stealing her valuables.  

Eight months afterwards, he felt the urge to do it again. On 17 March 1985, twenty-year-old Angela Barrios came home from work to the condominium she shared with thirty-four-year-old Dayle Okazaki in Rosemead, a town north of LA. As she got out of her car in the garage, she sensed a figure behind her. It was a man dressed in black with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. In his hand was a gun and it was pointing at her. Suddenly, he fired the weapon and she fell to the ground, a pain in her right hand. The bullet had miraculously struck the car keys she was holding before ricocheting away. She pretended that she had been hit more seriously and he walked round her and through the door leading into the building from the garage. She waited a moment before springing to her feet and running out of the garage. But, to her horror, she bumped straight into her attacker, who was coming out of the condominium’s front door. She staggered away from him back towards the garage, expecting at any moment to feel the heat of a bullet as he finished her off. Instead, however, she watched as he slowly put the gun into his belt at his waist and took off.

She was safe, but her housemate did not have such luck. He lay dead in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, shot in the forehead.

Ramirez was not finished for that night, however. Nearby, a police officer came upon a car with its engine running. Inside was a thirty-year-old woman of Taiwanese origin who had been shot several times. Tsian-lian Yu died before the arrival of the ambulance he had summoned.

Three days later, he killed an eight-year-old girl in Eagle Rock. Age did not seem to matter for Ramirez. It was the killing he enjoyed.

A week later, he struck again, but this time it went according to the crazed plan he had devised in his twisted mind.

Sixty-four-year-old pizzeria-owner, Vincent Zazzara and his forty-four-year-old wife were discovered by their son Peter. Vincent had been killed instantly by a single shot to the temple, while Maxine lay on their bed, her eyes horrifically gouged out. She had been repeatedly stabbed and a T-shaped wound had been carved in her left breast. Thankfully, it seemed she had also died instantly from a bullet wound and the work with the knife had been carried out afterwards.

Six weeks later, he woke Harold and Jean Wu in their bedroom. He shot sixty-year-old Mr Wu in the head before beating sixty-three-year-old Mrs Wu, to force her to tell him where they kept their money. He tied her up and then searched the house before returning to the bedroom where he viciously raped her.

Mr Wu, meanwhile, had miraculously survived his bullet wound and crawled to a telephone, dialing 911. An ambulance and patrol car arrived shortly after, but he died in hospital. Mrs Wu was later able to give a description of the attacker.

It became clear to the police that this was the scenario preferred by this killer. He would first dispose of the male of the house before doing what he wanted with the woman.

On 29 May, he killed two elderly women in Monrovia. Malvia Keller was eighty-three and her invalid sister, Blanche, was eighty. They were bludgeoned to death with a hammer that had been wielded so viciously that its handle had split. Interestingly, a pentagram, a design often associated with Satan, was drawn in lipstick on Malvia’s inner thigh. A second one had been drawn on the wall above Blanche’s body.

On 30 May, Ruth Wilson was shocked awake by a bright light shining in her eyes. It was a flashlight held by a man who had broken into her Burbank home and was now holding a gun to her head. He ordered her to go to the bedroom of her twelve-year-old son where he held the gun to his head, handcuffed him and locked him in a cupboard. She gave him what valuables he had, hoping that he would then leave. Instead, he took her back to her bedroom where he raped and sodomised her. She later recalled the stench of his foul breath, the result of all that junk food years ago.

This time, he did not kill and the boy managed to escape from the cupboard to phone 911. Ruth described her attacker to police officers as a tall Hispanic with long dark hair.

Los Angeles was in a state of terror. Amongst other things, the killer was being called the ‘Valley Intruder’, but the name that stuck was the ‘Night Stalker’.

On June 27, he raped a six-year-old girl in Arcadia and the following day the body of a thirty-two-year-old woman, Patty Higgins, was found in the same area. Her throat had been slit.

Five days later and the body of seventy-five-year-old Mary Louise Cannon was found, again with her throat slit and the house ransacked. It was back to Arcadia for 5 July where he pummelled sixteen-year-old Deirdre Palmer with a crowbar. A blunt object of some kind was also used to beat sixty-one-year-old Joyce Nelson to death on 7 July.

It was a busy few days for the Stalker. That same night, he woke sixty-three-year-old Linda Fortuna around 3.30 am. Pointing a gun at her, he ordered her into the bathroom while he searched the house for cash and valuables. He took her back into the bedroom where he tried and failed to rape and sodomise her, failing to maintain an erection. She was terrified that he would blame her and kill her, but he left instead.

A couple of weeks later, he shot and killed Maxson Kneiling and his wife Lela, butchering them both horrifically into the bargain. He struck twice that day. Having finished with the Kneilings, he moved on to the house of thirty-two-year-old Chitat Assawahem who he shot dead before raping his wife Sakima and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He then horrifically sodomised their eight-year-old son and left with $30,000 of jewellery.

On 6 August, he was in Northbridge, where he shot a married couple, Mr and Mrs Petersen who both managed to survive. Two nights later, he had more success in Diamond Bar, California, fatally shooting Ahmed Zia in the head and raping and sodomising his twenty-eight-year-old wife, Suu Kyi Zia.

The intervals between killings were growing less, suggesting that his anger was increasing as was his need to satisfy his grim urges. He surprised police by killing next in San Francisco. Peter and Barbara Pan were found in their blood-soaked bed in a suburb of the city on 18 August. The method was the same – Mr. Pan had been shot and then the Stalker had worked out his gruesome fantasies on Mrs Pan. She survived but was seriously injured and would be an invalid for the remainder of her life. Another pentagram was drawn on the wall in lipstick along with the words ‘Jack the Knife’ taken from a song called The Ripper by British heavy metal band, Judas Priest. The bullets recovered from Mr Pan’s body matched those used by the Night Stalker in Los Angeles.

Police checked their unsolved cases and discovered this was not the first time he had taken his horrific show on the road. The day after he had killed the Keller sisters in Los Angeles, twenty-five-year-old Theodore Wildings had been shot dead in San Francisco and his girlfriend had been raped by his murderer.

Now it was time for the city of San Francisco to panic as its inhabitants realised that the Night Stalker, now responsible for fourteen murders and five rapes, seemed to be on the loose there as well.

A man who ran a boarding-house in San Francisco came forward to volunteer information about a young Hispanic man with halitosis and bad body odour who had stayed at his place several times in the past year and a half. When they went to the room he used, they found a pentagram on the bathroom door. It had been used by the Night Stalker and he had vacated it the day that the Pans were attacked.

Back in Los Angeles, he attacked a couple in Mission Viejo, fifty miles south of the city. He shot and seriously wounded the man before dragging his fiancée into the next room where he told her that he was the Night Stalker, the killer who had been getting so much coverage in the media. He then raped her twice but was furious that there was nothing of value in the house. He made her say over and over that she loved Satan before making her perform oral sex on him. He then stepped away from her, laughed at her and left.

She crawled to the window and watched as he drove off in an old orange Toyota. Coincidentally, a teenager who had earlier become suspicious when he saw the vehicle in the neighbourhood, had scribbled down its licence number. He called the police with it the next morning. The car which had been stolen from Chinatown, turned up in the Rampart area but the Night Stalker had no further use for it and police waited in vain for him to return to it. However, they found a fingerprint in it which matched up with one Ricardo ‘Richard’ Leyva Ramirez. They now knew who they were after.

Seven days later he was captured. Looking for another car to steal, he had climbed into fifty-six-year-old Faustino Pinon’s beloved Mustang. The problem was that Faustino was under the car at the time working on it. As Ramirez turned the key, Faustino sprang out from under the vehicle and reached through the window, grabbing Ramirez by the throat. He tried to speed away but crashed the car into a fence. Faustino threw the car’s door open and dragged Ramirez out, pushing him to the ground. Ramirez jumped up and took to his heels, trying to steal another car driven by twenty-eight-year-old Angelina Torres. Her husband Manuel heard her screams and came after Ramirez with a length of metal post. By now there was a posse after the Stalker and one of them recognised him, shouting the fact to the others. Eventually, after pursuing him for a block, Manuel caught up with him, striking him a heavy blow on the head with the fence post. Ramirez collapsed to the ground where he was restrained. The Night Stalker had been taken and two cities breathed sighs of relief.