Case File: Richard Ramirez

Born in 1960 in El Paso, Texas, Ramirez’s youth was shattered by a violent, alcoholic father who frequently beat his five children. When Ramirez sought refuge in a local cemetery, his father began punishing him by tying him to a crucifix in the cemetery overnight.

An older cousin named Miguel Valles took Ramirez under his wing, but Valles was no role model. An admitted war criminal who was stationed in Vietnam, Valles showed Ramirez photos of Vietnamese women that he boasted about raping, murdering and dismembering.

By the time he was a teenager, Ramirez was using drugs, including LSD and, later, cocaine—drug habits that only increased after Valles shot and killed his wife right in front of Ramirez. In 1982, Ramirez left Texas and moved to California, drifting between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.

Beginning in 1984, a series of gruesome crimes occurred in California that investigators struggled to solve because they had so little in common. In April of that year, a 9-year-old girl named Mei Leung was battered, raped and stabbed to death in the basement of her apartment building in San Francisco. The killer hanged her bloody body from a pipe, and the murder was unsolved until 2009, when DNA analysis was used.

Two months later, 79-year-old Jennie Vincow was brutally murdered in Los Angeles, with multiple stab wounds and her throat deeply slashed. Her apartment had been ransacked in a search for valuables.

During the spring of 1985, at least three children were abducted, sexually abused and then abandoned. One of them, 6-year-old Anastasia Hronas, provided police with a fairly accurate description of her captor. But it would be months before police connected these child abductions with other murders.

In March 1985, police were called to a home in Rosemead, a town in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. Dayle Okazaki had been shot in the head with a .22 caliber handgun and killed instantly. Her roommate Maria Hernandez escaped death when she held up her hand, causing the killer’s bullet to bounce off her house keys.

A few hours later, Veronica Yu was pulled out of her car in nearby Monterey Park and shot to death with a .22 caliber handgun. News reports began referring to a “Walk-In Killer,” a “Valley Intruder” or, finally, a “Night Stalker,” the name that eventually stuck.

The following week, Vincent and Maxine Zazzara were found dead in their Whittier home: Both had been shot with a .22 caliber handgun. Maxine’s body had been mutilated, with an inverted cross carved into her chest and both of her eyes gouged out. With the same .22 caliber handgun used at three different crime scenes, police were now convinced that a serial killer was at large.

Importantly, the print of an Avia gym shoe was found in the dirt outside the Zazzara home’s windows. Police investigators took photos and a cast of the shoe print.

In May, 66-year-old Bill Doi was battered unconscious in his Monterey Park home, and his disabled wife, 56, was bound with thumbcuffs and raped. Two elderly sisters in Monrovia were bludgeoned with a hammer and raped. A teenage girl in Sierra Madre was battered with a tire iron as she slept, barely surviving.

A 60-year-old Monterey Park woman was found dead after her head had been stomped on repeatedly—with an Avia gym shoe. Some of the surviving victims described a tall, thin man with dark wavy hair and bad teeth. The attacker sometimes demanded that victims “swear to Satan” they weren’t withholding any valuables. Pentagrams and other satanic symbols were carved into the walls of victims’ homes.

By the end of that summer, at least 14 people had been murdered, in addition to numerous abductions, assaults, rapes and burglaries. In some cases, two or three attacks occurred in a single hellish night. At some of the crime scenes—including one in San Francisco where the killer slaughtered an elderly couple in August 1985—the telltale Avia shoe print was again discovered.

By that point, homicide investigators felt they were closing in on the Night Stalker. But their hard work faced a serious setback when San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein revealed that the police were tracking the killer by his gun type and his shoe prints, a public admission that infuriated detectives.

Following the news of his crimes closely, Ramirez later confessed that those clues caused him to throw his Avia shoes off the Golden Gate Bridge. But a big break in the case finally came when a San Francisco homicide detective got a local informant to reveal the full name of the killer, who was an associate of his: Richard Ramirez.

No stranger to crime, Ramirez had a long rap sheet going back several years for drug offenses, theft and traffic violations. After learning his full name in August 1985, police decided to release his mugshot from an earlier arrest. The image was immediately splashed all over newspapers and television broadcasts.

On the morning of August 31, 1985, Ramirez—returning to L.A. from a bus trip to Tucson—had no idea his face was widely known throughout California until he got off the bus, strolled to an East Los Angeles convenience store and saw his image on a newspaper rack. Sensing he was now identifiable by anyone in public, a dramatic scene unfolded: Ramirez ran from the store and crossed six lanes of the Santa Ana Freeway on foot, narrowly dodging traffic.

He attempted to carjack a vehicle in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, but the woman in the car refused to give Ramirez her keys. Seeing their altercation, her husband ran to Ramirez and struck him with a fence post. A crowd quickly gathered and severely beat Ramirez into submission until police arrived to arrest the Night Stalker, putting an end to his deadly crime spree.

Ramirez’s trial was as dramatic as his capture: He reveled in the media attention, shouting “hail Satan” in court and flashing a pentagram he had drawn on the palm of his hand. The trial was delayed when one of the jurors was found shot to death in her home, a murder that struck terror into all the jurors, even though it was eventually blamed on her boyfriend.

By September 1989, Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries. Sentenced to die in California’s gas chamber, he said to courtroom reporters, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”

Like other serial killers, Ramirez had a number of female admirers, including journalist Doreen Lioy, whom he married while incarcerated in San Quentin State Prison.

Because of numerous appeals and other legal maneuvers, Ramirez remained at San Quentin for almost 24 years until his death in 2013 from lymphoma at age 53.

The summer of 1985 was a season of horror in Southern California, as the ghastly attacks, sexual assaults and murders continued unabated. Local gun shops did a brisk business, and emergency calls to police spiked for months.

Neighborhood watch groups were formed throughout the vast regions around Los Angeles, especially in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. But the body count continued to climb until Ramirez’s arrest in August 1985.

The cost of prosecuting and trying Ramirez was more than $1.8 million, a record amount that wasn’t exceeded until the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995.