As the 1980s dawned, a new term was on American lips: “serial killer.” It increasingly haunted headlines, newscasts and neighborhoods as serial murders snowballed during that decade.
Extremely rare just twenty years earlier, in the ‘80s at least 200 serial killers operated across the U.S. It was a time of seismic societal shifts. Americans were moving more frequently, fraying the fabric of families and communities. In sprawling new suburbs, people were less likely to know their neighbors – or to know what they were doing. Strangers no longer stood out. Anonymity was easy.
Law enforcement lagged behind, lacking comprehensive computerized databases that could detect patterns of crime.
Then, in 1984, the FBI created its National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. DNA revolutionized forensic science. Serial killers slipped back into the statistical shadows.
In the 1980s, at least
200 serial killers operated across the U.S.
This was where 24-year-old Richard Ramirez washed up in 1984. Originally from El Paso, Texas, he soon disappeared among the faceless newcomers in downtown L.A.’s seedy hotels. With a raging cocaine craving, rotten teeth and dark, dead eyes, the lanky Ramirez survived on petty crime. He was repeatedly arrested for drug possession and auto theft.
Although the city made a huge effort to clean up its streets ahead of 1984, the effect was temporary. Ramirez committed his first “Night Stalker” murder – nearly decapitating a Glassell Park grandmother in her own bed – that June, right before the international community descended upon the city. But his bloodlust truly took over the following March, as L.A.’s fleeting luster faded.
– former LAPD detective Glynn Martin
“The likelihood of being a victim of a serious crime was just extremely high,” said Glynn Martin, an LAPD patrol officer at the time and later a detective. “There were about 30% fewer officers then, handling triple the crime.”
Belying its ostensibly glamorous aura, the Los Angeles of the 1980s could be a gritty, soulless place. Its population exploded by more than half a million over that decade. The crack cocaine epidemic hit. Street prostitution and gang violence proliferated. Homicides reached nearly quadruple their current rate.
There were about 30% fewer officers then,
handling triple the crime
The L.A. police and public alike were gripped by the hunt for such an unpredictable killer. “It will take a combination of police and citizen effort to break this case,” Monterey Park Police Chief Jon D. Elder told the Los Angeles Times in July, 1985. A headline in that same newspaper described a “Unity Born of Fear” between citizens and law enforcement that September.
“He was very versatile and broadened his appetites,” said Dr. Peter Vronsky,
a Canadian historian of serial homicide. “He was a home-invasion serial killer …
That’s the worst nightmare – a guy coming into your home when you’re asleep.”
Tell them the Night Stalker was here
“We’d get to these nighttime hours and it seemed like the calls would come in two, three minutes apart: Night Stalker sighting over at this location; no, Night Stalker sighting over at this location,” Martin recalled. “When those calls were dispatched,
it was drop everything and get there as quick as you can.”
Unlike many serial killers, Richard Ramirez didn’t lead a double life. Once his murderous frenzy began, it was his life. Burglary and violence were his passion, profession, and his unfathomably depraved sex life.
– Richard Ramirez to victim
“You get abuse as a young person, which creates anger,” said Pelto. “Then you do
damage to the frontal lobe, where they have the anger and that poor impulse control. And then they have an obsessive compulsive kind of behavior where they’re driven to kill.”
In early adolescence Ramirez
began sleeping in a local cemetery.
“Interviews with friends and acquaintances … paint a picture of a youth who early
on gained a reputation as a loner and a troublemaker,” revealed a 1985 Los Angeles Times article headlined “Even Friends Didn’t Trust Him.”
Serial killers are seldom seen coming. But Ramirez’ childhood didn’t bode well.
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“Eighty-eight percent of known American serial killers made their appearance in just those three decades,” said Vronsky. “It’s a historical, cultural phenomenon that I attributed to the parental generation, because the psychopathology of serial killers is essentially formed in childhood.”
In Vronsky’s hypothesis, the spike in serial killers during the 1970s-1990s – most of whom didn’t start killing until their late twenties – could be connected to their being children of the World War II generation, who’d grown up during the Great Depression.
88% of known American serial killers made their appearance in just those three decades
– Dr. Peter Vronsky, historian of serial homicide
In his latest book, American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950–2000, Vronsky theorizes that convulsive events in history, such as the Great Depression and World War II, may help shape serial killers a generation later, when parents reflect that trauma onto their offspring.
Most of Carrillo’s colleagues scoffed at the idea of the same perpetrator committing both child abductions, in which victims were allowed to live, and the gory rape and execution of adults. But Salerno saw wisdom in his hypothesis, and harnessed his huge experience to Carrillo’s raw enthusiasm.
Salerno was a poker-faced legend;
Carrillo an effusive newbie.
One of their first challenges was to break down barriers between individual police departments across L.A. County that had traditionally been guarded about sharing information with one another.
The investigation that led to Richard Ramirez’ capture and conviction is as fascinating as the Night Stalker himself. It was an exhaustive and meticulous connecting of often partial dots, in an era before DNA, computers, the Internet and cell phones revolutionized detective work.
– psychologist Dr. Vonda Pelto
He dressed like a movie star, and I think that
was a lot of his persona.
Serial killers like the clean-cut Bundy had attracted female fans in the past. But the incongruous allure of Ramirez, who reportedly had foul breath and body odor, generated a whole new level of macabre celebrity.
It literally up-ended this county:
People locking doors that had never locked doors; people buying guns.
“A Year Can't Ease Anxieties of Attack by Night Stalker,” boomed a Los Angeles Times headline in August of 1986.
– former LAPD detective Glynn Martin
Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, streaming now on Netflix.
– Alfredo Leyva, a waiter who knew Ramirez
This guy, he looked like
he was scared of something.
But what really makes another Night Stalker unlikely is Ramirez himself. He was
a uniquely appallingly coming-together of childhood brain injury, poisonous influences and examples, a (doubtless related) drug habit, and a sociopathic incapacity for remorse.
L.A. Times Archives – November 30, 1984
L.A. Times Archives – July 19th, 1984
L.A. Times Archives – May 9th, 1986
L.A. Times Archives – September 8th, 1985
The era’s more elusive and outlandish serial killers – Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez – became household names. None more so than Ramirez,
an enigmatic drifter whose brutal
and bizarre spate of mid-‘80s California crimes marked an apex of this
grim phenomenon.
Shortly afterwards, Ramirez headed to the West Coast, initially San Francisco, for good. By this point he’d developed an expensive drug habit, yet had no visible means of support. One of his Bay Area roommates recalled Ramirez as, “Too shy to go up to a girl and ask her for a date.”
Having teased his dark desires through burglary and probably continued voyeurism, Ramirez, became a murderer in his mid-twenties.
In a 1985 courtroom, Ramirez flashes a pentagram drawn on his palm. (image courtesy of Netflix)
L.A. Times Archives –
September 1st, 1985
Los Angeles homicide detectives Frank Salerno (left) and Gil Carrillo (right). (image courtesy of Netflix)
Police on Hubbard Street in East L.A. where Ramirez was captured. (image courtesy of L.A. Times)
Initially, few in law enforcement recognized a pattern in Ramirez’ crimes, which straddled multiple jurisdictions across the vastness of L.A. It was Carrillo, a newly-minted detective with L.A. County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, who first sensed that a serial rapist and murderer was at work.
L.A. Times Archives – October 3rd, 1996
Ramirez undoubtedly committed many more crimes than the 43 he was convicted of. L.A. County prosecutor Phil Halpin opted not to pursue his multiple assaults on children, to spare victims the ordeal of testifying when Ramirez was already facing the death penalty. And few close to the case believe that he was truly dormant during the nearly nine months between the first and second of his proven L.A. attacks.
Mercedes Ramirez is escorted into the courtroom by her daughter, Rosa Flores on Oct. 22, 1985. (image courtesy of L.A. Times)
Richard Ramirez wearing sunglasses during testimony on Jan. 13, 1989. (image courtesy of Netflix)
L.A. Times Archives – September 1st, 1985
Survivor Anastasia Hronas was abducted and assaulted by Ramirez at age 6. (image courtesy of Netflix)
Ramirez in a police van on his way to prsion. (image courtesy of Netflix)
The horror of the Night Stalker was brief but lasting. Serial killer Richard Ramirez’ proven Los Angeles murders and rapes spanned just 14 months in the mid 1980s.
Yet the Night Stalker lingers. The shadow of his remarkable crimes and capture are evocatively recounted by detectives who pursued him and surviving victims in new docu-series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer.
“If we have 5,400 unsolved homicides in this country, it’s not unreasonable to say at least 10% are the work of systematic, intelligent, probably transient killers,” pioneering FBI criminal profiler Roger Depue told the Los Angeles Times in 1984.
To this day, Ramirez’ homicidal rampage remains synonymous with serial murder.
His pursuit by veteran L.A. detective Frank Salerno and his young partner Gil Carrillo forever changed the way serial killers are identified and apprehended. And the
whole sordid episode still lurks in the American imagination.
Ramirez averaged a murder and sexual assault almost monthly during his Night Stalker reign of terror, sometimes unleashing attacks in separate locations on the same night. He even came to self-identify as Night Stalker, sparing his final victim but insisting that she, “Tell them the Night Stalker was here.”
Even in an era of serial killers, Ramirez was a savage anomaly. The sheer variety of his victims, murder weapons and means of torture delayed a connection being drawn between his crimes. Ramirez’ youngest victim was 6 years old; his oldest 84.
“Typically, if you weren’t out and about in a nightclub or walking in the evening, you weren’t apt to be a victim,” continued Pelto, author of Without Remorse: The Story of the Woman Who Kept Los Angeles’ Serial Killers Alive. “With Ramirez, even in your own house you were not safe.”
Ramirez used guns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a hammer. He attacked males and females, sometimes sparing the lives of women and children. He daubed satanic symbols on walls and on the bodies of his victims. A criminal of opportunity, he fashioned improvised restraints, but also employed handcuffs and thumb cuffs.
He’d sometimes loiter at a murder scene, even taking time to prepare a snack.
“Ramirez was a disorganized serial killer … very impulsive,” noted Dr. Vonda Pelto, a Long Beach psychologist who worked with serial killers including “Hillside Strangler” Kenneth Bianchi and “Freeway Killer” William Bonin in the 1980s. “He didn’t care who he killed; he just wanted to kill.”
Ramirez’ choice of targets only amplified the public’s terror. Whereas serial killers have tended to prey on high-risk individuals such as sex workers, transients and drug addicts, he favored regular working and retired folks – and usually in their own homes. Most people could identify with his victims.
He suffered two severe head injuries in infancy. Epilepsy followed. To escape his volatile father, in early adolescence Ramirez began sleeping in a local cemetery.
The pre-teen Ramirez fell under the sway of an older cousin, a decorated soldier who boasted of grisly exploits during the Vietnam War. He showed his nephew photos of women he’d raped and even decapitated. When Ramirez was 13, the cousin fatally shot his wife in the face in front of him.
Ramirez withdrew into sniffing glue and smoking pot. He would join a “Peeping Tom” brother-in-law in nocturnal voyeurism, honing the stealth that would become a Night Stalker signature. Ramirez regarded burglary as an art form, and was known to neighbors as a thief. A 1977 spell in juvenile detention was no surprise.
“He was a drug addict … but this wasn't what was driving him,” said Martin, author of Satan’s Summer in the City of Angels: The Social Impact of the Night Stalker. “This was just an evil, evil creature.”
While working at a hotel, Ramirez attempted to rape a guest, only to be beaten senseless by her husband. He dropped out of high school and began visiting a brother in L.A. At age 20, he reportedly witnessed his best friend fatally impaled by a fence post when their van wrecked.
“I’m not sure [Ramirez] was an innate, born killer,” said Martin, who’s now executive director of the Los Angeles Police Memorial Foundation. “There was probably a latent sexual deviancy to him that he found an opportunity to deploy, and that ultimately devolved to the killings.”
The future killers themselves grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, amid cultural turmoil that may have fueled their rejection of societal norms.
“We have this kind of social revolution in values and sexuality and our confidence in the state, in law,” Vronsky continued. “Everything is questioned. We’re talking about civil rights disorders; the protests against the war in Vietnam.”
In Ramirez’ case, “reflected trauma” skipped a generation. For while his parents would have endured the Great Depression while growing up in Mexico, it was Ramirez’ older cousin, apparently brutalized by his experiences in Vietnam, who was the dominant influence of his formative years.
Ramirez’ principal pursuers were an odd couple: longtime Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Salerno, who’d helmed the high-profile “Hillside Stranglers” investigation in the late 1970s, and his relative novice partner, Carrillo. Salerno was
a poker-faced legend; Carrillo an effusive newbie.
After recognizing him in a liquor store, a group of bystanders pursued Ramirez on foot through East L.A. Following a sprint across the Santa Ana Freeway and three failed carjackings, he was cornered and beaten by the growing mob. Ironically, the exhausted Ramirez was relieved when a police cruiser appeared and he was arrested.
“This was an effective information-sharing exercise, led by Carrillo and Salerno,” said Martin. “It was done with the Hillside Stranglers, but I think was done more notably, more effectively with Ramirez.”
The two detectives doggedly pieced together evidence such as distinctive shoe prints,
a partial license plate, a fingerprint from a stolen car, and consistently similar physical descriptions from Night Stalker survivors.
While most serial killers aren’t unmasked until their arrest, Salerno and Carrillo
had identified Ramirez while he was still on the loose. They released his mugshot
to the media on Aug. 30, 1985. Within 24 hours, he was captured – and in a most
unusual manner.
“He dressed like a movie star, and I think that was a lot of his persona,” Pelto recalled. “I think [serial killer fans] like the notoriety. These guys become stars to them. They’re bigger than life.”
Ramirez often wore his hair long, and favored dark clothing. In court, he’d perch sunglasses atop prominent cheekbones. He flashed a pentagram drawn onto the
palm of his hand. Ramirez would’ve fit right into one of the heavy metal bands he loved to listen to.
Ramirez’ trial lasted as long as his murder spree: 14 months. Yet even after being convicted of thirteen murders, five attempted murders, and eleven sexual assaults
in 1989, he still swaggered. “Big deal,” he sneered at reporters after being sentenced
to the gas chamber that November. “Death always went with the territory.”
Once behind bars, Ramirez received countless erotic photos and letters from female admirers. Some jostled to attend his court appearances. In a city unusually obsessed with fame, or even proximity to fame, Ramirez also attracted male admirers.
A 1996 death-row marriage to a pen-pal drew widespread revulsion. Yet at the time of his natural death at age 53, Ramirez was once again engaged, this time to a 23-year-old writer.
“He had charisma … And the media also played it up,” said Vronsky. “His appearances in court were televised, and so he becomes this object on television.”
In 2009, Ramirez’ DNA linked him to the 1984 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in the basement of the San Francisco hotel where he was living at the time.
Despite Ramirez’ capture, a “feeling of vulnerability and violation of their once-safe haven” persisted among some Angelenos, wrote the paper’s staff writer in the accompanying article.
Certainly Ramirez, alongside contemporaneous SoCal serial killers, left his mark on both the Los Angeles’ public and police.
“It literally up-ended this county,” said Martin. “People locking doors that had never locked doors; people buying guns. Installing lighting [or] putting rocks down the side of their house – any kind of early-detection methods you can imagine.”
Until the late 1970s, many Southern Californians would readily pickup hitchhikers and themselves accept rides from strangers. Few L.A. homes had bars on their windows or security doors. But that was before Ramirez instilled unprecedented community fear with the ferocity, frequency, and utter randomness of his crimes.
The fear spread into neighboring Orange County after what would be the Night Stalker’s final attacks, in Mission Viejo, in late August of 1985. As reported by the Los Angeles Times days later, Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates responded to “hundreds and hundreds of calls … from fearful residents” with advice to lock doors and windows, trim shrubbery around windows, and to join or form Neighborhood Watch programs. Gates instigated random auto checks by his deputies, and bolstered their patrols.
Yet no level of precaution seemed to deter or defeat the Night Stalker, which only fanned the borderline public hysteria as his sadistic urges reached their ghoulish crescendo in the summer of 1985.
“There was one incident where [Ramirez] actually gets into a gunfight with one of his victims, and he prevails,” said Vronsky. “If keeping a gun by your bedside doesn’t help you, then there’s nothing left.”
“We can connect these cases quicker than we could in the past, and we can bring law enforcement together,” said Martin. “We’ve got a better identifier, in DNA, than we had in the past.”
Months later, the East L.A. community whose residents finally cornered Ramirez remained shaken by his frantic flight through its streets. “Neighborhood Changed by Capture of Night Stalker,” revealed a Los Angeles Times headline that November. Locals were still wary of loud noises and commotions, with Hubbard Street – where Ramirez was pummeled into ignominious submission on a sidewalk – dubbed “The Street of Heroes.”
That same year, at the suggestion of L.A. homicide detective Pierce Brooks, the FBI created its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program to better track and correlate information on crimes of violence.
It’s hard to imagine a Richard Ramirez operating in today’s computerized, hyper-connected world. His was an analog existence, in a strictly cash economy. He carried no ID, drove stolen cars, and slept in no-questions-asked hotels under aliases. His trail through life was so faint that even forensic science and the expert eyes of detectives Salerno and Carrillo struggled to trace it.
The Night Stalker story is one of immeasurable tragedy for Ramirez’ victims and their loved ones, but also for his own family (who stood by him in court). And Ramirez himself was an isolated, wretched figure. For all of his strutting theatrics and courtroom bravado, no one ever characterized the Night Stalker – or indeed any
serial killer – as being happy.
– Paul Rogers for Netflix
Two women are shot with a handgun.
Only one survives.
March 17th, 1985
Rosemead, CA
A 30-year-old women
is pulled from her car,
shot and killed.
March 17th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
A 64-year-old man is
shot and killed. His wife
is raped and killed.
March 27th, 1985
Whittier, CA
A 66-year-old man shot and killed. His wife
is bound and raped.
May 14th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
Two elderly sisters
are beaten, bound and raped. One dies days
later from the attack.
May 29th, 1985
Monrovia, CA
A 42-year-old mother
and 11-year-old son
are beaten and bound.
May 30th, 1985
Burbank, CA
A 75-year-old women is
bludgeoned with a lamp and stabbed to death.
July 2nd, 1985
Arcadia, CA
A 16-year-old girl is
bludgeoned with a
tire iron while sleeping.
She survives.
July 5th, 1985
Sierra Madre, CA
A 61-year-old women
is beaten to death by blows and kicks to
the head.
July 7th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
A couple in their 60’s
are attacked with a
machete then shot
and killed.
July 20th, 1985
Glendale, CA
A man is shot in the head and killed, his wife beaten and raped.
July 21st, 1985
Sun Valley
A young married couple
are both shot. Both manage to survive.
August 6th, 1985
Northridge
A young couple are attacked. The husband shot and killed, the wife beaten and raped.
August 8th, 1985
Diamond Bar, CA
Attempted entry into a
family home. The 13-year-old son alerts his father
as the intruder flees.
August 24th, 1985
Mission Viejo, CA
A 79-year-old women is brutally murdered in her apartment.
June 28th, 1984
Glassell Park
“He always come in alone. He don’t talk with nobody,” Alfredo Leyva, an L.A. waiter who repeatedly encountered Ramirez told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “This guy,
he looked like he was scared of something.”
(image courtesy of Thought Catalog)
A 16-year-old girl is
bludgeoned with a
tire iron while sleeping.
She survives.
July 5th, 1985
Sierra Madre, CA
A man is shot in the
head and killed, his wife beaten and raped.
Julu 21st, 1985
Sun Valley
A 16-year-old girl is
bludgeoned with a
tire iron while sleeping.
She survives.
July 5th, 1985
Sierra Madre, CA
A 61-year-old women
is beaten to death by blows and kicks to
the head.
July 7th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
Two elderly sisters
are beaten, bound and raped. One dies days
later from the attack.
May 29th, 1985
Monrovia, CA
Two elderly sisters
are beaten, bound and raped. One dies days
later from the attack.
May 29th, 1985
Monrovia, CA
A 42-year-old mother
and 11-year-old son are
beaten and bound.
May 30th, 1985
Burbank, CA
A 66-year-old man shot and killed and his wife
is bound and raped.
May 14th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
A 66-year-old man shot and killed and his wife
is bound and raped.
May 14th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
A 64-year-old man is
shot and killed. His wife is raped and also killed.
March 27th, 1985
Whittier, CA
A 30-year-old women
is pulled from her car,
shot and killed.
March 17th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
Two women are shot
with a handgun.
Only one survives.
March 17th, 1985
Rosemead, CA
A 79-year-old women is brutally murdered in
her apartment.
June 28th, 1984
Glassell Park
– former LAPD detective Glynn Martin
There were about 30%
fewer officers then, handling
triple the crime
Belying its ostensibly glamorous aura, the Los Angeles of the 1980s could be a gritty, soulless place. Its population exploded by more than half a million over that decade. The crack cocaine epidemic hit. Street prostitution and gang violence proliferated. Homicides reached nearly quadruple their current rate.
Extremely rare just twenty years earlier, in the ‘80s at least 200 serial killers operated across the U.S. It was a time of seismic societal shifts. Americans were moving more frequently, fraying the fabric of families and communities. In sprawling new suburbs, people were less likely to know their neighbors – or to know what they were doing. Strangers no longer stood out. Anonymity was easy.
“If we have 5,400 unsolved homicides in this country, it’s not unreasonable to say at least 10% are the work of systematic, intelligent, probably transient killers,” pioneering FBI criminal profiler Roger Depue told the Los Angeles Times in 1984.
As the 1980s dawned, a new term was on American lips: “serial killer.” It increasingly haunted headlines, newscasts and neighborhoods as serial murders snowballed during that decade.
The horror of the Night Stalker was brief but lasting. Serial killer Richard Ramirez’ proven Los Angeles murders and rapes spanned just 14 months in the mid 1980s. Yet the Night Stalker lingers. The shadow of his remarkable crimes and capture are evocatively recounted by detectives who pursued him and surviving victims in new docu-series Night Stalker:
The Hunt for a Serial Killer.
For all the accolades poured upon her modest Spoon
by H café, including making last year, owner/chef Yoonjin Hwang remains disarmingly modest. A highly-trained virtuoso pianist with a fascinating life story, Hwang admits to being entirely self-taugh.
A 61-year-old women
is beaten to death by blows and kicks to
the head.
July 7th, 1985
Monterey Park, CA
Tell them the
Night Stalker was here
– Richard Ramirez to victim
Tell them the
Night Stalker was here
In his latest book, American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950–2000, Vronsky theorizes that convulsive events in history, such as the Great Depression and World War II, may help shape serial killers a generation later, when parents reflect that trauma onto
their offspring.
In the 1980s, at least
200 serial killers operated
across the U.S.
The investigation that led to Richard Ramirez’ capture and conviction is as fascinating as the Night Stalker himself. It was an exhaustive and meticulous connecting of often partial dots, in an era before DNA, computers, the Internet and cell phones revolutionized detective work.
– former LAPD detective Glynn Martin
There were about 30%
fewer officers then, handling
triple the crime
Certainly Ramirez, alongside contemporaneous SoCal serial killers, left his mark on both the Los Angeles’ public and police.
Despite Ramirez’ capture, a “feeling of vulnerability and violation of their once-safe haven” persisted among some Angelenos, wrote the paper’s staff writer in the accompanying article.
“A Year Can't Ease Anxieties of Attack by Night Stalker,” boomed a Los Angeles Times headline in August of 1986.
– Dr. Peter Vronsky, historian of serial homicide
88% of known
American serial killers
made their appearance in
just those three decades
– former LAPD detective Glynn Martin
It literally up-ended this county:
People locking doors that
hadnever locked doors;
people buying guns.
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