Long before we knew him as the Night Stalker, Richard
Ramirez was a serial killer in the making. As a teenager,
he worked at a Holiday Inn in El Paso, Texas.
He had access to a master key and let himself into guest rooms to rob and spy on
people while they slept.
Then a good friend of his from back then said this to Inside Edition.
"I did start seeing something going wrong with Ricky Ramirez.
I think what really messed him up was the acid. He would do a lot of acid,
the stealing, you know,
I noticed the stealing and then started at the peeping tom and things like that.
He said he was fired. He was dismissed due to the cause that,
uh, he, uh,
he had tried to molest two little kids that were going up up the elevator.".
It's been reported that he also tried raping a female guest in her room,
but her husband came back and fought him off.
He was never charged for that attempted rape because the couple were tourists
passing through and they didn't want to testify at a trial.
So Richard was fired and that was the end of that.
That was 1975 in El Paso, Texas. He was 15.
The recent four-part Netflix series 'Night Stalker:
The Hunt for a Serial Killer' starts with the Night Stalker's year-long
reign of terror in California from June,
1984 to August, 1985, when he was finally captured by an angry mob.
By 1989, he was sentenced to death on 13 counts of murder,
five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries.
But before he ever saw the gas chamber, he developed B cell lymphoma,
a type of blood cancer.
It didn't help that his liver was failing as a result of his earlier addictions.
When he died in Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae,
California in June, 2013,
the nurses and guards that saw him said his skin and the whites of his eyes had
turned highlighter green. When he died, he was 53.
Is a monster like him born that way or made that way.
And what else did he do that the Netflix series didn't tell us about?
I'm Chris with True Crime Recaps. And I just wanted to take a moment to say,
thank you for clicking this video. If you like, what you see here,
please do us the huge favor of hitting like and subscribe.
It only takes you about a half a second, but it means the world to us.
All right now on with the recap. And to get things started,
I've got a bizarre fact for you. In 1987,
Sean Penn was sentenced to 60 days in the LA County jail because
among other things, he punched an extra on the set of the movie Colors,
and he finds himself in a cell near Richard Ramirez and Richard wants his
autograph. So according to Vanity Fair,
Sean tells him through the guards that he wants Richard to write something for
him first. And this is what the note says that he gets from Richard. "Hey, Penn,
stay tough and hit them again.
Richard Ramirez 666." And it has a pentagram and a sketch of the devil on it.
So Sean Penn sends him back this note. "Richard,
it's impossible to be incarcerated and not feel a certain kinship with your
fellow inmates. Well, Richard, I've done the impossible.
I feel absolutely no kinship with you.
And I hope gas descends upon you before sanity does.
It would be a kinder way out." In a rare interview,
this is how Richard explained himself to Inside Edition.
I didn't particularly care for people.
A serial killer comes about by circumstances and like a
recipe, poverty, drugs, child abuse, these things,
you know, contribute to a person, uh,
to a person's frustration and anger. And, uh,
and uh, at some point in life, he explodes.
Richard did indeed explode, and dozens of people died,
starting with his first known murder in April, 1984.
This wasn't part of the Netflix series and I have to warn you,
this is hard to hear. When he was around 18,
Richard moved to California and sort of drifted between San Francisco and Los
Angeles. In 1981,
he was arrested in LA for trying to seal a car and by spring of 1984,
he was living in San Francisco's Tenderloin district.
His building was six blocks away from nine-year-old Mei Leung and her family.
On April 10th,
Mei and her eight year old brother went into the basement of their building,
looking for a dollar bill they'd lost. According to the San Francisco Gate,
they got separated for about a half an hour. When her brother saw her again,
she was hanging from a ceiling pipe in the basement.
She'd been raped and stabbed.
Her death was a cold case until 2009 when a DNA sample from a
handkerchief linked her to Richard Ramirez, but get this,
he may not have done it alone.
They pulled secondary DNA from the same handkerchief,
but didn't match it until 2012.
That's when they got a match to a convicted felon,
a guy who would have been under 18 at the time of Mei's murder.
He wasn't charged or named because the DNA evidence was too small and no other
evidence proving he was the Night Stalker's accomplice exists. Still.
It's strange.
Two months after Mei's murder Ramirez murdered 79 year old Jenny Vincow in Los
Angeles - the woman police previously thought was his first murder and the
beginning of his infamous crime spree that left dozens of people, dead,
tortured, assaulted, and robbed.
It's thought that he lived at the infamous Cecil Hotel for most of that year.
According to the tab.com,
he paid $14 a night for a room on the top floor of the hotel.
Quick side note, the Cecil Hotel is infamous for its history of suicides,
murders, and killer residents.
If you're familiar with the eerie death of Elisa Lam,
you might be interested to know that she was also staying on the top floor of
the hotel when she mysteriously died in 2013.
When the Night Stalker was living there,
he used the hotel dumpster to get rid of his bloody clothes,
and then just walked in naked. When he was first arrested, he confessed.
He even offered to kill himself.
According to trial transcripts reported by the tab.com. He said, quote,
"I did it. You know, you guys got me. The Stalker. Of course I did it.
You know that I'm a killer. So what. Give me your gun. I'll take care of myself.
You should. I'm a killer. So shoot me.
I deserve to die." But despite what he said, he pled not guilty.
His trial lasted for four years.
According to an article in Parade.com written by Jessica Sager,
delays started right off the bat with jury selection.
They had to interview 1600 potential jurors until they found 24
people that swore to be impartial. And then in 1989,
when they were in the middle of deliberations,
one of the jurors didn't show up one morning. Court officials tried calling her,
but when she didn't answer,
they went to her house and found her beaten and shot multiple times.
At first, they thought it had something to do with the Night Stalker case,
but ultimately the evidence pointed to her live in boyfriend, James Melton.
He killed himself days later.
And an alternate juror had to be assigned to finish deliberations and sentence
Ramirez. While he was on trial
he collected thousands of fan letters from female and male admirers.
One letter included a getting to know you questionnaire for him to fill out,
and get a load of his answers, published on Viral Nova.com.
His answers aren't necessarily surprising considering the monster he was,
but a few of the more telling statements are his first sexual experience was
at 12 with a sex worker. His childhood hero was Jack the ripper.
Favorite meals? Women's feet.
When asked what his new year resolution is every year, he says,
"he can't say here." His biggest regret? Not carrying a gun at all times.
And his thoughts on crime? "It's a wheel.
You're either the driver or the one who gets crushed by it.
Try and avoid altogether?" Before he was sentenced he made a bizarre statement
in court. This is the last part of what he said. Quote,
"I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil.
Legions of the night, nightbreed,
repeat not the errors of night prowler and show no mercy.
I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all.
That's it." Are
monsters born or are they made? You tell me.
The youngest of five kids,
he was born in El Paso on February 29th, 1960.
But his problem started even before he was born.
According to The Night Stalker by Philip Carlo and an article in Digital Spy by
Laura Jane Turner, while she was pregnant with Richard,
his mother was a factory worker exposed to chemicals daily.
She didn't leave the job until she was five months pregnant and suffering from
dizzy spells.
The family was also living near a nuclear bomb test site,
and there were lots of babies born with birth defects. When he was two,
a dresser fell on him and knocked him out. When he was five,
he was knocked out again by a swing in the playground.
He was diagnosed with epilepsy and suffered from at least 24 seizures before he
reached his teens. At seven years old,
he said he dreamed about monsters so vividly that he was afraid of seeing them
when he was awake.
Richard's father had been a policeman in Mexico and when his brothers started
getting into drugs and stealing, he beat them mercilessly,
scaring Richard enough that he would sleep in a nearby cemetery to escape.
But the worst influence of all is generally thought to be his older cousin.
He was a soldier in Vietnam and a monster in his own right.
He spent his time in the Army, raping,
torturing and killing Vietnamese women and taking pictures of his crimes.
He showed Richard the polaroids and according to Philip Carlos' book as quoted
in grunge.com, his cousin told him, quote,
"having power over life and death is a high.
You control who lives and who dies.
You are God." He was also responsible for teaching Richard how to sneak up on
people and how to use the combat skills he'd learned in Vietnam.
Then in 1973, when Richard was only 13,
his cousin shot and killed his wife in front of him. Then swore him to secrecy.
Richard never turned him in, but his cousin was arrested for the murder.
However, and you won't believe this.
He used an insanity defense and was released after only four years in a
psychiatric hospital. Before he dropped out of school in the ninth grade,
people that knew him in school said he was bullied. By the time he was 14,
he was living with his older sister and her husband,
a guy who used to take Richard out with him to spy on women at night.
Thanks to his extended family, by the time he moved to California,
he was already an accomplished peeping tom, a thief, a drug addict,
and a would be rapist and child molester with the skills of a brutal killer.
But no one in his family ever seemed to acknowledge the role they might have
played in turning him into the monster he was.
When he was sentenced in 1989,
his father told the El Paso Times that if his son really did do the terrible
things, he was found guilty of it was the drugs to blame. He said, quote,
"I've accepted he was a thief,
but I've never accepted that he did the things they say he did.
The media turned him into a monster.
He's really just a poor boy who was raised to believe in.
God. "I'm not going to blame society,
my race or people or anything. Uh,
it is up to the individual like myself, uh, to,
to keep on knocking on whatever door they want to get into.
As far as Satan is concerned, I, I believe, uh, you know,
malevolent being, uh, his description eludes me,
but I, I have felt powers that are here.".
Thanks for letting me catch you up on some of the other facts about Richard
Ramirez, the Night Stalker. If you like getting all the crime in half the time,
starting in February,
Amy and I are teaming up for the True Crime Recaps podcast.
You can watch us tape it right here on Wednesdays, or listen to it anytime,
wherever you get your podcasts.
Remember to subscribe and hit the bell so you know when a new episode is ready
for you to weigh in on. See you soon, take care.