In the balmy heat of a California summer’s night in 1985, the man known as the Nightstalker slides
himself through an open window of a house. He walks into a bedroom room and fires his
25-caliber handgun five times into the body of a sleeping man. Three bullets hit the man’s head,
one glances off his thumb, the other bursts the waterbed he’s sleeping on. The Nightstalker walks
into another room and grabs the man’s girlfriend, binding her hands with the now dying man’s tie.
When she looks into his dark eyes, she swears she sees the devil incarnate. While hurting her,
he screams over and over, “Swear! Swear to me you love Satan! Say it! Swear on Satan.”
As he leaves the house, he growls, “Tell them the Night Stalker was here.”
Thankfully, this was to be his final crime. The Nightstalker, aka, Richard Ramirez,
was one of the most monstrous human beings the world has ever spat out,
and yet, even after the sheer horror of his crimes became public knowledge,
a woman married him and told the world that the person they were
calling a monster was the man of her dreams. She once looked into a TV camera and said
with the utmost earnestness, “I can’t help how the world sees him. They don’t know him like I do.”
To really understand just how disturbing these words are, and thereby how disturbed
you will be by the time you finish this show, you need to know a bit more about his crimes.
Serial killers come in all shapes and sizes and not all of them enjoy
inflicting pain on the victims while they are alive. Ramirez bathed in people’s pain,
and he got off on having total control over them during the last minutes of their lives.
He was what’s called a sexual sadist, a person who enjoys inflicting pain on others for sexual
thrills. He was also a narcissist who believed he was some kind of chosen one, as you can see
in the comments he made after he’d been handed 19 death sentences. “You maggots make me sick! You
don’t understand me. You are not expected to…I will be avenged… Lucifer dwells in all of us.”
A judge who upheld those sentences described Ramirez perfectly, saying the killer exhibited
“cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.” We imagine his wife-to-be
heard that, too. In fact, as you’ll see, it is what very likely made her attracted to him.
Ramirez could also fall into the category of a “visionary” serial killer since he had lost all
touch with reality. He believed he was in contact with the devil, which could have partly been down
to not just his Satan-worshiping but also the fact he would sometimes stay awake for long periods of
time while taking copious amounts of drugs. On top of that, he seemed to think he was
fighting a worthy cause, cleaning up what he saw as a corrupt world. These kinds of killers are
often called “missionary” types. These people have a mission, usually thinking they take orders from
a higher power, such as God or Satan. Here are some more of Ramirez’s words that make this clear:
“I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogmas of this so-called society. I need to look
beyond this room to see the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards;
truly trematodes of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession.”
So, this is the type of person that some women fell in love with. He was a demon,
but his future wife saw someone who was damaged and needed to be nurtured.
It is true that the trauma he dealt with during his childhood shaped the man he would become.
His father didn't make his childhood easy, but young Richard had a few more
markings of a future killer. He’d had two serious head injuries; he had seizures,
and he may have seen his brothers being seriously hurt by a neighbor. Unloved, brain-damaged,
traumatized by violence. This can turn out badly if there is a flame to ignite the fire.
That’s where his cousin comes in, Miguel “Mike” Ramirez.
When Richard was 12, Miguel had recently come back from the Vietnam War, a place where he’d committed
horrendous war crimes. There are a handful of men who’ve been in wars and have come back killing,
as if they have acquired a taste for blood. For instance, the wife killer and fully-fledged
sadist Philip Jablonski said during his time in the Vietnam war he and his fellow
soldiers enjoyed taking Vietnamese soldiers up in the helicopter and throwing them out.
We’ll come back to Jablonski and his dark connection to Richard Ramirez later. His
story will help us to explain why not just one woman was in love with himself and Ramirez.
He once told Richard, “Having power over life and death was a high, an incredible rush.
It was Godlike. You controlled who’d live and who died.” About a year later,
Richard was there when Miguel shot his wife in the head during an argument. Even though she died,
he only served four years in prison, due to the fact the court heard he had PTSD after Vietnam.
What’s interesting is what Richard later said about going back to the apartment after the
murder. He said, “That day I went back to the apartment, it was like some kind of mystical
experience. It was all quiet and still and hot in there. You could still smell the blood.”
While Miguel served his time in prison, Richard started getting serious about a hobby he’d taken
up. That was being a Peeping Tom. His predatory urges then manifested into something uglier,
something more physical, but he was not yet a killer. What’s strange is that his
high school friends back then, especially the girls, called him a “gentle and sweet lover.”
As you’ll see soon, psychopaths can often come across as very charming.
He later became a fan of heroin, speed, cocaine, PCP, magic mushrooms, LSD, and to get those things
he became a burglar. During this period, he attended Satanist meetings in San Francisco
where he said he felt the presence of the devil. At this point in the early 80s, he’d pretty much
lost all contact with his family. His sister once remarked that when she saw him in 1983,
he was living in a “fleabag” hotel close to the LA bus station. At the time,
he was regularly injecting cocaine into his arms. A year later, still in his early 20s, he crept
into a woman’s house at night and stabbed her to death as she slept. The violence the
police knew had happened was so brutal they agreed that this was no break-in gone wrong.
This was the work of a maniac. The victim, a woman touching 80, was almost decapitated.
Ramirez was a “disorganized” killer, meaning he didn’t seem to plan his crimes well, or
at least not all of them. He also left behind lots of evidence, which is a reason he should
have been caught quicker. He was not, as criminal profilers like to say, “forensically aware.”
In 1985, he went on a murder spree that securely puts him in the Infographics Show’s “Serial Killer
Hall of Infamy.” His MO was almost the same every time. He’d sneak in a house at night,
often through an open window, and launch a frenzied attack. He’d shoot
people. He’d strangle people. He’d mutilate people. But often he kept the women alive
during the horrific ordeal he put them through. This man who later became a dream husband once
used a spoon to gouge out the eyes of a victim. He took the eyes home after to keep as a souvenir.
At the crime scene, he left some evidence. That was a footprint of some Avia sneakers,
not a common brand at all. It’s a story we’ve told before, but the cops might have caught him earlier
had the then-mayor of San Francisco not accidentally tipped Ramirez off by publicly
talking about the shoes the cops were looking for. But that’s not the story we want to tell today.
What we want to know is why someone would marry a man that crept into old folks’ houses at night
and hacked at them with a machete. Perhaps the women that adored him liked the fact
that twice he showed some humanity when he left very young kids alive.
But in general, he was monstrous. He once broke into the house of an elderly couple
and used thumb cuffs on the disabled wife while doing the things he liked to do. He shot the man
in the face, which proved to be a fatal shot. That same month in 1985, Ramirez broke into
the house of two women in their 80s. This time he used a hammer and he used it with abandon. Again,
he did awful things and in the end, one of the women died in hospital from her injuries.
He’d used this woman’s lipstick to draw a Satanic pentagram on the wall and one on her thigh.
We think you get the picture by now. This was one evil man. He tortured and mutilated
people and gained sexual satisfaction from doing so. As he held women down,
he often screamed, “Swear on Satan.” As you know, he kept screaming about Satan with
his last female victim. Her boyfriend who he’d shot three times in the head actually survived,
but not without serious injuries, including debilitating frontal-lobe brain trauma. The
woman he attacked also survived, but both victims were seriously traumatized for life.
The man’s mother had actually warned him the night before, saying, “Billy, keep your doors locked and
your windows closed. There’s a sick man killing people up and down the coast of California.”
Everyone knew about who the press was calling the “Walk-in Killer” and “The Valley Intruder” and,
of course, “The Nightstalker.” There were 18 victims, but the violence had happened over such
a short period of time. This was almost unheard of in the realm of serial killing. So much blood in
so little time. So much unrestrained violence. By this time, the cops had lots of evidence to
work with since Ramirez left clues and many of his survivors had seen the face of the man
who’d told them to love Satan. Then, with the use of their new high-tech computer
system called “Cal-ID”, the authorities soon had their man and released a composite sketch of him.
When that photo hit the newspapers, Ramirez was soon seen out in public.
He could have been beaten to death by members of the public had the cops not arrived on the scene.
It was over. The Nightstalker was in handcuffs and the public could breathe easy. Still,
when folks learned about the full extent of his crimes they were disgusted, absolutely disgusted.
There was a media frenzy when Ramirez went to court. There, he wore black sunglasses
on his smirking face, one time giving a two-fingered “devil sign” to the Satanists
who were attending the trial. That’s when he showed the pentagram on the palm of his hand.
Six women survivors identified Ramirez during the trial, and then when the jury found him guilty,
he said, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory.” My God,
was he hated. No human could have been more detested. But there was one person
who felt very differently. Her name was Doreen Lioy.
She started writing to Ramirez pretty much right after he was sent to Death Row. Believe it or not,
she was just one of many women who wrote love letters to Ramirez. This man who’d bashed women’s
heads with hammers and mutilated them with knives, who’d hurt children and grandparents, was popular,
immensely popular, with some people anyway. Lioy was educated, too, at the time of writing
to him she was a freelance editor at a California-based teen magazine.
Shen wrote 75 love letters to him over a period of 11 years and she was always first in line
when she visited him in prison four times a week. The media soon got wind of this and asked her why,
to which she replied, “He’s kind, he’s funny, he’s charming, I think he’s a really great person.
He’s my best friend; he’s my buddy.” Then, in 1996, she became his wife.
He’d chosen her out of a long line of possible suitors. Prior to that,
she told him she’d buy them both gold wedding rings. Ramirez reminded her,
“Satanists don’t wear gold.” So, she bought platinum for him and gold for her.
After the prison wedding, she smiled for the media and happily told one news program, “This is
wonderful. I’m so happy. So thrilled. Very proud.” Some people called her crazy and a shameful human
being, to which she shot back, “I’m none of those things. I just believe in him completely.”
She definitely had a thing for celebrities. In the 1970s and 80s,
she worked for a magazine called Tiger Beat and part of her job was interviewing stars
and future stars who had made Hollywood their home. One of those stars, the actor John Stamos,
she’d helped make famous while he was entertaining people on the TV show “General Hospital.”
When he was later asked about her relationship to Ramirez, he said, “To be that lonely that
this is the only man on the planet that she can find, I just thought, ‘How horrible.’”
But was it loneliness? Let’s now come back to Philip Jablonski,
a man who might help us understand why this woman was so smitten with the Night Stalker.
While Jablonski was on Death Row, also at San Quentin, he used to send letters
to pen pals from all over the world. He’d often sketch cute but weird photos on the envelopes.
So, these two had a lot in common. Ramirez also drew sketches in his letters,
with two different people saying on a web forum, “My friend has also written to Ramirez. He replied
to her letter and also sent her a drawing of sailor moon.” The next person wrote, “He
sent me Winnie The Pooh with his first letter.” These guys did this to look innocent, but they
also no doubt suffered from arrested development due to childhood trauma. Jablonski’s childhood
was nothing short of horrific, with his father and other men doing unspeakable things to him.
Jablonski had a baby with one lover, who he later beat, stabbed, and strangled to death. He also had
a history of attacking other women. He then went to prison and found out a lot of women liked him.
They wrote love letters to him, telling him he was misunderstood, that all he needed was true love.
He married one of those women in 1982 while still in prison after she’d seen a lonely
hearts ad he’d placed in a newspaper. Yep, he somehow could do that from his prison cell.
And then he got out after 12 years with good behavior on his record. He moved in with her
and her mother-in-law but before a year was up, he ended up killing them both. He suffocated
and stabbed his wife and shot her mother after a prolonged bout of violence. You could ask,
did she not see that coming given his track record with women?
Soon after, he killed a woman and removed he eyes, writing “I Love
Jesus” on her body with a knife. He once said in a letter to a pen pal that he’d done that because
she had a keyring that said, “Jesus Loves You.” He said in the letter, “I wanted to show her how much
Jesus loved her.” And this was a popular guy… He killed again and was later handed a death
sentence. But what’s shocking is the fact that women still kept writing to him and some asked
to marry him. When asked how this could be by one of his pen pals, he returned the disturbing reply,
“Never underestimate the power of loneliness.” He said if he did get out, there is no doubt
in the world that he would kill the next woman he met, who would probably be one of those pen pals.
He said that even though they knew he’d killed one partner and even killed a pen pal-turned-wife,
the new one would think they could change him, that they knew him better, that they were special.
After all, we all want to feel special, don’t we? This is a huge part of why a very small group
of women do this kind of thing. They just want to be loved, and it is highly possible,
they have been treated badly by a man in the past. Maybe they think if they love someone who
everyone else despises, this person will stay with them. But there is more to it than that.
There is a condition called “hybristophilia”, which means someone finds someone who commits
crime attractive, even the most violent of crimes. There are many reasons for this,
but a lack of self-esteem is a big one. As is someone thinking they can change someone, that
they are the special one, not like the others. They might also want to nurture a killer they
feel has never been nurtured before. Doreen Lioy once admitted that one of the things
that had attracted her to Ramirez was his “vulnerability.” She knew all about his
childhood trauma and she wanted to fix him. She was also probably quite happy to be in
the spotlight for once, being the focus of the news stories rather than the writer of
the stories. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe the writer of this Infographics Show needs to
be the one being talked about rather than the invisible man who is listened to on YouTube…
Just kidding. Another reason some
women might be attracted to vile men comes from an evolutionary psychology standpoint.
Experts say some women might despise such men but can’t help being attracted to them. After all,
such killers might have been the protective alpha males back when we were all hunting and gathering.
The writer and forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland who’s looked into this phenomenon as much
as anyone added another very salient point. She said men behind bars can be the perfect boyfriend.
All the woman’s experiences are positive. The love letters. The adoring partner.
Never having arguments. No housework. It’s bliss, or could feel like that,
in relation to crappy men she’s dated before. There is none of that day-to-day stuff that
sometimes makes relationships hard. The partnership in this case becomes a kind
of fantasy, said Ramsland. All these things can make some women delusional,
which is why there have been instances when women working as judges, psychologists and even lawyers
have fallen in love with extremely violent men. As for Doreen Lioy, we know from her father’s
obituary that she became Doreen Ramirez. Still, she split up with her imprisoned husband
after 13 years when new DNA evidence showed just how vile her husband was. We won’t go
into the crime, but it involved a young girl. The Night Stalker never was killed by the state,
dying instead from complications due to B-cell lymphoma in 2013. He was
53 years old. At the time, he was engaged to a female writer named Christine Lee. She was 23.
This new girlfriend of his was involved in an ongoing fight with another of Ramirez's admirers,
a model named Kelly Marquez. A 16-year named Eva was also madly in love with him,
in part she said because “he broke away from the system.” Ramirez once said,
“I think the girls are attracted to me because they can relate to me.”
Now you need to watch this about one of those kinds of men “How They Caught Serial Killer Ted
Bundy.” Or, see the world of this creep “America's Most Evil Serial Killer - John Wayne Gacy.”