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True Crime Documentary - Was LA's Night Stalker Destined For Violence？ · The Evolution of Evil - True Crime Stories

0:07
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, Los Angeles would be terrorized by
0:11
Speaker 1: a series of brutal rapes and murders.
0:14
Speaker 2: The panic had swept the county.
0:16
Speaker 3: I was enormous.
0:17
Speaker 4: People didn't know if they were going to live to
0:19
Speaker 4: see the next morning.
0:22
Speaker 1: Men, women, the elderly, and children were all in the
0:26
Speaker 1: sadistic killers' sites.
0:28
Speaker 5: Their final hours were at the hands of someone who
0:31
Speaker 5: was laughing as he tortured and raped and killed them.
0:35
Speaker 1: A serial murderer who broke all the rules.
0:38
Speaker 6: The suspect is used guns, knives, tie irons.
0:44
Speaker 3: I knew how vicious and violent he really was.
0:48
Speaker 1: The attacker, christened a knight Storm, would go down as
0:52
Speaker 1: one of history's most heenous killers.
0:55
Speaker 7: I think he is the worst. I think he would
0:58
Speaker 7: be number one on a monstrous there.
1:00
Speaker 1: But who was the night Stalker?
1:03
Speaker 8: He was friendly and he was nice, charming as how
1:06
Speaker 8: I would describe.
1:06
Speaker 1: Him, and was he born to kill?
1:10
Speaker 9: He just had this evil look in his eye, as
1:12
Speaker 9: if he were possessed.
1:49
Speaker 1: The seventeenth of March nineteen eighty five, and Gil Correo,
1:53
Speaker 1: a young homicide detective with the La County Sheriff's Department,
1:58
Speaker 1: was called to an incident in the Mead.
2:00
Speaker 3: District Sunday evening, ten forty at night. Carl comes in,
2:07
Speaker 3: very typical. Okay, Gill, you got one dead, one wounded,
2:10
Speaker 3: and I'm just going to work another routine, mundane Murderkreo.
2:15
Speaker 1: Didn't yet know it, but this murder would be anything
2:18
Speaker 1: but routine.
2:30
Speaker 3: We entered the location on Village Lane. Dale Okazaki was
2:36
Speaker 3: lying on her back in the kitchen. She had sustained
2:40
Speaker 3: a gunshow wounded the head.
2:43
Speaker 1: Thirty four year old Dale Okasaki had been unloading groceries
2:48
Speaker 1: when a man entered her apartment and executed her where
2:51
Speaker 1: she stood.
2:56
Speaker 3: I can still see her today.
3:03
Speaker 1: Dale's flatmate, twenty two year old Maria Hernandez, had also
3:08
Speaker 1: been shot at point black range, but had survived. She
3:12
Speaker 1: didn't recognize her attacker, and nothing had been taken from
3:16
Speaker 1: the property.
3:17
Speaker 3: We just had our work cut out for us. We
3:18
Speaker 3: didn't know if there was an angry boyfriend who was
3:20
Speaker 3: a home invasion robbery gone away, what it was.
3:26
Speaker 1: Detectives then learned that the killer had struck again.
3:30
Speaker 2: It occurred about a half hour later. It was in
3:32
Speaker 2: the same general area of town and the same gun.
3:36
Speaker 1: Was used in nearby Monterey Park thirty year old law
3:41
Speaker 1: student se Lan Yu had been driving home when another
3:46
Speaker 1: driver forced her to stop, then shot her twice in
3:50
Speaker 1: the chest at close range.
3:55
Speaker 10: Almost immediately, we were aware that we had some sort
3:59
Speaker 10: of a series. He's going not knowing just how big
4:02
Speaker 10: it was going to get or grow.
4:08
Speaker 1: The nature of the crimes was not typical of a
4:11
Speaker 1: serial killer.
4:14
Speaker 11: The overwhelming majority of serial sexual murderers kill up close
4:18
Speaker 11: and personal, manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, multiple stab wounds, blunt
4:24
Speaker 11: force trauma.
4:25
Speaker 3: Very very rarely.
4:26
Speaker 11: Did they shoot somebody because it's too cold and too impersonal.
4:40
Speaker 1: On the morning of March twenty seventh, the bodies of
4:43
Speaker 1: sixty four year old Vincent Tzara and his forty four
4:47
Speaker 1: year old wife Maxine were discovered in their home in
4:51
Speaker 1: the Pleasant suburb of Whittier. The same gun had been
4:57
Speaker 1: used the behavior at the crime scene. The significantly different
5:04
Speaker 1: Vincent Zarah had been shot as his snacks, Maxine had
5:09
Speaker 1: been shot and stacked and pieced, and the killer had
5:12
Speaker 1: taken a gruesome souvenir.
5:16
Speaker 10: The woman's eyes were gouged out, not to be found.
5:23
Speaker 12: Many serial murderers take souvenirs from people that they kill.
5:28
Speaker 12: Whether it's a piece of flesh, piece of jewelry, something
5:31
Speaker 12: it is a concrete reminder. It's something they can see,
5:35
Speaker 12: something they can hold on to, something that says, wow,
5:39
Speaker 12: you did this.
5:57
Speaker 1: On April the fifteenth, two weeks after the murder and
6:01
Speaker 1: mutilation of the Cazarees, the killer appeared to have struck again.
6:07
Speaker 1: Linda Martinez was called to process the crime scene at
6:11
Speaker 1: the home of William and Lillian Doy, a couple in
6:15
Speaker 1: their mid sixties.
6:19
Speaker 9: There were casings on the living room floor. Mister Douy
6:24
Speaker 9: was still in his bed and he had been shot.
6:29
Speaker 9: Missus Douy's room was next to the master bedroom. She
6:34
Speaker 9: was an invalid, so she had her own room. She
6:37
Speaker 9: had been sexually assaulted. It always is distressing to go
6:43
Speaker 9: into a crime scene.
6:46
Speaker 1: William Doy had been quickly dispatched with a gun shot
6:49
Speaker 1: to the head. Sixty three year old Lillian had been
6:53
Speaker 1: restrained with thumbcuffs, beaten, terrorized, and raped, but the killer
7:00
Speaker 1: had let her live.
7:02
Speaker 12: It was unusual for a serial murderer to have two people,
7:10
Speaker 12: shooting one and acting like a serial murderer with the
7:13
Speaker 12: other one.
7:15
Speaker 3: Men he was killing because they were the obstacle to
7:19
Speaker 3: get to his lust the women.
7:22
Speaker 12: It was an issue of control, It was an issue
7:24
Speaker 12: of not being overpowered. What husband or man would lay
7:28
Speaker 12: there and not intervene in trying to keep his partner
7:33
Speaker 12: from being attacked.
7:35
Speaker 1: Despite the many inconsistencies, detective guilt Career suspected that just
7:40
Speaker 1: one man was responsible for all of the crimes.
7:45
Speaker 3: I felt very strongly was a serial killer going on.
7:51
Speaker 3: Back at the time, there were two renowned psychologists, one
7:56
Speaker 3: from New York and one from locally here in the
8:00
Speaker 3: West Coast, from UCLA that essentially said that we were
8:04
Speaker 3: full of hot air, that one man was not capable
8:07
Speaker 3: of performing what we were ledging.
8:13
Speaker 1: Six weeks later, in the leafy city of Monrovia, two sisters,
8:18
Speaker 1: both in their eighties, were discovered in the home they shared.
8:25
Speaker 1: One had been raped, both had been severely beaten with
8:29
Speaker 1: a hammer. Here, again, there was something new.
8:35
Speaker 11: There was a whole aspect of the occult.
8:40
Speaker 10: There were some pentagrams, some things written on the wall,
8:44
Speaker 10: there were some markings on the body.
8:48
Speaker 1: The crimes appeared related, but defied the current theories regarding
8:53
Speaker 1: serial murder.
8:54
Speaker 12: When I was first contacted about the murders, police were baffled.
8:59
Speaker 12: They had no idea who was doing this, how it
9:02
Speaker 12: was happening. They wondered what type of a person would
9:06
Speaker 12: have done this. I mean, was it a maniac? Was
9:09
Speaker 12: it a group of people, because don't forget in California
9:13
Speaker 12: they had Charles Manson, who with his cult went out
9:18
Speaker 12: murdering an awful lot of individuals. But my impression was
9:21
Speaker 12: that it was a single individual. It was someone who
9:25
Speaker 12: was not insane, who was not showing outrageous behaviors, and
9:29
Speaker 12: that he was probably young. He was probably either Caucasian Hispanic,
9:35
Speaker 12: but he was certainly not a standout in his community.
9:44
Speaker 1: The press would dub the mystery Killer the night Stalker,
9:48
Speaker 1: and those who had known him would never have suspected
9:51
Speaker 1: what he was king.
9:55
Speaker 13: He was an ordinary kid, no different than the rest
9:58
Speaker 13: of us.
10:00
Speaker 8: Friendly, and he was nice, and and he was so funny.
10:06
Speaker 8: He was so funny. He would always have me laughing.
10:09
Speaker 1: And the night Stalker's reign of terror had only just begun.
10:22
Speaker 1: Man eighty five, and the night Stalker had only just
10:25
Speaker 1: begun a series of crimes that would both sicken and
10:29
Speaker 1: terrify the residents of California. Preying on the unsuspecting citizens
10:35
Speaker 1: of their homes. He took glee in rape, murder and mutilation.
10:43
Speaker 1: As the crimes escalated, detectives raced to try to identify
10:47
Speaker 1: who was responsible for the shockingly vicious accounts. Who was
10:55
Speaker 1: the night stalker. Richard Ramirez was born in nineteen sixty,
11:11
Speaker 1: the last of five children to Mexican immigrants living in
11:14
Speaker 1: the Texan border town of El Paso.
11:19
Speaker 5: El Paso was a town of about half a million people,
11:22
Speaker 5: and across the Rio Grande was Siola Vuarez, which had
11:25
Speaker 5: one point five million people, about triple the size of
11:28
Speaker 5: El Paso. It's a heavily Hispanic population.
11:35
Speaker 8: It was basically a very quiet town allah, a very
11:39
Speaker 8: quiet place to live.
11:42
Speaker 1: Ramirez had a humble upbringing, typical to his neighborhood as
11:48
Speaker 1: a low income neighborhood.
11:49
Speaker 3: But it was nice.
11:50
Speaker 5: It had green grass in front and the house was painted.
11:53
Speaker 5: It wasn't shabby, but it was quite small.
11:57
Speaker 8: We were like lower class people, and everybody used to
12:03
Speaker 8: just hang around together at night. We would all play
12:08
Speaker 8: games all that. Neighborhood kids would get together up until
12:12
Speaker 8: everybody parents started calling them in for dinner.
12:18
Speaker 1: Richard's father was hard working and strict with his children.
12:22
Speaker 5: He was very much what I would classify as as
12:25
Speaker 5: someone from Mexico who had come up, come to El
12:29
Speaker 5: Paso and had scratched out a living here. He worked
12:32
Speaker 5: for the railroad. It's a hard scrabble when you're a
12:35
Speaker 5: first generation immigrant to learn a new language and try
12:39
Speaker 5: to scrape told in a new country.
12:46
Speaker 1: The young Richard Ramirez appeared no different from his friends
12:49
Speaker 1: and neighbors.
12:53
Speaker 8: They were all very nice, normal neighborhood family, just like mine.
13:00
Speaker 13: He was an ordinary kid, just like the rest of us.
13:05
Speaker 13: We went to school, minded our manners, did what we
13:10
Speaker 13: had to do, but no different than the rest of us.
13:13
Speaker 8: He was friendly, and he was nice, and and he
13:18
Speaker 8: was so funny. He was so funny. He would always
13:22
Speaker 8: have me laughing. We used to play this game called
13:26
Speaker 8: kick the can, and he was the fastest runner, so
13:29
Speaker 8: we always wanted to be on his team.
13:33
Speaker 1: Richard's friend Patricia found him kind and caring.
13:39
Speaker 8: If we wanted to take a short cut to school,
13:41
Speaker 8: we had to cut through this really tough neighborhood, and
13:45
Speaker 8: he always used to wait for me sitting on a
13:47
Speaker 8: little pony wall, and then he would walk me to school.
13:52
Speaker 8: It was always safer to be in twos, I guess.
13:57
Speaker 1: But by the time he turned ten, it appears all
14:00
Speaker 1: was not well with Richard Ramirez.
14:05
Speaker 8: He used to.
14:06
Speaker 14: Sit in back of me in fifth grade, and I
14:10
Speaker 14: remember that he would poke me in the back, and
14:14
Speaker 14: every time he would poke me, I would jump up.
14:17
Speaker 14: And so that time that he kept poking me and
14:20
Speaker 14: poking me, I turned around very upset, and I said, hey,
14:22
Speaker 14: you know, slop stop, stop, And I remember him like
14:28
Speaker 14: slumping over and then I'm just hitting the floor on
14:33
Speaker 14: the side.
14:34
Speaker 13: He would have seizures. You know, he would be shaking.
14:38
Speaker 13: You know, we knew he was sick.
14:43
Speaker 1: Ramirez was diagnosed with epilepsy, a condition that would affect
14:48
Speaker 1: him for much of his school life. As Ramirez approached
14:53
Speaker 1: his teens, he grew distant to his father and began
14:57
Speaker 1: to look up to his cousin, Mike, a Vietnam veteran
15:02
Speaker 1: who boasted of many atrocities while in service.
15:06
Speaker 12: The cousin kept multiple mementos of his time in Vietnam,
15:11
Speaker 12: and he pulled out this box and showed all of
15:14
Speaker 12: these photographs of the women he was raping or the
15:17
Speaker 12: heads he was cutting off. It was a fascination. It
15:22
Speaker 12: wasn't recoiling in horror. It was like, Wow, look what
15:27
Speaker 12: you've done.
15:32
Speaker 1: At the age when his sexuality was being formed, Ramirez
15:36
Speaker 1: was exposed to images of rape, torture, and murder.
15:44
Speaker 11: These individuals are in their fantasy lives from early adolescents,
15:48
Speaker 11: and in some regards some respects, their fantasy life is
15:52
Speaker 11: more real to them than reality. Their fantasy lives are
15:56
Speaker 11: filled with sadistic aggression where there's a fusion of sex aggression.
16:04
Speaker 1: Ramirez later claimed that his cousin Mike, gave him a
16:08
Speaker 1: front row view of his brutality.
16:12
Speaker 12: He watched this cousin shoot his.
16:15
Speaker 1: Wife after a petty argument at their apartment. Mike shot
16:21
Speaker 1: his wife in the face, killing her instantly.
16:28
Speaker 12: And it stuck with him. Not in the sense of
16:31
Speaker 12: it was a bad thing, not in the sense that
16:35
Speaker 12: how could you do something so horrendous? I mean being
16:38
Speaker 12: sick to your stomach. He was fascinated.
16:42
Speaker 15: The fantasies of those that had committed serial crimes have
16:46
Speaker 15: been very carefully studied by the staff of the FBI
16:50
Speaker 15: Behavioral Science here over the years. The fantasies start very
16:54
Speaker 15: learned life and oftentimes our result of some incident that
16:58
Speaker 15: triggers these thoughts, and once the fantasies become sexualized, it
17:04
Speaker 15: becomes extremely dangerous because they start fantasizing but events of rape, torture, mutilation.
17:14
Speaker 13: I did not notice anything strange of him until we
17:18
Speaker 13: were in high school and he was no longer part
17:22
Speaker 13: of my clique kind of thing. That's when I noticed
17:25
Speaker 13: that he was different and he had changed, didn't no
17:29
Speaker 13: longer say hello that kind of thing. I noticed that
17:33
Speaker 13: he would hang out with boys that did drugs.
17:38
Speaker 5: A lot of second generation immigrants sometimes get involved in gangs,
17:44
Speaker 5: and some of the thinking is that they see that
17:47
Speaker 5: their parents have come to America and have worked really,
17:49
Speaker 5: really hard and have very little to show for it.
17:52
Speaker 5: And there's some people think that there's a disillusioning on
17:55
Speaker 5: their part, like why play by the rules if this
17:59
Speaker 5: is what you end up with, which is what my
18:00
Speaker 5: parents had, And I suppose you could say that that
18:05
Speaker 5: might have been a factor in the rebelliousness of Ricky Ramirez.
18:11
Speaker 1: Ramirez became interested in hard rock and Satanism.
18:16
Speaker 7: A lot of kids, high school kids, for instance, were
18:19
Speaker 7: dabbling in this and they would give it their own
18:23
Speaker 7: little touches, and being high school kids, the brain's still
18:27
Speaker 7: developing they're developing. A lot of them got in trouble
18:31
Speaker 7: and what the wrong way. We did have some kids
18:33
Speaker 7: that kill their parents and things like that.
18:37
Speaker 1: Ramirez dropped out of school and began living on the
18:40
Speaker 1: fringes of society, sometimes sleeping in the local cemetery.
18:48
Speaker 7: Right from the get go, Richard stole anything that was loose,
18:51
Speaker 7: in anything that he could pry loose. I mean, his
18:55
Speaker 7: neighbors started calling him didros fingers and they call him
19:00
Speaker 7: Ricky Rabon, Ricky the thief.
19:05
Speaker 1: After the attempted rape of a guest in an El
19:08
Speaker 1: Paso hotel, Ramirez moved to California.
19:16
Speaker 12: He became a cocaine and alcohol addict. He lived in
19:19
Speaker 12: what's called skid row in Los Angeles, which is a
19:22
Speaker 12: pretty scruffy area. I mean, there are people doing everything
19:26
Speaker 12: and taking everything, and homelessness is not an unusual thing.
19:31
Speaker 12: You live in what's called a flop house, where you
19:33
Speaker 12: go and flop to get off your high or to recover. Now,
19:39
Speaker 12: did the drugs affect his brain functioning? Did it affect
19:43
Speaker 12: to the way he saw the world. Probably, But it
19:47
Speaker 12: wasn't causitive. It didn't need to make him kill. He
19:50
Speaker 12: was already primed.
19:57
Speaker 1: Rimirez lived day to day making guns, using prostitutes, stealing combs,
20:05
Speaker 1: breaking an injury.
20:08
Speaker 7: So he would go out in the suburbs where often
20:11
Speaker 7: they did not lock their doors at night, even they
20:13
Speaker 7: didn't lock their windows.
20:15
Speaker 3: This was like heaven for him.
20:16
Speaker 7: This is exactly what he was looking for, and he
20:18
Speaker 7: would go through the unlocked doors and unlocked windows. Sometimes
20:22
Speaker 7: he would go on and burglarize when nobody was home
20:25
Speaker 7: at night, and then he got bolder and bolder and bolder.
20:28
Speaker 11: The vast majority of burglaries are for material gain. These
20:32
Speaker 11: are usually drug people who want to get some money
20:35
Speaker 11: to buy drugs, and they might do it with a
20:37
Speaker 11: friend or a partner and so on.
20:40
Speaker 3: But there are a small.
20:42
Speaker 11: Group of burglars that are sexually motivated, where the burglary
20:47
Speaker 11: itself is motivated by an urge to look sexual stimulation
20:52
Speaker 11: through looking. And since about fifty percent of burglaries occur
20:56
Speaker 11: in the evening, when the victim is likely to be home,
20:59
Speaker 11: it's very easy to see the progression from voyeurism to
21:04
Speaker 11: break an entry to sexual assault or the sexual murder.
21:10
Speaker 1: By May nineteen eighty five, Richard Ramirez had killed at
21:14
Speaker 1: least eight times and his violent home invasions were about
21:18
Speaker 1: to escalate, plunging the people of Los Angeles into panic.
21:34
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, Los Angeles County was in the
21:38
Speaker 1: grip of a vicious serial killer. Ordinary citizens were no
21:43
Speaker 1: longer safe in their homes as the mysterious killer, christened
21:47
Speaker 1: the night Stalker, raped, murdered, and mutilated in the name
21:52
Speaker 1: of Satan. The dreadful and indiscriminate crimes caused a wave
22:08
Speaker 1: of fear.
22:11
Speaker 4: Everybody was scared. Everybody in the County of Los Angeles
22:16
Speaker 4: and southern California were scared to death.
22:20
Speaker 2: Gun seals seriously went up, vast increase in gun seals.
22:26
Speaker 2: During the summer of eighty five. People were keeping their
22:28
Speaker 2: windows closed.
22:30
Speaker 4: It was a very, very hot summer. I would not
22:33
Speaker 4: open the windows at night. We sweltered in our house
22:37
Speaker 4: every night because I was afraid somebody would come in
22:40
Speaker 4: and kill me.
22:45
Speaker 1: And still the violent attacks continued. In Burbank. On May thirtieth,
22:54
Speaker 1: a forty one year old woman was raped while her
22:57
Speaker 1: twelve year old son was locked cuffed in a closet.
23:02
Speaker 1: She was allowed to live. On the twenty seventh of June,
23:08
Speaker 1: the body of a twenty eight year old teacher was
23:10
Speaker 1: found in Arcadia. She'd been sodomized and her throat slipped.
23:17
Speaker 1: On July the second, again in Arcadia, a seventy five
23:21
Speaker 1: year old woman was found dead. She'd been beaten, her
23:25
Speaker 1: throat cut, and her home ransacked. Detective Gil Carrier was
23:31
Speaker 1: convinced just one man was at work, but the facts
23:35
Speaker 1: flew in the face of received wisdom.
23:38
Speaker 3: Here he was crossing all the gamuts and the only
23:40
Speaker 3: consistency was his inconsistency in the way he was committing
23:43
Speaker 3: his crimes.
23:44
Speaker 2: What the FBI was telling us is that serial killers
23:47
Speaker 2: tend to operate in the same way. That will use
23:50
Speaker 2: the same weapon and over the same method of operation.
23:54
Speaker 2: But there were different weapons used. There were two separate
23:57
Speaker 2: guns that were used throughout these events. There were knives
24:01
Speaker 2: used and a couple of on a couple of the occasions.
24:04
Speaker 2: There were bludgeons used on a couple of occasions. These
24:07
Speaker 2: are all differences in the method of operation.
24:11
Speaker 1: On July the fifth, the night stalker targeted a quiet
24:15
Speaker 1: suburban street in Sierra Madred. He entered the bedroom of
24:22
Speaker 1: sixteen year old schoolgirl Withney Bennett.
24:27
Speaker 10: You talk about a nightmare her parents awakened her crying
24:32
Speaker 10: and coming down the hall, they find her in her
24:36
Speaker 10: bedroom on the floor covered in blood. The suspect had
24:44
Speaker 10: entered the house, confronted her in bed while she was asleep,
24:50
Speaker 10: and beat her with a tire iron and tried to
24:57
Speaker 10: strangle her and left her for dead. Four feet of
25:03
Speaker 10: sutures ended up in her head. Took to close the wound.
25:12
Speaker 10: As you work, these cases are your law enforcement. For
25:16
Speaker 10: a long period of time. You see a lot and
25:20
Speaker 10: it has to have an effect on you. I know
25:22
Speaker 10: it takes its toll somewhere down the line, I've seen it.
25:32
Speaker 1: The seventh of July was another in a long run
25:35
Speaker 1: of swelteringly hot nights.
25:41
Speaker 3: I'm home alone. It's first time that I've ever slept
25:44
Speaker 3: with my gun on the nightstand.
25:47
Speaker 9: Everybody was afraid and pretty much kept their doors locked,
25:52
Speaker 9: windows locked. But the night was so hot, and our
25:55
Speaker 9: summer was so hot, so here I had the doors open.
26:03
Speaker 1: In the middle of the night, Detective Career awoke, convinced
26:07
Speaker 1: the night stalker was in his own house.
26:11
Speaker 3: I woke up, I was sweating, I was nauseated, and
26:18
Speaker 3: I got my gun and I cleared my house as
26:21
Speaker 3: if I was looking for Burtlar. All of a sudden,
26:26
Speaker 3: the phone rang. I scared the Bejesus out of me,
26:28
Speaker 3: and it was my desk telling me to call my
26:32
Speaker 3: friend Linda.
26:34
Speaker 1: In the early hours, crime scene investigator Linda Martinez had
26:38
Speaker 1: to work with a start.
26:39
Speaker 9: About three o'clock in the morning. My friend said, someone's
26:42
Speaker 9: calling your name. Somebody's yelling for you.
26:46
Speaker 1: Linda's neighbor was crying out for help.
26:51
Speaker 9: Well, I went to the back fence and then called
26:52
Speaker 9: across the street to the lady calling me and asked
26:55
Speaker 9: her what was wrong, and she told me that she
26:58
Speaker 9: had been bobbed and raped and she was handcuffed to
27:01
Speaker 9: her bed. Once I heard her voice, I knew it
27:07
Speaker 9: was him.
27:09
Speaker 3: Sophie Dickman, a lady in her sixties, had been sexually assaulted.
27:15
Speaker 3: She was raped, and.
27:18
Speaker 1: Detective Career recognized all the hallmarks of a night stalker attack.
27:28
Speaker 3: I learned that he had verbalized words, words that were
27:32
Speaker 3: common that we had heard in the past. Words he
27:34
Speaker 3: had spoke there, where's the money, where's a jewelry? Shut
27:38
Speaker 3: up bits. There was no doubt in my mind we
27:40
Speaker 3: were dealing with the same guy.
27:48
Speaker 1: His suspicions were confirmed by the discovery in a nearby
27:51
Speaker 1: home of the sixty one year old Joyce Nelson, beaten
27:55
Speaker 1: to death with a blunt object. The night stalker had
27:59
Speaker 1: struck in one night, and he would repeat the trick
28:10
Speaker 1: just two weeks later, on the twentieth of July, first
28:13
Speaker 1: shooting Max and Layla Nading at their home in Glendale
28:17
Speaker 1: before moving on to Sun Valley.
28:22
Speaker 10: We had a couple that lived in a home.
28:25
Speaker 3: The male had been.
28:26
Speaker 10: Executed in a sleep where the woman had been sexually assaulted,
28:31
Speaker 10: and there was a young boy there that also had
28:33
Speaker 10: been assaulted.
28:37
Speaker 1: Ramirez had again dispatched the husband as he slept. He
28:44
Speaker 1: had repeatedly beaten, sexually assaulted and humiliated the mother, demanding
28:50
Speaker 1: that she prayed to Satan for her life, and then
28:54
Speaker 1: raped her eight year old son.
28:58
Speaker 7: It was not enough just to murder or to rape.
29:02
Speaker 7: He had the torture, and he loved to terrorize him.
29:04
Speaker 7: He would make him say Hail Satan.
29:09
Speaker 11: Humiliation of victims is very, very typical in serial sexual homicide.
29:15
Speaker 11: This is arousing to them. This reassures the offender that
29:19
Speaker 11: they are in such complete control that they can degrade
29:23
Speaker 11: and humiliate the victim any way. They want nothing could
29:28
Speaker 11: be more stimulating for an individual with this deviant sexual
29:32
Speaker 11: arousal pattern.
29:34
Speaker 1: No one was able to predict or prevent the knight
29:37
Speaker 1: Stalker's crimes.
29:39
Speaker 7: It's typical of serial killers to choose people who put
29:44
Speaker 7: themselves at risk somehow, like male or female prostitutes, like hitchhikers.
29:51
Speaker 7: But these other people, they were living their normal lives.
29:55
Speaker 7: They weren't doing anything at all that should have brought
29:58
Speaker 7: this down on him, and the panic escalated.
30:04
Speaker 4: The publicity of the killings was like a drum beat.
30:08
Speaker 4: The more killings, the more publicity, the more fair.
30:12
Speaker 3: Hello.
30:13
Speaker 6: My name is Detective Guiltreo with the Los Angeles County
30:15
Speaker 6: Sheriff's Department. Assigned a homicide bureau and the Sheriff's Department
30:19
Speaker 6: it's currently conducting an investigation in this series of homicides
30:23
Speaker 6: and sexual assaults that occurred in Los Angeles County.
30:26
Speaker 3: I knew how vicious and violent and how vile he
30:30
Speaker 3: really was, and there was an enormous amount of pressure
30:34
Speaker 3: to stop before he hurt anybody else, even more so
30:39
Speaker 3: before he heard somebody in my own family.
30:41
Speaker 4: People were buying guns, people were buying guard dogs, people
30:45
Speaker 4: were scared to death.
30:47
Speaker 6: The suspect is used guns, knives, tire irons, as well
30:53
Speaker 6: as his own shod foot to inflict serious injury to
30:55
Speaker 6: several victims in the past.
30:57
Speaker 4: Nobody knew who it was, nobody knew where he was
31:01
Speaker 4: going to hit. People didn't know if they were going
31:04
Speaker 4: to live to see the next morning. It was really,
31:07
Speaker 4: really scary.
31:09
Speaker 1: And then a shocking twist, it was.
31:12
Speaker 10: Very obvious that our killer from southern California had now
31:16
Speaker 10: struck in the city of San Francisco.
31:23
Speaker 1: On the seventeenth of August, the night stalker had shot
31:25
Speaker 1: another couple in their home, leaving a Satanic symbol on
31:29
Speaker 1: the wall. A week later, he struck fifty miles south
31:36
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles, shooting the husband and sexually assaulting the wife,
31:41
Speaker 1: forcing her to swear her love for Satan. With the
31:47
Speaker 1: killer on the move, detectives were now working night and
31:51
Speaker 1: day to try to catch him before he struck again.
31:55
Speaker 16: Since the last taping, which was August thirteenth, nineteen eighty five,
31:59
Speaker 16: the suspect in this case, currently under investigation, is committed
32:02
Speaker 16: two more homicides.
32:05
Speaker 3: I have the pressure of the world on me. I
32:08
Speaker 3: need to save not only my immediate family, my wife,
32:12
Speaker 3: my mother and my kid, everybody but the citizens of
32:16
Speaker 3: Los Angeles County. There's an animal going out there. I
32:19
Speaker 3: have to solve it.
32:21
Speaker 16: The vehicle used in this crime was a nineteen seventy
32:25
Speaker 16: six Toyota station Wagon. If the vehicle is found abandoned,
32:29
Speaker 16: contact Sergeant Frank Salerno or Detective Gil Correo.
32:34
Speaker 3: My wife found my thirteen year old daughter crying in
32:36
Speaker 3: the bedroom and she said, what's wrong? And she said nothing.
32:42
Speaker 3: And my wife said, no, something's wrong. What is it?
32:45
Speaker 3: And she said, I just wish this rover. I just
32:52
Speaker 3: want my dad back.
33:00
Speaker 1: Detective Career didn't yet know it, but before the end
33:03
Speaker 1: of the month he would be face to face with
33:06
Speaker 1: one of history's most heenous serial killers. By August of
33:22
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five, the night Stalker had killed at least thirteen,
33:28
Speaker 1: terrorized Los Angeles County, and pushed investigators to their limits.
33:36
Speaker 1: Now he appeared to be on the move, and detectives
33:39
Speaker 1: feared he'd be even harder to catch.
33:42
Speaker 10: Where we'd had him localized in Los Angeles County, now
33:46
Speaker 10: all of a sudden, he's in the city of San Francisco.
33:51
Speaker 10: That was of great concern.
33:55
Speaker 1: But by the end of the month, a number of
33:57
Speaker 1: important leads finally came together.
34:02
Speaker 3: We actually threw informants that identified him. We knew where
34:06
Speaker 3: he hung out, he knew we loved, He liked drugs,
34:10
Speaker 3: and he used to hang around the skin Row area.
34:12
Speaker 10: At the same time, there was a fingerprint recovered on
34:16
Speaker 10: the rear view mirror of a stolen car that the
34:21
Speaker 10: killer had used, and they made Richard Ramirez off that fingerprint.
34:26
Speaker 10: The sheriff of La County, the chief of police of
34:29
Speaker 10: La City, the chief of Glendale decided that they were
34:33
Speaker 10: going to release the picture of the killer, Richard Ramirez
34:37
Speaker 10: to the press.
34:37
Speaker 8: Immediately when they showed him, I told my husband, Oh
34:40
Speaker 8: my god, look that's Richie. That's Richie. But that was
34:46
Speaker 8: so weird because I can't comprehend him doing something like that,
34:54
Speaker 8: not with his personality.
34:58
Speaker 15: We were.
34:58
Speaker 13: He shook knew what I knew of him as a child,
35:02
Speaker 13: and I was just shocked. I was just shocked.
35:15
Speaker 1: On the morning of the twenty ninth of August nineteen
35:17
Speaker 1: eighty five, Richard Ramirez arrived in Los Angeles after visiting
35:25
Speaker 1: a brother in Arizona.
35:27
Speaker 7: Ricky walked into the nearest convenience store to buy some candy,
35:32
Speaker 7: and he noticed people were looking at him, and then
35:40
Speaker 7: when he would look at them, they'd look away, of course,
35:43
Speaker 7: And as he was waiting for his change, he looked
35:46
Speaker 7: at the newspapers on the counter, and every paper there
35:49
Speaker 7: were four or five of them, then from La and
35:51
Speaker 7: from the area, and every paper had his pictures photograph
35:55
Speaker 7: and then one woman she said, it's him al matador,
36:00
Speaker 7: which is killer in Spanish.
36:04
Speaker 1: Didn't he evens.
36:05
Speaker 3: Bend and saying So he started running through yards, across
36:10
Speaker 3: over fences. He climbed about a nine foot sound barrier wall.
36:18
Speaker 3: As he went through yards, people were calling in. They
36:20
Speaker 3: were calling a look to the Los Angeles Police Department, saying,
36:23
Speaker 3: somebody's coming to my yard. I have a prowler. Members
36:31
Speaker 3: of the Law Center's police apartment were already on his trail.
36:35
Speaker 3: They were following the nine to one one calls. So
36:39
Speaker 3: he running east in the northeasterly direction and made it
36:42
Speaker 3: all the way to Hubbard Street. He tries to use carjack.
36:46
Speaker 3: Female resident.
36:47
Speaker 17: She screams, we were actually still asleep.
36:54
Speaker 3: We heard a bang, then a scream. We went out here.
37:00
Speaker 17: We noticed a tall, dark, skinny guy running and my
37:06
Speaker 17: dad right behind him. He just came running as fast
37:12
Speaker 17: as we can to assist my dad and the neighbors.
37:15
Speaker 3: Richard has been running for about two miles.
37:18
Speaker 17: Pretty much caught up to him about here and tackle
37:23
Speaker 17: dump right here up against this fence.
37:25
Speaker 3: Citizens come out and surrounded and he.
37:28
Speaker 17: Was right here, sitting down right here. He was bleeding
37:33
Speaker 17: because one of the neighbors had hit him with a
37:36
Speaker 17: fence post right over the head. He was perspiring and
37:41
Speaker 17: huffing and puffing, and very looked very tired and scary.
37:47
Speaker 17: He looked very scary. Actually. People just started coming out
37:51
Speaker 17: with the newspapers and saying, that's the killer, mytones, that's
37:55
Speaker 17: just you know, nice docor Greg.
38:01
Speaker 1: From there is in custody. Officers would now come face
38:05
Speaker 1: to face with the killer for the first time.
38:10
Speaker 9: When I saw him, he just had this evil look
38:13
Speaker 9: in his eye. He just looked so sinister, as if
38:17
Speaker 9: he were possessed.
38:18
Speaker 13: He just looked evil.
38:22
Speaker 3: I remember playing with his anxiety level, trying to make
38:28
Speaker 3: it go up and come down. I wanted to see
38:31
Speaker 3: what I could do to raise it or lower it.
38:34
Speaker 3: And Richard was almost to the point of hyperventilation. His
38:38
Speaker 3: head was down on the table and he's going and
38:45
Speaker 3: for a millisecond, Just for a millisecond, I'm becoming somewhat nervous.
38:51
Speaker 3: I knew that this guy was into Satanism, and all
38:54
Speaker 3: of a sudden when he starts hyperventiling, and I'm saying
38:57
Speaker 3: to myself, if this guy starts levitating, I'm out of here.
39:03
Speaker 10: This is a guy that although at times there were
39:07
Speaker 10: photographs taken of him that he looked like, you know,
39:09
Speaker 10: wild man, He's not somebody somebody would point out and say,
39:14
Speaker 10: there goes that crazy sob because he just doesn't come
39:19
Speaker 10: across that way.
39:20
Speaker 3: He was much more intelligent that I envisioned people think
39:25
Speaker 3: of him as a crazy man. I didn't think he
39:27
Speaker 3: was crazy. He was much much more articulate than most
39:30
Speaker 3: murder suspects that I've interviewed.
39:34
Speaker 1: Ramirez revealed he was well schooled in murder.
39:38
Speaker 3: The impression I.
39:39
Speaker 10: Got from him was that he was well read, even
39:43
Speaker 10: though he had dropped out of school I think after
39:45
Speaker 10: the ninth grade or so thereabouts. He was very interested
39:49
Speaker 10: in murder and killing and passed serial killers because he
39:57
Speaker 10: had done a lot of reading on it.
39:58
Speaker 3: He could tell you everything about serial killers. From the
40:00
Speaker 3: time the Romans fed the Christians of lions, the modern
40:02
Speaker 3: day serial killers. When we took him to his first
40:05
Speaker 3: cell and he found out that that was the cell
40:08
Speaker 3: that Angelo Bono, who was part of the Hillside Strangler duo,
40:12
Speaker 3: that's the cell he was in. He was excited.
40:18
Speaker 1: The night Stalker had petrified California and haunted detectives Sealerno
40:23
Speaker 1: and Carreo for five months. Now he was finally behind bars.
40:32
Speaker 3: I remember seeing my mother and a couple of my
40:34
Speaker 3: sisters and they came up and we all just started.
40:39
Speaker 3: I start crying. It was over. I said, it's okay.
40:56
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty nine, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of
41:00
Speaker 1: thirteen murders and thirty attempted murders, rapes, and sexual assaults.
41:06
Speaker 1: He was sentenced to death. So what drove the knight
41:13
Speaker 1: Stalker to his ultimate destiny as one of history's most
41:17
Speaker 1: savage serial murderers? Were the lessons he learned in his
41:22
Speaker 1: upbringing to blame? Or was Richard Ramirez born to kill?
41:30
Speaker 10: I don't see anything in his upbringing there was any
41:33
Speaker 10: more unusual than a lot of people.
41:35
Speaker 3: I know.
41:36
Speaker 10: A lot of successful people have gone through help being
41:39
Speaker 10: raised and come out just fine. This could be a
41:42
Speaker 10: case and It probably is a case of when he
41:46
Speaker 10: was conceived, he's a bad seed. No matter how he
41:50
Speaker 10: was raised, he was destined to do what he did.
41:56
Speaker 7: A lot of people grow up poor and a lot
41:58
Speaker 7: of people are abused in the childhood. They don't all
42:01
Speaker 7: grow up to do the things that Richard Ramirez did.
42:04
Speaker 2: It does not appear that he was abused as a
42:07
Speaker 2: child or deprived or there there's certainly no evidence of
42:10
Speaker 2: that was presented.
42:12
Speaker 3: So how did he grow up to do these things?
42:15
Speaker 11: The best way to look at it is from a
42:17
Speaker 11: biopsychosocial approach, but with a heavy emphasis on neurobiology, whether
42:24
Speaker 11: it's hormonal, chemical, electrical, brain damage, some combination of facts
42:31
Speaker 11: plus psychosocial stressors. Abuse never helps many many things have
42:36
Speaker 11: to go wrong in order for one of these individuals
42:39
Speaker 11: to be created.
42:41
Speaker 12: Richard Ramirez was born to kill. He began his life
42:46
Speaker 12: in the way everybody does, seemingly normal. Something happened in
42:51
Speaker 12: that gene that he has, something that was added on
42:55
Speaker 12: to by the experiences that he had in his environment
42:59
Speaker 12: and childhood. It's like a recipe. You have a basic thing,
43:06
Speaker 12: you add to that recipe, You add to that recipe,
43:09
Speaker 12: and finally you have the born killer.
43:12
Speaker 3: Nature or nurtured. I don't believe anybody is born with
43:17
Speaker 3: the entema. You know, this comes about from something they've learned,
43:23
Speaker 3: they've seen, and they've decided to do. Richard had the
43:27
Speaker 3: liberties to do whatever he wanted to do and was
43:30
Speaker 3: a drifter early on in age. And when you couple
43:34
Speaker 3: that with narcotics activity, the drugs, you know, then that
43:38
Speaker 3: definitely causes problems in the mind. And I don't think
43:42
Speaker 3: anybody is born like that. They learned, they see, and
43:45
Speaker 3: they do