Richard Ramirez

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez (; February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), better known as Richard Ramirez, was an American serial killer, sex offender and burglar whose killing spree occurred in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the state of California. From April 1984 to August 1985, Ramirez murdered at least fifteen people during various break-ins, with his crimes usually taking place after dark, leading to him being dubbed the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer, and the Valley Intruder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 and died while awaiting execution in 2013.

Ramirez's crimes were heavily influenced by a troubled childhood. Frequently abused by his father, he developed brain damage and started abusing drugs at the age of 10. He began developing interests in the macabre in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin, a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD, who extensively bragged about the war crimes he had committed, and who killed his wife in front of Ramirez when Ramirez was 15. Ramirez learned military skills from him that he later employed during his killing spree. He cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. By the time he had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, Ramirez frequently used cocaine. He often committed burglaries to support his drug addiction, many of which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders, rapes, attempted rapes and battery.

The murder spree terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles and later the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of fourteen months. His first known murder occurred as early as April 1984; this crime was not connected to Ramirez, nor was it known to be his doing, until 2009. Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, various types of knives, a machete, a tire iron and a claw hammer. He punched, pistol-whipped, and strangled many of his victims, both with his hands and in one instance a ligature; stomped at least one victim to death in her sleep; and tortured another by shocking her with a live electrical cord. Ramirez also frequently enjoyed degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill.

In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Ramirez never expressed any remorse for his crimes. He died in June 2013 of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison.

Early life and education

Childhood

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, to Mexican immigrants Mercedes Muñoz and Julián Tapia Ramirez, the youngest of their five children. His father, a railway laborer, was a violent alcoholic who was prone to fits of anger that often resulted in physical abuse towards the household. Ramirez was brought up a Catholic. He began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at the age of 10.

Psychiatrist Michael Stone describes Ramirez as a "made" psychopath as opposed to a "born" psychopath. He says that Ramirez's schizoid personality disorder contributed to his indifference to the suffering of his victims and his untreatability. Stone stated that Ramirez was knocked unconscious and almost died on multiple occasions before he was six years old, and as a result "later developed temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality".

At age 12, Ramirez was taken under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel "Mike" Valles, a soldier in the U.S. Army who himself had become a serial killer and rapist during his service in the Vietnam War. Valles often boasted of committing gruesome war crimes in Vietnam, and shared Polaroid photos with Ramirez showing Vietnamese women whom he had raped, murdered, and dismembered or decapitated. It is alleged that many of these photos depicted women being tied to trees or wooden posts both before and after they were sexually assaulted and killed by Valles. Ramirez later stated while incarcerated that he was fascinated, rather than repulsed, by the images and stories Valles shared with him. Valles taught Ramirez some of his military skills, including stealth and kill tactics. Around this time, Ramirez began to seek escape from his father's violent temper by sleeping in a local cemetery. His father often tied him to a crucifix in a cemetery overnight as punishment.

Adolescence

Shortly after Ramirez had turned 14 in 1974, he began using LSD frequently. He and Valles resumed bonding over their shared use of drugs and alcohol. It was during this period that Ramirez began to cultivate an interest in Satanism and the occult. When he reached adolescence, Ramirez began to meld his burgeoning sexual fantasies with graphic violence, including forced bondage, murder, mutilation, and rape. As a teenager, Ramirez frequently hunted coyotes, rabbits and birds with his father's .22 rifle in the El Paso desert at night; often disemboweling them afterwards and feeding their entrails to the family dog. While still in school, he took a job at a local Holiday Inn and used his master key to steal from sleeping patrons. On at least one occasion, Ramirez molested two children in an elevator at the hotel, but he was never reported or prosecuted for this act. His employment ended abruptly after Ramirez attempted to rape a woman in her hotel room and was caught in the act by the victim's husband. Although the husband beat Ramirez at the scene, criminal charges were dropped when the couple, who lived out of state, declined to return to Texas to testify against him.

At the age of 15, Ramirez was present on May 4, 1975, when Valles fatally shot his second wife Jesse in the face with a handgun during a domestic argument. Like the graphic photos and stories of his cousin's war crimes in Vietnam, Ramirez later remarked similarly that witnessing the murder was not traumatic for him in any traditional sense, but rather a subject of fascination. After the shooting, Ramirez became sullen and withdrawn from his family and peers, and began increasingly committing burglaries and getting high. Valles was found not guilty of Jesse's murder by reason of insanity, with the shooting attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service. Ramirez dropped out of Jefferson High School in the ninth grade, shortly before the school year ended in 1977. Former teachers and classmates from Jefferson High later reported that Ramirez was "essentially a troublemaker" known for his truancy, and that he was bullied by other students.

Shortly after the shooting, Ramirez moved in with his older sister Ruth and her husband Roberto, an obsessive peeping tom who took Ramirez along on his nocturnal exploits. After Valles was released from the mental hospital in 1977, he sometimes accompanied Ramirez and Roberto on these voyeuristic walks, spying on women in the nearby areas through their windows. In 1982, at age 22, he moved to and settled permanently in California. It was around this time that Ramirez began to use cocaine, which quickly became his substance of choice, and began to commit theft and burglaries to procure money for sustaining his addiction. He lived nomadically between San Francisco and Los Angeles County during this time prior to his incarceration.

Murders

Leung killing

On April 10, 1984, Ramirez murdered Mei Leung, a nine-year-old girl, in the basement of her apartment building in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Leung was with her eight-year-old brother and looking for a lost one-dollar bill when Ramirez approached the girl and told her to follow him into the basement to find it. Once they were in the basement, Ramirez beat, strangled and raped Leung before stabbing her to death with a switchblade, hanging her partially nude body from a pipe by her blouse.

The killing was not linked to Ramirez until 2009, when his DNA was matched to a sample obtained at the crime scene. In 2016, officials disclosed evidence of a second suspect, identified through another DNA sample retrieved from the scene, who is believed to have been present at Leung's murder. Authorities had not publicly identified the suspect, described as being a juvenile at the time, and have not brought charges due to the lack of evidence.

Night Stalker crimes

Two months after the murder of Leung, Ramirez initiated a series of violent home invasions that sparked a moral panic in Los Angeles and later San Francisco. He began with a lone June 1984 attack before reemerging in March 1985 and continuing his spree throughout the summer, leading to one of the largest police manhunts in California history. Before his identification, the murderer was known as the Night Stalker; previously, an unrelated serial killer active in the same area from 1979 to 1981 possessed the Night Stalker nickname, but Ramirez's crimes quickly overshadowed those. Thus, that killer was renamed the Original Night Stalker, who was later identified as Joseph James DeAngelo.