Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez (; February 29, 1960 â 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, Ramirez was 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 manually 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.
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.
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, Ramirez moved to and settled permanently in California. It was around this time that he 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.
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.
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.
On the night of June 27, 1985, 32-year-old Patty Elaine Higgins was murdered in her Arcadia home. The crime was not discovered until July 2, when she failed to show up for work. Her attacker had sodomized her, strangled her, and slashed her throat. Ramirez was charged with murder and burglary in relation to Higgins's death. However, these charges were eventually dropped due to a lack of concrete physical evidence linking Higgins to the other murders.
Based on a statement Ramirez made to an investigator, he is also a suspect in the San Francisco double murder of 58-year-old Christina Caldwell and 70-year-old Mary Caldwell. The sisters were found stabbed to death in their Telegraph Hill apartment on February 20, 1985. While incarcerated, Ramirez openly bragged to a prison officer and other inmates about having killed "more than 20 people".
Lead detectives Frank Salerno and Gil Carrillo contacted the manufacturer of the shoes and were able to retrieve the soles. Upon the discovery of the make and distribution across the United States, only six of them existed in the men's size 11ý. With five of them shipped to locations in Arizona, and one shipped to a shoe store in Los Angeles, it was evident that the one pair of its size and kind in the state of California belonged to the perpetrator. When it was discovered that the ballistics and shoe print evidence from the Los Angeles crime scenes matched the Pan crime scene, San Francisco's mayor Dianne Feinstein divulged the information, including the gun caliber, in a televised press conference. This leak infuriated detectives, as they knew the killer would be following news coverage, which gave him the opportunity to destroy crucial forensic evidence. Ramirez, who had indeed been watching the press, dropped his sneakers over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge that night. He remained in the area for a few more days before heading back to the Los Angeles area.
Erickson gave a detailed description of her assailant to investigators, and police obtained a cast of Ramirez's footprint from the Romero house. The stolen Toyota was found abandoned on August 28 in Koreatown, Los Angeles, and police obtained a single fingerprint from the rear-view mirror despite Ramirez's careful efforts to wipe the car clean of his prints. The print was positively identified as belonging to Ramirez, who was described by police as a 25-year-old drifter from Texas, with a long rap sheet that included many arrests for traffic and illegal drug violations. The identification of Ramirez's print was described as a "near miracle" as the system used to identify him was recently installed, as well as the fact that the system contained the fingerprints of criminals born after January 1, 1960, only two months before Ramirez was born.
On August 29, 1985, law enforcement officials decided to release a mug shot of Ramirez from a 1984 arrest for auto theft to the media. At the police press conference, it was announced: "We know who you are now, and soon everyone else will. There will be no place you can hide."
On August 30, 1985, Ramirez took a bus to Tucson, Arizona, to visit his brother, unaware that he had become the lead story in virtually every major newspaper and television news program across California. After failing to meet his brother due to his not being home, he returned to Los Angeles early on the morning of August 31. He walked past police officers, who were staking out the bus terminal in hopes of catching the killer should he attempt to flee on an outbound bus, and into a convenience store in East Los Angeles.
After noticing a group of elderly Hispanic women fearfully identifying him as "el matador" (the killer), Ramirez saw his face on the front page of the newspaper La Opinión with a headline calling him "Invasor Nocturno" (English: "Night Invader") and fled the store in a panic. After running across the Santa Ana Freeway, he attempted to carjack an unlocked Ford Mustang but was pulled out by angry residents Faustino Pinon and Jose Burgoin. Ramirez ran across the street and attempted to take car keys from Angelina De La Torre. Her husband, Manuel De La Torre, witnessed the attempt and struck Ramirez over the head with a fence post in the pursuit. A group of over ten residents (including Jose Burgoin's sons) formed and chased Ramirez down Hubbard Street in Boyle Heights. They restrained Ramirez and beat him. At around 8 a.m., police were called over a disturbance in the area with few other details. Police arrived on Hubbard Street and took a severely beaten Ramirez into custody.
Jury selection for Ramirez's trial began on July 22, 1988. At his first court appearance, he raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail Satan!" On August 3, 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that some jail employees overheard Ramirez planning to shoot the prosecutor with a gun, which he intended to have smuggled into the courtroom. Consequently, a metal detector was installed outside and intensive searches were conducted on people entering.
On August 14, the trial was interrupted because one of the jurors, Phyllis Singletary, did not arrive at the courtroom. Later that day, she was found shot to death in her apartment. The jury was terrified, wondering if Ramirez had somehow directed this event from inside his prison cell, and whether or not he could reach other jurors. However, it was ultimately determined that Ramirez was not responsible for Singletary's death, as she was shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later committed suicide with the same weapon in a hotel. The alternate juror who replaced Singletary was too frightened to return to her home.
On September 20, 1989, Ramirez was convicted of all forty-three charges: thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. During the penalty phase of the trial on November 7, 1989, he was sentenced to death in California's gas chamber. He stated to reporters after the death sentences, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland." The trial cost $1.8 million, which at the time made it the most expensive murder trial in the history of California until it was surpassed by the O. J. Simpson case in 1994.
While awaiting trial, Ramirez reportedly met actor Sean Penn. Penn, who was jailed for 33 days in 1987 for reckless driving and assault of an extra on the set of the film Colors, claimed to receive a letter from Ramirez as a fellow inmate, to which he wrote back telling Ramirez he had no sympathy and hoped he died in the gas chamber.
By the time of the trial, Ramirez had fans who were writing him letters and paying him visits. Beginning in 1985, Doreen Lioy wrote Ramirez nearly seventy-five letters during his incarceration. In 1988 he proposed to Lioy, and on October 3, 1996, they were married in California's San Quentin State Prison. For many years before Ramirez's death, Lioy stated that she would commit suicide when Ramirez was executed. By the time of his death in 2013, Ramirez was engaged to a 23-year-old writer.
On August 7, 2006, Ramirez's first round of state appeals ended unsuccessfully when the California Supreme Court upheld his convictions and death sentence. On September 7, 2006, the California Supreme Court denied his request for a rehearing. Ramirez had additional appeals pending until the time of his death. Ramirez died of complications secondary to B-cell lymphoma at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, on June 7, 2013, at age 53. He had also been affected by "chronic substance abuse and chronic hepatitis C viral infection". His body was not claimed, so it was cremated.