The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (31 page)

Between 1984 and 1985, the residents of Los Angeles County lived in fear of the anonymous Night Stalker, as he was called, because he always carried out his attacks at night. The killer would creep silently into his victims’ bedrooms. Any males in the house were killed swiftly with a bullet to the head. Females were kept alive to be raped and degraded.

On 28 June 1984, the Night Stalker claimed his first known victim in Los Angeles. He entered the home of Jennie Vincow, aged 79, through an insecure window. After making a cursory search and finding nothing of value to steal, he stabbed the sleeping woman and then cut her throat. The act of killing aroused him and he had sex with the body before leaving.

On 17 March 1985, at 11.30pm, 20-year-old Angela Barrios was just returning home from a long day at work. She shared a condominium with a room-mate in Rosemead, a middle-class town northeast of LA. She pulled her car into the driveway and opened the garage door with a remote control. All she wanted to do was get inside and unwind; she was tired and hadn’t had dinner yet. But as she got out of her car, she heard something behind her. A dark figure suddenly rushed up to her. He was tall and dressed entirely in black. A navy blue baseball cap was pulled down low over his brow. He was holding a gun.

He pointed the gun in her face, holding it just inches from her nose. Angela pleaded with him not to kill her. She tried not to look at his face, hoping that he might spare her, but she couldn’t help but glance at him. His eyes were cold and hard. She continued to beg for mercy, but he ignored her – perhaps her pleading angered him – and he pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was like an explosion in the enclosed garage. Angela collapsed on the concrete floor. She was alive but too afraid to move. The gunman stepped over her and went to the door that led to her apartment, kicking her body out of the way so he could open it.

Angela lay perfectly still, playing dead. After a while – she didn’t know how long – she realised that her hand was bleeding and she was still holding her keys. She’d raised her hands instinctively when the man had menaced her with the gun and the bullet had miraculously hit the keys and ricocheted away. Angela collected herself and got to her feet. She had started to run out of the garage when she heard another gunshot behind her. She kept running, just hoping to
escape, but she ran into the man in black as he was coming out the front door of her condo.

She tried to get away from him, but her legs were shaky. She stumbled back towards her car in the garage, convinced that he was going to finish her off. But instead of pursuing her, the man shoved the gun into his belt and fled. Her room-mate, Dayle Okazaki, aged 34, had not been so lucky. Angela found her face down on the kitchen floor in a pool of her own blood. There was blood everywhere: on the walls, furniture and appliances. Angela ran to her side to check for signs of life, but Okazaki had been shot through the forehead. Angela grabbed the phone and called the police. Later, when the police searched the crime scene, they found the killer’s baseball cap in the garage.

Within an hour of killing Okazaki, the killer struck again. He attacked 30-year-old Tsai-Lian Yu, dragging her out of her car onto the road. He shot her several times and fled. A policeman found Yu still breathing, but she died before the ambulance arrived. The two attacks occurring on the same day bolstered media attention and, in turn, caused panic and fear among the public. The news media dubbed the attacker, who was described as having long curly hair, bulging eyes and wide-spaced rotting teeth, the Walk-in Killer and the Valley Intruder.

On 20 March, three days after his previous murder, an
eight-year
-old girl was abducted from her home, sexually assaulted and murdered. On 27 March, Vincent Zazzara, aged 64, and his wife Maxine, aged 44, were attacked. Both were shot and Maxine Zazzara’s body was mutilated with several stab wounds and a T-shaped carving on her left breast. Her eyes had been gouged out. The post-mortem determined that the mutilations were made after death. Police found footprints, which they believed were the killer’s, in the flowerbeds. This evidence and the bullets found at the scene, which were matched to those found at previous attacks, made the police realise that a serial killer was on the loose.

Six weeks after killing the Zazzaras, the killer struck again.
His next victim was Harold Wu, aged 66, who was shot in the head, and his wife, Jean Wu, aged 63, who was punched, bound and then violently raped. For unknown reasons, the killer decided to let her live. The killer’s attacks were now gaining momentum. He was now leaving behind more clues to his identity and he was renamed the Night Stalker by the media. Survivors of his attacks provided the police with a description: Hispanic male, long dark hair and foul smelling.

On 29 May 1985, the killer struck again. Malvia Keller, 83, and her invalid sister, Blanche Wolfe, 80, were both beaten with a hammer. An attempt was made to rape Keller, but this failed. Using lipstick, the killer drew pentagrams on Keller’s thigh and on the wall in the bedroom. Blanche survived the attack. The following day Ruth Wilson, 41, was bound, raped and buggered by her attacker, while her 12-year-old son was locked in a cupboard. Her attacker slashed her once, and then bound her and her son together and left.

One month later, on 27 June, the Night Stalker raped a
six-year
-old girl in Arcadia. A day later, the body of 32-year-old Patty Elaine Higgins was found in her Arcadia home; her throat had been cut. A few days later, on 2 July, the body of 75-year-old Mary Louise Cannon was found in her Arcadia home. Like Patty Higgins, she had been beaten and her throat had been cut. The house had been ransacked.

On 5 July, the killer returned to Arcadia and attacked 16-year-old Deirdre Palmer savagely with a tyre lever. She survived. Two days later, on 7 July, the body of Joyce Lucille Nelson was found in her home in Monterey Park. The 61-year-old had been beaten to death with a blunt object. Later that same night in Monterey Park, Linda Fortuna, a 63-year-old registered nurse, was awakened at around 3.30am by a ‘tall, bony man dressed in black’. The man, who fitted the description of the Night Stalker, was pointing a gun at her. He ordered her out of bed and into the bathroom, warning her to be quiet. After ransacking the house, he returned to her, forcing her back onto her bed. He
attempted to rape and bugger her but could not maintain an erection. He was frustrated and humiliated and she was sure he would kill her. He screamed at her furiously, but then gathered up the valuables he wanted and left. She was astounded that he had spared her life.

Less than two weeks later, on 20 July, the Night Stalker chose a new location in the Los Angeles area of Glendale. Maxson Kneiling and his wife Lela, both 66, were found in their bed, both shot in the head and horribly slashed with a knife. Maxson had been butchered so brutally his head was barely attached to his body. Police experts had difficulty re-creating the attack based on the evidence. It’s possible that the Stalker killed them both quickly with his gun and then mutilated them post-mortem, but, given his developing
modus operandi
, it’s also possible that he kept Lela Kneiling alive to play out his perverse fantasies. However, he may also have failed to perform sexually with Lela Kneiling, just as he had with Linda Fortuna. And so he turned 20 July into a double event, striking again, this time in Sun Valley. Chitat Assawahem, 32, was shot in his sleep. His wife Sakima, 29, was raped, forced to perform oral sex on the intruder and then beaten mercilessly. He then buggered the couple’s eight-
year-old
son. The attacker tied Sakima Assawahem up in her bedroom and left, but not before taking $30,000 in cash and jewellery.

On 6 August, the killer targeted another couple, Christopher and Virginia Petersen, aged 38 and 27. Following his pattern, he broke into the Petersens’ Northridge bedroom and shot them both in the head. But they didn’t die. In fact, Christopher Petersen, a powerfully built truck driver, got out of bed and chased the intruder away despite having a bullet lodged in his brain. Miraculously, the Petersens survived their wounds.

Two nights after the attack on the Petersens, the Stalker struck again, this time in Diamond Bar, California. Ahmed Zia, 35, was shot in the head and killed while he slept. The Stalker then raped and buggered Suu Kyi Zia, 28, forcing her to perform oral sex on him.

Los Angeles County was terrified. The Night Stalker’s crimes were becoming more frequent. The cooling-off periods were shortening and his rage was escalating. There was little doubt that he would strike again. The only questions were where and when?

It wasn’t long before they were answered. On 18 August 1985, Peter and Barbara Pan were found in their blood-soaked bed in Lake Merced, a suburb of San Francisco. Both had been shot in the head. Peter Pan, a 66-year-old accountant, was pronounced dead at the scene. Barbara Pan, 64, survived but would be an invalid for the rest of her life. Scrawled on the wall in lipstick were an inverted pentagram and the words ‘Jack the Knife’, which is from a song called ‘The Ripper’ by heavy metal band Judas Priest. Local police determined that the killer had come in through an open window. Fearing that LA’s Night Stalker had moved to their city, murder squad detectives sent a bullet removed from Peter Pan to a forensic team in Los Angeles. The bullet matched others recovered from two of the Night Stalker’s Los Angeles crime scenes.

Police in San Francisco searched their unsolved murder files and came up with two incidents that fitted the Stalker’s MO. On 20 February 1985, sisters Mary and Christina Caldwell, aged 70 and 50, had been stabbed to death in their Telegraph Hill apartment. If this was indeed the work of the Night Stalker, he had committed this crime about a month before the night he killed Dayle Okazaki and Tsai-Lian Yu and wounded Angela Barrios.

The police also discovered that on 2 June, the day after the murders of the elderly sisters Blanche Wolfe and Malvia Keller, Theodore Wildings, 25, was shot in the head while he slept in his apartment in the Cow Hollow section of San Francisco. His girlfriend, Nancy Brien, 25, was then brutally raped by the killer.

Could the Night Stalker have been active in San Francisco as well as Los Angeles throughout 1985 without the San Francisco police realising it?

Police traced the manager of a lodging house who claimed that a young man who fitted the Stalker’s description had stayed at his establishment from time to time over the past year and a half. The manager remembered that the man had rotten teeth and smelt bad. The police checked the room he had last stayed in. On the bathroom door they found a drawing of a pentagram. The man had checked out during the day on 17 August. The Pans had been attacked that night. Police then located a man from the El Sobrante district who said he had purchased some jewellery – a diamond ring and a pair of cufflinks – from a young man who fitted the Stalker’s description. Further investigation revealed that these items had belonged to Peter Pan.

The police got their first big break in the case following another attack that took place on 24 August 1985, 50 miles south of Los Angeles in Mission Viejo. The Night Stalker broke into the Mediterranean Village apartment of Bill Carns, 29, and his fiancée, Inez Erickson, 27. Bill Carns was shot in the head and Inez Erickson raped. The attacker demanded that she swear her love for Satan and afterwards forced her to perform oral sex on him. He then tied her up and left. She struggled to the window and saw the car the attacker was driving. She was able to give a description both of her attacker and his stolen orange Toyota estate car. A teenager later identified the car from news reports and wrote down half of its registration number. The stolen car was located on 28 August. It had been stolen from LA’s Chinatown district while the owner was dining at a restaurant. The police kept the car under surveillance for nearly 24 hours in the hope that the Night Stalker would return for it, but he didn’t.

Police were able to obtain a fingerprint from one of the vehicle’s mirrors, which matched a print taken from a windowsill at the Pans’ house near San Francisco. The prints belonged to Ricardo ‘Richard’ Muñoz Ramirez (b. 1960). At long last the police knew who their suspect was. Now they had to find him before he struck again.

Police published his photograph in the major Californian
newspapers, and the next day, in the Latin Quarter of LA, Ramirez was identified as he was trying to steal a car. He was chased, surrounded and severely beaten by an angry mob. Police had to break up the mob to prevent them from killing Ramirez.

Following his arrest and subsequent interviews, Ramirez was charged with 14 murders and 31 other felonies related to his murder, rape and robbery spree. A fifteenth murder in San Francisco was held in abeyance with the potential for a trial in Orange County for rape and attempted murder.

The trial did not begin until 30 January 1989, following almost three years of legal arguments. Ramirez had pleaded not guilty. However, on 20 September, almost two months after they had begun deliberating, the jury announced that they had reached a unanimous decision. Ramirez elected not to attend the verdict. On each of the counts he faced, the jury had found him guilty and had affirmed 19 ‘special circumstances’ that made him eligible for the death penalty.

His defence team asked him to assist with the mitigation against the death penalty being imposed, because without mitigating factors, he surely would be condemned to death. ‘Dying doesn’t scare me,’ he responded. ‘I’ll be in hell. With Satan.’ He told his lawyers that he would not beg. So, to everyone’s surprise, they offered no witnesses and did not call him to plead for his life. On 3 October 1989, after four days of deliberations, the jury voted for the death penalty for Richard Ramirez. Ramirez, who was present for this, was led from the courtroom smiling. ‘Big deal,’ he said. ‘Death always went with the territory.’ Later, as he was led in shackles back to the county jail, he added for reporters, ‘I’ll see you in Disneyland.’