June 08, 2013
Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" serial killer who terrorized California with a series of break-in murders in the 1980s, has died, state corrections officials confirmed to the Times.
Ramirez was 53. He died Friday morning of natural causes at Marin General Hospital, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman said. Ramirez was serving time on Death Row at San Quentin.
http://us.cnn.com/2013/06/07/justice/california-night-stalker-ramirez-dead/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews
In most of the cases, Ramirez entered homes in the early morning hours through open windows or doors.
Some of the victims were found strangled, others had their throats slashed, but most had been fatally shot.
Spray-painted pentagrams -- a distinctive Satanist symbol -- were also found on the walls of the some of victims' homes.
Ramirez's killing rampage finally ended on Aug. 31, 1985, when he was captured and beaten by angry citizens in East Los Angeles after he tried to steal a woman's car.
On Sept. 20, 1989, Ramirez was convicted by a Los Angeles jury of 13 slayings. The following month, the jury voted for the death penalty.
Richard Ramirez, the demonic serial killer known as the Night Stalker who left satanic signs at murder scenes and mutilated victims' bodies during a reign of terror in the 1980s, died early Friday in a hospital, a prison official said.
Ramirez, 53, had been taken from San Quentin's death row to a hospital where authorities said he died of liver failure. Prison officials said they could not release further details on the cause of death, citing federal patient privacy laws.
Ramirez had been housed on death row for decades and was awaiting execution, even though it has been years since anyone has been put to death in California.
At his first court appearance, Ramirez raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail, Satan."
His marathon trial, which ended in 1989, was a horror show in which jurors heard about one dead victim's eyes being gouged out and another's head being nearly severed. Courtroom observers wept when survivors of some of the attacks testified.
Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders that terrorized Southern California in 1984 and 1985 as well as charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.
The killing spree reached its peak in the hot summer of 1985, as the nocturnal killer entered homes through unlocked windows and doors and killed men and women with gunshot blasts to the head or knives to the throat, sexually assaulted female victims, and burglarized the residences.
He was dubbed the Night Stalker by the press while residents were warned to lock their doors and windows at night.
Some of the crimes were grisly beyond imagining: A man was murdered in his bed and his wife was raped beside the dead body. The killer beat a small child and attempted to sodomize him.
There were also signs of devil worship — a pentagram drawn on the wall at one murder scene and survivors' accounts of being ordered to "swear to Satan " by the killer.
Ramirez was finally chased down and beaten in 1985 by residents of a blue-collar East Los Angeles neighborhood as he attempted a carjacking. They recognized him after his picture appeared that day in the news media.
The trial of Ramirez took a year, but the entire case — bogged down in pretrial motions and appeals — lasted four years, making it one of the longest criminal cases in U.S. history.
Because of the notoriety, more than 1,600 prospective jurors were called.
The trial was almost aborted in its final stages when a woman juror was murdered during deliberations. Jurors were 13 days into talks when the juror failed to appear one morning. She was found beaten and shot to death at the home she shared with her boyfriend. The next day, the man committed suicide and left a note saying he killed her in an argument.
Jurors wept when they learned of the tragedy, and Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan was faced with one of his most trying legal challenges. Lawyers said there were no legal precedents for the situation.
Defense attorneys argued the jurors were too distraught to resume their talks and noted the murder was similar to the gruesome attacks attributed to the Night Stalker.
Tynan decided to move forward. "We must get on with the task life has given us," he told jurors, ordering them to begin deliberations with an alternate juror.
Jurors later said the death of the juror did not influence their decision.
Tynan said Friday, "The Richard Ramirez case was the most difficult trial I ever handled. It was an experience I will never forget, and I'm glad the ordeal is over."
After the conviction, Ramirez flashed a two-fingered "devil sign" to photographers and muttered a single word: "Evil."
On his way to a jail bus, he sneered in reaction to the verdict, muttering: "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."
The black-clad killer, unrepentant to the end, made his comment in an underground garage after the jury recommended the death penalty for his gruesome crimes.
Inexplicably, Ramirez, a native of El Paso, Texas, had a following of young women admirers who came to the courtroom regularly and sent him love notes.
Some visited him in prison, and in 1996 Ramirez was married to 41-year-old freelance magazine editor Doreen Lioy in a visiting room at San Quentin prison.
Relatives called Lioy a recluse who lived in a fantasy world.
Her whereabouts could not be determined on Friday. She was not listed as Ramirez's next of kin, prison spokesman Samuel Robinson said in an email.
"His blood relatives are listed as the next of kin," Robinson said.
In 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld Ramirez's convictions and death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court refused in 2007 to review the convictions and sentence. Ramirez still had appeals pending when he died.
His lawyers claimed the case should have been moved out of Los Angeles and said Ramirez was incompetent to stand trial.
Two years after his arrest, San Francisco police said DNA linked Ramirez to the April 10, 1984, killing of 9-year-old Mei Leung. She was killed in the basement of a residential hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood where she lived with her family.
Ramirez had been staying at nearby hotels.
Ramirez previously was tied to killings in Northern California. He was charged in the shooting deaths of Peter Pan, 66, and his wife, Barbara, in 1985 just before his arrest in Los Angeles, but he was never tried in that case.
___
"I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all."
"That's it."
Richard Ramirez was 29 when he spoke those words in a Southern California courtroom in 1989. He'd just been sentenced to death following his conviction for 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries.
A serial murderer, a serial rapist, a Satan worshiper, a man who inflicted physical and emotional pain on his victims in myriad ways. Richard Ramirez was all those things, but to Californians terrorized during his violent spree in the spring and summer of 1985, he was simply the "Night Stalker."
The vengeance that Ramirez promised apparently never came to fruition. Neither did the state's plan to execute him.
Instead, on Friday morning, Richard Ramirez died of natural causes at Marin General Hospital north of San Francisco, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Ramirez became the 59th inmate in the state to die in this manner while awaiting execution, not including 22 who committed suicide and six dead of other causes.
He was 53.
Guns, knives, fists and fear
So how did the "Night Stalker" come to be?
Ramirez was born to a large family in El Paso, Texas. He was in his late teens when he landed in Southern California in the 1970s.
Media reports indicated that he had a history of drug use, some arrests on relatively minor charges, and no evident purpose in life over his first few decades.
But some time in the mid-1980s, things turned drastically.
It was then that horrific tales began to surface of a man breaking into homes, mostly in Southern California, in the wee hours of the morning.
On several occasions, a man who happened to be inside was killed quickly. A female might be raped, sometimes more than once. Then the man who'd become known as the "Night Stalker" would ransack the home looking for valuables.
There were gory exceptions to this scenario. Like 30-year-old student Tsai-Lian Yu, found lying bloody on the ground near her running car in Monterey Park, California, according to media reports. There was also the 41-year-old woman bound and raped, as her 12-year-old son was handcuffed and locked in a closet.
While some victims were in their 60s and older, others were in their 20s and 30s. There were reports of pentagrams being scrawled at crime scenes, as well as snippets from heavy metal songs.
The killing weapons varied: guns, knives, fists. All were used with evident malice, and all contributed to the fear and frenzy that gripped the region.
Some victims survived -- in some cases without the assailant's apparent knowledge, in others seemingly spared for whatever reason -- and then talked to police. Yet authorities were still grasping for clues in August 1985, when a manager at a hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district recognized descriptions of the suspect as a man who'd stayed at his hotel periodically for a year and a half.
By then, Ramirez had already left the Bay Area for Southern California. He attacked again on August 24 in Los Angeles. After a bus trip to Tucson, Arizona -- where he'd been visiting his brother -- he was finally recognized at a store near a downtown L.A. bus station after his image had been splashed across newspapers.
Ramirez fled. Residents of an east Los Angeles neighborhood, though, spotted him trying to steal two cars, caught and subdued him, then held him down until police arrived.
'It's just pure evil'
After years of delays, Ramirez's case went to trial in 1989. The whole prosecution cost Los Angeles County more than $1.8 million, a record amount that stood until O.J. Simpson's murder trial years later.
As horrific and dramatic as the allegations against him, Ramirez's antics during the proceedings added to the intrigue -- like when he'd draw a pentagram on his hand and yell out, "Hail Satan."
The jury convicted him of 11 murders in Southern California and two others in the San Francisco area.
A death sentence followed. According to the Los Angeles Times, Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan said Ramirez, during his bloody spree, had displayed "cruelty, callousness and viciousness beyond any human understanding."
The rest of his life was spent at the home for many of California's most dangerous felons -- San Quentin State Prison, which sits like a fortress along the bay just north of San Francisco.
Even on Death Row, alongside the likes of Scott Peterson and the Menendez brothers, it hasn't been an entirely lonely existence for Ramirez. One woman who sat through his trial, thinking he was innocent, then wrote him dozens of letters and visited him in prison. It was there, in 1996, that the two married.
"He's kind, he's funny, he's charming," the convicted serial killer's wife, Doreen Ramirez, told CNN one year later. "I think he's a really great person. He's my best friend; he's my buddy."
That's not the impression of millions in Los Angeles County who'd been terrified by him, and especially those who survived his attacks or are related to those killed.
They are people like Peter Zazzara, whose parents were among those slain. He couldn't stomach sitting through Ramirez's trial, and even talking to CNN years later in 2006, he couldn't make sense of what happened.
"It's just evil. It's just pure evil," said Zazzara. "I don't know why somebody would want to do something like that. To take joy in the way it happened."
http://us.cnn.com/2013/06/07/justice/california-night-stalker-ramirez-dead/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews
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