The True Story of The Night Stalker: Richard Ramirez

In 1985, California found itself plagued with one of the most blood-curdling types of social disease: a murderous stalker. It is one thing to know that there’s a killer on the loose, but to know that in addition to simply killing his victims, he feels the need to take that extra step and stalk out his victims in a psychologically torturous way. It was a double-whammy notion that definitely took Californians to an entirely different level of fear.

Richard Ramirez never actually claimed the title of The Night Stalker, but after a long string of home invasions that led to gut-wrenching torture and murder, the media eventually coined him with the name. In this article, we’ll explore exactly what it was about Richard Ramirez that made him so infamous.

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The True Story

Born in 1960, Richard Ramirez was the youngest of seven children. Though his immediate home life wasn’t bad, he did have a cousin who had recently returned home from the horrors of the Vietnam War who filled his head with disturbing stories of imprisonment, torture, and vicious slayings that he saw in his time served overseas. At the young age of eleven, Richard Ramirez was smoking marijuana with this cousin and discussing these horror stories in detail. To the impressionable young mind, this might have seemed like something he could have made into a reality and actually even looked up to as a cool thing to do. It wouldn’t be long until he did just that.
A mere ten years later, at the age of twenty two, Richard Ramirez carried out his first murder. He had just been released from prison for petty theft crimes and small marijuana charges and seemingly had no initiative in life. In addition, he was also known by his peers at the time for having blackened teeth and an oily, non-hygienic personal style. In 1984, Richard Ramirez preyed upon a seventy-nine year old woman by stalking her out for a few days before barbarically sexually assaulting her, burglarizing her home, and then finally stabbing her to death.
It would be another nine months until he preyed on someone else. This time, however, his intended victim ended up escaping his attack. So, to satisfy his killing instincts, he decided to shoot her roommate and proceeded to burglarize the rest of the home.
It would appear that this was an event that boosted his confidence as it was only ten days after the last kill that he stalked out and murdered not one, but two people. He had preyed upon a husband and wife, and after quickly shooting the husband, he moved onto the wife. Richard Ramirez sexually assaulted her before killing her, and after he had done what he needed to do, he cut out her eyeballs. The eyeballs were never found, so it is assumed that he kept them as a trophy.
These attacks created quite a stir within the media, so he set his sights on a new area a little further north: The San Francisco area. Though he was still mostly a drifter, he would stay in motels so he could get away quickly if need be. Though now his murder scenes were left with messages of Satanism and other obscenities, it was clear to expert authorities that this was the work of the same predator. The media immediately began referring to Richard Ramirez as The Night Stalker, and soon enough, composite sketches were flowing through the airwaves. This, however, was not quite enough for him to stop. It actually seemed as if it fueled his fire even more. He was still burglarizing victims and leaving even bigger obscene messages written in blood next to his mutilated victims.
Finally, in August of 1985, as Richard Ramirez was attempting a carjacking, he ended up getting jumped by a group of citizens who had recognized him from the composite sketch all over the news channels. He was arrested, and after trying every trick in the book to procrastinate his trial, in 1989, he was charged forty-three charges in total. The charges included five counts of attempted murder, thirteen counts of homicide, fourteen burglary charges, and eleven charges of sexual assault. During this time, however, he had created a cult type of following and many different women wrote him love letters while he was in prison.

Richard Ramirez attained nineteen death sentences from all of these charges, but he didn’t really seem to care much. His only response to any of it was, “Death always comes with the territory—I’ll see you in Disneyland,”.
Before his death in 2013 from Lymphoma, he had been additionally charged with a 1984 rape and brutal killing of a nine year old girl that new DNA technology came to prove. He had gotten married in his time on death row, and he passed peacefully in his sleep at the age of fifty-three.