California’s ‘Night Stalker’ Richard Ramirez is dead

By Tony Castro, Voxxi

They called him the “Night Stalker,” and in the mid-1980s he terrorized Southern California as the demonic serial killer leaving satanic signs at murder scenes and mutilating his victims’ bodies.

When he was finally captured on August 31,1985, Latinos in Los Angeles couldn’t believe he had been one of their own.

Richard Ramirez known as the ‘Night Stalker’

His name was Richard Ramirez. He was a 25-year-old Mexican American, and police had to break up a mob of angry Latinos to keep them from killing him after he was identified and found in a barrio in East Los Angeles.

“Thank God you came,” Ramirez said to one of the police officers who rescued him.

Four years later, a Los Angeles jury convicted Ramirez of 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries.

“I will be avenged,” Ramirez vowed when he was sentenced. “Lucifer dwells in us all.”

He was sentenced to death but spent the rest of his life on San Quentin’s death row awaiting execution.

On Friday morning, Richard  Ramirez finally died in a prison hospital of liver failure. He was 53.

His death closed a chapter of incredible mass killings in California, marked at the start by the Charles Manson cult gang murders in the late 1960s and the Night Stalker nocturnal rampage in which Ramirez entered homes through unlocked windows and doors.

He killed men and women with gunshot blasts to the head or knives to the throat. He sexually assaulted female victims, and burglarized the residences. One dead victim’s eyes were gouged out and another’s head was almost severed.

The trial, which lasted a year, began with Ramirez at his first court appearance raising a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelling, “Hail, Satan.”

The courtroom was shocked when a woman juror was found murdered — beaten and shot to death at the home she shared with her boyfriend — during deliberations.

A chill came over the proceedings with newspapers reporting that the jury was terrified, fearing that Ramirez had possibly used some kind of evil magic from inside his jail cell.

But the next day the boyfriend committed suicide and left a note confessing that he had killed the juror.

As happens sometimes, Ramirez became cult figure in prison, getting fan mail and visits.

One of those fans was freelance magazine editor Doreen Lioy who began a romance with him while he was on death row. Ramirez and Lioy were married in 1996 in San Quentin.

Ramirez was born Feb. 29, 1960, in El Paso, Texas, the fifth and final child of Julian Tapia Ramirez, a Santa Fe Railway worker, demand his wife, Mercedes.

According to neighbors, Ramirez’s parents were strict, old-fashioned and church going.

“He’s really just a poor boy,” his father told reporters, “who was raised to believe in God.”

A jail house conversation with  Richard Ramirez “The Night Stalker”:

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Los Angeles based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”