Richard Ramirez

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez, known as Richard Ramirez, was an American criminal who killed at least fifteen people during burglaries across Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area between April 1984 and August 1985. Because he typically struck after dark, he became known as the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer, and the Valley Intruder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989, and died in 2013 while still on death row.

Ramirez’s crimes were shaped by a difficult upbringing. His father, an alcoholic, frequently abused him, leading to brain damage. By age ten, Ramirez was using drugs. As a teenager, he became fascinated with the macabre through his older cousin, a Vietnam veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD who bragged about war crimes and, when Ramirez was fifteen, killed his own wife in front of him. From this cousin, Ramirez learned military skills he later used in his attacks. He also developed a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. After moving to California at twenty-two, he used cocaine heavily and committed burglaries to fund his addiction, many of which escalated into murders, rapes, and assaults.

Over fourteen months, his spree terrified residents of Los Angeles and the Bay Area. His first known murder occurred in April 1984, but it was not linked to him until 2009. He used a range of weapons: handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a claw hammer. He also punched, pistol-whipped, strangled, stomped a victim to death in her sleep, and tortured another with a live electrical cord. He often degraded and humiliated survivors or those he chose not to kill.

In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences said his acts showed “cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.” Ramirez never expressed remorse. He died in June 2013 at San Quentin State Prison from complications of B-cell lymphoma.

Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, to Mexican immigrants, the youngest of five children. His father, a railway laborer, was a violent alcoholic who physically abused the family. Raised Catholic, Ramirez started smoking marijuana and drinking at age ten. Psychiatrist Michael Stone described him as a “made” psychopath, not a “born” one, and said schizoid personality disorder contributed to his indifference and untreatability. Stone noted that Ramirez was knocked unconscious and nearly died several times before age six, resulting in temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality.

At twelve, Ramirez became close to his older cousin Miguel “Mike” Valles, a U.S. Army soldier who had become a serial killer and rapist during the Vietnam War. Valles bragged about war crimes and showed Ramirez Polaroid photos of Vietnamese women he had raped, murdered, and dismembered. Ramirez later said he was fascinated, not repulsed, by these images. Valles taught him stealth and kill tactics. Around this time, Ramirez began sleeping in a local cemetery to escape his father’s temper; his father sometimes tied him to a crucifix there as punishment.

After turning fourteen in 1974, Ramirez used LSD frequently and bonded with Valles over drugs and alcohol. He developed an interest in Satanism and the occult, and began merging sexual fantasies with graphic violence. As a teen, he hunted coyotes, rabbits, and birds at night in the El Paso desert, often disemboweling them and feeding the entrails to the family dog. He worked at a Holiday Inn, using a master key to steal from sleeping guests. On one occasion, he molested two children in an elevator but was never reported. His job ended after he attempted to rape a woman in her room and was caught by her husband, who beat him; charges were dropped when the out-of-state couple declined to return to Texas to testify.

At fifteen, Ramirez was present when Valles shot and killed his second wife, Jesse, in the face during a domestic argument.