Who Was The Real Richard Ramirez? | The Night Stalker: Born To Kill? | Absolute Crime

in 1985 los angeles would be terrorized by a series of brutal rapes and murders the panic swept the county was enormous people didn't know if they were going to live to see the next morning men women the elderly and children were all in the sadistic killer's sites their final hours were at the hands of someone who was laughing as he tortured and raped and killed them a serial murderer who broke all the rules the suspect has used guns knives tire irons i knew how vicious and violent he really was the attacker christened the night stalker would go down as one of history's most heinous killers i think he is the worst i i think he would be number one on the monster list there but who was the night stalker he was friendly and he was nice charming is how i would describe him and was he born to kill he just had this evil look in his eye as if he were possessed [Music] [Music] [Music] the 17th of march 1985 and gil carrillo a young homicide detective with the la county sheriff's department was called to an incident in the rose mead district sunday evening 10 40 at night call uh comes in very typical okay you got one dead one wounded i'm just going to work another routine mundane murder carrillo didn't yet know it but this murder would be anything but routine [Music] we entered the location on village lane dale okazaki was lying on her back in the kitchen she had sustained a gunshot wound to the head 34 year old dale okazaki had been unloading groceries when a man entered her apartment and executed her where she stood [Music] i can still see her today dale's flatmate 22 year old maria hernandez had also been shot at point-blank range but had survived she didn't recognize her attacker and nothing had been taken from the property we just had our work cut out for us we didn't know if there was an angry boyfriend it was a home invasion robbery gone awry what it was detectives then learned that the killer had struck again it occurred about a half hour later it was in the same general area of town and the same gun was used in nearby monterey park 30 year old law student celia nu had been driving home when another driver forced her to stop then shot her twice in the chest at close range almost immediately we were aware that we had some sort of a series going not knowing just how big it was going to get or grow [Music] the nature of the crimes was not typical of a serial killer the overwhelming majority of serial sexual murderers kill up close and personal manual strangulation ligature strangulation multiple stab wounds blunt force trauma very very rarely do they shoot somebody because it's too cold and too impersonal [Music] on the morning of march the 27th the bodies of 64 year old vincent zazara and his 44 year old wife maxine were discovered in their home in the pleasant suburb of whittier the same gun had been used but behavior at the crime scene was significantly different vincent zazara had been shot as he slept maxine had been shot and stabbed repeatedly and the killer had taken a gruesome souvenir the woman's eyes were gouged out not to be found many serial murderers take souvenirs from people that they kill whether it's a piece of flesh piece of jewelry something it is a concrete reminder it's something they can see something they can hold onto something that says wow you did this [Music] on april the 15th two weeks after the murder and mutilation of the cesaros the killer appeared to have struck again linda martinez was called to process the crime scene at the home of william and lillian doi a couple in their mid-sixties [Music] there were casings on the living room floor the mr doy was still in his bed and he had been shot [Music] mrs doy's room was next to the master bedroom she was an invalid so she had her own room she had been sexually assaulted [Music] it always is distressing to go into a crime scene [Music] william doyle had been quickly dispatched with a gun shot to the head 63 year old lillian had been restrained with thumb cuffs beaten terrorized and raped but the killer had let her live it was unusual for a serial murderer to have two people shooting one and acting like a serial murderer with the other one men he was killing because they were the obstacle to get to his lust the women it was an issue of control it was an issue of not being overpowered what husband or man would lay there and not intervene in trying to keep his partner from being attacked despite the many inconsistencies detective gil carrillo suspected that just one man was responsible for all the crimes i felt very strongly there was a serial killer going on back at the time there were two renowned psychologists one from new york and one from locally here on the west coast from ucla that essentially said that we were full of hot air that one man was not capable of performing what we were alleging six weeks later in the leafy city of monrovia two sisters both in their eighties were discovered in the home they shared one had been raped both had been severely beaten with a hammer here again there was something new there was a whole aspect of the occult there were some pentagrams some things written on the wall there were some markings on the body the crimes appeared related but defied the current theories regarding serial murder when i was first contacted about the murders police were baffled they had no idea who was doing this how it was happening they wondered what type of a person would have done this i mean was it a maniac was it a group of people because don't forget in california they had charles manson who with his cult went out to murdering an awful lot of individuals but my impression was that it was a single individual it was someone who was not insane who was not showing outrageous behaviors and that he was probably young he was probably either caucasian hispanic but he was certainly not a standout in his community the press would dub the mystery killer the night stalker and those who had known him would never have suspected what he was capable of he was an ordinary kid no different than the rest of us he was friendly and he was nice and [Music] and he was so funny he was so funny he would always have me laughing and the night stalker's reign of terror had only just begun may 1985 and the night stalker had only just begun a series of crimes that would both sicken and terrify the residents of california [Music] preying on the unsuspecting citizens in their homes he took glee in rape murder and mutilation as the crimes escalated detectives raced to try to identify who was responsible for the shockingly vicious attacks who was the night stalker [Music] richard ramirez was born in 1960 the last of five children to mexican immigrants living in the texan border town of el paso el paso was a town of about half a million people and across the rio grande was cilar juarez which had 1.5 million people about triple the size of el paso it's a heavily hispanic population it was basically a very quiet town a la very quiet place to live [Music] ramirez had a humble upbringing typical to his neighborhood it's a low-income neighborhood but it was nice it had green grass in front and the house was painted it wasn't shabby but it was quite small we were like lower class people and um everybody used to just hang around together at night um we would all play um games and all the neighborhood kids would get together up until everybody's parents started calling them in for dinner richard's father was hard-working and strict with his children he was very much what i would classify as someone from mexico who had come up come to el paso and had scratched out a living here he worked for the railroad it's a hard scrabble when you're a first generation immigrant to learn a new language and try to scrape a toll in a new country the young richard ramirez appeared no different from his friends and neighbors [Music] they were all very nice normal neighborhood family just like mine he was an ordinary kid just like the rest of us we went to school minded our manners did what we had to do but no different than the rest of us he was friendly and he was nice and and he was so funny he was so funny he would always have me laughing [Music] we used to play this game called kick the can and he was the fastest runner so we always wanted to be on his team richard's friend patricia found him kind and [Music] caring if we wanted to take a shortcut to school we had to cut through this really tough neighborhood and he always used to wait for me sitting on a little pony wall and then he would walk me to school it was always safer you know to be in twos i guess but by the time he turned 10 it appeared all was not well with richard ramirez he used to sit in back of me in fifth grade [Music] and i remember that he would poke me in the back and every time he would poke me i would jump up and so that time that he kept poking me and poking me i turned around very upset and i said hey you know stop stop stop and uh i remember him like slumping over and then uh i'm just hitting the floor on the side he would have seizures you know he would be shaking you know we knew he was sick [Music] ramirez was diagnosed with epilepsy a condition that would affect him for much of his school life [Music] as ramirez approached his teens he grew distant to his father and began to look up to his cousin mike a vietnam veteran who boasted of many atrocities while in service the cousin kept multiple mementos of his time in vietnam and he pulled out this box and showed all of these photographs of the women he was raping or the heads he was cutting off it was a fascination it wasn't recoiling in horror it was like wow look what you've done [Music] at the age when his sexuality was being formed ramirez was exposed to images of rape torture and murder these individuals are in their fantasy lives from early adolescence and in some regards some respects their fantasy life is more real to them than reality their fantasy lives are filled with sadistic aggression where there's a fusion of sex and aggression ramirez later claimed that his cousin mike gave him a front row view of his brutality he watched this cousin shoot his wife after a petty argument at their apartment mike shot his wife in the face killing her instantly [Music] and it stuck with him not in the sense of it was a bad thing not in the sense that uh how could you do something so horrendous i mean oh my god being sick to your stomach he was fascinated the fantasies of of those that have committed serial crimes have been very carefully studied by the staff of the fbi behavioral science over the years the fantasies start very early in life and oftentimes are a result of some incident that triggers these thoughts and once the fantasies become sexualized it becomes extremely dangerous because they start fantasizing about events of rape torture mutilation i did not notice anything strange of him until we were in high school and he was no longer part of my clique kind of thing that's when i noticed that that he was different and he had changed didn't no longer say hello that kind of thing i noticed that he would hang out with boys that did drugs a lot of second generation immigrants sometimes get involved in gangs and and some of the thinking is that they see that their parents have come to america and have worked really really hard and have very little to show for it and there's some people think that they there's a disillusioning on their part like why play by the rules if if this is what you end up with which is what my parents had and i i suppose you could say that that might have been a factor in in the rebelliousness of ricky ramirez ramirez became interested in hard rock and satanism a lot of kids high school kids for instance were dabbling in this and they would they would give it on their own little touches and being high school kids brains still developing they're developing a lot of them got in trouble and went the wrong way we did have some kids that killed their parents and things like that ramirez dropped out of school and began living on the fringes of society sometimes sleeping in the local cemetery [Music] right from the get-go richard stole anything that was loose and anything that he could pry loose i mean his neighbor started calling him dido's fingers and they call him ricky rabone ricky the thief after the attempted rape of a guest in an el paso hotel ramirez moved to california he became a cocaine and alcohol addict he lived in what's called skid row in los angeles which is a pretty scruffy area i mean there are people doing everything and taking everything and homelessness is not an unusual thing you live in what's called a flop house where you go and flop to to get off your high or to recover now did the drugs affect his brain functioning did it affect the way he saw the world probably but it wasn't causative it didn't lead to make him kill he was already [Music] primed ramirez lived day to day taking drugs using prostitutes stealing cars breaking and entering so he would go out in the suburbs where often they did not lock their doors at night even they didn't lock their windows this was like heaven for him this is exactly what he was looking for and he would go through the unlocked doors and unlock windows sometimes he would go in and burglarize when nobody was home at night and then he got bolder and bolder and bolder the vast majority of burglaries are for material gain these are usually drug people who want to get some money to buy drugs and they might do it with a friend or a partner and so on but there are a small group of burglars that are sexually motivated where the burglary itself is motivated by an urge to look sexual stimulation through looking and since about 50 percent of burglaries cur occur in the evening when the victim is likely to be home it's very easy to see the progression from voyeurism to breaking entry to sexual assault or to sexual murder by may 1985 richard ramirez had killed at least eight times and his violent home invasions were about to escalate plunging the people of los angeles into panic [Music] in 1985 los angeles county was in the grip of a vicious serial killer ordinary citizens were no longer safe in their homes as the mysterious killer christened the night stalker raped murdered and mutilated in the name of satan [Music] the dreadful and indiscriminate crimes caused a wave of fear everybody was scared everybody in the county of los angeles and southern california was scared to death gun sales seriously went up vast increase in gun sales during the summer of 85 people were keeping their windows closed it was a very very hot summer i would not open the windows at night we sweltered in our house every night because i was afraid somebody come in and kill me [Music] and still the violent attacks continued in burbank on may the 30th a 41 year old woman was raped while her 12 year old son was locked handcuffed in a closet she was allowed to live on the 27th of june the body of a 28 year old teacher was found in arcadia she'd been sodomized and her throat slit on july the 2nd again in arcadia a 75 year old woman was found dead she'd been beaten her throat cut and her home ransacked detective gil carrillo was convinced just one man was at work but the facts flew in the face of received wisdom here he was crossing all the gamuts and the only consistency was his inconsistency in the way he was committing his crimes what the fbi was telling us is that serial killers tend to operate in the same way they'll use the same weapon over and over the same method of operation but there were different weapons used there was there were two separate guns that were used throughout these events there was there were knives used in a couple of on a couple of the occasions there were bludgeons used on a couple of occasions these are all differences in the method of operation on july the 5th the night stalker targeted a quiet suburban street in sierra madre [Music] he entered the bedroom of 16 year old school girl whitney bennett you talk about a nightmare her parents awakened to her crying and coming down the hall they find her in her bedroom on the floor covered in blood the suspect had entered the house uh confronted her in bed while she was asleep and beat her with a tire iron and tried to strangle her and left her for dead four feet of sutures ended up in her head took to close the wound as you work these cases or you're in law enforcement for a long period of time you see a lot and it has to have an effect on you i know it takes its toll somewhere down the line i've seen it [Music] the 7th of july was another in a long run of swelteringly hot nights i'm home alone it's first time that i've ever slept with my gun on the nightstand everybody was afraid and pretty much kept their doors locked windows locked but the night was so hot and our summer was so hot so here i had the doors open [Music] in the middle of the night detective carrillo awoke convinced the night stalker was in his own house [Music] i woke up i was sweating i was nauseated [Music] and i got my gun and i cleared my house as if i was looking for burglar all of a sudden the phone rang i scared the bejesus out of me and it was my desk telling me to call my friend linda in the early hours crime scene investigator linda martinez had a work with a start about three o'clock in the morning my friend says someone's calling your name somebody's yelling for you [Music] linda's neighbor was crying out for help i went to the back fence and called across the street to the lady calling me and asked her what was wrong and she told me that she would have been robbed and raped and she was handcuffed to her bed once i heard her voice i knew it was him sophie dickman a lady in her 60s had been sexually assaulted she was raped and detective carrillo recognized all the hallmarks of a night stalker attack i learned that he had verbalized words words that were common that we had heard in the past words he had spoke there where's the money where's the jewelry shut up [ __ ] there was no doubt in my mind we were dealing with uh the same guy [Music] his suspicions were confirmed by the discovery in a nearby home of the 61 year old joyce nelson beaten to death with a blunt object the night stalker had struck twice in one night [Music] and he would repeat the trick just two weeks later on the 20th of july first shooting max and layla kneading at their home in glendale before moving on to sun valley [Music] we had a couple that lived in a home the male had been executed in his sleep the woman had been sexually assaulted and there was a young boy there that also had been assaulted ramirez had again dispatched the husband as he slept [Music] he had repeatedly beaten sexually assaulted and humiliated the mother demanding that she pray to satan for her life and then raped her eight-year-old son [Music] it was not enough just to murder or to rape he had to torture and he loved to terrorize him he would make him say hail satan humiliation of victims is very very typical in serial sexual homicide this is arousing to them this reassures the offender that they are in such complete control that they can degrade and humiliate the victim any way they want nothing could be more stimulating for an individual with this deviant sexual arousal pattern no one was able to predict or prevent the night stalkers crimes it's typical of serial killers to choose people who put themselves at risk somehow like male or female prostitutes like hitchhikers but these other people they were living their their normal lives they weren't doing anything at all that should have brought this down on them [Music] and the panic escalated the publicity of the killings was like a drum beat the more killings the more publicity the more fear hello my name is detective gill carrillo with the los angeles county sheriff's department assigned a homicide bureau and the sheriff's department is currently conducting an investigation into a series of homicides and sexual assaults that occurred in los angeles county i knew how vicious and violent how vile he really was and there was an enormous amount of pressure to stop before he hurt anybody else even more so before he hurt somebody in my own family people were buying guns people were buying guard dogs people were scared to death the suspect has used guns knives tire irons as well as his own shod foot to inflict serious injury to several victims in the past nobody knew who it was nobody knew where he was going to hit people didn't know if they were going to live to see the next morning it was really really scary and then a shocking twist it was very obvious that our killer from southern california had now struck in the city of san francisco on the 17th of august the night stalker had shot another couple in their home leaving a satanic symbol on the wall a week later he struck 50 miles south of los angeles shooting the husband and sexually assaulting the wife forcing her to swear her love for satan with the killer on the move detectives were now working night and day to try to catch him before he struck again since the last taping which was august 13 1985 the suspect in this case currently under investigation has committed two more homicides i have the pressure of the world on me i need to save not only my immediate family my wife my mother my kid everybody but the citizens of los angeles county there's an animal going out there i have to solve it the vehicle used in this crime was a 1976 toyota station wagon if the vehicle is found abandoned contact sergeant frank salerno or detective gil carrillo my wife found my 13 year old daughter crying in the bedroom and she said what's wrong and she said nothing and my wife said no something's wrong what is it and she said i just wish this were over [Music] i just want my dad back detective carrillo didn't yet know it but before the end of the month he would be face to face with one of history's most heinous serial killers by august of 1985 the night stalker had killed at least 13. terrorized los angeles county and pushed investigators to their limits now he appeared to be on the move and detectives feared he'd be even harder to catch where we'd had him localized in los angeles county now all of a sudden he's in the city of san francisco that was of great concern but by the end of the month a number of important leads finally came together we actually through informants that identified him uh we knew where he hung out he knew we loved uh he liked drugs and he used to hang around the skid row area at the same time there was a fingerprint recovered on the rear view mirror of a stolen car that the killer had used and they made richard ramirez off that fingerprint the sheriff of l.a county the chief of police of la city the chief of glendale decided that they were going to release the picture of the killer richard ramirez to the press immediately when they showed him i told my husband oh my god look that's richie that's richie but that was so weird because [Music] i can't comprehend him doing something like that not with his personality we were in shock i just knew what i knew of him as a child and i was just shocked i was just shocked [Music] on the morning of the 29th of august 1985 richard ramirez arrived in los angeles after visiting a brother in arizona ricky walked into the nearest convenience store to buy some candy and he noticed people were were looking at him [Music] and uh and then when he would look at them they'd look away of course and as he was waiting for his change he looked at the newspapers on the counter and every paper there were four or five of them then from la and from the area every paper had his picture his photograph and then one woman she said it's him el matador which is killer in spanish ramirez panicked and fled so he started running through yards across over fences he climbed a about a nine foot sound barrier wall as he went through yards people were calling in they were calling to the los angeles police department saying somebody's coming to my yard i have a crawler members of the los angeles police department were already on his trail they were following the 911 calls continue running east in the northeasterly direction and made it all the way to hubbard street he tries to carjack a female resident she screams we were actually still asleep we heard a bang then a scream we ran out here we noticed a tall dark skinny guy running and my dad right behind him we just came running as fast as we can to assist my dad and the neighbors richard has been running for about two miles pretty much uh caught up to him about here and uh tackled them right here up against this fence citizens come out and surround him and he was right here sitting down right here he was bleeding because one of the neighbors had hit him with a fence post right over the head he was perspiring and huffing and puffing and very look very tired and uh scary he looked very scary actually people just started coming with the newspapers and saying that's the killer maton that's you know nice talker [Music] with ramirez in custody officers would now come face to face with the killer for the first time [Music] when i saw him he he just had this evil look in his eye he just looked so sinister as if he were possessed he just looked evil i remember uh playing with his anxiety level trying to make it go up and come down i wanted to see what i could do to raise it or lower it and richard was almost to the point of hyperventilation his head was down on the table and he's going and for a millisecond just for a millisecond i'm becoming somewhat nervous i knew that this guy was into satanism and all of a sudden when he starts hyperventilating i'm saying to myself if this guy starts levitating i'm out of here this is a guy that although at times there were photographs taken of him that he looked like you know wild man uh he's not somebody somebody would point out and say there goes that crazy sob because uh he he just doesn't come across that way he was much more intelligent than i that i envisioned people think of him as a crazed man i didn't think he was crazy he was much much more articulate than most murder suspects that i've interviewed ramirez revealed he was well schooled in murder the impression i got from him was that he was well read even though he had dropped out of school i think after the ninth grade or so thereabouts he was very interested in murder and killing and and past serial killers because he had done a lot of reading on that he could tell you everything about serial killers from the time the romans fed the christian lines and modern day serial killers when we took him to his first cell and he found out that that was the cell that angelo bono who was part of the hillside strangler duo that's the cell he was in he was excited [Music] the night stalker had petrified california and haunted detectives salerno and carrillo for five months now he was finally behind bars [Music] i remember seeing my mother and a couple of my sisters and they came up and we all just started i started crying it was over i said it's okay [Music] in 1989 richard ramirez was found guilty of 13 murders and 30 attempted murders rapes and sexual assaults he was sentenced to death so what drove the knight stalker to his ultimate destiny as one of history's most savage serial murderers were the lessons he learned in his upbringing to blame or was richard ramirez born to kill i don't see anything in his upbringing that was any more unusual than a lot of people i know a lot of successful people have gone through hell being raised and come out just fine this could be a case and it probably is a case of of when he was conceived he's a bad seed no matter how he was raised he was destined to do what he did a lot of people grow up poor and a lot of people are abused in their childhood but they don't all grow up to do the things that richard ramirez did it does not appear that he was abused as a child or deprived or there's certainly no evidence that that was was presented so how did he grow up to do these things the best way to look at it is from a biopsychosocial approach but with a heavy emphasis on neurobiology whether it's hormonal chemical electrical brain damage some combination of facts plus psychosocial stressors abuse never helps many many things have to go wrong in order for one of these individuals to be created richard ramirez was born to kill he began his life in the way everybody does seemingly normal something happened in that gene that he has something that was added on to by the experiences that he had in his environment and childhood it's like a recipe you have a basic thing you add to that recipe you add to that recipe and finally you have the born killer natured or nurtured i don't believe anybody is born with this in him you know this comes about from something they've learned they've seen and they've decided to do richard had the liberties to do whatever he wanted to do and was a drifter early on in age and when you couple that with narcotics activity the drugs you know then that definitely causes problems in the mind and i don't think anybody's born like that they learn they see and they do [Music] you

Channel: Absolute Crime

Views: 547,832

Keywords: Absolute Crime, Crime Documentaries, True Crime, True Crime Documentaries, Murder documentaries, True Crime Stories, True Crime Youtube Channel, True Crime Documentary, full documentary channel, full length documentary 2022, richard ramirez, night stalker, serial killer, los angeles, serial killer documentary, the night stalker, richard ramirez interview, richard ramirez film, the night stalker netflix, who was richard ramirez, the hunt for a serial killer, la crime, doc

Id: qdW3USC43pc

Length: 43min 54sec (2634 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2022