Richard Ramirez
Published by Aaron Perez
Published 12/3/2025
Richard Ramirez died more than twelve years ago, but the mere mention of his name still empties the warmth from a room. Between June 1984 and August 1985 he turned the entire state of California into a locked-down prison of fear. People slept with guns under pillows, installed iron bars on windows, and drew pentagrams on doors in lipstick hoping the devil would pass them by. He didn’t.
What most people forget is that the monster wasn’t born in Los Angeles. He was forged three thousand miles away under the relentless West Texas sun.
Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez came into the world on February 29, 1960—leap year baby, fifth child of Julián and Mercedes Ramírez—in a modest house on the east side of El Paso. The family lived in the Lower Valley, not far from the railroad tracks where Julián worked laying ties for the Santa Fe line. The neighborhood was working-class Mexican-American, the kind of place where kids played in irrigation ditches and the air smelled of creosote and chile roasting on backyard grills.
Young Richard’s childhood was already violent. His father had a temper that exploded like summer lightning; Richard was knocked unconscious more than once before he turned six. He began having epileptic seizures. To escape the beatings he sometimes slept in Concordia Cemetery on Yandell Drive, among the weathered headstones of gunfighters and cholera victims. At night he hunted jackrabbits and coyotes in the empty desert lots south of I-10 with his father’s .22, gutting them under the stars while the family dog ate the entrails.
The real fracture came when he was thirteen. His cousin Miguel, a Green Beret fresh from Vietnam, moved in nearby on Fort Boulevard. Miguel kept a shoebox of Polaroids—severed heads, raped women, bodies posed like trophies. He showed them to Richard for hours. On May 4, 1973, in the living room of the little house on Fort Boulevard, Miguel shot his wife Jessie in the face while Richard watched from three feet away. The blood spatter hit Richard’s face. Something switched off permanently that afternoon.
He dropped out of Jefferson High School in South El Paso in ninth grade. He worked briefly at the Holiday Inn on Airport Road, using a passkey to rob rooms. He was fired after attempting to rape a guest. By eighteen he was smoking weed in Smeltertown, dropping acid in the projects near Ascarate Park, and breaking into houses along the Alameda corridor. In 1982, at age twenty-two, he put El Paso in his rear-view mirror and headed west on I-10 in a stolen car. He never really came back—except, police later believed, to mail stolen jewelry and possibly worse things to family members still living in the 79915 zip code.
Ramirez arrived in Los Angeles with nothing but a duffel bag full of black clothes and an insatiable hunger for cocaine. He crashed on skid row, in abandoned buses in Chinatown, in flophouse hotels on Main Street. He supported himself with burglaries in Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Koreatown.
The murders began in earnest in the spring of 1984.
His territory was almost entirely the suburban ring around downtown Los Angeles:
- Glassell Park (Jennie Vincow, June 1984)
- Rosemead (Maria Hernandez survived, Dayle Okazaki murdered, March 1985)
- Monterey Park (Tsai-Lian Yu dragged from her car; Vincent Zazzara and his wife Maxine later the same spring)
- Whittier (the Zazzara home where he gouged out Maxine’s eyes)
- Monrovia (Mabel Bell and Florence Lang bludgeoned with a hammer, pentagram drawn in lipstick on the wall)
- Arcadia (Mary Louise Cannon beaten to death in her bed)
- Sierra Madre (teenager Whitney Bennett survived a tire-iron attack)
- Burbank (Carol Kyle raped in front of her young son)
- Northridge (Chris and Virginia Peterson shot in their own bedroom)
- Diamond Bar (Elyas Abowath executed, his wife Sakina raped)
- Mission Viejo, Orange County (the final attack—Bill Carns shot, Inez Erickson raped; teenager James Romero Jr. got the license plate that broke the case)
He also struck north in the San Francisco Bay Area:
- Tenderloin district, San Francisco (9-year-old Mei Leung, April 1984—proven by DNA in 2009)
- Lake Merced, San Francisco (Peter and Barbara Pan, August 1985—pentagram scrawled in lipstick, “Jack the Knife” written on the wall)
Ramirez moved like smoke—Greyhound buses, stolen Toyotas and Mercurys abandoned in ramp parking lots, freeways at 3 a.m. He slept in the bushes of Griffith Park, in the drainage ditches along the Los Angeles River, in the graveyard at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights when he needed to feel at home.
August 31, 1985. Ramirez stepped off a bus from Tijuana at the Greyhound terminal on 7th and Alameda thinking he’d slipped away again. He walked east into the old neighborhood—Boyle Heights, the same streets where he’d once sold stolen jewelry to buy drugs. At a liquor store on Hubbard Street near 4th, an old woman recognized the face that had been on every front page and television screen for a week.
He ran. The entire barrio chased him—men with pipes, women with broomsticks, teenagers jumping off low-riders. They caught him between two apartment buildings on Hubbard Street. By the time LAPD arrived he was already unconscious, beaten nearly to death by the people he had terrorized for fifteen months.
He was tried in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in downtown Los Angeles, sentenced to death nineteen times, and spent the rest of his life in a single cell on San Quentin’s East Block overlooking the same bay he had once stalked.
He died on June 7, 2013, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California—liver failure, lymphoma, decades of poison catching up with him at last. No family member claimed the body. He was cremated and the ashes scattered in an undisclosed location.
El Paso still doesn’t talk about him much. The old house on the east side is gone, replaced by a vacant lot. Concordia Cemetery keeps its silence under the cottonwoods. And somewhere out in the desert south of I-10, the jackrabbits still run at night, listening for footsteps that will never come again.
Sources:
Carlo, Philip. The Night Stalker: The Disturbing Life and Chilling Crimes of Richard Ramirez. Citadel Press-Kensington Publishing Corp., 2016.
---. The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez. Kensington Publishing Corp., 1996.
Foreman, Laura. Serial Killers – True Crime. Time-Life Books, 1992.
Linedecker, Clifford L. Night Stalker. St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1991.
"Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer". Directed by Tiller Russell, Netflix, 2021, www.netflix.com/title/81025701.
"Richard Ramirez." Biography.com, A&E Networks, 17 May 2023, www.biography.com/crime/richard-ramirez. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025.
"Richard Ramirez." Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Ramirez. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025.
"Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes". Peacock, 2024, www.peacocktv.com/watch-online/tv/richard-ramirez-the-night-stalker-tapes/5445336098818518112. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025.
Wilson, Colin. Serial Killer Investigations: The Story of Forensics and Profiling Through the Hunt for the World's Worst Murderers. Hylas Publishing, 2006.
Comments
Post a Comment