World Famous Cults and Fanatics (19 page)

Ramirez, by now, was desperate to get a vehicle.
He attempted to pull a woman from her car in a supermarket lot until he was chased away by some customers of the barber’s shop opposite.
He
carried on running though exhausted, into the more residential areas of east Los Angeles.
There, he tried to steal a 1966 red Mustang having failed to notice that the owner, Faustino Pinon, was
lying underneath repairing it.
As Ramirez attempted to start the car Pinon grabbed him by the collar and tried to pull him from the driver’s seat.
Ramirez shouted that he had a gun, but Pinon
carried on pulling at him even after the car had started, causing it to career into the gatepost.
Ramirez slammed it into reverse and accelerated into the side of Pinon’s garage, and the
vehicle stalled.
Pinon succeeded in wrenching Ramirez out of his car, but in the following struggle Ramirez escaped, leaping the fence and running off across the road.
There he tried to wrestle
Angelina De La Torres from her Ford Granada.
“Te voy a matar!
(I’m going to kill you!)” screamed Ramirez.
“Give me the keys!”, but again he was thwarted and he ran
away, now pursued by a growing crowd of neighbours.
Manuel De La Torries, Angelina’s husband, succeeded in smashing Ramirez on the head with a gate bar and he fell, but he managed to struggle
up and set off running again before he could be restrained.
Incredibly, when Ramirez had developed a lead, he stopped, turned around and stuck his tongue out at his pursuers, then sped off once
more.
His stamina could not hold indefinitely however, and it was De La Torres who again tackled him and held him down.
It is possible that Ramirez would have been lynched there and then had not a
patrolman called to the scene arrived.
Coincidentally the patrolman was the same age as the killer, and he too was called Ramirez.
He reached the scene just as The Night Stalker disappeared under
the mob.
He drove his patrol car to within a few feet of where Ramirez was restrained, got out and prepared to handcuff the captive.

“Save me.
Please.
Thank God you’re here.
It’s me, I’m the one you want.
Save me before they kill me,” babbled Ramirez.
The patrolman handcuffed him and pushed him
into the back of the car.
The crowd was becoming restless, and the car was kicked as it pulled away.
Sixteen-year-old Felipe Castaneda, part of the mob that captured Ramirez, remarked, “He
should never, never have come to east LA.
He might have been a tough guy, but he came to a tough neighbourhood.
He was Hispanic.
He should have known better.”

“The Night Stalker” was in custody, at first in a police holding cell and then in Los Angeles county jail.
While in police care he repeatedly admitted to being “The Night
Stalker” and begged to be killed.

The case against Ramirez was strong.
The murder weapon, a .22 semi-automatic pistol, was found in the possession of a woman in Tijuana, who had been given it by a friend of Ramirez.
Police also
tried to track down some of the jewellery that Ramirez had stolen and fenced, by sending investigators to his birthplace El Paso, a spiralling town on the Texas–Mexico border.
Questioning his
family and neighbours revealed that Ramirez’s early life had been spent in petty theft and smoking a lot of marijuana.
He had never joined any of the rival teenage gangs that fight over
territory throughout El Paso, preferring drugs and listening to Heavy Metal.
It had been common knowledge that Ramirez was a Satanist; a boyhood friend, Tom Ramos, said he believed that it was
Bible-study classes that had turned the killer that way.

The investigators also found a great deal of jewellery, stashed at the house of Ramirez’s sister Rosa Flores.
The police were also hoping to find a pair of eyes that Ramirez had gouged
from one of his victims that had not been found in any previous searches.
Unfortunately they were not recovered.

The evidence against Ramirez now seemed unequivocal.
In a controversial move, the mayor of Los Angeles said that whatever went on in court, he was convinced of Ramirez’s guilt.
This was
later to prove a mainstay in a defence argument that Ramirez could not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles.

The appointed chief prosecutor in the case was deputy District Attorney P.
Philip Halpin, who had prosecuted the “Onion Field” cop-killing case twenty years earlier.
Halpin hoped to
end the trial and have Ramirez in the gas chamber in a relatively short period of time.
The prosecutor drew up a set of initial charges and submitted them as quickly as possible.
A public defender
was appointed to represent Ramirez.
However Ramirez’s family had engaged an El Paso lawyer, Manuel Barraza, and Ramirez eventually rejected his appointed public defender in favour of the El
Paso attorney.
Barrata did not even have a licence to practise law in California.

Ramirez accepted, then rejected three more lawyers, finally settling upon two defenders, Dan and Arturo Hernandez.
The two were not related, although they often worked together.
The judge
advised Ramirez that his lawyers did not even meet the minimum requirements for trying a death-penalty case in California, but Ramirez insisted, and more than seven weeks after the initial charges
were filed, pleas of Not Guilty were entered on all counts.

The Hernandezes and Ramirez seemed to be trying to force Halpin into making a mistake out of sheer frustration, and thus to create a mis-trial.
After each hearing the Hernandez’ made pleas
for, and obtained, more time to prepare their case.
Meanwhile one prosecution witness had died of natural causes, and Ramirez’s appearance was gradually changing.
He had had his hair permed
and his rotten teeth replaced.
This naturally introduced more uncertainty into the minds of prosecution witnesses as to Ramirez’s identity.
The racial make-up of the jury was contested by the
defence, which caused delays.
The defence also argued, with some justification, that Ramirez could not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles, and moved for a change of location.
Although the motion
was refused it caused yet more delays.
It actually took three and a half years for Ramirez’s trial to finally get under way.

Halpin’s case was, in practical terms, unbeatable.
The defence’s only real possibility of success was in infinite delay.
For the first three weeks of the trial events progressed
relatively smoothly.
Then Daniel Hernandez announced that the trial would have to be postponed as he was suffering from nervous exhaustion.
He had a doctor’s report that advised six
weeks’ rest with psychological counselling.
It seemed likely that a mis-trial would be declared.
Halpin tried to argue that Arturo Hernandez could maintain the defence, even though he had
failed to turn up at the hearings and trial for the first seven months.
However this proved unnecessary as the judge made a surprise decision and denied Daniel Hernandez his time off, arguing that
he had failed to prove a genuine need.

Halpin, by this stage was actually providing the Hernandezes with all the information that they required to mount an adequate defence, in order to move things along and prevent mis-trial.
For
the same reasons the judge eventually appointed a defence co-counsel Ray Clark.
Clark immediately put the defence on a new track: Ramirez was the victim of a mistaken identity.
He even developed an
acronym for this defence – SODDI or Some Other Dude Did It.
When the defence case opened, Clark produced testimony from Ramirez’s father that he had been in El Paso at the time of one
of the murders of which he was accused.
He also criticized the prosecution for managing to prove that footprints at one of the crime scenes were made by a size eleven-and-a-half Avia trainer,
without ever proving that Ramirez actually owned such a shoe.
When the jury finally left to deliberate however, it seemed clear that they would find Ramirez guilty.

Things were not quite that easy however.
After thirteen days of deliberation, juror Robert Lee was dismissed for inattention and replaced by an alternative who had also witnessed the case.
Two
days later, juror Phyllis Singletary was murdered in a domestic dispute.
Her live-in lover had beaten her then shot her several times.
She was also replaced.

At last on 20 September 1989 after twenty-two days of deliberation the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all thirteen counts of murder, twelve of those in the first degree.
The jury also
found Ramirez guilty of thirty other felonies, including burglary, rape, sodomy and attempted murder.
Asked by reporters how he felt after the verdict, Ramirez replied, “Evil.”

There remained only the selection of sentence.
At the hearing Clark argued that Ramirez might actually have been possessed by the devil, or that alternatively he had been driven to murder by
over-active hormones.
He begged the jury to imprison Ramirez for life rather than put him on death row.
If the jury agreed, Clark pointed out, “he will never see Disneyland again,”
surely punishment enough.
After five further days of deliberation, the jury voted for the death penalty.
Again, reporters asked Ramirez how he felt about the outcome as he was being taken away,
“Big deal.
Death always went with the territory.
I’ll see you in Disneyland.”

Any attempt to trace the source of Ramirez’s violent behaviour runs up against an insurmountable problem.
No external traumas or difficulties seem to have brutalized him.
He had a poor
upbringing, he was part of a racial minority, but these things alone cannot explain such an incredibly sociopathic personality.
Ramirez seems to have created himself.
He was an intelligent and
deeply religious child.
Having decided at some stage that counter-culture and drug-taking provided a more appealing lifestyle, he developed pride in his separateness.
In the El Paso of his early
manhood, people would lock their doors, if they saw him coming down the street.
He was known as “Ricky Rabon”, Ricky the thief, a nickname he enjoyed as he felt it made him
“someone”.
By the time he moved to Los Angeles, he was injecting cocaine and probably committing burglaries to support himself.
He let his teeth rot away, eating only childish sugary
foods.
He refused to wash.
He listened to loud Heavy Metal music.

It has been argued that it was his taste in music that drove him to murder and Satanism, but this would seem to be more part of the mood of censorship sweeping America than a genuine
explanation.
Anyone who takes the trouble to listen to the music in question, particularly the AC/DC album cited by American newspapers at the time of the murders, will find that there is little in
it to incite violence.

Ramirez’s obvious attempts to repel others in his personal behaviour, and his heavy drug use seem more likely sources of violence than early poverty or music.
His assumed
“otherness” seems in retrospect sadly underdeveloped, having never progressed beyond a teenager’s need to appal staid grown-up society.

This is not to say that Ramirez was unintelligent.
His delaying of his trial and his choice of the Hemandezes to continue the delays, shows that he had worked out the most effective method of
staying alive for the longest period either before, or soon after he was captured.
His remarks in court upon being sentenced were not particularly original, yet they are articulate:

“It’s nothing you’d understand but I do have something to say .
.
.
I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society.
I need not
look beyond this room to see all the liars, haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards – truly
trematodes
of the Earth, each one in his own legal profession.
You maggots
make me sick – hypocrites one and all .
.
.
I am beyond your experience.
I am beyond good and evil, legions of the night, night breed, repeat not the errors of the Night Prowler [a name from
an AC/DC song] and show no mercy.
I will be avenged.
Lucifer dwells within us all.
That’s it.”

The Night Stalker may not seem a “messiah” in any sense of the word, but it should be noted that Satanism is a religion – some anthropologists have even defined it as a
sub-cult of Judo-Christianity, as its creeds are based on biblical sources.
Richard Ramirez clearly felt that he was making a stand for his religion when he was on trial, and his statements won him
followers .
.
.
of a sort.

Since his conviction he has received fan mail from dozens of women, many enclosing sexual photographs of themselves.
Most of these “followers” are probably just looking for a cheap
thrill, like children who lean over the edge of a bear pit at a zoo – he’s caged, so they can play at titillating him.
None, however, should have any illusions about what he would have
done to them if it had been their house he broke into during his 1985 rampage.