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Richard Ramirez

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez (February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), also known as Richard Ramirez, "Valley Intruder" and "Night Stalker" was an American serial killer, serial rapist, kidnapper, child abuser, and burglar. In period from June 28, 1984 to August 24, 1985, he committed at least 18 attacks that included 32 known victims, 14 of whom were murdered or died of injuries, 16 of whom survived the attack and the remaining 2 avoided attack.

Biography[]

Richard Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, the youngest of Julián and Mercedes Ramirez's five children. His father was prone to fits of rage and often physically abused him. He was knocked unconscious and suffered severe injuries due to which he later developed temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality. At the age of 10 Richard begun smoking marijuana. When Richard was 12 years old his older cousin, Miguel Ramirez, boasted to him about abusing and raping Vietnamese women during Vietnam War. Miguel showed him photos of his victims, in some of which he posed with the severed head of a woman he had abused. On May 4, 1973, Richard witnessed Miguel fatally shoot his wife in the middle of an argument. Later that year, Richard moved in with his older sister, Ruth. Her husband, a voyeur, often took Richard on his noctural exploits. Ramirez also began using LSD and cultivated an interest in Satanism.

As an adolescent, Ramirez started to experience sexual fantasies with violence, forced bondage and rape. He was also arrested several times for illegal drug possession. He took a job in a hotel and he would use passkey to rob sleeping customers. He once attempted to rape a woman but he was caught and beat senseless by her husband. He was fired from his job, but his criminal charges were dropped as the couple, who lived out of state, declined to return to testify against him.

Ramirez's first known murder victim was a 9-year-old Chinese-American Mei Leung. The murder occurred in the basement of the hotel where he was living, in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. He raped and beat the girl before stabbing her to death, and hanging her body from a pipe. This murder was not known to be Ramirez's until 2009, when Ramirez's DNA was matched to a sample obtained at this crime scene.

From June 28, 1984 to August 24, 1985 Ramirez committed series of crimes and murders which would become known as Night Stalker crimes. He committed 18 different cases of attacks, 15 which occurred in Los Angeles, 2 in San Francisco and 2 in Orange. They included 32 known victims, 14 of whom were murdered or died of injuries, 16 of whom survived the attack and the remaining 2 avoided attack. Ramirez would usually stalk his victims, break in their homes, threatened them with a handgun, forced them to give them their valuables, kill them, rape them and mutilate them. He would use .22 handgun and later .25 handgun as a weapon. On multiple occasions he left Satanic imagery on the scene of the crime or/and made victims take oath on Satan. On August 24, 1985 in, Ramirez drove to Mission Viejo in a stolen car wanted to break in the home of James Romero Jr but Romero's son, 13-year-old James Romero III was awake and heard his footsteps outside of the house. He woke up his parents so Ramirez decided to flee the scene but James managed to note the color, make, and style of the car, as well as a partial license plate number told it to the police. After this encounter, Ramirez broke into the house of Bill Carns and his fiancée, Inez Erickson through a back door. He  entered the sleeping couple's bedroom and awakened Carns when he cocked his .25 caliber handgun and shot him three times in the head before turning his attention to Erickson. Ramirez introduced himself as "Night Stalker" and forced her to swear she loved Satan as he beat her with his fists and bound her with neckties from the closet. Before leaving the home, Ramirez told Erickson, "Tell them the Night Stalker was here." Erickson untied herself and went to a neighbor's house to get help for her severely injured fiancé. Surgeons removed two of the three bullets from his head, and he survived his injuries. Erickson gave a detailed description of the assailant to investigators, and police obtained a cast of Ramirez's footprint from the Romero house. The stolen car was found abandoned on August 28 in Wilshire Center, Los Angeles, and police obtained a single fingerprint from the rear-view mirror despite Ramirez's careful efforts to wipe the car clean of his prints. The print was positively identified as belonging to Ramirez and the law enforcement releases a mug shot of Ramirez from a 1984 arrest for auto theft to the media. Ramirez was captured on August 31 1985 in Los Angeles. He was walking through a convenience store when a group of elderly Hispanic women fearfully identified him as "el matador" ("the killer") and he saw his face on the front pages on the newspaper rack. He fled the store attempted to carjack a woman but was chased away by bystanders, who pursued him. After hopping over several fences and attempting two more carjackings, he was eventually subdued by a group of residents, one of whom had struck him over the head with a metal fence post in the pursuit. The group of enraged citizens held Ramirez down and relentlessly beat him until the police arrived and took him into custody.

On September 20, 1989, Ramirez was convicted of all charges: thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. He was sentenced to die in California's gas chamber. During his time in prison, he had few female fans writing him love letters. One of them was Doreen Lioy whom he married on October 3, 1996 in California's San Quentin State Prison but she left him in 2009 after DNA confirmed he had raped and murdered 9-year-old Mei Leung. The other was Christine Lee whom he became engaged to. Ramirez died on June 7, 2013, of complications secondary to B-cell lymphoma at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California. Ramirez died of complications secondary to B-cell lymphoma at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California, on June 7, 2013. He had been on death row for more than 23 years due to California's lengthy appeals process.

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