RICHARD CHASE: A REIGN IN BLOOD

Article BY Cristo M. Sanchez - Art by NICOLAS CASTELAUX

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The story of Richard Chase is equally tragic as it is disturbing. It forces one to consider the factors of nature Vs nurture to a great extent, as well as including mental illness into the equation. It is a story about how the mental health care system and family can fail a young schizophrenic man - though I do not feel confident that Richard Chase would not have ended up as a serial killer had he received the best treatment possible. There are always many factors that go into making a serial killer, never just one. That is what makes it all the more tragic; the uncertainty, as well as the fact that one will never know at this point. No matter what the conclusion is, or however many theories one has about what could have been done, it does not take away from the horrible occurrence that left six people dead in the span of a month in the Sacramento winter of 1977. This is the story of Richard Trenton Chase, aka The Vampire of Sacramento.

 

THE BEGINNING

Richard Trenton Chase was born May 23, 1950, in Santa Clara, California. His childhood was unstable as his father – a strict disciplinarian – and his mother were prone to constant bicker. There are conflicting rapports whether or not he was abused as a child (specifically by his mother), but these are mostly unsupported as the worse anyone has ever said concerning Richard's upbringing and his parents was that his father could at times be a little too strict on the young boy. Although his parents’ quarrels would eventually lead them to divorce, it seems by most accounts that Richard was loved and supported by his parents. Keeping in mind that slapping a child was much more accepted in the 1950s and 1960s than today, it is fair to assess that Richard was most probably slapped around a bit, but there is no evidence to show than any physical abuse of a more extreme nature ever took place.

Though Richard was not physically abused to any extent deemed as abuse for the era, one could speculate that the fact that his parents used him against each other early in the divorce process could be considered psychological abuse and might have accelerated the mental illnesses already festering in him.

Young Richard is what one would consider to be an unusual child by most. Since childhood he had increasing problems taking baths and never cleaned after himself whatsoever. That he liked to live in his own filth should maybe have caught his parents’ attention, but if it did they found a solution to this problem and it would carry on until his adult years.

His early bizarreness was enhanced by the fact that when he was left alone in the house he would turn the heat up in the house to near 100 degrees - as high as he could get it - remove all his clothes and lie on the living room floor, sweltering in the heat.

It was also at childhood that he began to feel worried about not having enough blood in his body - a problem which he would never find a solution to.

Another factor that didn’t help his development was that he exhibited traits complying with the MacDonald triad (a set of three behavioral characteristics suggesting that all three or a combination of two can more strongly predict a future tendency to violence and/or serial offenses) by being a bed-wetter over the age of five; having predisposition to start fires; and torture, mutilate and kill animals. The latter being one of Richard’s great passions as he engaged in this behavior to an excessive amount, even for a future serial killer.

When Richard was 10 years old, his mother confided in a neighbor that she had found a dead cat buried in her flower box. This neighbor later recalled that she remembered a lot of cats going missing from the neighborhood while the Chase family lived there, though the specific number of missing cats is unknown.

Even though he was a complicated young man, he didn’t experience too much difficulty in his teen years. According to statements from his peers from his high school days, Richard was popular both socially and romantically - which isn't very common in serial killers as most experience an alienated adolescence.

Though he didn't have much trouble getting friends or dates in his early teens, it became a different matter when puberty hit and he realized that he was impotent when it came to sexual relations with girls, which caused him great frustration. The rumor about his impotence spread quickly in his hometown, something that must have been immensely embarrassing and frustrating, not to mention traumatizing to young Richard.

These rumors, along with his developing schizophrenia and his growing frustration, caused him to become obsessed with his impotence.

In high school Richard learned that in order for a man to get an erection, blood is needed to rush into the penis, filling the flaccid member and making it erect following arousal. Because of this, and further augmented by his yet not diagnosed schizophrenia, Richard, who had already considered himself to be deficient of blood since childhood, became even more worried. As these thoughts continued to grow and expand, he soon became convinced that the problem with his impotence was directly linked with his lack of blood.

This delusion soon led him to believe that if he were to drink blood he could fill his body, and therefore also fill his penis, with blood and no longer suffer the humiliation he had endured sexually. And so the first seed of a dangerous obsession was sown and would soon cultivate into something all the more horrific.

 

FIRST ATTEMPTS AT FINDING A SOLUTION

Richard's first attempt to “fill” his body with what he considered much needed blood came from a kitten he had gotten from his then girlfriend's house. Richard most likely stole the kitten and took it home. Desperate to find a solution to his predicament, he brought the small feline to the back of the house where he killed it and drank the blood straight from the animal. Finding that it did not help with his impotence, he went on to larger prey.

Soon after murdering the cat, Richard shot and killed a white dog named Sabbath before he tried to collect the blood pouring out of the holes with a Dixie cup. These would be his first ventures into the horrible world of blood consumption, but far from his last.

Around the age of 18, Richard went to a psychiatrist concerning his obsession with blood, though one can only speculate whether or not he admitted to drinking the blood of animals in any of his sessions. But since psychology was far from as advance in the late 1960s as it is now, if might be fair to assume that had he confessed this to his doctor, his doctor might not have been too worried about his animal abuse either way.

It is around this time that his psychological problems escalated from being only about blood to what he believed to be other bodily abnormalities, one of which included Richard’s belief that his stomach was put in backwards and that his cranium was changing in shape.

What we do know is that in these sessions with his psychiatrist Richard did tell him about his impotence problems and how he thought they were related to his blood deficiency, but his psychiatrist told him that suppressed anger was the most probable cause; specifically anger directed towards women. (Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo - The Butcher of Rostov – was another serial killer who suffered from impotence and was actually unable to achieve an erection without being soaked in blood after committing violent acts.) We can conclude that Richard’s psychiatrist didn’t put him at ease or help him understand how to solve his dire dilemma.

Though it is clear that Richard Chase suffered from schizophrenia as he displayed many schizophrenic symptoms and tendencies, he also had a few other traits that we often see in serial killers. From pathological lying - not being embarrassed or ashamed when being caught in a lie - to theft and showing no remorse for his actions when caught in the act - which he was many times - goes to show that his case is one of several layers and factors.

 

BECOMING AN ADULT

After a stint enrolled in the American River College - where Richard managed to maintain a steady C grade average while consistently using drugs - he moved out from his parents’ house at age 21 and moved in with two female roommates - one of which he knew from high school, while the other one he had met since graduating.

Richard had not improved within personal hygiene and the two girls that lived with him described him as a filthy human being who flat out refused to take a shower and never washed his clothes. When he first moved in with the girls, he was already showing obvious irregularities from what one would refer to as normal, but he still had some friends at the time. The 1970s, in particular the hippie-culture, had done much to make what was considered normal etiquette more lenient and Richard’s erratic behavoir was more easily camouflaged.

His obsession with drugs, particularly weed and acid, that had begun in high school escalated in his adulthood and he would go on to start selling - becoming a small time drug dealer - something that most probably made it easier for him to keep relations.
While living with the girls, his obsession with drugs accelerated and he became a hardcore drug user, something that only made the imbalance in his already imbalanced, schizophrenic mind even more unstable and unpredictable.

One night in the apartment Richard boarded up his bedroom door, locked himself in the closet of his bedroom and boarded the door up, refusing to come out. When he was later asked why he did it, he said that people were sneaking up on him from inside.
Another time, he walked out of his bedroom completely nude and started talking non-sense to his roommates.

The female roommates grew more and more afraid of Richard’s erratic behavoir and soon became too afraid to ask him to leave, instead opting to leave themselves, abandoning the apartment and leaving Richard on his own.

Left alone, Richard’s delusions about various parts of his anatomy being wrong or abnormal continued to intensify. As well as still believing that his stomach was turned backwards and bones were growing out the back of his head (he would eventually shave his head in order to keep an eye on this imagined cranial growth), he also began to tell people that his heart would periodically stop beating for short periods of time.

That Richard was obsessed with anatomy books didn’t do much to help his state of mind as he continually became more convinced that it was his body that was the ones with complications, not his psyche. The books’ pictures must’ve pushed his fixations with his “morphing” body and schizophrenia over the top.

A short time after the girls moved out, Richard, unable to pay the whole rent on his own, lost the apartment and was forced to live with his recently separated parents. At this time Richard knew that something was wrong with him, he knew that he didn't fit into society, but found himself with nowhere to go, which put his mother and father in a difficult position. Between his fixation with the faults of his body and his continued compulsion to drink animal blood, as well as his refusal to clean himself or wash his clothes, he was very difficult to live with, which is the primary reason that his mother and father would bounce him back and forth between them.

In April of 1973, Chase was attending a friend's apartment party where he fondled a girl and was asked to leave. When he returned to the apartment shortly after, the police were called and soon arrived to escort him out. As they escorted him out a .22 calibre gun fell from his belt and he was sent to jail. His father bailed him out and the following month, in May, he moved to LA to live with his grandmother. Here, we assume that Richard had a very uneventful year, driving developmentally disabled kids back and forth to the school that his grandmother helped at.

Even though he wouldn't move on to human blood for another 4 years, Richard was nothing short of a terror at home with his grandmother as well as outside during this period. He was constantly in and out of the doctor offices and the mental asylum. He was well-monitored for a period of time, but his behavoir was finally attributed to just being "weird" and not dangerous. It is in this turbulent period that Richard once showed up at his mother's house screaming about how people were following him. She was calling the hospital for them to come pick Richard up when he took the phone from his mother and beat her with it. With that violent outburst things came to a head. He had been weird at his grandmother's house, but things were getting worse now, and quickly.
Amongst the odd things Richard did at this time was that he would wrap his head in towels and saran wrap filled with orange slices. He did this with the belief that he could ingest vitamin C from the fruit this way.

His grandmother, no longer able to stand his erratic behavior, sent him back to Sacramento, and shortly after his return he ended up in the American River Hospital where he told doctors that his heart and kidneys had stopped working, his pulmonary artery had been stolen and his blood had stopped flowing completely. He would be admitted to the psychiatric ward and doctors would finally diagnose him as a schizophrenic (1973-74).

They told his mother than he needed treatment and care, but that he was not a danger to himself or others. Because of this, they allowed his mother to have him released and introduce him back into society, which proved to worsen his condition.

Out of the American River Hospital Richard got even more delusional and began accusing his mother of poisoning his food as well as controlling his mind. The complaints about his mother were made to an imaginary friend that Richard had created.

Though his parents were firsthand witnesses of their son’s mental deterioration, further enhanced by aggressive drug use, Richard's parents decided that what was best to do was to give Richard his own apartment.

 

LIVING ON HIS OWN

Living on his own Richard would spend his days riding to and back from the local rabbit farm. At the farm he would buy a rabbit, bring it to his apartment where he’d butcher it and then either eat the rabbit raw – in particular the entrails - drink its blood or throw both of into the blender, liquefying them and guzzling the whole thing down. One can only speculate what the rabbit farm owner(s) thought of Richard as he bought rabbits with such frequency. The vigorous consumption of rabbits was done because Richard now believed that his heart was shrinking and that his heart would disappear if he did not do anything about it, which in this case he concluded eating raw rabbit meat and entrails would help.

Richard's condition has been said to be an example of Cotard's syndrome - a psychological illness that leads a person to believe that he or she is a walking corpse, or are alive but rotting from the inside, or are missing important pieces of their anatomy like blood or organs.

One night Richard's father came to visit his son and found him sitting on the couch wearing only shorts and looking pale and sick. Richard told his dad that he had bought a bad rabbit and thought he had food poisoning.

Richard, aided by his father, went to the hospital where doctors found that he was indeed sick, but not food poisoning but rather from blood poisoning, brought on because he had injected himself with the blood of a Rabbit. Richard did this because he thought that he had eaten a rabbit who had eaten battery acid and that battery acid had seeped through the walls of his stomach into his flesh and the only thing that could cure the battery acid-stained rabbit blood was clean rabbit blood.

After the rabbit-acid incident, Richard was committed to a mental institution yet again, but it didn’t last more than two days as he escaped by running out through the front door which had been unlocked.

The staff caught him soon after, and when brought him back they transferred him to a different facility where he earned the nickname Dracula because Richard would constantly talk about blood and killing animals. He once said that he liked killing rabbit's because they were like little machines.

Impressively, he even continued killing animals while committed in the hospital. One day the staff found him with fresh blood over his face and upon inspecting his room they found birds with their necks broken by his window. He had apparently caught them somehow, ripped off their heads and sucked out their blood. When they asked the blood and feather-covered Richard what was going on, he told them that he had cut himself shaving.

In addition to his other diagnoses, it is likely that Chase suffered from what is now known as Renfield syndrome. Although not included in the DSM-5 list of mental disorders it is an acceptable diagnosis for somebody who is constantly talking about blood, covering themselves in blood and has a compulsion to drink blood.

Renfield syndrome has 3 stages. The first one is when the patients cut themselves and drink their own blood. The second is the zoophagia stage, in which a person consumes the blood of an animal, which includes the drinking of an animal’s blood while the animal is still alive. The third stage is moving on to the blood of humans, which Richard would move on to do soon after his release on September 29th, 1976.

His release was against the strong disapproval of everyone on the staff except from Richard's doctor, who said that Richard had good socialisation and a gotten a realistic view of his problem. It is largely believed that Richard's mother was an influence in his release as she had a strong sense of denial when concerning his son's illness. Richard's mother would often visit the facility, telling the doctors that he didn't belong in there and that she could take better care of him. When Richard was released in September, he lived with his mother for a couple of days before becoming too much for her to handle and being sent to live in his apartment again.

Following his release, his mother also felt it right to wean him off his medication because she didn't think that he needed it. She said that they [the medication] made Richard walk around like a zombie, something she didn't like. Being the 1970s, the medicine prescribed to schizophrenics were very strong medications that not only removed the delusions, but blocked the flow of dopamine into the brain which fuels the schizophrenia, making the patients often “zombie-like”.

Somewhere in the beginning on 1977, his parents allowed the court-ordered conservatorship to expire and Richard became responsible for his own livelihood. Still thinking she was aiding her son, Richard's mother helped him plan a three week trip to Washington and gave him $1450.

In Washington, Chase bought a 1966 Ford Ranchero for $800 from a man in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a car that would facilitate his thirst for blood.

On August, 1977, the true unstable thoughts in Richard’s mind were unleashed. He was off his medication, living on his own in an apartment his parents were paying the rent for and barely checking up on him, his own mother kept telling him that nothing was wrong with him and that the medications were not needed, and with Richard tormented by his own delusions and compulsions stemming from his aggressive illness soon proved to be the recipe for disaster.

On August 3rd, 1977, tribal police were called out after a car had been reported abandoned near Pyramid Lake, near the Walker river reservation in Nevada. Upon arriving they found a 1966 Ford ranchero with a bumper sticker that said “I RATHER BE FLYING” stuck in the sand. Inside the car they found a loaded 30-30 rifle and a .22 rifle, both of them stained with blood. Near the guns was a pair of bloody tennis shoes and a pile of blood-soaked clothes. On the floor of the car, on a pool of fresh blood, there was a white plastic bucket with a liver inside. Using their binoculars, the tribal police spotted Richard Chase, naked, perched on a large rock about a half mile away. When the officers approached him, Richard reportedly "took off like a shot!" but was soon caught by a police officer on an ATV.

Once he was caught they saw that Richard was literally covered in blood – with blood smeared under his armpits and even poured into his ears. When the police asked him where the blood came from he told them that it was seeping from him. Chase was taking to the station for questioning.

At the police station they figured out that the liver had been taken from a cow and not a human. He was arrested nonetheless and his car was impounded, but because the US attorney didn't press charges he was let go. Had the police checked his records and seen just how many times he had been checked into mental hospitals, they most likely would have held him longer and he might have been committed again. The fact that Richard might’ve been under the influence of drugs could be a possible explanation for him being released as the police might have blamed his crazy behavior on the drugs.

In October of 1977, Richard bought and stole a few dogs which he killed and presumably drank the blood of. It would be no more than two months later that Richard Chase would go on to commit his first human murder.

 

IN SEARCH OF HUMAN VICTIMS

On December 2nd, Richard Chase bought a gun for 69 dollars, which he would not be able to pick up before December 18th so his credentials could be verified. This purchase tapped out all his funds so he asked his mother to buy him a holster for it, but when she said no he stole the holster from a drift store. That his mother allowed him to own a gun with everything she knew about his unbalanced mind is negligent at best and straight out moronic at worst.

On why Richard’s murderous thirst escaladed to such a degree around this time might be because his parents decided that they would not allow him to spend Christmas at home that year. Upon learning this, Richard allegedly shot the family cat through the head in front of his mother and proceeded to smear blood all over himself. His mother allegedly told his father about what had happened, though she left out the part where Richard smeared the animal’s blood all over himself. His parents then decided that he could no longer be in the house and had to reside in his own apartment.

A couple of days after that incident Richard cut his hair, shaved, began to dress better and told his parents that he was feeling better. He also told them that he was thinking about starting to look for a job. But while his parents thought that Richard was finding more stable ground and was attempting to lead a more normal life, he was in the process of attaining more guns and buying ammo over the next couple of days. This collecting of weapons and ammo might be used as proof to show that he premeditated the murders to come.

Being a visionary serial killer, Richard didn't target women or men specifically; it was mostly about the blood for him so either sex would do. Leading up to his first murder, Richard started walking up to people's homes as well stalking them, going into properties and even backyards to ogle at potential victims through their windows. He was going through the process that most serial killer's go through; the process of constantly allowing oneself little liberties, which helps to build up the courage and confidence needed in order to move on to murder.

December 27th, 1977. A woman named Dorothy Polinski was doing her dishes around 6:30 pm when she heard a loud pop, followed by the sound of glass breaking. As she reacted to the sound of breaking glass, she felt a streak of heat pass right above her skull. The sensation on her scalp was from a bullet that had passed through the tight bun that Dorothy wore her hair in, before it lodged itself in the back of a kitchen cabinet. Richard’s first attempt at murdering of a human being was unsuccessful, but the bullet would match the gun that Richard would use the very next day, on his second attempt.

The next day, on December 28th, 1977, Chase took his car to the streets of Sacramento with his .22 calibre gun in hand to try again. Not far from where Richard himself lived, he drove by a house where he spotted 51 year old Ambrose Griffin. Ambrose was unloading groceries from the back of his car, about to carry them inside along with his wife. Two loud pops rang out, stunning them both. Reacting to the sound, his wife turned around just in time to see her husband slump to the ground.

The first bullet had missed Ambrose completely, but a second bullet had hit him right in the chest, killing him.

After the murder of Ambrose Griffin, Richard went home and watched television for the rest of the day - TV being one of his favorite pastimes.

With Ambrose being a completely random killing, the Sacramento police didn't have any clues to who the perpetrator might have been. The next day, in a weird turn of event, the police decided to bring in a psychic after a twelve year old reported that a man in his mid-twenties had attempted to shoot at him from a brown Pontiac Trans Am. The boy couldn't remember any other details than that and therefore the psychic was brought to the case in a very bizarre decision by the police.

After a long psychic session, the boy recalled a license plate number - 219EEP - but as we now know, Richard Chase had a Ford Ranchero and the plate did not match the number, leaving the lead to go nowhere and thus allowing Richard to get away with the murder of Ambrose Griffin.

Between the first and the second murder, Richard was institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia yet again, where he continued to complain that his head kept changing shape and that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery, but he was again soon released for undisclosed reasons. Unfortunately the short stint institutionalized did nothing to stop Richard's growing bloodlust.

Dawn Larson, a neighbor of Chase's, saw the young man bring home three animals on three different occasions in this period - two dogs and one cat - and she never saw any of the animals again. It has been stated that he bought so many animals from local pet shops that he was placed on a no-selling list after none of the animals he’d bought were ever seen again. It is a common myth that animals have a sixth sense, and the fact animals would recoil from Chase and dogs would often bark at him when he walked down the street might support for that belief.

No longer able to buy animals from pet stores, Richard stole a puppy, killed it and drank its blood. After the atrocious act, he called up the owner he had stolen the puppy from and proceeded to tell how he had killed and cut open the dog. This behavoir strays from the theory that Richard murdered animals and humans purely for the delusional necessity of needing their blood; it is clear that Richard got some morbid pleasure from psychological torment as well.

 

IN SEARCH OF HUMAN BLOOD

On January 23rd, 1978, Richard decided it was time to get up close and personal with his first human blood-victim. He began walking on 2909 Bernie Street, strolling up to the house of a woman named Jean Layton. He tried getting in via the patio door, but the door was locked so he moved on to the windows. The windows were also locked so he moved on to the back door where Jean, who had already spotted him, was staring at him through the window. Face to face through the glass, Jean would later say that he stared at her with no emotion, as if he was looking at a car he was thinking about buying. Unable to enter her home, Richard lit a cigarette and walked away from her house, continuing down the street.

About half an hour later, Richard entered the unlocked house of Robert and Barbara Edwards. (Years later, Richard told FBI profiler Robert Ressler that when he went out to murder he only went to houses that were unlocked, not because it was easier but because he thought that locked houses meant that he was not welcome - a play on the mythology that vampires cannot enter without being invited in.)

When Robert and Barbara came home from grocery shopping they opened the door and found the filthy and scraggly-looking Richard Chase standing in the hallway.

Robert and Barbara spotted Richard and chased him around the house for a short while before Richard finally got passed them and ran out the front door. As Richard was running from the Edwards' house and they screamed for him to stop, he apparently screamed back that he was taking a short cut.

When they inspected their house they soon understood that Richard had intended to steal a few things as they found a bag full of items such as rings, a tape player, a decorative dagger and a stethoscope. They also found that Richard had left something behind. When the couple walked into their baby's bedroom, they found that Richard had opened the chest of drawers and urinated on all the baby's clothes. He had also defecated on the infant's bed. (A few serial murderers – among them Albert Fish - have left fecal matter behind as it is a sign of power, literally defecating on their victims or on something they cherish.)

The Edwards’ called the police, but since it was the seventies, a time with many hippies walking around doing drugs, acting odd and often filthy, it is believed that the police didn't take it as seriously as they maybe should have.

After the break-in attempt, Richard was thirsty and went to a store to grab himself his favorite drink, an orange soda. While at the store, he ran into an old classmate of his, Nancy Holden. Chase walked up to her and said: "Were you on the motor cycle when Kurt was killed? Because that would've been fucking awesome."

Although Nancy had in fact dated a guy named Kurt, who had in fact died in a motorcycle accident, Nancy was understandably freaked out by the question, not the least because she barely recognized Chase as he was filthy, smelled bad, skinnier than he had been when she had known him, and was wearing a bright orange ski parka which was covered in brown stains that were most definitively dried up blood. Nancy soon broke free from the uncomfortable conversation but Richard followed her outside, asking Nancy for a ride. Nancy managed to get in her car, start the engine and drive off just as Richard was about to open the passenger side door. Though we don't know what intentions Richard had with Nancy Holden, it is fair to assume that little good could have come out of the situation had Richard been given a ride as he had his .22 in his shoulder holster the entire time.

By chance Richard noticed a blue van in the grocery store parking lot after Nancy drove away.

Still bloodthirsty after failing to hitch a ride with Nancy Holden, Richard landed on murder at 2360 Tioga Way. We do know that at this point his motive was no longer robbery because a blue van was parked in the driveway, clearly proving that someone was home. We don’t know exactly why he chose this house in particular, though a possible explanation, if there is one, is that Richard recognized the van from the store parking lot - the same store where his soon-to-be 22 year old victim Teresa Wallin had visited about an hour before Richard showed up at her house. It is therefore possible that Richard, deep in the webs of schizophrenia at this point, saw the blue van as a symbol and because of that he chose that specific house. But being the textbook definition of a disorganized serial killer, it could have been a random act, and the blue van merely a coincidence.

Richard walked up to the front yard, took his .22 caliber handgun from his leather shoulder holster, cocked it, ejected a bullet and put it Teresa's mailbox before he walked up to the house and opened the unlocked door. In the hall he found Teresa on her way out with a bag of garbage. When Richard pointed his gun at Teresa she dropped the bag and put up her hands. That’s when Richard began firing. The first bullet entered her palm, travelled up her arm, exited through the elbow and nicked her neck. The second bullet went through the top part of her skull, killing her, and she dropped to the ground.
Richard then walked up to her and fired one more bullet into her temple from six inches away - which was a mercy considering what was to come.

As well as being a disorganized killer, Richard also falls under the category of a product killer as his intention was to kill people as fast as possible because it was not so much about the thrill of the murder but rather what he could do with the body afterwards. He didn't want a struggle; he wanted immediate control of the situation, especially considering that he was a short, thin and scrawny man.

Richard picked up Teresa's body by the shoulders and dragged her to the bedroom leaving a long dark streak of blood on the floor. After he'd laid her down, he walked back to the kitchen where he got a knife. In the hall he picked up an empty yoghurt cup out of the garbage that Teresa had dropped and brought it back to the bedroom where he started working on the body.

First her pulled her sweater over her shoulders and cut off her left nipple. He then stabbed her torso so hard he split open her sternum. He sliced the left side of her stomach open, reached inside the wound and pulled out the intestines until the organs were exposed before he stabbed the organs eight times, stabbing so deep that the knife came out through her back. The only organs he left unscathed were the kidneys. He then used the empty yoghurt cup to gather blood from Teresa's stomach cavity and drink much of it before he went to the bathroom and smeared his face and hands with the more of Teresa’s blood. The final disgrace of the body came when Chase walked out of the house and picked up a pile of dog feces from the yard which he shoved into Teresa's mouth. But maybe worst of all was that when it was performed an autopsy on Teresa it was discovered that she had been six weeks pregnant at the time of her death.
He left Teresa's house still covered in blood and walked to his apartment that was very close by, where he again spent the rest of the day watching TV. It would be Teresa's husband who'd find her disgraced body.

Like with most serial murders, police had no immediate leads on the murder of Teresa Wallin. Because the majority of murders are committed by a person the victim knows, it was very difficult to know where to begin looking after such a random murder, though that is not to say that Sacramento PD didn't try - in particularly Lieutenant Ray Biondi, who would go on to write the book The Vampire Killer about Richard Chase.

The only clues the police had was a set of foot prints in a pool of Theresa's blood, the bullet that ended her life and the one in the mail box, and a series of ring stains that appeared to have been made by a pan or a bucket set on the floor. These ring stains imply that Richard either brought his own bucket or took a bucket from the kitchen. Since Richard was most likely not organized enough to bring a bucket himself it is believed that he found it in the house.

As early as a few days later it is possible that Richard might have begun looking for his next victim as he went door to door asking for old magazines, specifically back issues of Mad Magazine and Cosmopolitan. Though it is impossible to say with certainty whether he was looking for his next victim or if he was acting on schizophrenic impulses. Seeing as Richard's behaviour, as well as his look, was unusual in the neighbourhood, a few of the neighbors reported to the police that they’d seen him walking from house to house.
Later that same month, a couple called the police after they found one of their Labrador puppies dead on their rear patio. The pup had been shot and had its stomach ripped open. When the police asked if they had seen any strange people, they told the police about a skinny, filthy man in an orange jacket who had bought two puppies from them a few days prior.

Lieutenant Biondi, acting on a hunch, and remembering the reports people had made about the magazine hunter that fit the same description, ordered an autopsy on the little pup and found fragments of a .22 bullet. It wasn't enough to match it to the Wallin murder, but it was still a clue, though it wouldn't be enough to catch Richard before he committed one of the worst and most blood-soaked killing sprees in American history. Despite the police’s hard work and tireless efforts, Richard Chase would claim four more victims before they would even know name.

 

45 MINUTES OF HELL

Evelyn Miroth was 38 years old, a single mother of two boys - Vernon, 13 years old and Jason, 6 years old - who lived in the country club center neighborhood of Sacramento.
On January 27th, Evelyn was home with her son Jason and her sister in-law's 20 month-old baby boy, David Ferreira. On that day, Evelyn had planned to send her 6 year old son to play in the snow at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains along with a neighbor, but the plan would never come to fruition because of Richard Chase.
At 9:05 am, Evelyn's friend Danny Meredith came over to the house in a red station wagon. Once there, Evelyn asked him if he could drive out and rent some snow shoes for Jason to take on the trip, something to which Danny happily obliged.

Not long after Danny left the house, Chase entered the home through an unlocked back door. He proceeded into the bathroom where Evelyn was taking a bath and quickly shot her in the head, killing her instantly. He had done the deed quickly and cowardly in order to avoid a struggle, just like he had done with Teresa Wallin. Once Evelyn was dead, Richard dragged her naked body out of the bathroom and into her bedroom, where he laid her on the bed.

What happened next is not known in detail, but it is presumed that 6 year-old Jason heard the gunshot and came into the bedroom just as Richard was laying his mother on the bed. Richard shot the young boy twice in the head at close range and left the body on the floor.

He then got a knife from the kitchen in order to repeat the atrocities he had subjected Teresa Wallin to, but was interrupted when the front door swung open. It was Danny Meredith back with the snow shoes for Jason. Chase walked out of the kitchen and met Danny in the hall with the .22 caliber ready in his hand. Richard immediately raised his gun and shot Danny between the eyes. It is after murdering Danny Meredith that Richard noticed the sounds of the 20 month-old crying infant coming from one of the bedrooms. Following the wails, he found the baby lying in a crib. He pointed the gun at the small head of the baby boy and pulled the trigger.

Richard then returned to the bedroom with two carving knives from the kitchen and began to emulate the blood ritual he had performed on the corpse of Teresa Wallin. First he cut open Evelyn's stomach, sternum to navel, then cut again across her belly and pulled out her intestines. He stabbed her deliberately in specific organs, again leaving only the kidneys unscathed. He took out the liver, cut off a piece and ate it. Then he proceeded to pull out the rest of the organs and collected as much blood as he could from the abdomen of Evelyn. Where this murder is different from Teresa's is that Chase decided to take it even further. He rolled Evelyn's body over on its stomach and stabbed the anus six times before he sodomized the wound. He then rolled her back over and sliced her neck open before he carefully cut out one of her eyes. Richard had done all he wanted with the body of Evelyn Miroth, but his work was not done.

Richard went back to bedroom where the dead infant was, brought the body back to the bathroom where he split the head open and partially dumped the baby's brains into the bathtub. It was then that a knock came from the front door.

The family across the street were still waiting for Jason to come over so they could go on their trip. After waiting for a while and not hearing anything, the mother next door sent her young daughter to check on why it was taking so long. Luckily Richard Chase did not open the door. Instead he waited until the little girl left, took Danny Meredith's keys to the red station wagon and escaped unseen by anyone with a bucket of blood and the body of the 20 month-old baby boy.

The crime scene was discovered 30 minutes later when a worried neighbor opened the back door and saw Danny Meredith's corpse lying in the hall. The murder of the two adults, the child and the infant - from the time Richard had entered the house to when he escaped - had taken a mere 45 minutes.

 

FOLLOWING HUNCHES

Police were at a loss about who had committed the atrocious murders, but based on the similar styles of mutilations done on the bodies it was easy to assume that the same person who had murdered Teresa Wallin had also committed the mass murder that had just been uncovered. The police also found the same ring imprints they had discovered in the earlier crime scene on the carpet next to one of the bodies, as well as bullets from the same gun. But there were no fingerprints...

Richard, in a very sudden move, had worn rubber gloves, thus leaving no fingerprints, which reveals, at least to some extent, his ability to tell right from wrong. In addition to wearing gloves, he had dumped his Ranchero truck at the Miroth house and taken Meredith's red station wagon, which he drove to another apartment complex, where he parked it, again proving that he knew what he had done was wrong. All of these elements combined were just enough to cast a shadow of a doubt about the insanity defence later on.

Police found Meredith's car, but found little to link it to Chase - which is surprising considering that Chase was carrying a bucket of blood and the corpse of an infant. However, they would later find out that Richard had parked the car only 100 yards away from his front door.

Most of the time it's a happy accident that killers are caught (Richard Ramirez being a prime example of this), but the situation was not such with Richard Chase. Even though the detectives in this case where either very new detectives or rookie detectives they did an impressive job capturing the Vampire of Sacramento.

With no concrete leads, Lieutenant Biondo decided to try something new that he had learned two years earlier at a seminar hosted by the FBI: psychological profiling. Using the techniques he had learned in combination with crime scene evidence and a few hunches, Biondi was able to make a few assumptions.

The first assumption was that since no witnesses in the suburban neighborhood could remember having seeing any minorities around - this being the late 1970's, a time when people would have noticed - Biondi could assume that the killer was Caucasian. And since the one suspicious person that did show up in the police reports was this skinny, white male in his 20's wearing an orange jacket, it was safe to assume that that was probably their guy.

The second assumption was that he thought that the killer was probably schizophrenic. The crimes were extremely disorganized and occurred in daylight with no real effort to cover the crimes except from the use of gloves. The fact that the crimes had been done with no real regard for witnesses proved that it was obviously an individual who had broken from reality.

Thirdly, Biondi concluded that the killer was most probably a loner, unmarried and out of work as no one would be able to live with or employ someone who was capable of doing such atrocious acts as those murders. That the murders had occurred in regular work hours also supported this theory.

The fourth assumption was that the killer had most probably limited social skills. Biondi could establish from the crime scene that there had not been long interactions with the victims before the murders had been committed, which supported the theory that the perpetrator needed to keep control of the situation and he was not capable of doing this through communication.

The fifth assumption was that the perpetrator had probably been recently released from a mental institution based on the nature of the crimes. And since the crimes had occurred only in a small area, Biondi could conclude that the killer was a new-comer to the area.

Biondi's profile matched Richard Chase perfectly, and the FBI often holds up the Chase case as the gold standard of a disorganized killer profile. (The FBI continues to take credit for Chase being brought in and solving the Richard Chase case, despite the fact that they were not involved in the case in the least - something several books and articles about Richard Chase falsely claim.)

As a city-wide search for baby boy David Ferreira was organized, the police continued to question neighbors of the Miroth family and were told the same story about a skinny, filthy man in his 20's wearing an orange ski parka. This was unfortunately not a great help to Biondi as we have already established that the hippy movement had many skinny, dirty, white males walking around Sacramento. Nevertheless they were able to make a sketch of the filthy man in the parka and send it out.

They also knew that the murderer had used a .22 semi-automatic gun, but the problem with this lied in the fact that .22 semi-automatics were amongst the most popular guns sold at the time. They were in fact so popular that they were known for their reputation of being "murder-weapons".

The lucky break came when Richard's high school friend Nancy Holden - the one who Richard had harassed at the grocery store and possibly planned to kill on the day of the Wallin murder - told her police officer father-in-law about the incident after seeing the sketch of the scrubby stranger.

Following his hunches, Biondi started looking into Richard Chase's file specifically and found that he had a concealed weapons arrest, which alone would have been enough for the police to look into it, but he also noticed that Chase had spent time in a mental institution where we was described as a violent patient. This confirmed a few points of Biondi’s FBI profile, but more convincingly Richard's file also had information about the blood incident at Pyramid Lake, which confirmed a fascination with blood clearly evident in the crime scenes.

Detectives soon found out were Richard lived, drove over and knocked on the door, but Richard didn't answer. They were certain he was inside because they could hear him, but not wanting to compromise the scene by entering without a warrant, the officers made a big show of acting like they were going to leave and return later. The officer's left the building and decided to wait for him by the corner. Sure enough their elaborate scene managed to trick Richard as he was soon spotted walking outside carrying a cardboard box. When the officers yelled for him to stop, Chase threw the box at one of the officers and a whole collection of bloody pieces of paper flew out if the box. (All that was in fact in the box were little, bloody pieces of paper.)

Chase took off in one direction with one officer going after him, while the other officer came around the other corner and bashed him in the head with his gun when Chase appeared. Richard immediately fell to the ground and the officer thought he may had killed him as he lay completely still. But when he went down to put the cuffs on him, Richard started wiggling and jerking around. The officer later stated that Richard was trying to reach into his jacket to get the gun out and he had to throw himself over him in order to keep him from doing so. The officer was in a bind; he couldn't get to his own gun while holding Richard down, and was struggling to keep Richard's arms away from his weapon. Luckily the other officer arrived before Richard managed to reach his gun and they finally got the cuffs on him.

With Richard secure, they searched him and in his back pocket they found Danny Meredith's wallet. In his shoulder holster was the .22 semi- automatic which further went to show that they had the right man. But most disturbing of all is that they also found pictures of Evelyn and Jason Miroth in his pocket. Richard had apparently stolen the photographs from the house after the murder.

 

THE END OF THE REIGN IN BLOOD

When the police got a warrant for Richard's apartment, they discovered a scene that was nothing less of grotesque. Almost everything in the apartment was stained with either dried or fresh blood, down to a loaf French bread that was on the couch. Next to the couch was Richard's blood-soaked sleeping bag.

There were small pieces of bones in the kitchen, and in the fridge they found the body parts of animals on dishes as well as human brain tissue stored in a container. His blender was also badly stained and smelled of rotting flesh.

They also found anatomy text books, health magazines, a marked up psychology article titled UNDERSTIMULATION, a classified section with all the ads for dogs circled and a spiral notebook. The notebook had been filled with handwritten notes, drawings of guns and obscene images as well as swastikas and translations of German words.

(It was later established that Richard thought Nazis were after him and he believed that they were placing radios in his soap. He was obsessed with the Nazis and thought his mother was in communications with them, and also that the Nazis were working in conjunction with UFOs to get him.)

Besides all the gore and carnage, the most disturbing thing the police found in Richard's apartment was a calendar. On the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders, Richard had written the word TODAY. He had also written the same word on 44 more dates in the coming year, which goes to show that Richard had done some planning concerning when he would kill again.

In March of 1978, the body of the infant David Ferreira was found in a cardboard box in a vacant lot between a church and a supermarket.

In police custody, Chase showed displayed no expressions of regret or guilt and willingly described his crimes in detailed manners. Because of this, along with the statements from two psychiatrists who deemed him sane at the time of the crimes, Richard Chase was found guilty on all six murder counts and sentenced to death on May 8th. The trial had lasted for four months, but the jury had deliberated only for five hours before presenting the verdict.

Richard Chase was sent to Death Row in San Quentin State Prison.

One of the things he did to pass the time in prison is that he would lie in his cell and when the trailer would come by, he would hide under the covers and then pop up and laugh maniacally - almost as if playing peek-a-boo with the jailors. Something we can assume was not taken with humor.

His time in prison was not easy as his reputation preceded him and all the other inmates on Death Row knew that he was a baby killer. Because of this, the inmates would collect jars of urine and get it to the person closest to Richard’s cell. This inmate would then splash it all over Chase while he lay in bed.

Richard Trenton Chase would not take his final breath in a gas chamber as the state of California had intended. On December 26th, 1980 – 2 days before the 3 year anniversary of the murder of Ambrose Griffin - Richard Chase, egged on by fellow death row inmates, took a hand full of anti-depressants that he had been hoarding from his daily dose and died from an overdose. He was 30 years old.