On August 3, 1977, Nevada police found a Ford Ranchero stuck in the sand near Pyramid Lake. Inside were two rifles and a pile of clothes, blood smeared across the cab, and a bucket holding a liver. When officers found the driver, Richard Trenton Chase, twenty-seven, he was naked and covered in blood. He ran, and they caught him. He told them the blood was his own, that it had seeped out of his body. Five months later he began killing people in Sacramento, and in the space of a month he shot six, among them a pregnant woman, a six-year-old boy and a baby.
Chase was born on May 23, 1950, in Santa Clara County, California. By his teens he was drinking heavily and using drugs, and in his twenties he developed fixed beliefs about his own body: that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, that his heart kept stopping, that the bones of his skull had separated and were moving. He moved out of his mother's house convinced she was poisoning him. Living alone, he killed rabbits and other small animals and ate their organs, and in 1975, after he injected rabbit blood into his own veins and fell ill, he was committed, and later held at Beverly Manor, a psychiatric facility. He escaped once and turned up at his mother's home, and was returned. He talked to doctors and nurses about killing rabbits and drinking their blood, and many assumed he was inventing it, until he was found one day with blood on his mouth and two dead birds on his windowsill. Whether his illness was paranoid schizophrenia, a psychosis brought on by drugs, or something else was disputed then and afterward.
In 1976 he was released into his mother's care. She took him off his medication and moved him into an apartment, where the roommates soon left. He went on torturing dogs, cats and rabbits and bought several guns. On one visit his mother saw him tear open a dead cat and smear himself with its blood. She never reported it. In December 1977 he bought a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol, registered in his name, and on January 10 he bought ammunition.
On December 27, 1977, a bullet from that gun was fired into the kitchen of a woman who lived a few blocks from the Griffin family in East Sacramento; no one was hurt. Two days later, on December 29, Ambrose Griffin, fifty-one, an engineer and father of two, was helping his wife carry groceries in from the car when he collapsed. She thought it was a heart attack. He had been shot in the chest from a passing car, and he died in the emergency room.
Chase later told detectives he went from house to house trying doors: a locked door meant he was not welcome, and an open one was an invitation. On January 23, 1978, a woman on Burnece Street watched a young man with long, unkempt hair try her patio door and her windows, find them locked, and walk away. That day he walked through the unlocked door of the home of Teresa Wallin, twenty-two, who was three months pregnant with a son she and her husband, David, planned to name Dane. He shot her, then stabbed and mutilated her body, collected her blood in a container and drank it. David Wallin came home and found her. "I had no idea where I was, or who or what I had seen," he said decades later.
Earlier that same day, by the account later pieced together, a homeowner named Robert Edwards had run him out of his house, and at the Town and Country Village shopping center he had walked up to a woman he had gone to high school with. Nancy Holder, named Holden in some accounts, barely recognized him; she remembered a clean-cut, studious boy, and the man in front of her was gaunt and unkempt. He asked her whether she had been on the motorcycle when Kurt was killed, a boyfriend of hers who had died in an accident ten years before. While he paid for something she walked out to her car and drove off.
The Wallin killing brought in the FBI. Russ Vorpagel, an agent in the bureau's young behavioral unit, and Robert Ressler worked up a profile from the scene: a white man in his mid-to-late twenties, thin, malnourished, unclean, living alone, with a history of serious mental illness, a man who had not planned the crime and had done little to hide what he had left behind, and who would kill again soon. Four days later he did.
Four days later, on January 27, the door of Evelyn Miroth's house was open. Miroth, thirty-eight, was home with her six-year-old son, Jason, and was babysitting her twenty-two-month-old nephew, David Ferreira. Daniel Meredith, fifty-one, a friend, was there too. Chase shot Meredith in the hallway, then Jason, then Evelyn Miroth, whose body he mutilated and drank from, and then the baby. A knock at the door, a child who had come to play, startled him. He took the baby's body and drove off in Meredith's car. The child went to a neighbor, who called the police. Chase had left his palm prints and shoe prints in blood.
The alert went out for a thin, disheveled man in an orange parka, and police released a sketch. When the description and the profile reached the newspapers, Nancy Holder remembered that the man at the shopping center had been wearing an orange parka, and she called detectives. They found the pistol registered to him and his record: the psychiatric commitment and escape, a concealed weapons charge, drug arrests and the Pyramid Lake incident. Officers went to his apartment on Watt Avenue. He would not open the door, so they waited down the hall, and when he came out carrying a box they took him. He had Meredith's wallet on him, and everything was stained with blood.
The apartment was soaked in blood. Investigators found blood-soaked clothing, knives and dishes, animal parts and bone fragments, blenders holding residue of blood and organs, and newspaper clippings about the killings. Parts of David Ferreira's body were found in the apartment. In questioning Chase admitted only to killing some dogs and would not talk about the murders. The squalor matched what Vorpagel and Ressler had predicted.
The case was too notorious to try in Sacramento, and on a change of venue it went a hundred and twenty miles south to Santa Clara County, where the trial opened in Palo Alto on January 2, 1979. Chase pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. By the end, about a dozen psychiatrists had examined him, and they did not agree: one concluded he had an antisocial personality rather than schizophrenia, that his thinking was organized and that he knew what he had done and that it was wrong, and he told one of them he was afraid his victims would come back for him from the dead. The prosecution kept returning to the rubber gloves he had brought to the victims' houses, evidence, it said, that he had gone there meaning to kill. The defense asked for second degree verdicts, arguing that his psychiatric history and the chaos of the crimes ruled out premeditation. On May 8, 1979, after about five hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him on six counts of first degree murder. In the sanity phase that followed it deliberated for about an hour and found him legally sane, and he was sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
On death row at San Quentin he told the FBI agent Robert Ressler, in a series of interviews, that he had killed because Nazis and UFOs were poisoning his blood. Other prisoners, who knew what he had done, urged him to kill himself. He saved up the Sinequan, an antidepressant, that the prison doctor prescribed him, and on December 26, 1980, a guard found him dead in his cell of an overdose. He was thirty. He had never been executed, and his appeal was never decided.