Richard Trenton Chase was born in Santa Clara County, California, on May 23, 1950. He wet the bed, set fires and killed animals as a child, the three behaviours the older literature groups as the Macdonald triad, and by his teens he was drinking heavily and taking LSD. In his twenties he developed a set of fixed beliefs about his own body: that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, that his heart kept stopping, that his cranial bones had come apart and were moving around, for which he shaved his head so that he could watch them.
He moved out of his mother's house convinced she was poisoning him, and shared a flat until his flatmates gave up and left it to him. Alone there he caught rats and rabbits, ate them raw, and blended their organs with Coca-Cola and drank it, to stop his heart shrinking. In 1975 he injected rabbit blood into his own vein and gave himself septicaemia, and was involuntarily committed. Staff at the hospital called him Dracula after he was found with blood round his mouth, having caught and drained two birds. Whether he had paranoid schizophrenia or a drug-induced psychosis was argued over then and afterwards. The press called him the Vampire of Sacramento and the Dracula Killer.
He was released in 1976 as no longer a danger, into his mother's care. She decided the antipsychotics were turning her son into a zombie and weaned him off them, and helped him get a flat of his own. He bought a handgun and a dog, and started with the dog.
On December 29, 1977, he shot fifty-one-year-old Ambrose Griffin from a moving car as Griffin was carrying groceries into his house. On January 23, 1978, he walked into the unlocked house of David and Teresa Wallin and shot Teresa, who was twenty-two and three months pregnant. He then mutilated the body, collected her blood in a yoghurt pot and drank it. He told detectives afterwards that a locked door meant he was not welcome and an unlocked one meant he was, which is the whole reason he chose the houses he did.
On January 27 he went into the home of Evelyn Miroth, thirty-eight. He shot her neighbour Daniel Meredith in the hallway, then Evelyn's six-year-old son Jason, then Evelyn herself, then her twenty-two-month-old nephew David Ferreira, whom she was minding. He mutilated and drank from Evelyn's body, and took David's away with him. He was interrupted by a child knocking at the door for a playdate, and left in Meredith's car. The child raised the alarm. He had left palm prints and shoe prints in blood across the house.
He was arrested the next day. The FBI profile prepared for the case, by Robert Ressler and Russell Vorpagel, described a thin, unkempt, undernourished white man in his twenties with a history of mental illness living alone in squalor within a mile of the scenes, and it fitted him closely enough that it became one of the founding examples used to argue for behavioural profiling.
He was tried in Palo Alto in 1979. The defence sought second degree murder on the grounds of his psychiatric history and the absence of planning. On May 8, 1979, the jury convicted him on six counts of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. On death row he gave Ressler a series of interviews in which he explained that he had killed because Nazis and UFOs were poisoning his blood and turning it to powder, and asked for a radar gun so that the Nazi UFOs could be brought to trial. He hoarded the antidepressants prescribed by the prison doctor, and on December 26, 1980, a guard found him dead in his cell. He was thirty.