Richard Trenton Chase shot and killed six people in Sacramento, California, between December 29, 1977, and January 27, 1978. He was unemployed and living alone in an apartment on Watt Avenue, and he had spent years in and out of psychiatric care. The victims were Ambrose Griffin, an engineer shot outside his house; Teresa Wallin, a young pregnant woman killed in her home; and four people killed in a single attack at the home of Evelyn Miroth: Evelyn Miroth herself, her six-year-old son, Jason, a family friend, Daniel Meredith, and the infant nephew she was babysitting, David Ferreira.
He was caught within days of the last killings, after a woman who had known him at school recognized him from a police description. In May 1979 a jury in Santa Clara County found him guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, rejected his plea that he was insane, and sentenced him to death. He died at San Quentin State Prison on December 26, 1980, of an overdose of medication he had saved up. The press called him the "Vampire of Sacramento," the name under which local television still refers to the case.
Chase was born on May 23, 1950, according to a 2021 account in the Sacramento News & Review. Two writers for that paper, David A. Kulczyk and Josie Klakström, describe a troubled childhood: by about the age of 10 he was setting fires and harming animals, and Kulczyk writes that he was killing cats by then. In his teens he used drugs heavily.
At 18 he moved out on his own. Klakström writes that roommates left because of his erratic, drug-driven behavior, and that he went back home for a time, shaved his head and became convinced that he was being poisoned. A psychiatrist who saw him considered paranoid schizophrenia but also thought drugs might explain his state, and Chase left a 72-hour period of hospital observation before it was over. He went on killing small animals, including rabbits, and neighborhood pets disappeared.
In 1975, after an act of self-harm involving animal blood left him with blood poisoning, he was committed involuntarily to Beverly Manor, a psychiatric facility, where doctors diagnosed severe schizophrenia, according to Klakström. About a year later he escaped and was quickly returned. He was released in 1976 into family custody.
After his release, Kulczyk writes, Chase stopped taking his medication, bought a gun and began breaking into houses. Klakström says he bought several guns and continued to harm animals.
On December 27, 1977, a woman in Sacramento reported that a man had fired a shot at her home. Two days later, on December 29, Ambrose Griffin, 51, was shot as he unloaded his car in the driveway of his house on Robertson Avenue after a shopping trip. Klakström describes the shooting as a random drive-by and says a .22-caliber casing from it matched the earlier shot at the woman's home. Griffin was an engineer. He died, and for a time the case went unsolved.
In January 1978 a man named Robert Edwards found an intruder inside his family's house and chased him out; the intruder got away by jumping a fence. The intruder was Chase. Klakström places the Edwards incident a few days before the Wallin killing.
On January 23, 1978, Teresa Wallin, 22, was taking out the trash at her home on Tioga Way, in the Sacramento area, when Chase walked in through the unlocked front door. He shot her, and her body was mutilated. She was pregnant. Her husband, David Wallin, came home from work that evening and found her.
Thirty-six years later, David Wallin told CBS13 in Sacramento that the memory had never left him, and that the worst of it was that he had been the one who came home after a hard day at work and found her.
Chase later explained, in words attributed to him by Klakström, how he picked houses: "If the door was locked, that means you're not welcome."
Four days after Teresa Wallin's death, on January 27, 1978, Chase found the door of Evelyn Miroth's house on Merrywood Drive unlocked. Miroth, 38, was home with her six-year-old son, Jason, and was babysitting her nephew, David Ferreira, an infant whose age is given as 20 months by Kulczyk and 22 months by Klakström. Daniel Meredith, 51, a friend, was visiting.
Chase shot Meredith in the hallway. He shot Jason and Evelyn Miroth, and her body was mutilated. He left with the baby, and he took Meredith's car, which was later found a few blocks away with the engine still running. In his hurry, Klakström writes, he left bloody footprints throughout the house. Detectives matched the shoe prints there to those at the Wallin house, Kulczyk writes.
Investigators questioned many people in the area. Tips described an odd, hippie-like man in the neighborhood, Kulczyk writes, but only one witness gave even a partial description, according to Klakström: among other things, a man in an orange parka.
Two FBI agents, Robert Ressler and Russ Vorpagel, drew up a profile of the man the police were seeking. As Klakström summarizes it, the profile described a white man of 25 to 27, thin and undernourished-looking, single, unemployed and a loner, with a history of mental illness and drug use, no military service, and a record of dropping out of high school or college. It predicted that he lived within about a mile of where the stolen station wagon had been abandoned, that his home would be slovenly and would hold evidence of the crimes, and that he was probably suffering from paranoid psychosis. It also suggested he might live with his parents, though it considered that unlikely.
The break came from a woman who had been at school with Chase. Nancy Holder had run into him at the Town and Country Village shopping center on the day of the Edwards break-in, according to Klakström. At first she did not recognize him; he was, in Klakström's phrase, a shadow of the boy he had been at school. He asked her, "Were you on the motorcycle when Kurt was killed?" She felt uneasy and left the store.
When the police description was made public, Holder realized that the man at the shopping center had been wearing the same orange parka, and she called the police. Investigators ran a background check on Chase and found a .22-caliber gun registered in his name.
Officers went to Chase's apartment on Watt Avenue. He would not open the door. They waited in the hallway, and when he came out they took hold of him. He was wearing the orange parka and carrying a box, and he had Daniel Meredith's wallet on him. Klakström dates the arrest January 27, 1978. Notes kept with KCRA-TV's news film of the case, now in the Center for Sacramento History, record January 28, 1978, as the first day of the search.
Inside, police found human remains in the apartment, as well as pet collars. They also found a calendar on which the dates of the Wallin and Miroth killings were circled and marked "Today," and on which 44 more dates were circled, according to Kulczyk.
On March 24, 1978, a janitor found the remains of David Ferreira behind the parking lot of the Arcade Wesleyan Church, near Chase's apartment. Meredith's car keys were in the box.
Chase was charged with six counts of murder. Pretrial publicity in Sacramento was so heavy that the trial was moved to Santa Clara County. KCRA-TV, which covered the case from the search of his apartment through the trial, recorded his appearance in court on February 14, 1978, and trial coverage in May 1979, according to the notes kept with its film.
Chase's defense rested on his mental illness, and the jury decided his guilt and, in a separate phase, his sanity.
On May 8, 1979, the jury found Chase guilty of all six counts of first-degree murder. Kulczyk reports that the jury reached its verdicts after about five hours of deliberation. In the sanity phase, Klakström writes, the jury took about an hour to find him legally sane, and then about four more hours to decide that he should die in the gas chamber. He was sentenced to death, to be carried out in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
Chase was taken to San Quentin State Prison. There, Klakström writes, other prisoners reportedly urged him to kill himself. He agreed to meet the FBI agent Robert Ressler, and in their interviews he talked about Nazis and aliens, about his beliefs concerning his own blood, and about how he chose his victims. Ressler later wrote about the interviews in his book Whoever Fights Monsters, according to Klakström.
On December 26, 1980, Chase was found dead in his cell. He was 30. He had been prescribed Sinequan, an antidepressant, and had been saving the pills rather than taking them, Kulczyk writes; Klakström says he had been saving them for weeks and took them all at once. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, in its list of condemned prisoners who have died since 1978, gives his date of death as December 26, 1980, and the cause as suicide. ABC10 in Sacramento has described him as dying while awaiting execution. He was never executed.
Kulczyk wrote that the addresses of the houses where the killings took place were later changed, except for the Miroth house, which was torn down and replaced.
In October 2014 a haunted house attraction on Auburn Boulevard in Sacramento used scenes based on the killings to frighten its customers. The Wallin family contacted CBS13. David Wallin said it was a slap in the face that others were profiting from grief, and his daughter said the scenes were plainly reenactments of each of the murders. "He's lived through enough," she said. After CBS13 began asking questions, the organizers changed the theme and apologized.
The KCRA-TV news film of the arrest and trial, five reels of 16 mm footage with reporting by Spencer Michaels, courtroom sketches and courthouse scenes, is held by the Center for Sacramento History and was digitized through California Revealed in 2019. Klakström wrote in 2021 that the FBI still cites the case as an example of a disorganized killer, the category of offender the Ressler and Vorpagel profile described.
Proven by the jury's verdicts: six killings of the first degree, in three separate attacks, on December 29, 1977, January 23, 1978, and January 27, 1978, and the finding that he was legally sane. No appellate ruling on the verdicts before his death was reported.
Points on which the accounts differ: the date of the arrest (January 27, 1978, in the Sacramento News & Review in 2021; KCRA's notes record January 28 as the first day of the search); David Ferreira's age (20 months or 22 months); and how long the jury took (about five hours to reach the guilty verdicts in Kulczyk's account; one hour for sanity and four for penalty in Klakström's). The catalog description of the KCRA film gives the dates of the killings as December 1978 to January 1979, which is a year late.
Not reported: the formal sentencing date, the name of the trial judge and lawyers, the courthouse where the trial was held, and the coroner's findings. The diagnosis recorded at Beverly Manor in 1975 was severe schizophrenia, according to Klakström; the reports do not describe the psychiatric testimony at trial.
May 23, 1950: Richard Trenton Chase is born.
1975: committed to Beverly Manor after blood poisoning; diagnosed with severe schizophrenia.
About 1976: escapes, is returned, and is released into family custody.
December 27, 1977: a woman in Sacramento reports a shot fired at her home.
December 29, 1977: Ambrose Griffin, 51, is shot in his driveway on Robertson Avenue.
January 1978: Robert Edwards chases an intruder, Chase, from his house; Chase speaks to Nancy Holder at Town and Country Village.
January 23, 1978: Teresa Wallin, 22, is killed in her home on Tioga Way.
January 27, 1978: Evelyn Miroth, 38, Jason Miroth, 6, and Daniel Meredith, 51, are killed and David Ferreira is taken from the Miroth home on Merrywood Drive.
January 27 or 28, 1978: Chase is arrested outside his Watt Avenue apartment.
February 14, 1978: appears in court (KCRA film notes).
March 24, 1978: David Ferreira's remains are found behind the Arcade Wesleyan Church.
May 8, 1979: a Santa Clara County jury finds him guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, finds him sane and fixes the penalty at death.
December 26, 1980: found dead in his cell at San Quentin of an overdose of hoarded Sinequan; listed by CDCR as a suicide.
October 2014: a Sacramento haunted house drops a theme based on the killings after the Wallin family objects.
2019: KCRA's film of the case is digitized by the Center for Sacramento History.