Richard Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of killing 13 people in Los Angeles County between June 1984 and August 1985. He came into their homes at night, through windows and doors that were open or that he forced, and he shot, stabbed, beat or strangled them. Women in the houses he entered were raped, and some were made to swear to Satan. He took jewelry, cash and electronics and sold them. He drew pentagrams at some of the scenes. The press called the unknown attacker the Night Stalker, and through the summer of 1985 people across Southern California shut their windows in the heat, bought locks, guns and guard dogs.
He was 25, a drifter and petty thief from El Paso, Texas, who lived in cheap hotels in downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco. Detectives linked the attacks through shoe prints, bullets and stolen property, then got a name from a fingerprint left in a stolen car. On August 30, 1985, they released his photograph. The next morning residents of an East Los Angeles street caught him as he tried to take a car and held him until police came. His trial lasted more than a year. A jury found him guilty on all 43 counts, and he was sentenced to death. He died on death row in 2013. In 2009 San Francisco police said DNA linked him to the 1984 killing of a 9-year-old girl, a case never charged.
Ramirez was born on February 29, 1960, in El Paso, Texas, according to Britannica, which gives his birth name as Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez. He was the youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez. United Press International, reporting from El Paso a week after his arrest, described his father as a resident alien who worked at the nearby railyards, and the family's street, Ledo Street, as a single block of concrete lined with rusting cars and chain-link fences, near passing trains and amid youth gangs and graffiti. As a child he went to El Calvario, a Catholic church that was later torn down for an elevated highway.
People who knew him told UPI that he had withdrawn from his family and friends by the age of 9 or 10. He stayed in his room with the radio, wandered at night, and spent time at video arcades and a convenience store. A childhood friend, Ray Garcia, recalled that he lived on chocolate and Pepsi. He did not join the neighborhood gangs. His sister, Rosa Flores, said he had epilepsy, although authorities were not sure of it. He was an average student at Lincoln and Cooley elementary schools. After a stay at a Texas youth camp for juvenile offenders, where he received counseling, he went back to junior high. He failed the ninth grade twice and left Jefferson High School at 17. "He was a quiet guy, never got involved in violence, vandalism," the assistant principal, Cesar Mendoza, told UPI. Mendoza said the boy was often truant, and that he had tried without success to get him to play sports, since he was already six feet one.
He was nicknamed "Ricky the Klepto." He stole, UPI reported, often by climbing through open windows at night. As an adult in El Paso he was arrested three times: twice for drug possession and once for reckless driving, when police found a toy cap gun, a ski mask and a stolen wallet in the car he was driving. A marijuana charge was dropped after he finished a pretrial counseling program. Friends said he used cocaine and marijuana heavily and burglarized homes to pay for drugs. He had become interested in Satan and devil worship, they said, and two years before his arrest he had a tattoo artist put a pentagram on his hand. He was devoted to the Australian band AC/DC, especially its 1979 album Highway to Hell, and wore an AC/DC cap. His father told UPI, "When he wanted to do something, he did it," and said the two had not spoken in three years because of the drugs.
David Hancock, then an El Paso Times reporter, was the first journalist to speak to the family after the arrest. He later wrote for CBS News that the father told him, in Spanish, that he blamed drugs for his son's troubles and did not know whether his son had committed the killings.
Ramirez left El Paso for California in 1978, according to a 2013 Associated Press account carried by KVIA in El Paso; UPI's 1985 profile said 1979. He lived at first with his brother, Julian Jr., in Los Angeles and then moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He held no steady job. His sister said he had once worked as a street sweeper, but reporters found no record of regular work.
In Los Angeles he stayed in skid row hotels, including the Hotel Cecil and the Hotel Huntington, UPI reported. Los Angeles Magazine wrote in 2026 that he stored stolen goods at the downtown Greyhound station and fenced them near his room at the Cecil. In San Francisco he lived from time to time in residential hotels in the Tenderloin. The San Francisco Examiner reported in 2009 that he was believed to have stayed at two of them in the spring of 1984, at 373 Ellis Street and 561 Mason Street. He also had a girlfriend in the East Bay, according to Greg Suhr, who was San Francisco's police chief in 2013 and had worked the case as a young officer.
He used several names. When police identified him in 1985, Los Angeles Sheriff Sherman Block listed his aliases as Richard Mena, Richard Moreno, Richard Munoz, Noah Jimenez and Nicholas Adame. On December 12, 1984, he was arrested for driving a stolen car, under the name Richard Munoz. Court records noted needle marks on both arms. He was released on January 23, 1985. The booking photograph from that arrest is the one police released eight months later.
The earliest killing now attributed to Ramirez took place in San Francisco. Mei Leung was 9 years old. She lived with her family in a residential hotel at 765 O'Farrell Street in the Tenderloin, and on April 10, 1984, she was found dead in the building's basement. The case went unsolved for 25 years. San Francisco Police Inspector Holly Pera had been a new patrol officer in the neighborhood in 1984. "It's the type of case as a new officer, a case involving a little girl, that you don't forget," she told NBC Bay Area. About five years before 2009 she reopened it, and with Inspector Joseph Toomey she had the department's crime lab test evidence that had been stored since 1984, before DNA profiling was routine.
A criminalist produced a DNA profile from an item that the lab's DNA technical leader, Matthew Gabriel, called extremely difficult to analyze. Police did not say what the item was. The profile was searched against CODIS, the national DNA database, then holding samples from about 1.2 million people, and it returned a match to Ramirez, who had been on death row since 1989. In October 2009 Pera and Toomey went to San Quentin with a warrant for a fresh sample to confirm the match. He cooperated. "He made no comment," Pera said. The family, who still lived in the Bay Area, was told. Deputy Chief David Shinn said, "It's painful for them. Hopefully it brings closure."
The San Francisco Examiner later reported that the confirming test took about 11 months and allowed police to close the case. No charge was ever filed. Ramirez was never tried for Mei Leung's death, and it remains a killing attributed to him by police on the strength of the DNA evidence, not one of his convictions.
The first of the 13 murders for which Ramirez was convicted was the killing of Jennie Vincow, 79, in Glassell Park, Los Angeles. On the afternoon of June 28, 1984, her son, Jack Vincow, came to her home and found her dead in her bedroom. The screen was missing from an open living room window and the front door was unlocked. Police found the screen on the living room floor and lifted fingerprints from it. The prints were identified as Ramirez's after his arrest.
Months passed before the next attack that went to trial. In the spring of 1985 the killings resumed and came quickly.
On the night of March 17, 1985, Maria Hernandez came home to the condominium she shared with Dale Okazaki in Rosemead. In the garage a man shot at her, and the bullet struck her hand. She ran. When she came back, the door was ajar and Okazaki lay dead on the kitchen floor, shot in the forehead at close range. Outside the garage police found a blue cap bearing the AC/DC name; an associate of Ramirez later said it looked like one he wore. Hernandez picked Ramirez out of a lineup after his arrest and identified him again at trial.
About midnight the same night, in Monterey Park, a man forced Tsai-Lian Yu's car to stop, pulled her out and shot her twice in the chest. Two witnesses, Jorge Gallegos and Joseph Duenas, saw the struggle. A police officer found her still breathing but unconscious, and she died at the hospital. Gallegos noted the license plate of the attacker's car and identified Ramirez at trial. The .22 caliber bullet from her body and the one that killed Dale Okazaki came from the same gun, which also fired the bullet recovered from Lela Kneiding that July.
On the evening of March 28, 1985, Bruno Polo, who managed Vincent Zazzara's pizzerias, noticed the door of the Zazzara home standing ajar. The next morning he went in and found Vincent and Maxine Zazzara dead. Both had been shot in the head at close range, and Maxine had also been stabbed. Someone had taken the screen off a patio window, pried the window open and set a bucket beneath it. On the bucket and in the flower bed were prints from an Avia athletic shoe. Two .22 caliber bullets taken from Maxine Zazzara matched the gun used in July to kill Chainarong K. in Sun Valley.
On May 9, 1985, an intruder removed the louvers from a kitchen window of a house in Monrovia, standing on a patio chair to reach it. An Avia print was left on the kitchen sink, and so was a palm print later matched to Ramirez.
At about 5 a.m. on May 14, an emergency operator in Monterey Park took a call from a man saying, "Help me, help me." Firefighters found the gate and door of the Doi home open. William Doi, 65, had been shot in the head with a .22 caliber pistol and died. His wife had been beaten. She had suffered a stroke before the attack and could not testify. The screen had been taken off a bathroom window, and Avia footprints were outside. The murder weapon, a Jennings semiautomatic pistol, was later recovered from Jose Perez, a convicted felon who said he had got it from Ramirez. Mrs. Doi's wallet and jewelry turned up with Felipe Solano, who had bought them from Ramirez. A newspaper carrier, Launie Dempster, had seen Ramirez in a parked car near the house about 90 minutes before the call.
On May 30, in Burbank, a woman woke to find a man with a gun in her room. He handcuffed her 12-year-old son, and he sexually assaulted her. She identified Ramirez in a lineup and at trial, and jewelry taken from her was recovered from Solano.
The next attack the court record describes was on two sisters, Mabel Bell, 83, and her sister, 79, in their home. A neighbor, Carlos Valenzuela, noticed newspapers piling up in the driveway, went in through an unlocked door and found them. Mabel Bell had a fractured skull. She never regained consciousness and died about a month later, in July 1985. Her sister was bound and sexually assaulted and survived, but she could not communicate with police. A pentagram had been drawn on Mabel Bell's thigh and on the wall above her sister. A partial shoe print on a clock was consistent with an Avia shoe, and items from the house were recovered from Solano. This was the incident for which the defense later offered an alibi.
On July 2, 1985, in Arcadia, Frank Starich saw a window screen lying on the porch of his neighbor Mary Cannon, a widow in her eighties, and her newspaper still in the driveway. He let himself in with a spare key and found her dead. She had been strangled, beaten and stabbed. A bedroom window was open and its screen removed. There were Avia prints on the carpet and on a tissue. A blood sample from the house did not match Ramirez's blood type, a point the defense later raised.
On July 5 a 16-year-old girl, identified in the court record only by her first name and initial, woke in her bed covered in blood and called her father, who telephoned police. She had been struck repeatedly with a tire iron and strangled, and she survived with severe head injuries. The screen had been removed from her bedroom window. An Avia print was found in the room. CBS News, drawing on case records shown in a 2021 documentary, placed the attack in Sierra Madre.
On July 7, in Monterey Park, a neighbor noticed that the screen had been taken off a bedroom window of Joyce Nelson's house, saw the front door ajar and called police. Joyce Nelson, 60, had been beaten and strangled. An Avia print lay in the flower bed below the window. Launie Dempster, the newspaper carrier who had seen Ramirez near the Doi house, saw him walking to a car parked next to the Nelson house between 3 and 4:30 that morning.
At about 3:30 the same morning, also in Monterey Park, an intruder came in through a bent cat door, handcuffed a woman, robbed her, and sexually assaulted her. A neighbor who was a deputy sheriff heard her calls for help. She identified Ramirez at a lineup and at trial, and her jewelry was recovered from Solano.
On the morning of July 19, 1985, the daughter of Maxon and Lela Kneiding went looking for her parents in Glendale when they did not arrive for a breakfast meeting. She found them dead in their bed. Both had been shot and both had been cut. The .22 caliber bullet from Lela Kneiding matched the gun that killed Dale Okazaki and Tsai-Lian Yu. Their daughter later identified jewelry that Solano had bought from Ramirez.
Early on July 20 an intruder came through a sliding screen door into a house in Sun Valley. Chainarong K. was shot in the head and killed. His wife was sexually assaulted, and their 8-year-old son was tied up and struck. Avia prints were found on the front and rear porches and inside. She identified Ramirez in a lineup, and her jewelry and a suitcase were recovered from Solano. The bullet that killed her husband matched the gun used on the Zazzaras.
On August 5, 1985, a gunman came through an unlocked sliding glass door into the home of Christopher and Virginia Petersen, in Northridge. He shot Virginia in the face and Christopher in the head. Both survived; Christopher Petersen drove his wife to the hospital himself. Virginia identified Ramirez at a lineup and at trial. The weapon was a .25 caliber gun.
Three nights later, on August 8, a sliding glass door was pried open at a house in Diamond Bar. Elyas A. was shot in the head in his bed and killed. His wife was beaten, handcuffed and sexually assaulted. Their 3-year-old son was bound; there was also a baby in the house. The boy was sent to a neighbor's home, and the neighbor found his mother and called police. The .25 caliber bullet that killed Elyas A. matched the one fired in the Petersen house. His wife identified Ramirez at a lineup and at trial, and a television, a video recorder and jewelry from the house were recovered from Solano.
By August, the fear had spread well beyond the neighborhoods where the attacks occurred. Evidence at the 1986 hearing on moving the trial recorded that Neighborhood Watch participation in Los Angeles had probably doubled and that gun sales had tripled. The Los Angeles Times obituary of the lead prosecutor, Philip Halpin, said that handgun sales doubled that summer and that sales of locks and window bars climbed. The UPI report announcing the suspect's name noted surges in sales of guns, guard dogs and home security. Glynn Martin, a retired Los Angeles police sergeant who later wrote a history of that summer, told Los Angeles Magazine in 2026 that people who had never owned guns bought them, people locked their windows, and some spread gravel around their homes so they would hear anyone approaching.
The Los Angeles Herald Examiner's photo files, now held by the Los Angeles Public Library, preserve part of the public record of those months: an LAPD artist's composite drawn on July 21, 1985; an August 6 caption about the search after the Sun Valley killing; and an August 10 caption noting that victims had described the attacker's prominently gapped, discolored teeth. A later caption, written for the paper in 1989, said that residents of quiet, middle-class neighborhoods across Southern California had felt unsafe throughout the summer of 1985.
When police released the suspect's identity on August 31, the task force of 50 detectives believed the Night Stalker responsible for 16 killings and about two dozen rapes and assaults, including at least four children believed to have been abducted, molested and released, UPI reported. Rewards totaling 70,000 dollars had been offered.
The attacks crossed the boundaries of a dozen police agencies, and at first the cases did not look connected. The victims were men and women, young and old; some were shot and some were beaten or stabbed. Gil Carrillo, a young Los Angeles County Sheriff's homicide detective, was the first to argue that one man was responsible, FOX 11 Los Angeles reported in 2021, and other detectives initially rejected the idea. He was paired with Frank Salerno, a veteran of the department's homicide bureau who had led the investigation that identified the Hillside Strangler killers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, in the late 1970s. Salerno coordinated the task force formed to find the killer.
The clearest link was a shoe. Prints from Avia athletic shoes, then a little-known brand, turned up at scene after scene: the Zazzara home, the Monrovia kitchen, the Doi house, the sisters' home, the Cannon and Nelson houses, the teenager's bedroom, and the Sun Valley house. The ballistics added more. One .22 caliber gun fired the bullets that killed Okazaki, Yu and Lela Kneiding; another .22 killed the Zazzaras and Chainarong K.; a .25 was used in Northridge and Diamond Bar. Carrillo later said that he needed more evidence and needed the killer to make a mistake, and that a mistake would come only with more victims, the documentary's director, Tiller Russell, told KCRW in 2021.
On August 23, 1985, after the August 17 attack in San Francisco, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a news conference and said that ballistics tests linked the gun used in San Francisco to the Los Angeles killings and that a shoe print had been found at some scenes. Investigators had asked her not to discuss the evidence, according to people interviewed for a 2019 Fox Nation program. Carrillo was furious, FOX 11 reported. Detectives later said Ramirez threw his shoes away after the disclosure; Martin said he dropped them in the bay near the Golden Gate Bridge. Where the shoes went was not confirmed in court records or contemporary reports.
On August 17, 1985, an intruder entered the home of Peter Pan, 66, an accountant, near Lake Merced in San Francisco. Peter Pan was shot and killed. His wife was sexually assaulted and shot, and she survived. Police found a pentagram and other satanic symbols in the house, and the Los Angeles task force recognized the attack as part of its series. Ramirez was later charged in the Pan case and the case went to a grand jury, the San Francisco Examiner reported in 2009, but it was never prosecuted. "We did not have DNA tests or any of the scientific tools we have today," Frank Falzon, a retired San Francisco Police Department homicide inspector who worked the case, told the Examiner.
San Francisco detectives also worked a separate trail. A Marina District home had been burglarized two days before the Pan attack, and jewelry taken there turned up with a man linked to the name Richard Ramirez. San Francisco police passed his fingerprints to the Los Angeles task force, UPI reported on the day he was named. According to the Examiner, the task force publicized photographs of stolen jewelry, a caller from Lompoc recognized pieces through his mother-in-law, Donna Myers, who knew the man only as "Rick" from El Paso, and an acquaintance, Armando Rodriguez, gave investigators his last name. Myers told UPI that "it was like Satan was his friend." Suhr told CBS San Francisco in 2013 that jewelry Ramirez gave his East Bay girlfriend led her mother to report him to police.
Late in August 1985 the Romero family came home to Mission Viejo, in Orange County, from a camping trip in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. James Romero, 13, went out to the garage after midnight to get a pillow from the family's truck camper and heard footsteps in the gravel. He ran inside, saw a man outside his bedroom window, and then ran out again and saw a tall, stooped man dressed mostly in black get into an orange Toyota station wagon with a chrome roof rack. The car turned and drove past him. "He looked right at me," Romero told Los Angeles Magazine in 2017. He memorized part of the license plate. His parents called police.
Hours later that night, the attacker shot Bill Carns three times in the head as he slept, and sexually assaulted Carns's fiancée. Carns survived. He was at first listed as brain dead, and one bullet stayed lodged between his skull and brain. He lived afterward with paralysis in his left arm and foot, memory loss and difficulty with balance, and moved to Bismarck, North Dakota, to live near his mother, The Forum of Fargo reported. "It hasn't been an easy survival. He took a part of Bill's life," his mother, Anne Carns, said. The Forum gave the date of the attack as August 25, 1985. Romero's description was used for a composite drawing, FOX 11 reported.
The Toyota was a 1976 station wagon that had been stolen from its owner, Bill Gregory, in Chinatown, according to a Herald Examiner photo caption dated August 29, 1985. It was found in a parking lot in the Rampart area of Los Angeles, where a business owner reported it. Police watched it for nearly a day before towing it to the Orange County Sheriff's headquarters in Santa Ana, where Romero looked at it. "That's the one," he told them. The car had been wiped, but technicians fuming it with superglue found one readable print on the back of the rearview mirror. The owner was excluded, and the print was matched by late that week, Los Angeles Magazine reported. CBS News, in a 2021 account drawn from the documentary, said the match was made among eight men named Richard Ramirez in police records, and that an informant then identified a 1984 booking photo.
Late on August 30, 1985, Sheriff Block announced the identification at a news conference. He said investigators had considered keeping the name secret but decided that releasing it would better help the search. He said police were "satisfied" they had the right identity. San Francisco Police Chief Con Murphy said the suspect was probably in the Los Angeles area but could return north. Police described him as 25, six feet one and 155 pounds, with black hair, brown eyes and badly stained teeth, and said his mug shot closely resembled the composite circulated statewide. The photograph ran in newspapers the next morning.
Ramirez did not know. He had gone to Arizona to see his brother, Los Angeles Magazine reported, and he came back to Los Angeles by bus before 8 a.m. on Saturday, August 31. At a liquor store he saw his own face on the front page of the Spanish-language daily La Opinión, Boyle Heights Beat, a community newspaper, reported in 2013. He left downtown on a city bus toward East Los Angeles.
He got off near Hubbard Street. According to the California Supreme Court's account of the trial evidence, he first tried to take the car keys of a woman named Manuela Villanueva. Two men, Frank Moreno and Carmelo Robles, chased him. He then tried to take a car belonging to Faustino Pinon, a red Mustang, in the 3700 block of East Hubbard Street. Jose Burgoin, 57, was watering plants in his yard when he heard a neighbor shouting for help. Ramirez warned him that he would shoot if he came closer. "I did not see any weapons, and with two strong pulls, I took him out of the car," Burgoin told La Opinión in 2013. He sent his two grown children, then 18 and 22, after him; one of them, Julio Burgoin, was later honored for the capture.
Ramirez ran across the street and tried to take the car of Angelina De La Torre. When she refused to hand over her keys he struck her. Her husband, Manuel De La Torre, came out with a steel bar and hit him twice on the head, and the men held him as a crowd gathered. Some of them were carrying the morning paper with his picture. "Then I recognized the eyes from the news last night," Angelina De La Torre said, according to a report UPI repeated in 2013. Police arrived and took him into custody.
The Herald Examiner photographed him, bruised, being led by LAPD detectives into the booking room at the Hollenbeck station. Mayor Tom Bradley went to Hollenbeck to confirm that the man in custody was the suspect, Martin recalled. On September 4, 1985, Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman presented plaques to the men who had caught him, with Sheriff Block present; the Herald Examiner's caption names a sheriff's deputy, Andres Ramirez, along with Carmelo Robles, Manuel De La Torre, Jose Burgoin, Julio Burgoin, Frank Moreno and Faustino Pinon. The capture is remembered in the neighborhood still. A neighbor, Marina Vargas, told Boyle Heights Beat that after the capture she kept locking her doors and windows at night, like many people in Los Angeles. Alan Yockelson, a deputy district attorney who worked on the prosecution, later told ABC7, "A very very dangerous person was taken off the streets."
On the ride to the station Ramirez asked the officer to "just shoot me," and said that "all the killings are going to be blamed on me," according to the trial evidence. At the station, without being questioned, he talked. "I did it, you know," he said, and "You guys got me, the Stalker." He hummed the AC/DC song "Night Prowler" and showed a pentagram drawn on his left shoulder. These statements, which he made before any interrogation, were part of the evidence at trial.
On September 2, 1985, a jail guard saw him bleeding from his palm and using the blood to draw a pentagram and the number 666 on the floor of his cell. Later that fall, at his arraignment on October 24, he displayed a pentagram and the number 666 on his palm and said, "Hail Satan." On October 30, 1986, he called a guard over to show him photographs of two of the victims and spoke of the "blood behind the Night Stalker." The California Supreme Court later cited this conduct when it upheld the trial judge's decision to keep him in restraints in court.
A felony complaint was filed against Ramirez on September 3, 1985, and the public defender was appointed. He appeared in court with the public defender on September 9, 17 and 27. A Herald Examiner caption from September 10 described him in court facing eight charges, including one murder. More were added as the investigation went on. By late October 1985 he had pleaded not guilty to 68 felony counts, UPI reported: 14 murders, five attempted murders, 19 burglaries, six robberies, seven rapes, five counts of forcible oral copulation, seven of sodomy, two of kidnapping and three of lewd acts on children. At that point 15 killings were being blamed on the Night Stalker, 14 in Los Angeles County and one in San Francisco.
The case that reached a jury was smaller. The prosecution conceded that two charges over the death of Patty Higgins had not been properly joined to the rest, and the court dismissed them. The counts involving children did not go to trial. Tiller Russell, who directed the 2021 Netflix series on the case, told KCRW that the cases in which Ramirez was accused of abusing children were never prosecuted, reportedly to spare the victims further trauma. The Orange County attack on Bill Carns and the San Francisco cases were not part of the Los Angeles trial. The final charges covered 43 offenses in 15 incidents involving 24 victims over 14 months, from June 1984 to August 1985.
On October 9, 1985, Municipal Court Judge Elva Soper relieved the public defender on condition that Ramirez sign an agreement retaining a private lawyer, Joseph Gallegos. He did not. Instead, on October 22, he asked to retain two other lawyers, Arturo Hernandez and Daniel Hernandez, who were not related. The judge told the court that neither would qualify for appointment in a capital case under the county bar's plan, which required among other things ten years of bar membership and fifty trials. She noted that both had been held in contempt in Santa Clara County on at least two occasions, and that another contempt matter and a request for sanctions against Daniel Hernandez were pending. She ordered both men to tell Ramirez of any facts that might affect their ability to represent him, and she offered him an independent lawyer, Victor E. Chavez, to review their contract.
On October 24, in chambers, Ramirez said he had read and understood the contract. He declined to talk with Chavez, who had visited him the day before. In open court he substituted the Hernandez lawyers, and the court relieved Gallegos. That same day Gallegos had asked for a psychiatric evaluation, citing a radio report that Ramirez wanted to plead guilty to 14 counts if the counts involving minors were dropped. A psychiatrist appointed earlier had interviewed Ramirez for 10 or 15 minutes before he ended the interview, and had called him borderline in his competence but could not say for sure. A psychiatrist who had watched him in court, Lillian Imperi, told UPI she thought he was psychotic and incompetent to stand trial, though she had not examined him. The court found he answered its questions in a logical and intelligent way. Arturo Hernandez said the lawyers saw him almost daily and found him "very rational, very intelligent."
The prosecutor, Philip Halpin, was a veteran deputy district attorney who had won the retrial of the Onion Field case in the late 1960s. He clashed often with Daniel Hernandez, whom he called a clown, the Los Angeles Times reported in Halpin's obituary.
The preliminary hearing in Municipal Court was set in November 1985 for February 1986 and took place in the spring of 1986. Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times photographers recorded him being brought into court in March 1986, still facing 68 felony counts. On April 14, 1986, the court said there was no evidence that he could not understand the proceedings. James Romero, then 17, testified at the preliminary hearing for about eight hours over two days.
On July 21, 1986, the defense moved to move the trial out of Los Angeles. The hearing took about two months, and the judge watched hours of videotaped news coverage. A survey of 300 eligible jurors, conducted by Paul Strand, in late November 1986 found that 94.3 percent had heard of the case and 51.7 percent believed he was responsible. On January 9, 1987, the court denied the motion. It called the coverage "saturation" but found no reasonable likelihood that he could not get a fair trial in a county as large as Los Angeles. The defense also asked for eight separate trials, and the court refused, ruling that the shoe prints and the sales of stolen property to Solano tied the incidents together.
Jury selection began on July 21, 1988. More than 1,600 prospective jurors were called, the Associated Press reported. The defense challenged the jury pool for underrepresenting Hispanic residents; the court denied the motion on May 31, 1988, after the jury commissioner revised the master list, and the California Supreme Court later found no systematic exclusion. Of the 12 jurors finally seated, one had never heard of the case, and the others knew it only in general terms and said they had formed no opinion. Ramirez chose to wear leg chains in court rather than a less visible but more uncomfortable leg brace. On March 6, 1989, during the prosecution's case, the court appointed a third defense lawyer, Roy Clark, as co-counsel.
Halpin's opening statement framed the case simply: "The essence of this case is burglaries and murders committed during the burglaries." The prosecution's evidence was the fingerprints on the Vincow screen and the palm print on the Monrovia sink; the Avia prints; the bullets matched gun to gun across separate killings; the Jennings pistol recovered from Jose Perez; the property traced to Felipe Solano and identified by survivors and families; the newspaper carrier's sightings; the witnesses from the March 17 shootings; and the survivors who picked Ramirez out of lineups and again in court. James Romero spent eight hours on the stand, sworn in a few feet from Ramirez, he told CBS Los Angeles in 2017.
The defense argued that there was little physical evidence tying Ramirez to particular crimes and that the identifications were unreliable. It called Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist known for research on eyewitness memory, and a police officer, Judith Crawford, who testified that she had seen officers making finger gestures before a lineup. Hair and blood evidence from some scenes did not match him. Sandra Hotchkiss, a convicted burglar, said she had committed burglaries with him and never saw him with a gun or acting violently. His father, who testified as Julian Tapia, said that his son had been in El Paso from May 22 or 23 to May 31, 1985, the period of the attack on Mabel Bell and her sister. To rebut that, the prosecution called David Hancock, the former El Paso Times reporter, who testified that in 1985 the father had told him he had not seen his son in several years.
During the jury's deliberations, after 13 days, one of the jurors, Phyllis Singletary, was found beaten and shot to death in her home. Her boyfriend killed himself the next day and left a note saying he had killed her in an argument, the Associated Press reported. Lawyers said there was no precedent for the situation. Judge Michael Tynan decided to go on with an alternate. "We must get on with the task life has given us," he told the jurors. Jurors said afterward that her death had not influenced their decision.
On September 20, 1989, the jury found Ramirez guilty on all 43 counts: 12 counts of first degree murder, one of second degree murder, five of attempted murder, four of rape, four of forcible sodomy, three of forcible oral copulation and 14 of first degree burglary. It found true special circumstances of multiple murder and of murder in the course of burglary, rape, sodomy and oral copulation. After the verdict he flashed what reporters described as a devil sign at photographers and muttered, "Evil." Halpin said, "These things are not contests. It has not been fun."
At the penalty phase the prosecution told the court on September 20 that it would present no further evidence. The judge gave the defense a week. On September 27, 1989, the defense lawyers announced that they had made a tactical decision to present no evidence at all. Daniel Hernandez said he had found witnesses in El Paso who were willing to testify. In a colloquy on the record, Ramirez said he understood his right to testify, did not wish to, and agreed with his lawyers' choice. The court found his waivers "freely, voluntarily and intelligently made." The jury heard nothing about his childhood or background, and it returned a verdict of death.
On November 7, 1989, Judge Tynan denied a motion to reduce the penalty to life in prison and sentenced Ramirez to death in the gas chamber, plus 59 years and four months for the other felonies. Ramirez, then 29, addressed the court. "I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil," he said. "Lucifer dwells in us all." He told those in the room that he did not need to look beyond it to see "all the liars, the haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards," the Deseret News reported. On the way to the jail bus he told reporters, "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland." At the time California had 265 people under sentence of death and had not used the gas chamber at San Quentin since 1967. Tynan said on the day Ramirez died that it was the most difficult trial he had ever handled.
The length of the trial has been given in different ways. The Deseret News called it a 16-month trial in 1989. The Associated Press later said the trial lasted about a year, that the whole case took four years from arrest to sentence, and that it was one of the longest criminal cases in the country.
Ramirez was sent to San Quentin State Prison in 1989. A prison spokesman, Lieutenant Sam Robinson, said in 2013 that he had arrived acting like a rock star, received more mail than anyone else in the prison, and was far from a model prisoner, though he had become more withdrawn in later years. A following of young women had attended his trial and sent him love letters, and some visited him in prison, the AP reported.
In 1996 he married one of those correspondents, Doreen Lioy, a 41-year-old freelance magazine editor from Richmond, California, in a San Quentin visiting room. She declined to comment to reporters. CBS News reported in 2021 that she left him in 2009. Prison officials did not list her as his next of kin when he died.
Because he was sentenced to death, Ramirez's appeal went directly to the California Supreme Court. His appointed appellate lawyers, Geraldine S. Russell and Nicholas C. Arguimbau, argued the case in June 2006. Russell told the court that the trial had been "the blind leading the blind," and that the two Hernandez lawyers had been held in contempt four times before trial and were often absent during it. Deputy Attorney General Margaret E. Maxwell answered that Ramirez had chosen his own lawyers and that judges should step in only in extreme cases. Justice Carol A. Corrigan asked whether the court should tell him he had "picked two doofuses as attorneys." Arturo Hernandez, by then a San Jose lawyer, told the AP the defense had worked without pay and "did a hell of a good job." Daniel Hernandez had died in 2003.
On August 7, 2006, the court unanimously affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in an opinion by Justice Carlos Moreno. It held that the trial court had not erred in letting Ramirez substitute the lawyers he wanted, since a defendant has a qualified right to retained counsel of his choice and the court had warned him and offered independent advice. Ramirez had not claimed ineffective assistance on the appeal itself, leaving that for habeas corpus. The court rejected his claims on competency, the change of venue, severance, the makeup of the jury pool, a challenge to one juror, the restraints and the photographs of victims shown to the jury. In 2007 the United States Supreme Court declined, without comment, to review the case. Law.com noted after the 2006 ruling that he could still pursue a separate habeas corpus process.
Ramirez was never tried for anything that happened in San Francisco. The Pan case was charged and went to a grand jury but was never prosecuted. Mei Leung's death was linked to him by DNA in 2009 and closed by police without a charge. In 2009 San Francisco's two-person cold case unit, Pera and Toomey, also reviewed other killings from 1984 and 1985 that occurred within reach of the Tenderloin hotels where he had stayed. "He was kind of an opportunist," Pera told the Examiner. Among them were the stabbing deaths of two sisters, Christina Caldwell, 58, and Mary Caldwell, 70, in their Telegraph Hill flat in February 1985; the death of Masataka Kobayashi, the chef who founded the restaurant Masa's, found in his Nob Hill home on November 13, 1984; and the June 2, 1985, shooting of Edward Wildgans, 29, in Cow Hollow, whose girlfriend fought off the attacker. Falzon said he had no doubt Ramirez killed the Caldwell sisters. He told the Examiner that Ramirez had once taunted him, asking whether he would like to know about "those two old ladies," and that Ramirez had "virtually" confessed to him. No charge was filed in any of these cases, and none is attributed to him in any court record.
On the morning of June 7, 2013, Ramirez died at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, where he had been taken from death row for treatment. He was pronounced dead at 9:10 a.m. He was 53. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he died of natural causes. The Marin County coroner's report, released on June 17, 2013, gave the cause as complications of B-cell lymphoma, with chronic substance abuse and hepatitis C infection as contributing factors.
He had spent more than two decades on death row. The department said he was the 59th condemned inmate to die of natural causes since California restored capital punishment in 1978; in the same years 22 had died by suicide and 13 had been executed in California. California then held 735 people under sentence of death.
Greg Suhr, the San Francisco police chief, said, "We're at a better place to not have him here anymore." He remembered taking Ramirez into custody in 1985 in connection with a San Francisco burglary and homicide. "He scared me," Suhr said. "If you saw him you knew something was wrong." Jose Burgoin, the neighbor who had pulled him from the Mustang in 1985, said he regretted that the sentence was never carried out.
Ramirez's convictions and death sentence had been affirmed on direct appeal in 2006, and the US Supreme Court's refusal to review them in 2007 made the judgment final. The Associated Press reported when he died that he still had appeals pending, without saying what they were. What happened to those proceedings after his death was not reported. Because the automatic appeal had already been decided, his death did not undo the convictions; the 13 murder convictions and the other 30 felony convictions stand.
Many of the people who survived his attacks lived with the injuries for decades. Bill Carns could not hold a job after the shooting because of trouble finishing tasks and keeping track of time; he got a driver's license again in 2007. "My injury made everything funny," he told The Forum, describing changes in his personality that his family said had permanently altered a future that once looked bright. James Romero told CBS Los Angeles in 2017, at 45, that testifying had frightened him but that he was glad he had helped solve the case, and he told FOX 11 in 2021 that he still had bad dreams about what could have happened to his family.
The women and children whom Ramirez sexually assaulted, and the girl beaten in July 1985, testified or gave statements under their first names and initials in the court record.
The Herald Examiner's photographs of the case later formed an exhibit at the Los Angeles Public Library, Satan's Summer in the City of Angels: the Social Impact of the Night Stalker. Glynn Martin, a retired LAPD sergeant who became executive director of the Los Angeles Police Memorial Foundation, wrote a book of a similar name about that summer. In January 2021 Netflix released Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, a four-hour documentary series directed by Tiller Russell, built around interviews with Carrillo and Salerno, survivors and reporters who covered the case. Russell said he asked everyone he interviewed why Ramirez had done it and found no clear answer.
The documentary prompted new local reporting. FOX 11 Los Angeles went back to Hubbard Street and, in May 2021, reviewed about 40 boxes of trial exhibits, including handcuffs, an AC/DC cap, and the leather jacket and sunglasses Ramirez wore in court. "I'm just grateful that I don't have to worry about an appeal," Carrillo said. In August 2026 Martin and Carrillo presented a public evening on the investigation in the City of Commerce, Los Angeles Magazine reported.
Proven by final judgment: the 13 murders in Los Angeles County from June 28, 1984, to August 8, 1985, and the 30 other felony counts tried with them, including five attempted murders, rapes and other sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries. The California Supreme Court affirmed every count in 2006.
Attributed, never tried: the killing of Mei Leung, 9, in San Francisco on April 10, 1984, which San Francisco police linked to Ramirez by DNA in 2009 and closed without a charge.
Charged, never tried: the August 17, 1985, killing of Peter Pan and the attack on his wife in San Francisco. Several wire reports in 2009, 2013 and 2022 said that both Peter Pan and his wife were shot to death; that is wrong. CBS San Francisco and the San Francisco Examiner report that his wife survived.
Not tried in the Los Angeles case: the Mission Viejo attack on Bill Carns and his fiancée in August 1985; the counts involving the death of Patty Higgins, dismissed before trial; and the early counts of kidnapping and lewd acts on children, which did not go to trial. The death of Patty Higgins is not attributed to him by any court finding.
Suspected only: the deaths of Christina and Mary Caldwell, Masataka Kobayashi and the shooting of Edward Wildgans in San Francisco, which the city's cold case unit reviewed in 2009. No charge was filed.
Numbers that vary between sources: the count of killings blamed on the Night Stalker at the time (16 in UPI's August 31, 1985, report; 15 in UPI's October 1985 report); the number of felony counts at arraignment (68, including 14 murders) compared with the 43 counts tried (including 13 murders); a 2026 magazine account that he was convicted of 67 felonies and 14 murders, and a 2021 CBS account of 19 death sentences, neither matching the court record; and the claim in some 2009 and 2013 reports that two of the 13 murders for which he was convicted occurred in San Francisco, when all 13 were Los Angeles County counts.
Dates that vary: the verdict is dated September 20, 1989, in the court record and contemporary reports, and September 21 in the Los Angeles Times obituary of Philip Halpin. The year he left El Paso is given as 1978 by the AP and 1979 by UPI. The trial is described as lasting 16 months (Deseret News, 1989), about a year (AP), or four years (AP, counting from arrest to sentence). The date of the Mission Viejo attack is given as August 25, 1985, by The Forum; other accounts say late August.
February 29, 1960: born in El Paso, Texas, youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez.
About 1977: leaves Jefferson High School at 17 after failing the ninth grade twice.
1978 or 1979: moves to California.
April 10, 1984: Mei Leung, 9, is killed in San Francisco's Tenderloin (attributed by DNA in 2009; never charged).
June 28, 1984: Jennie Vincow, 79, is found dead in Glassell Park, Los Angeles.
December 12, 1984: arrested in Los Angeles in a stolen car under the name Richard Munoz; released January 23, 1985.
March 17, 1985: Dale Okazaki is killed and Maria Hernandez wounded in Rosemead; Tsai-Lian Yu is killed in Monterey Park.
March 28, 1985: Vincent and Maxine Zazzara are killed.
May 14, 1985: William Doi, 65, is killed in Monterey Park.
May 30 and 31, 1985: attacks in Burbank and on Mabel Bell, 83, and her sister; Mabel Bell dies in July.
July 2, 1985: Mary Cannon is killed in Arcadia.
July 5, 1985: a 16-year-old girl is beaten and survives.
July 7, 1985: Joyce Nelson, 60, is killed in Monterey Park; another woman is attacked there.
July 19 and 20, 1985: Maxon and Lela Kneiding are found dead in Glendale; Chainarong K. is killed in Sun Valley.
August 5, 1985: Christopher and Virginia Petersen are shot and survive.
August 8, 1985: Elyas A. is killed in Diamond Bar.
August 17, 1985: Peter Pan, 66, is killed in San Francisco; his wife survives.
August 23, 1985: Mayor Dianne Feinstein discloses ballistics and shoe print evidence.
About August 25, 1985: Bill Carns is shot in Mission Viejo; James Romero notes part of the Toyota's plate.
August 29 to 30, 1985: the Toyota is found and a fingerprint identifies Ramirez; his name and photo are released.
August 31, 1985: captured by residents on Hubbard Street, East Los Angeles.
September 3, 1985: felony complaint filed.
October 24, 1985: substitutes the Hernandez lawyers; says "Hail Satan" in court.
Spring 1986: preliminary hearing.
January 9, 1987: change of venue denied.
July 21, 1988: jury selection begins.
1989, during deliberations: juror Phyllis Singletary is killed; deliberations continue with an alternate.
September 20, 1989: guilty on all 43 counts.
September 27, 1989: defense presents no penalty evidence; the jury returns death.
November 7, 1989: sentenced to death by Judge Michael Tynan.
1996: marries Doreen Lioy at San Quentin.
June 2006: automatic appeal argued.
August 7, 2006: California Supreme Court affirms.
2007: US Supreme Court declines review.
October 2009: San Francisco police announce the DNA link to Mei Leung.
June 7, 2013: dies at Marin General Hospital, aged 53.
June 17, 2013: coroner's report gives B-cell lymphoma as the cause.
January 2021: Netflix series Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer.