On April 10, 1984, a nine-year-old girl named Mei Leung went down to the basement of the residential hotel at 765 O'Farrell Street, in San Francisco's Tenderloin, to look for a dollar bill she had lost. She had been with her eight-year-old brother a moment before. He wandered off, came back, and found her body hanging over a pipe. She had been beaten, raped and stabbed. The case stayed open for twenty-five years. In October 2009, San Francisco inspectors Holly Pera and Joseph Toomey had material from the basement retested, ran the profile through the national DNA database, and got a cold hit on a man who had been sitting on California's death row since 1989. Nobody was ever charged with Mei Leung's murder. The district attorney's office said there was not enough evidence for additional charges, and by then there was no practical point: Richard Ramírez was already condemned to die for thirteen other killings.
He was tried once, in Los Angeles, on forty-three counts, and the jury convicted him on every one of them. What the California Supreme Court recorded when it reviewed the judgment was twelve counts of first degree murder, one count of second degree murder, five of attempted murder, four of rape, four of forcible sodomy, three of forcible oral copulation and fourteen of first degree burglary, with special circumstances found true for multiple murder, burglary, rape, sodomy and oral copulation. He was arraigned in October 1985 on sixty-eight felonies including fourteen murders; the case that actually went to a jury was smaller than that. The San Francisco killings were never tried at all.
The earliest of the murders he was convicted of came almost three months after Mei Leung died. On the afternoon of June 28, 1984, Jack Vincow went to his mother's apartment in the Glassell Park district of Los Angeles and found the screen gone from her open living room window. Jennie Vincow was seventy-nine. She had been stabbed repeatedly in her bed and her throat was cut so deeply that she was nearly decapitated. The apartment had been gone through for anything worth selling. It read as a burglary that had found somebody home, and for nine months nothing like it happened again.
The series that terrified Southern California began on the night of March 17, 1985. In a garage in Rosemead, Ramírez shot twenty-two-year-old Maria Hernandez as she came home; the bullet struck the keys in her hand and deflected, and she survived. He went into the condominium and shot her roommate, Dayle Yoshie Okazaki, thirty-four, in the forehead. He left a black AC/DC cap behind. About an hour later and a few miles away, in Monterey Park, he pulled Tsai-Lian Yu, a thirty-year-old law student known to her friends as Veronica, out of her car and shot her twice. She died before the ambulance reached the hospital.
The method settled quickly and it almost never varied. He looked for an unlocked window or a sliding door, usually a single-story house on a quiet street near a freeway. He shot the man of the house in the head while he slept. He handcuffed or bound the woman, took cash and jewelry, raped her, and sometimes ate something from the kitchen before he left. On March 27 he shot Vincent Charles Zazzara, sixty-four, in his Whittier home, then killed his wife Maxine Levenia Zazzara, forty-four, and mutilated her body with a knife from her own kitchen, cutting out her eyes and taking them with him.
Through the spring the attacks came faster. On May 14 he shot William Doi in the face in Monterey Park and raped his wife Lillian, who had been disabled by a stroke and could never testify; Doi died in the hospital. On the night of May 29 he broke into a house in Monrovia where two elderly sisters lived, Mabel Bell, eighty-three, and Florence Lang, eighty-one. He beat both of them with a hammer he found in their kitchen, bound them, raped Lang, and drew pentagrams in lipstick on Bell's thigh and on the bedroom wall. They were not found for two days. Lang survived. Bell died on July 15. The next night, in Burbank, he handcuffed Carol Kyle, forty-two, and her twelve-year-old son, locked the boy in a closet, and raped her. On June 2, Edward Wildgans, twenty-nine, was shot through the temple in his Los Angeles apartment; his girlfriend fought the intruder off.
The pentagrams told the detectives working the file that the cases belonged together, and the summer was worse than the spring. Patty Elaine Higgins, Mary Louise Cannon and Joyce Lucille Nelson were all killed in their homes in the first week of July. Whitney Bennett, sixteen, was beaten with a tire iron in Sierra Madre and lived. Sophie Dickman was raped in Monterey Park. On July 20, Max and Lela Kneiding, sixty-eight and sixty-six, were shot in their Glendale house, and Chainarong Khovananth was shot in Sun Valley the same night, after which his wife was raped and made to swear on Satan that she would not scream while her eight-year-old son was in the room. Elyas Abowath was shot dead in his bed in Diamond Bar on August 8. By then Los Angeles County was buying deadbolts and window locks faster than the hardware stores could stock them, and the sheriff was fielding questions about why a man who killed people asleep in their own beds could not be caught. There was no pattern in who he chose. That is most of what made it unbearable.
In mid-August he went north. On the night of August 17, 1985, he removed a screen at a two-story house near Lake Merced in San Francisco and shot Peter Pan, a sixty-six-year-old accountant, in the head as he slept. He beat and shot Pan's wife Barbara, sixty-four, who survived with permanent injuries. On the bedroom wall he drew a pentagram and wrote "Jack the Knife" in lipstick. Barbara Pan later picked out her attacker from sketches built by surviving victims in Southern California, and investigators traced her stolen jewelry to a man matching Ramírez's description who had been selling it in El Sobrante. The San Francisco case never reached a courtroom. Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a press conference and disclosed what the task force had, including the shoe type and the caliber, which detectives said told the killer exactly what to change.
He was caught because of a car and a thirteen-year-old. On August 24 he attacked a couple in Mission Viejo, shooting Bill Carns three times in the head and raping his fiancée Inez Erickson; Carns lived. A boy named James Romero III, who had heard someone prowling around his family's house that night, gave police a partial license plate from an orange Toyota he had seen driving off. The car was found abandoned in Los Angeles days later. A single fingerprint lifted from it was run through California's newly built automated fingerprint system, which was not yet a year old, and the search returned the name of a drifter from El Paso with a 1984 arrest for auto theft. On August 30 the police issued an all-points bulletin, and the next morning his booking photograph was on the front page of every paper in California.
He did not know any of that. He had taken a bus to Tucson to see his brother and came back on the morning of August 31, walked into a liquor store near the downtown Los Angeles bus terminal at about half past eight, and saw his own face on the news rack. He took a bus east to Boyle Heights and tried to take a car. Faustino Pinon, fifty-six, was working under a red Mustang on Hubbard Street and fought him off. Ramírez ran across the street and punched Angelina De La Torre, twenty-eight, in the stomach as she got into her car; her husband Manuel pulled a steel rod loose from their gate and hit him in the back of the head with it. Jose Burgoin, a fifty-four-year-old retired construction worker who had been watering his plants, joined the chase along with his sons Jaime and Julio, and they held him on the ground on Hubbard Street until a patrol car arrived to take him to the Hollenbeck station. He told the officers to kill him.
He had been born Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, the youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramírez. His father, a Mexican national and former policeman in Juárez who became a laborer on the Santa Fe railroad, had a violent temper, and the boy took to sleeping in a local cemetery to get away from him. At two a dresser fell on him and opened a forehead wound that took thirty stitches; at five a swing in a park knocked him unconscious, and afterward he had frequent epileptic seizures that lasted into his early teens. He fell under the influence of an older cousin, Miguel, known as Mike, a decorated Green Beret back from Vietnam who boasted of what he had done there and showed the boy Polaroid photographs of women he said he had raped and killed. On May 4, 1973, in the boy's presence, Mike shot his wife, Jessie, in the face with a .38 during an argument, and killed her. Richard, thirteen, withdrew from everyone, moved in with his older sister Ruth and her husband, Roberto, a compulsive peeper who took him along at night, began using LSD, took up Satanism and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. By the time he reached Los Angeles he was a drifter with a record of petty theft; the booking photograph that later went on every front page was taken after an arrest for auto theft on December 12, 1984.
Getting him to trial took nearly three years, most of it his own doing. He dismissed the public defenders assigned to him and retained Daniel and Arturo Hernandez, and the trial court told the two men plainly that they did not appear to meet the State Bar's standards for lawyers in capital cases. The judge required them to disclose anything affecting their ability to represent him and offered Ramírez independent counsel to advise him on the choice, which he declined. The court allowed the substitution. Whether it should have was the central question on appeal twenty years later.
The trial ran fifteen months in a Los Angeles courtroom, one of the longest in the state's history, and he used it. He arrived at an early hearing with a pentagram inked on his palm, held it up, and shouted for Satan. He wore sunglasses at counsel table. The prosecution, led by Deputy District Attorney P. Philip Halpin, put in more than five hundred exhibits and well over a hundred witnesses. During the jury's deliberations one juror was dismissed for sleeping, and another, Phyllis Singletary, was shot dead in her apartment by her boyfriend, who then killed himself. The deaths had nothing to do with Ramírez, though the courthouse rumor said otherwise; the defense moved for a mistrial and the judge refused. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated twenty-two days. At twenty past two on the afternoon of September 20, 1989, the clerk began reading the verdicts, and it took thirty-five minutes to get through them. Ramírez was not in the room. He had signed a waiver and listened from a holding cell.
At the penalty phase his lawyers announced that they had made a tactical decision to present no evidence at all: no witnesses, nothing about the seizures, the head injuries, the cousin who had shown a thirteen-year-old boy photographs of women he said he had killed in Vietnam and then shot his own wife in front of him. The jury recommended death. On November 7, 1989, the court sentenced him to die in the gas chamber. Leaving court he told reporters that death came with the territory and that he would see them in Disneyland.
He never came close to being executed. He married a magazine editor named Doreen Lioy at San Quentin in 1996, in a ceremony the prison allowed and the press covered heavily. His automatic appeal took until August 7, 2006, when the California Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Carlos Moreno, rejected every claim including the one about his lawyers and affirmed the judgment and the death sentence. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2007. He died on June 7, 2013, at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, of complications from B-cell lymphoma, at fifty-three, after nearly twenty-four years on death row.
What was left unresolved stayed unresolved. San Francisco prosecutors had held the Peter Pan case in abeyance in the 1980s, partly because their Los Angeles counterparts worried a second trial would produce conflicting testimony and force surviving victims back onto the stand, and after 1989 there was no reason to spend the money trying a man already sentenced to death. So Barbara Pan identified the man who shot her husband and shot her, and no jury ever heard her say it. The same logic covered Mei Leung: a DNA match in 2009, no charge. San Francisco police have also long suspected him of killing Masataka Kobayashi, a forty-five-year-old chef and part owner of Masa's on Bush Street, in November 1984, and no case was ever brought there either. A second, unidentified DNA profile found on a handkerchief in the O'Farrell Street basement has never been explained; in 2016 the department said it belonged to someone who had been a juvenile in 1984, declined to name him, and has not connected him to anything since.