Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez was born in El Paso on February 29, 1960, the youngest of five children of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez. He had epileptic seizures from early childhood, two of them following head injuries, and was thrown off the school football team because of them. Accounts of the household differ: his father, a railway worker, has described a good boy who changed in his teens, while neighbours have described beatings. What is not disputed is the influence of an older cousin, a Vietnam veteran, who showed the boy photographs of women he said he had killed and raped in the war and taught him to smoke marijuana. In 1973 the cousin shot his own wife in the face in front of Ramirez. He was thirteen.
He drifted into burglary, drugs and voyeurism, moved to California, and read Anton LaVey while taking LSD. He never joined any church; the Satanism was his own. On the night of June 28, 1984, he climbed through an open window in Glassell Park, found seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow asleep, and stabbed and nearly decapitated her.
The series proper began nine months later. On March 17, 1985, he shot Maria Hernandez in her garage in Rosemead; the bullet deflected off her keys and she survived. He went inside and shot her flatmate Dayle Okazaki dead, leaving an AC/DC cap behind. The same night he dragged Tsai-Lian Yu from her car in Monterey Park and shot her. Ten days later he shot Vincent Zazzara in Whittier and mutilated his wife Maxine's body after killing her, taking her eyes with him. On May 14 he shot Bill Doi in the face in Monterey Park and raped his disabled wife Lillian; Doi died in hospital. On the night of May 29 he attacked two elderly sisters in Monrovia, Mabel Bell and Florence Lang, bludgeoning both with a hammer from their kitchen, raping Lang, and drawing pentagrams in lipstick on Bell's thigh and on the bedroom walls. They were found comatose two days later. Lang lived. Bell died on July 15.
The pentagrams told the task force what they were dealing with, and the killings kept coming through the summer: Patty Elaine Higgins, Mary Louise Cannon, Joyce Lucille Nelson, Max and Lela Kneiding, Chainarong Khovananth, Elyas Abowath. Whitney Bennett, sixteen, survived a beating with a tyre iron. Others were raped and left alive, including children. He had a working method. Shoot the man in the head first, restrain the woman, take cash and jewellery, then rape her, and sometimes eat from the kitchen before leaving. There was no pattern in the victims at all, which is part of why the city was so frightened.
In August 1985 he went north and shot Peter Pan and his wife in their San Francisco home; Pan died. On August 24 he attacked a couple in Mission Viejo, and a thirteen-year-old boy who had heard him prowling gave police a partial plate from the stolen Toyota. The car was recovered and a fingerprint from it went into California's new automated system, which returned a name from an old car-theft arrest. His mugshot ran on the front page of every paper in Southern California.
He came back into Los Angeles by bus on August 31, 1985, walked into an East LA shop and saw his own face on the news rack. He ran. Residents of the neighbourhood chased him down as he tried to take cars, and he was held on the ground by Jose Burgoin's sons until police arrived. He told the arresting officer to kill him.
The pre-trial period ran three and a half years as he cycled through lawyers. He was tried on 43 counts and turned the courtroom into a stage, wearing sunglasses, showing a pentagram drawn on his palm, and calling out to Satan. The state produced 521 exhibits and 137 witnesses. During 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 the case, but the defence moved for a mistrial and was refused. On September 20, 1989, the jury convicted him on every count, among them thirteen of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. He married a correspondent, Doreen Lioy, at San Quentin in 1996. He died on June 7, 2013, of complications from B-cell lymphoma, aged fifty-three, with his appeals still running.