People slept with their windows open.
It was summer in Los Angeles, hot and thick, the kind of heat that doesn’t let up even at midnight. People felt safe in their homes. Family was there, locks were set, the night was nothing special.
Then Richard Ramirez came through those wndows.
From the beginning, Ramirez was raised in the poor and troubled city of El Paso, Texas. His older cousin, a Vietnam vet, came home broken and filled the young boy’s head with things no child should ever see. By his teens, Ramirez was already into drugs and petty crime. He came to Los Angeles, lived in cheap hotels downtown, stole to survive and slowly became something the city was not ready for.
The attacks started in 1984 and continued into 1985. He struck Monterey Park, Mission Hills, Burbank and suburbs throughout Southern California, entering homes through unlocked doors and open windows. He murdered fourteen people and abused many others. His victims were young, old, men, women – he had no set pattern, no preference. It was that randomness that made the fear so complete. No one knew who would be next. Nobody was safe.
Hardware stores were selling out of deadbolts. Overnight gun sales skyrocketed. Every morning, neighbors would call each other, just to make sure they were all still alive. They called him The Night Stalker, and the fear spread from Los Angeles to the whole country.
The case was cracked with a single fingerprint lifted from a stolen car in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was put through California’s new computerized fingerprint database and spit out a name—Richard Ramirez.
On August 30, 1985, his picture graced every front page. The next morning Ramirez walked into a convenience store in East Los Angeles and saw his own face staring back at him from every newspaper rack. He ran. Neighbors recognized him and chased him through yards and alleys and held him down until police came. Not by detectives, but by the community he terrorized for a year, he was caught.
In 1989 he was found guilty of thirteen murders and sentenced to death. He died in prison in 2013, cancer claiming him before the state could.
That time never came to fourteenth people. They slept in their own beds and never woke up. They deserve to be remembered as people, not as a true crime series episode.
The Night Stalker was not enjoyable. Fourteen funerals. And a city that would not sleep.
That is the only story there is to tell.
Richard Ramirez · Convicted 1989 · Died June 7, 2013
Fourteen lives lost · Los Angeles, CA
