Ramirez, Richard

Richard Ramirez was born February 29, 1960 in El Paso , Texas . He was the fifth and youngest child in the family of a Mexican émigré and former policeman, Julian Ramirez, who worked at the time of Richard's birth as a railroad worker. As a child, Ramirez suffered from epilepsy, seizures lasted several years and stopped only when Richard became a teenager ^[2] . At school, Richard did not stand out among his peers and was periodically attacked by other students. According to the memoirs of his classmate, Richard began to use soft drugs and smoke marijuana at the age of 10 years, before that his school successes were average, after his academic performance and discipline fell completely ^[3] .

Around the same years, he began to spend a lot of time with his cousin Miguel Ramirez, a veteran of the Vietnam War . Returning from the war, Miguel boasted of stories of how he had tortured and killed enemy soldiers, and in confirmation of his words showed the young brother polaroid images of mutilated victims of the war. On May 4, 1973, Richard witnessed a quarrel between his cousin and his wife. The quarrel ended with Miguel killing his wife by shooting her point blank in the face. Blood spattered young Richard's face. This murder and the brother himself as a whole strongly influenced the psycho-emotional state of Richard. After the murder he saw, Ramirez closed himself in ^[4] .

At this time, he studied at Jefferson High School, but finally dropped out of school 6 weeks before the end of 9th grade ^[3] . His lifestyle began to change, he began to spend more time on the street. Starting with shoplifting , he gradually reached the looting of houses. In the district, he gained a reputation as a thief: according to the testimony of his friend of those years, Eddie Gonzalez, Richard walked in a long coat, behind the floors of which he hid stolen things, and declared that he wanted to be a first-class robber ^[5] .

He was fond of heavy music and the occult , it came to accusations that Richard and a company of occultists performed rituals with animal sacrifices in the Chihuahua desert, but there was no evidence of this ^[6] . On December 7, 1977, Ramirez was first arrested for possession of marijuana , but it doesn’t reach the court. In 1978, Ramirez decided to leave his hometown and go to California. Over the years, it runs between San Francisco and El Paso.

In El Paso, he was arrested twice in 1979 and 1982, but only in 1982 did it go to court and Ramirez was sentenced to 50 days imprisonment ^[7] . According to the testimony of his friend of those years, Earl Gregg and his mother-in-law Donna Myers, Ramirez finally decided to move to Los Angeles at the end of 1983, when he had already become addicted to heavy drugs, for which, having no work, he obtained by thefts. He lived mainly in cheap hotels and with friends, loved to listen to the music of AC / DC and Judas Priest, and declared his commitment to Satanism ^[8] . AC / DC's song “Night Prowler” was his favorite. ^[9]

Richard's first victim was a 79-year-old woman, whom he stabbed with a knife. The next time, Ramirez, dressed in black, shoots three young people with a pistol, but thanks to a lucky accident (a bullet ricocheted from the keys held in his hand), one girl survived, as a result of which the police got the first verbal description of the portrait of the killer. The elusive serial killer opens a real terror campaign against the people of California : at night, he breaks into houses, robs, rapes, kills. However, he deliberately leaves some victims alive. Soon Ramirez begins to peculiarly declare his commitment to Satanism - he leaves images of the pentagram at the crime scene; for example, he painted one of them with lipstick on the inside of the thigh of a murdered 83-year-old woman, and he also made his victims say “I love Satan”. Ramirez’s victims are young children, for example, on June 27, 1985, he raped a 6-year-old girl.

Ramirez attacked completely different people, which is not typical for serial killers, who, as a rule, have their own distinct type of victim. In the media, he is assigned the nickname "Night Wanderer", which greatly flattered Ramirez himself, as his favorite song was the song of AC / DC "Night Prowler".

The photobot of Ramirez was shown on television and published in newspapers, but this did not produce results. The last victim of Ramirez, who survived, was able to examine the car on which he disappeared - it was an old Toyota of orange color with scratches. All Los Angeles police forces were thrown into the search for a car. They managed to find the car in one of the parking lots on the outskirts of the city. Among hundreds of fingerprints, fingerprints of Richard Ramirez were also found, which corresponded very well to the photobot. By August 27, leaflets appeared on the streets of the city with a photograph of Ramirez himself, reporting on his search. As it turned out, the circumstances helped the police: from August 24, Ramirez was outside the state and did not know anything about what was wanted by the police, so when he returned to Los Angeles on the morning of August 31, he went to the store as if nothing had happened. People who saw Ramirez in the store immediately recognized in him the “Night Wanderer,” which terrified Los Angeles . Police brought the suspect to the station. In November 1989, a court sentenced Richard Ramirez to death in a gas chamber . Ramirez was awaiting execution on death row. The killer’s father, Julian Ramirez, trying to find the reasons that prompted his son to commit brutal murders, gave an interview in 1985 in which he stated that the drugs were to blame; he noted that drugs can be easily acquired in El Paso schools and there is no administrative control; ultimately the abuse of them contributed to the final moral corruption of his son Richard ^[10] . One of Ramirez’s acquaintances, Eddie González, expressed a different point of view: in his opinion, Richard’s mental problems appeared after a car accident in which he was hit in 1980. Richard himself escaped with only fright, but his close friend Nicholas Nevarez died; according to Gonzalez, depression and worries about the death of a best friend along with drug addiction prompted Ramirez to commit crimes ^[11] .

Ramirez spent all subsequent years of his life on death row. Being in custody, he received many letters. He married one of his fans, Dorin Laoy, in October 1996, the wedding took place in a meeting room in the prison building ^[12] . In recent years, Ramirez has become more reserved, he repeatedly exposed himself in obscene form to prison staff and visitors to the prison. He masturbated in front of his relatives and relatives of other prisoners. After that, he was forbidden to touch anyone, and all his subsequent visits took place in a room separated by a partition. After the fight he started in 2000, he was forbidden to contact other suicide bombers. Since 2007, he had no visitors, and in the last years of his life, Ramirez refused to meet with anyone. Ramirez spent most of his time watching television while in his cell. Despite this, until his death, he remained the most popular prisoner, and the wave of interest in him did not subside ^[13] .

On June 7, 2013, Ramirez, while in custody, died in hospital from liver failure at the age of 53 years.

• Richard Ramirez on serial-killers.ru
• Richard Ramirez at crimelibrary.com