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  • you could call him a real life bookie man not as well known as Saved Ted Bundy or Charles Manson, yet still one of the most vicious serial killers in American history.

  • Today, the search for California's Nightstalker continues.

  • I'm afraid for everybody.

  • Elderly young, everybody.

  • In the mid eighties, the night Stalker was more than a man.

  • He was a collective nightmare.

  • And when the police finally caught him, people wanted to know everything.

  • He was an avowed Satanist whose crimes didn't just terrified communities.

  • They made him this object of intrigue.

  • So who was Richard Ramirez?

  • By the time he was charged with the night soccer murders?

  • Richard was only 25 years old.

  • It's hard to say that any one or two things that happened up until then is what made him a serial killer.

  • But looking back at his life does provide some chilling clues.

  • Richard was born the youngest of five Children on February 29th, 1960 in El Paso, Texas.

  • His mother, Mercedes, worked at a boot factory, and his father, Julian, was an Army veteran who worked on the Santa Fe railway.

  • He had a violent temper and was away from the family, often with both parents at work, the kids started getting into trouble.

  • Richards, older brother, sniff glue and broke into houses with their cousin Mike, and Richard spent most of his early days with the baby sitter or playing in the yard by himself.

  • When he was two years old, he was reaching for radio when a dresser fell on his head, leaving him with 30 stitches and a concussion.

  • Three years later, Richard was at a playground when a swing knocked him unconscious.

  • He was rushed to the hospital again and sent home with more stitches.

  • In fifth grade, his parents started to worry.

  • Richard was having seizures in class.

  • It's unclear if the head injuries or what caused them.

  • But Richard was diagnosed with epilepsy that school year, and the seizures continued until he was a teenager.

  • Experts say this could be what caused him toe have disturbing visions and vivid dreams.

  • Two years later, those disturbing thoughts took shape.

  • Richards cousin Mike came back from two tours in Vietnam.

  • He was, Ah, war hero, and Richard idolized him.

  • Mike like to brag about everything he done overseas.

  • He showed Richard the Polaroids he kept of at least 20 women he claimed to have raped and murdered.

  • Mike also taught Richard what he learned as a soldier stealth, precision and combat.

  • He wanted him to know how to fight and kill.

  • Meanwhile, Mike's wife, Jesse, hated that he was spending so much time with his young cousin.

  • She wanted him to get a job, and they argued often one day that May, she came in with groceries and Mike took out his 38 revolver.

  • She dared him to shoot her, and Mike did point blank in front of both his kids and Richard.

  • Mike was arrested, and Richard says that's when he became obsessed with killers, crime, murder and death.

  • Richard read detective magazines and fantasized about the violent sex acts he saw in Mike's photos.

  • At the same time, his great slipped.

  • He was hunting, stealing and getting high.

  • And as punishment, he got beatings from his dad.

  • On one of the most brutal nights at home.

  • Richard's father took him to the cemetery and left him chained there for a night to escape.

  • Julie and Richard moved in with his older sister, Ruth, and her husband, Roberto.

  • Roberto was a peeping Tom and Richard like going along on his nightly haunts.

  • By the time he was 15, Richard landed a job at the Holiday Inn.

  • Ah, friend gave him a master key to the rooms.

  • He'd watch people through openings in their curtains, then slip inside once they were asleep to steal valuables.

  • But one night he wanted more.

  • He hid in the closet while a guest was in the bathroom, then tried to rape her.

  • Her husband walked in and fought him off.

  • Richard was arrested, but the charges were dropped.

  • When the couple refused to come back to El Paso to testify.

  • When he was 18, Richard left the city for good.

  • He boarded a Greyhound bus and made the one way trip to Los Angeles.

  • He started using cocaine and this string of burglaries crew with his addiction.

  • He spent his time studying maps of the city's freeways and neighborhoods, often driving around and sleeping in stolen cars.

  • One night that summer, a woman downtown asked him to get her some PCP.

  • Later, at her apartment, she turned down his advances and he brutally raped her.

  • That week marked a shift.

  • Richard found a philosophy that fit his crimes.

  • He started reading books by Anton Love, a.

  • The founder of the Church of Satan, then stole another car to attend one of Love, a Satanic ceremonies in San Francisco.

  • Afterward, he called his mother, saying he'd been touched by Satan.

  • Richard wasn't back in L A long before he was arrested for auto theft.

  • By the time he was 23 he had lost touch with everyone in his family.

  • When his sister came to look for him in L.

  • A.

  • She found Richard at the bus depot, almost unrecognizable.

  • He was living in a motel downtown, still heavily addicted to cocaine.

  • That's where things started to get hazy.

  • Up until 2009, police thought the first night stalker murder was in the summer of 1984.

  • But sometime in the months after Richard saw his sister, he made his way back to San Francisco.

  • He was reportedly living out of two different hotels in the city's Tenderloin district.

  • Nine year old May Linda Leong lived in an apartment a few blocks away, police said.

  • May was at the building on April 10th with her eight year old brother.

  • He left her alone while she looked for a dollar bills she dropped.

  • When he came back to the basement, he found his sister there stabbed to death.

  • Nine year old May Long was found dead in the basement of her apartment building, where she lived in the Tenderloin.

  • Still, even with the evidence, Maze murder became a cold case.

  • It wasn't until three years later, in 1987 that anyone in the U.

  • S was convicted of a crime based on DNA.

  • So in 2004, when police reopened May's case, they took another look at the samples, and it turned up a match.

  • A DNA sample collected in 1984 at the crime scene.

  • They were able to match it with his DNA.

  • Richard Ramirez.

  • Two months after Malians murder, Richard was back in L.

  • A.

  • Cruising in another stolen car, he was out of cocaine and looking for cash.

  • He stopped at a small building in Glassell Park.

  • The window of Apartment two was open, so he pried the screen off and climbed inside.

  • 79 year old tenant was asleep, but she didn't have anything worth stealing.

  • Richard was enraged.

  • He stood over her bed and stabbed her to death.

  • The victim's son, called the police the next day, but Richard hadn't left any fingerprints.

  • For the next eight months, Richard slipped deeper into his addiction and his conviction for the devil.

  • He was stealing cars, mainlining cocaine and breaking into houses.

  • But he wanted to keep killing.

  • He quit using and bought a gun.

  • That's when the Nightstalker killings escalated.

  • Over the next five months, Richard got increasingly violent, killing at least 14 people and burglarizing, raping and assaulting others.

  • But by August 30th, everyone knew his name and his face man by the name of Richard Ramirez.

  • Police arrested him.

  • The next day it's me.

  • It's me.

  • What's your name, Huh?

  • Relax.

  • Richard was convicted of the Nightstalker crimes and the whole world learned about his satanic worship.

  • The infamy excited Richard.

  • He wore suits and sunglasses every day to court.

  • Outside of the trial, he was getting massive amounts of attention.

  • For the first time in his life, he had multiple girlfriends at a time, 12 to 15, by some accounts.

  • But then there was Doreen Leroy.

  • She was a 25 year old magazine editor who believed he was innocents.

  • She wrote him over 75 love letters and was there every day in court.

  • Richard trusted her.

  • She seemed to really care about him, so he proposed to Doreen at the jail.

  • A judge in Los Angeles today sentence Richard Ramirez, the so called Nightstalker killer and rapist, to death in the gas chamber.

  • After the trial, Richard served most of his time on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

  • He got used to visits from groupies, but in 1992 he got a request from a journalist, Philip Carlo.

  • The two ended up doing over 100 hours of interviews.

  • Four years later, Carlo published the book of chilling, comprehensive look at Richard's past and Richard Mary Doreen in a death row wedding.

  • Reporters flocked to the prison, asked her how she felt.

  • Here's the couple and her response of being the new Mrs Richard Ramirez.

  • It feels wonderful.

  • I'm so happy.

  • I'm I'm so thrilled.

  • In 2006, the state of California denied Richard's first round of appeals and upheld his death sentence.

  • The following year, the U.

  • S Supreme Court refused to review his case.

  • Richard died of lymphoma while still on death row at the age of 53 it left people with lingering questions.

  • Newscasters asked detectives if Richard ever showed remorse for his crimes.

  • He had no empathy, no feelings, nothing.

  • He wanted to be known as the greatest serial killer that ever, you know, ever lived.

  • Psychiatrists weighed in to Dr Michael H.

  • Stone argued that Richard was a maid psychopath and not a born one.

  • Could his childhood of violent trauma and crime be what led him to become the Nightstalker?

  • Richard actually had the same question.

  • In one of his hours long interviews with Philip Carlo, he asked, Is there such a thing is that when a baby is born, is he already serial killer?

  • Already made for it?

  • Is he created?

  • It's difficult to say for sure, but Richard did believe environmental factors played role.

  • He explained it to Inside Edition reporters in 1993.

  • In a rare interview, Ramirez refused to discuss his own crimes but had this to say about serial killers.

  • A serial killer comes about by circumstances and, like a recipe poverty, drugs, child abuse, these things, you know, contribute.

  • There may be some truth to that.

  • A study of mass murderers in 2014 found that more than half had experienced physical or sexual abuse.

  • And, like Richard, roughly one in five killers had sustained a head injury.

  • Off course.

  • None of these things on their own make someone the night stalker.

  • But looking back at Richard's life, it's possible to see how one thing led to another.

  • How each year of drugs, abuse and violent fantasies added up to something bigger, something more monstrous until Richard Ramirez became this one of the most brutal serial killers in American history.

you could call him a real life bookie man not as well known as Saved Ted Bundy or Charles Manson, yet still one of the most vicious serial killers in American history.

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