Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [75]
Even so, the impact of the bullet was enough to knock her to the ground. The gunman stepped over her, giving her a vicious kicking, and made his way into her apartment. From inside, Maria heard a gunshot. She staggered to her feet, only to be confronted by the gunman running from the house.
‘Please don’t shoot me again,’ she begged. The gunman froze, then took to his heels.
Inside the apartment Maria Hernandez found her boyfriend, 34-year-old Hawaiian-born Dayle Okazaki, lying on the kitchen floor, dead. He had been shot through the head.
There was only one clue to the murder. Maria said that the gunman had worn a baseball cap with the AC/DC logo on the front. The Australian heavy metal band AC/DC had recently released an album called Highway to Hell. On it, there was track called ‘Night Prowler’. This was the nom d’assassin Ramirez preferred. He was annoyed that the newspapers insisted on calling him the Night Stalker.
That night, his lust for blood had not nearly been satisfied. Less than an hour later, on his way home, Ramirez pulled 30-year-old Taiwanese law student Tsai Lian Yu from her car and shot her repeatedly. She died before the ambulance arrived.
Ten days later, Ramirez entered the home of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara, half a mile from the San Gabriel freeway. Maxine was a successful lawyer and Vincent had just fulfilled a lifetime ambition to open his own pizzeria. Both of them were shot at point-blank range and Maxine Zazzara’s naked body was mutilated after death. Ramirez stabbed her repeatedly, making a pattern of a large ragged T. He also gouged her eyes out. The bodies were found by their son Peter, when he called in at the house the next day.
On 14 May 1985, Ramirez broke into the home of William and Lillie Doi. He shot 66-year-old William in the head while he lay sleeping. His wife, 63-year-old Lillie who was in bed next to him, was beaten repeatedly around the head until she told the intruder where the valuables were hidden. Then he handcuffed her and ransacked the house. Later he returned to rape her.
A fortnight later, Carol Kyle was awoken in her Burbank flat by a torch shining in her eyes. A man pointed a gun at her and dragged her out of bed. In the next room, Carol’s terrified 12-year-old son was handcuffed and locked in a cupboard. His mother was then raped. Even then, she was sympathetic.
‘You must have had a very unhappy life to have done this to me,’ she said.
Ramirez shrugged off her sympathy.
‘I don’t know why I’m letting you live,’ he spat. ‘I’ve killed people before.’
He ransacked the apartment for valuables. Satisfied with the jewellery he found, he went away, leaving both Carol and her son alive.
Around the same time, two elderly women, 83-year-old Mabel Bell and her 80-year-old sister Florence Long, an invalid, were attacked in their home in the suburb of Monrovia. On 1 June, Carlos Venezuala, a gardener who did chores for the sisters, dropped round. The house was unusually silent and he let himself in. He found Florence lying on her bed in a coma. There was a huge wound over her ear and a bloodstained hammer was lying on the dressing table. Mabel was lying barely conscious on her bedroom floor in a pool of her own blood. Both women had been beaten with the hammer. They had been cut and tortured. There were even signs that Ramirez had tried to rape the older sister Mabel. The police concluded that the two sisters had been left that way for two days.
The house had been ransacked but this time, the attacker had left some clues. Along with the hammer, he had left a half-eaten banana on the dining table. He had also left what was to become his trademark – an inverted pentagram, the encircled five-point star that is used in witchcraft. One was scrawled in lipstick on Mabel’s thigh. Another was drawn on Florence’s bedroom wall.
Six weeks after the attack