Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [77]
A week later, Ramirez travelled 50 miles south of Los Angeles to the small town of Mission Viego. He shot 29-year-old computer engineer William Carns three times in the head and raped his fiancée Inez Erickson, also 29, twice.
‘You know who I am, don’t you,’ Ramirez taunted. ‘I’m the one they’re writing about in the newspapers and on TV.’
He also forced Inez to say ‘I love Satan’ during her ordeal.
William Carns survived the shooting, but suffered permanent brain damage and the couple never married. However, Inez provided a vital clue. She spotted Ramirez’s rusty, old orange Toyota after he left the house. This would put an end to the reign of the Night Stalker.
A sharp-eyed kid, James Romero III, had also spotted the orange Toyota as it cruised the area and had noted down its licence-plate number. The police put out an all-points bulletin. Two days later, the car was found in a car park of Los Angeles’ Rampart suburb.
When examining the car, forensic scientists used a new technique. They put a dab of Superglue in a saucer in the car and sealed the doors and window. Fumes from the Superglue would react with moisture in any fingerprints and then turn them white. The interior of the car was then scanned using a laser. This technique should pick up any fingerprints, including those that the culprit had tried to wipe off.
The scan yielded one fingerprint. It was computer matched to that of 25-year-old Richard Ramirez, who had been arrested three times for marijuana possession in El Paso. Soon Ramirez’s photograph was on the front page of every newspaper in California.
Ramirez was quite unaware of this when he stepped down from the Greyhound bus at Los Angeles’ main bus station. He had been out in Phoenix, Arizona, to score some cocaine and was high. He had killed 13 people and felt good. Surely by now he must be Satan’s favourite son.
He went to a drugstore to buy himself a Pepsi. Then at the checkout desk he saw his own face splashed across the Spanish language paper La Opinion. The checkout clerk recognised him too, so did the other customers. Ramirez made a run for it.
In the street, someone cried out: ‘It’s the Night Stalker.’ Soon he heard the wail of police sirens behind him. He knocked on a door. Bonnie Navarro opened it. Ramirez shouted ‘Help me!’ in Spanish. She slammed the door in his face.
On the next block, he tried to pull a woman from her car, but bystanders rushed to her rescue. Ramirez jumped a fence into a backyard where Luis Muñoz was cooking a barbecue. He hit Ramirez with his tongs. In the next garden, he tried to steal a red 1966 Mustang, but 56-year-old Faustin Pinon, who was working on the transmission, grabbed him in a headlock. Ramirez broke free, but across the street 55-year-old construction worker Jose Burgoin heard Pinon’s shouts. He picked up a steel rod and hit Ramirez with it. Ramirez stumbled on but Burgoin soon caught up with him. This time he clubbed him to the ground.
In the nick of time, Deputy Sheriff Andres Ramirez pulled up in a patrol car.
‘Save me!’ yelled the Night Stalker.
As his namesake handcuffed him, Ramirez said: ‘Thank God you came. I am the one you want. Save me before they kill me.’
Only the arrival of more police patrol cars prevented the angry mob taking the law into their own hands. Even at the police station, a crowd gathered, calling for him to be lynched.
Ramirez showed no contrition. He told the police: ‘I love to kill people. I love watching them die. I would shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place, and then just stop. Or I would cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white. I love all that blood. I told one lady one time to give me all her money. She said no. So I cut her and pulled her eyes out.’
In court, Ramirez made Satanic signs and even appeared with the inverted pentagram scratched in his palm. He told the judge: ‘You maggots make me sick. Hypocrites one and all. You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience.