The Night Stalker
A recent request resurfaced old memories and new thoughts on Richard Ramirez, The Grim Sleeper and other California killers
One could argue that Night Stalker Richard Ramirez remains California’s most prolific serial killer.
Nearly four decades have passed since Ramirez’s 1985 exploits terrorized residents of the state from San Francisco to Orange County. He confidently killed for fun and sick thrills and did it with impunity.
And, thanks to an insatiable audience, TV loves to rehash the case, over and over again. I’m not so sure I have that same feeling about it. In fact, it gives me the creeps.
Not that I covered much of it as a reporter. When the murders first started getting press attention, I was selling accessories at Guitar Center in Lawndale and living in Long Beach. Later that summer I got another job and moved to the San Gabriel Valley and was in the thick of it, but only from the perspective of the general public who followed the case closely in the daily newspapers (especially the Los Angeles Herald Examiner) and on TV, where Ramirez was known as “The Valley Intruder.”
There was other stuff happening around LA in 1985 that’s worth noting.
In San Marino, Police were searching for John and Linda Sohus, a young couple who went missing. Although Linda, an up-and-coming artist, told friends that they were getting government jobs in New York (maybe as spies?), in fact they were murdered. It took decades before Christian Gernartsreiter, a German conman posing as a Boston socialite named Clark Rockefeller, was convicted of killing John and sentenced to state prison.
In South LA, a serial killer who would later be known as “The Grim Sleeper” preyed on sex workers and dumped their lifeless bodies in back alleys along Western Avenue. After meeting someone who was friends with Lonnie Franklin, convicted in several of the “Grim Sleeper” slayings, I started to write about the case. Then, after reading Christine Pelisek’s great true crime book, “The Grim Sleeper: The Lost Women of South Central,” I decided not to.
Maybe someday I’ll finish the story. Here’s an excerpt for now.
The freaks came out at night -- especially on the streets of South Los Angeles in the mid 1980s.
Take Western Avenue. The westerly edge of L.A. in the 19th Century, Western is a mostly four-lane road that stretches 30 miles from fancy Los Feliz at the northeastern edge of Los Angeles in the Hollywood Hills to the high bluffs of San Pedro, which overlook the Pacific Ocean just beyond the busy Port of Los Angeles.
A good portion of the 500 square miles that make up Los Angeles is bisected by Western and most of L.A.’s varied cultures have a relationship with the avenue as it runs through the neighborhoods of Hollywood and Koreatown and into the blue collar suburbs of Gardena, Torrance and Lomita.
At the heart of Western Avenue lies the community once known as South Central Los Angeles. For much of the 80s and 90s, it might as well have been called the Wild Wild West. The sun-baked and often treeless streets were mishmash of close-set homes, small manufacturers, used car lots and storefront churches punctuated by indecipherable graffiti, liquor stores that cashed payroll checks for a percentage, pay-by-the hour motels and the occasional strand of tall, swaying palm trees to remind the errant visitor that this collection of urban neighborhoods was still -- in fact -- Southern California.
Drive down a random street and you might have encountered a drug deal going down. Corner boys stood guard outside apartment buildings that fronted as crack cocaine supermarkets. Others took over abandoned homes and turned them into 24-hour crack houses. The first good hit of rock turned some users into zombies who sought only another high. You might be a good-looking businessman wearing a tie from Nordstrom on Monday. But get enough freebase and by Saturday afternoon you’d be a shirtless freak who just sold his car for a nickel bag and a night’s stay in a shitty hotel room with a couple of blasted hookers picking at the carpet for anything that may have fallen out of the pipe. It was that powerful. And in 1985, crack cocaine, with all the societal havoc it wrought, was as much a part of the fabric of life in South Central Los Angeles as tacos, the Harbor Freeway and the Crips and Bloods.
At first no one really knew what was happening -- even those in law enforcement.
“Crack nearly did me in,” said Issac Freeman, a Los Angeles resident who witnessed the 1980s unfold in South Central Los Angeles. “I went through my possessions -- cars, watches, cameras, various antiques. Then I started burning my friends and finally my family. At the end all I wanted out of life was a decent place to spend the night, maybe a blowjob and a glass pipe to burn a rock.”
Co-existing in this world was Ramirez. A crackhead who happened to be an exceptional burglar. At a young age, Ramirez suffered brain damage. Here it is described on the “Beautiful Minds” blog.
At age 2, a dresser fell on his head causing him to get 30 stitches, almost killing him. At age 6, he was hit by a swing, knocked unconscious and this caused deep gashes. And finally at age 11, he was diagnosed with epilepsy, which is a neurological disorder marked by sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions …
Ramirez, was heavily influenced by his cousin Mike. It was Mike who shared snapshots of torture, rape and murders he participated in while a Green Beret in Vietnam. Mike introduced Richard to weed and burglary. Mike also shot and killed his wife at point blank range in front of a 13-year-old Richard, and then told Richard to keep his mouth shut.
Psychologists would undoubtedly say this history contributed to Ramirez’s campaign of terror that captured California’s imagination that summer of 1985.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F37960335-2872-4b4b-bc0a-f34daabf0d27_620x344.gif)
In the last week or so our weather turned warmer than it had been. At night you have two options during a heat wave — turn on the AC or leave the windows open. I’m probably like a lot of Angelenos who survived 1985, I mostly sleep with the windows locked tight and the AC turned down.
During the Night Stalker’s murder spree, contractors were inundated with customers who wanted HVAC systems installed, bars on their windows and the type of security systems that were once only the province of residents of Bel Air and Beverly Hills. If you listen closely in the San Gabriel Valley on a warm summer night you can still hear that hum of fear.
This was a lot of background to explain something else: Namely, why I’m probably not the best choice to narrate a TV documentary on that terrible summer and its aftermath.
Here’s how I know. Recently, the executive producer of a newly proposed Night Stalker show for Peacock interviewed me about the case and after our conversation, she invited me to re-read Philip Carlo’s great (and well-researched) book on the case.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to True Crime’s Area 51 to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.