On this date in 1985, Richard Ramirez, the ‘Night Stalker’ killer, was arrested in Los Angeles, California.
His full name was Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez. He was dubbed the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer, and the Valley Intruder.
From April 1984 to August 1985, Ramirez murdered at least fourteen people. He was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries.
It’s likely the seeds of extreme mental illness were sown during his childhood. His father was abusive and his cousin, Miguel, would show him pictures of women he’d abused. When he was 13, Ramirez was present when Miguel shot his wife in the face.
He was a Satanist who would often leave pentagrams at the scenes of his crimes, in Lipstick on a mirror on one occasion and on a victim’s leg on another. Survivors of his attacks told how he would tell them to swear to Satan, not to God. He even had a pentagram tattooed on his hand, which he famously showed off in court during his trial. He was obsessed with a song by AC/DC called Night Prowler, which describes watching someone outside their window and slipping into their house.
Another of his foibles was helping himself to snacks from the Fridge after killing the people in the house.
A significant clue left behind at one crime scene was a shoe print in a flower bed, which turned out to belong to a very rare make of Shoe, only one of which had ever been sold in that size in Los Angeles. However, the investigation was scuppered when a judge appeared on TV and mentioned the shoe. Needless to say, Ramirez ditched those shoes after that.
He narrowly evaded capture several times. Fleeing the scene of a failed kidnapping, he was pulled over for a traffic violation but made a run for it when he heard details of the kidnapping broadcast over the traffic cop’s radio. On another occasion they found a dentist’s business card in a car he’d stolen. Police contacted the dentist and found that someone matching his description had been in for X-rays and would be returning for treatment of an infected tooth. Police set up an alarm staff could press when he came back, but it failed to go off.
He was finally caught after getting off a bus, walking past police who were hoping to apprehend him at the Bus station and into a shop where his face was on the front page of a newspaper. People in the shop recognised him, so he ran and tried to steal a car. Local residents pulled him out of the car and one hit him over the head with a fence post. They chased him down and beat him up in the street, resulting in neighbours calling the cops about the disturbance.
While he was in prison, women used to send him love letters. He married one of them, a woman named Doreen Lioy, who was convinced he was innocent. She left him, however, when DNA evidence proved he’d murdered a nine year old girl.
Despite being handed 19 death sentences, he was never executed. You could say that God took care of the execution Himself as Ramirez died of cancer while on Death Row.
The first in a new series! It has invading aliens, gladiator-style contests, rivalry and romance.
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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