Decades after Richard Ramirez left thirteen dead and paralyzed the city of Los Angeles, his name is still synonymous with fear, torture, and sadistic murder. Philip Carlo’s classic The Night Stalker, based on years of meticulous research and extensive interviews with Ramirez, revealed the killer and his horrifying crimes to be even more chilling than anyone could have imagined. From watching his cousin commit murder at age eleven to his nineteen death sentences to the juror who fell in love with him, the story of Ramirez is a bizarre and spellbinding descent into the very heart of human evil.
Incredibly, after The Night Stalker was first published, thousands of women from all over the world contacted Carlo, begging to be put in touch with the killer. Carlo interviewed them and here presents their disturbing stories and the dark sexual desires that would drive them towards a brutal murderer. And in an exclusive death row interview, the killer himself gives his thoughts on the “Ramirez Groupies”—and what he thinks they really want.
True Crime Book Review Blog: The Night Stalker
I was four and five years old, respectively, when Richard Ramirez went on his murderous killing spree across the country from me in California. Author Philip Carlo chronicles the savagery and inhumane ways of Ramirez as no time is wasted by Carlo as he immediately jumps into Ramirez’s crime wave with the first murder being that of an elderly woman in a shady section of downtown Los Angeles. Then, we jump to another killing where a sadistic killer is portrayed as he laughed after shooting a husband in the head and brutally stabbing his wife who had the barrel of a shotgun aimed at him, unbeknownst to Ramirez until he heard the metallic click of an empty shotgun. Having the jump on him momentarily infuriated Ramirez and it resulted in her eventual and horrific demise where the killer tried to literally rip her heart out of her chest and succumbed to removing her eyeballs when his knife could not penetrate through her breastbone. He took her eyes and laughed like a hyena certain that his master, Satan, would be content with his actions. To say he was twisted and sadistic would be an understatement. It was no wonder that drawing his inspiration from Jack the Ripper, dressed in black and stealthily roaming the streets of L.A. and San Francisco he would be known as “The Night Stalker“.
It wasn’t until chapter eighteen that the author started to divulge the killer’s history and his Mexican roots. We learn of his hardworking parents, his siblings, and his father’s short temper whose fury was unleashed on his children. Ramirez was the “baby”, the youngest who was adored by his sister, the only other female in the family. It was here where an image of his family was painted and, for the first, I felt empathy. Not for Richard Ramirez but for the family, especially the parents who, according to the author, wanted nothing more than for their kids to experience a better life than they did. Being a parent myself, I am able to under their plight. There were, however, telltale signs of the making of a serial killer: blows to the head, a morning fascination with pornography, and his keen interest in a cousin’s tales of rape and torture during a duty while serving in Vietnam – these stories only elicited excitement to Richard, especially when he was shown photos of these women who fell victim to his cousin. It was at his cousin’s house where a young Richard, not even in his teens, witnessed his cousin murder his wife right in front of him. I can only imagine the lasting effect of having witnessed such an atrocity.
Or, it could have something to do with the temporal lobe epilepsy that he was diagnosed with which, according to Dr. Ronald Geshwind, “people who suffer from this have altered sexuality and hyper-religious feelings, are hypergraphic (have a compulsion to write), and are excessively aggressive.” Or, yet again, he simply enjoyed doing what he did. We are not all wired the same.
The tail end of the book described, in length, his capture and the subsequent trial that ensued. The trial played out like, for lack of a better word, a circus with the many different attorneys representing the now infamous Richard Ramirez, the woman who was head over heels over the dark-skinned Mexican murderer, the media frenzy, and his family who stuck by him throughout despite their being thrust into the limelight and the whirlwind surrounding the trial. I have to say that this last portion of the book was lengthy and may have tapered some as my interest began to wane. Phillip Carlo’s The Night Stalker may be the definitive look into Richard Ramirez during his reign of terror, before the atrocities and the aftermath – in that order. The book started with a bang and kept my attention until it started to lose steam with the court proceedings and the shenanigans that came along with the trial. Regardless of my discontent with the book’s conclusion, it is a gripping tale of madness and the horror that was The Night Stalker.