Richard Ramirez was perhaps one of the brutal serial killers of all time, notably for the intense brutality and indiscriminate violence visited upon his victims. Ramirez was known as the “Night Stalker’, a man who cruised Los Angeles, California homes and randomly selected areas and victims of all genders, ethnicities, and types.The trial of Richard Ramirez was one of the most expensive in California history, outdone only by the O. J. Simpson media circus to come years later. Lucifer-worshipper Ramirez is currently awaiting a Death Row date with his real maker with all his Supreme Court appeals having been exhausted.
Richard Ramirez typically attacked couples or home owners while at home asleep in their beds at night. Brutal shootings through the eye or death by a blunt object applied with force might occur before victims were fully awake. The vicious and purposely satanic mien of Ramirez during his trial was a chilling reminder of what evil a single individual is capable of. After double digit homicides and invasive murders accompanied by burglary, one final targeting by investigators led to a desperate chase by civilians who recognized the man trying to steal their neighbour’s car. Things might have been different for many people if only the judge for his break-in and motel assault of a woman when he was 16 had been more seriously punished.
Anybody waking up to the face of Richard Ramirez in their bedroom had a date with death. Ricardo Munoz Ramirez had little holding him anywhere except a taste for the suffering of others and the displacement of their cash and goods for resale and drug purchases. Ramirez, a drifting drug user whose violent tendencies were ameliorated by no guilt, religious or conscientious forbearance, had rotten teeth from poor diet habits and had begun a career in robbery to finance a cocaine habit. Ramirez was the child of Texan Mexican American immigrants, yet he favoured rock band AC/DC music, Satanic themes, and decidedly non-Catholic drug uses.
Ramirez grew up a possibly epileptic, certainly asocial loner, shunning friends and hanging around cemeteries. His former Special Forces cousin Mike acquainted him with guns, violence, the concept of mutilating women and assaulting them sexually for power. The cousin shot his wife while Ramirez was immediately nearby, and a lifetime drug habit began with marijuana at that time. Dropping out of school, by 1981 Ramirez was a native of Los Angeles, albeit without employment or habitation. By 1984, Ramirez began a series of break-ins of older women and people too stunned to recover or fight back at the intruder bringing forth violence and death in their last conscious seconds of life.
Richard Ramirez was a serious threat to public safety due to the erratic nature of his intrusions and murders. No age group or ethnicity was safe, and Ramirez raped a 79 year old woman as well as one aged 29. Ramirez’s compulsion to murder was due less to an unconscious desire for homosexual activity or intelligent heists, but rather seemed to be a random string of violence episodes with little done beforehand in the way of planning or surveillance of his robbery targets. The frequency of Ramirez’ activities show he was getting a taste for it, even as media reports sensationalized his descriptions, deeds, and power over bedroom communities. Ramirez has wanted to exploit a possibly satanic motif with his crimes, but these may have been little more than feints due to his lack of imagination or other raison d’etre.
By 1985, Ramirez had stacked up bodies from Monrovia to Mission Viejo. Ramirez had traveled to the Bay area and introduced his methods of nightly visitation to a stunned set of victims, and reports has the San Francisco populace riveted on the threat from Southern California. Pistol whipping his victims and forcing the women of the home to unwilling sexual acts completed the Night Stalker modus operandi. By this time Los Angeles homeowners and apartment renters had purchased en masse new window treatments, locks, double screens, storm windows, and other notably window-based home improvements.
Ramirez terrified the Los Angeles area because his appearance as a tall thin Hispanic man was too general to identify anyone in Los Angeles. Without a family, social network or job to report to, nobody noticed his absence or observed his activities as unusual. The beatings, rapes, sodomies and murders continued from Diamond Bar to Burbank, or Glendale to Rosemead, and from Arcadia to Monterey Park. Ramirez’ haunts were notably low-rent or suburban residential areas where he might pass unnoticed, unlike upscale parts of Los Angeles like Beverly Hills and Westside Los Angeles, where he never struck.
Ramirez was somewhat proud of the media attention, yet the increased vigilance of Los Angeles residents due to awareness of his crimes and description were his undoing. When he stole an orange Toyota and used it to cruise unfamiliar neighbourhoods, an observer reported this to police. When police examined the abandoned car, a fingerprint identified Richard Ramirez from his drug possession arrests. Ramirez’ fingerprints were part of the evidence from an accountant’s home where he had delivered his deathly visitation earlier in the year, and matched that taken from other crime scenes.
At 25 Richard Ramirez was behind bars with a stack of felonies aimed at him and additional charges pending. While the media portrayal of the trial focused on the pentagram carving and Satanic leanings of Ramirez, most felt this was just a casual pose. Ramirez’ subsequent trial and marriage from within San Quentin prison are the stuff of avid tabloid news, while the majority of the Los Angeles public remembers a summer of uncomfortable radio and news reports, eyeing the window screens and sizing up the risks.
Black Comedy of Capture
Ramirez happened to be away in Arizona visiting family when the news broke of the Night Stalker suspect’s identity broke. Ongoing media reporting concerning the Night Stalker emphasized the work of police to capture the killer and safeguard public morale. Ramirez disembarked from a Greyhound bus to see numerous officers in uniform about, and ducked into a bodega. The newsstand had several cover magazines featuring Ramirez, and the owner called out “El Matador” (It’s Him-The Killer!) Ramirez panicked and ran.
The six minute mile is the fitness standard for California’s schoolchildren, and Ramirez ran two of them in 12 minutes. Casing the neighbourhood, he began jumping backyard fences and eyeballing a new ride. Ramirez spotted a red Mustang with keys in it, and jumped in to escape. But the owner of the car jumped up too, from underneath the car and grabbed Ramirez, ignoring the threat of a gun. Faustino Pinon then held on as Ramirez threw the car into gear and smashed it.
Ramirez then jumped out and tried to carjack the Granada from another driveway, with the owner still in it – Angelina de la Torres. Ramirez threatened her in Spanish, but her husband came running at the sounds of her screams and another neighbour called police after hearing the crash. Jose Burgoin had heard the incident in the Pinon driveway and came outside after making the call to help his neighbour out of the wreck. When de la Torres screamed with Ramirez trying to take her car, Burgoin yelled for his young sons (Jaime and Julio) to come out.
Jaime Burgoin ran toward the car, and recognized the media-saturated suspect’s familiar profile in the car. Yelling that he was the killer, all the men converged as Ramirez was trying to make a break for it on foot. Manuel de la Torres tagged Ramirez with the fence post he’d grabbed, and caught him again and again with it. Tackling Ramirez after a particularly hard swing by de la Torres, the men had achieved the impossible. The Night Stalker had finally been caught. Not by police, but by members of the terrorized community.
In total Richard Ramirez murdered 13 people.
Article by
Roy Whyte
. Visit his Google+ page for more.
As serial killer cases go, one of the most bizarre and downright sickening is the Jeffrey Dahmer case. Dahmer initially became fixated with sex with men but evolved his strange desires into more brutally inhuman tastes. Gregarious and active as a child, his playful personality underwent a change after a move. The Dahmers were by all accounts a fairly healthy family whose second child arrived shortly after Mr. Dahmer achieved his Ph.D in a Chemistry. 4-H gardening and animal raising was a father and son bonding activity.
No serious or extreme changes marked the childhood fascination with nature and animals except after the Dahmers’ marriage problems. Jeffrey Dahmer’s mother was hospitalized just about the time puberty onset occurred. Dahmer’s obsessive roadkill gathering and backyard dissection grew. The fantasies became an aggressive reality, with mental plans for lying beside a nude man. But by the time high school started Dahmer was taking alcohol before school time to vanquish thoughts of partaking in sex with men.
Dahmer’s extroverted behaviour drew attention to himself from casual observers around school. Dahmer even talked his classmates into meeting with Vice President Walter Mondale during a trip to the nation’s capital. Dahmer’s academia was erratic from good grades to failure due to boredom or lack of attention. No close friends or partners meant a social life spent inside the world of animals while living on a diet of fantasies. High school was spent mantling his inner traumas of his parent’s bickering and escapist sexuality involving men and animals.
After high school graduation, loner Dahmer was left with splitting parents. The divorced Mrs. Dahmer moved from Ohio to Wisconsin, where her deviant son spent his isolation pursuing means to act out his violent and deviant fantasies. This is when Dahmer picked up a hitchhiker and first victim Stephen Hicks. This eighteen year old boy never saw another sunrise. Dahmer used his house to attack Hicks after hours spent hanging around. Dahmer used his roadkill dissection skills to dismember the body to hide the evidence.
Unlike many serial killers, the incident disturbed Dahmer enough to cause him to retreat into an alcoholic coping mechanism. Dahmer’s father moved back in after finding Jeff alone, but he was still recovering from the impact of his first murder. Jeff Dahmer had inventively lied to police when disposing of the body, and smashed the bones after hiding them under the house. Dahmer’s father was concerned and suggested a job. Later Mr. Dahmer enrolled Jeff at Ohio State, but Jeff had little interest in this and resorted to selling his blood for beer money and he eventually flunked out.
Ironically, Jeffrey Dahmer was medicating himself out of his violent and deviant behaviours. In contrast to the rejecting and abusive father and son relationship. Jeff’s father was concerned for him and suggested the armed forces as a possible method to turn him towards a straighter path in life. Jeff briefly seemed to improve, his appearance fit and his manner relaxed from socialization and communal discipline. But a stunt in Germany earned Dahmer an early discharge. After a vagabond hotel escape in Miami Florida, Jeff’s father sent him to live with his own mother in Milwaukee.
The early mix of sexual desire with animal dissection, his developed knowledge of human anatomy from armed services training, and the widened homosexual scene in Milwaukee caused predictable results. The gay bars and clubs afforded Dahmer the perfect hunting ground for increasingly submissive “dates” with men whose drinks were loaded with sleeping pills. Dahmer’s predatory behaviour was hidden within the gay scene nobody talked about and insiders kept closed. For a serial killer this was a perfect combination.
Dahmer’s emotional life was so hidden from himself that the first murder episode outside the house seemed to have occurred without his knowledge. Dahmer’s arrival on the Milwaukee gay scene had been noted, but Dahmer’s taste required an anatomical type that his practices devolved around. Dahmer’s desires for a submissive partner had evolved from a lifeless mannequin hidden inside his closet to a live body of a man drugged and then killed before the morning.
Dahmer’s confused and troubled mind kept him strangling his victims as a way to spare them further pain. While the power politics of sexual domination were present, Dahmer’s preference for dead flesh entered into another dimension of deviancy with the instinct to kill combined with the protectionism of hiding the body and making evidence disappear. Hapless victims succeeded one another while Dahmer drank heavily, “medicating” himself to carry out the ugly deeds.
Foul smells from the basement made Jeff’s grandmother see red. The now typical pattern of an isolated life, a safe killing ground, a new environment, progressed into an apartment alone. Dahmer now dissolved into a single track life motive of killing. His brief stint in a men’s dormitory after second degree charges did not rehabilitate him in any way. The flow of victims continued, the accelerated stalking, killing, drugging and dismemberment became more commonplace. Dahmer made no attempt to seek help or find social outlets to counteract his murderous behaviour.
For this serial killer, his bloody reign nearly ended when one boy escaped. Able to briefly get away, a 14 year old running naked and bruised was seen running from his apartment. But bystanders who called police were appalled to see officers return the boy to Dahmer’s apartment after convincing explanations. These officers would later be dismissed after the episode was examined. The police looked upon the affair as a lover’s quarrel, a light onto the way Dahmer used the gay community to cover his liaisons. But bodies and disposal were still a problem. Dahmer’s killing rate and appetite for stalking new victims had progressed.
Strange smells and noises caused apartment residents to question Dahmer’s activities. It was becoming too hard to cover his tracks any longer. Another potential victim Tracy Edwards escaped his clutches after a brief tussle and was able to flag down members of the police department.
Dahmer’s arrest and incarceration stunned and shocked the community, with media attention riveted on the bizarre nature of the cannibalistic aspects of Dahmer’s crimes. The officers found a severed head in the fridge, human remains including severed hands and male organs, scattered around the apartment. Later interviews shed a horrific light on family values and everyday life gone wrong.
For Dahmer, his life behind bars was short as he was killed in prison by another inmate in a violent attack. In total, Dahmer had murdered 17 boys and men.
Article by
Roy Whyte
. Visit his Google+ page for more.
The following is a Jeffrey Dahmer interview and it gives a brief look into what makes up the mind of a serial killer.
John Wayne Gacy is perhaps one of the best known American serial killers of all time. Lacking remorse, repeating serial style abductions, killings, and sadistic torture procedures, Gacy claimed enough lives to be put to death. Twisted desire and corrupted behaviour gave way to private perversions of rape and murder performed on male captives his clown costume and people-friendly demeanour deceived. Wife swapping early in his marriage degenerated into homosexual activities with strange men. In a time when most things of this ilk were not spoken of, Gacy pursued stag films, prostitute led orgies and private homosexual encounters.
Many know Gacy for his propensity to wear a clown costume during block parties, but there is much more to this serial killer.
A socially aggressive man with a knack for cooking, Gacy personifies the ugly stereotype of the hidden psycho killer lurking within us all. A sickly child whose maturity hid a frightening alter ego, Gacy existed as a social curiosity who committed murders while belonging to social organizations and enjoying a social personality. The Junior Chamber International was the type of service club that Gacy might have earned the respect of his father for leading, if the known proclivity wasn’t stag parties, dirty movies, and paid women to bring in new members.
John Wayne Gacy became JayCee president despite known homosexual teenage tendencies. His history had already included incidences of accusations for kidnapping, sodomy, and other crimes. But Gacy’s white male status and Jaycees reputation formed a confidence that convinced even visiting police all was well. With a custom built crawlspace under his house and his wife and mother out of the way, Gacy pursued the serial killings and amassed a stack of ID’s, personal possessions, and torture trophies from the murders.
Gacy’s encounter with Donald Voorhies caused a prosecution for sodomy to occur. But Gacy may have been eyeballing young teenage men years before that, as the sub-basement full of corpses found later would attest. Gacy’s spree of abduction, homosexual assault, strangulation and death by asphyxiation, and storage/removal of bodies kept a steady flow of young men abused and/or missing from the area in the years 1972 to 1978. These were the crimes for which he was executed in 1994.
Gacy was the first son of a humble American machinist in Chicago environs who was of Polish extraction and a war veteran besides. Illinois was a humble place to grow up but not big enough for room between father and son in the Gacy household. Could Gacy’s father have been more accepting of his son’s tendencies? Would lives have been saved if the era had not been so homophobic? Would the later Gacy’s rage have been manageable? None can say.
The distance between the father and son grew with the years, when instinctive leanings toward cooking and gardening rubbed the father the wrong way. named for the mother’s favourite movie star. Gacy’s heart condition caused blackouts during sports and mechanized work activities, and as a high school dropout he began a career in sales. Nunn-Bush shoes was his career after a stint in Nevada failed to yield a high school diploma, yet Gacy was sharp enough to pursue a business degree later at Northwestern Business College.
John Wayne Gacy was abused emotionally by his father and rejected as being a “wimp”, while closely associating with his mother. Childhood friends relate that he had an inordinate appetite for cross-dressing and feminine type activities which resulted in him being all but alienated from his father. His public response to the sodomy charge included a failed lie detector test and his wife leaving him with the two children. Other allegations surfaced after the sodomy prosecution, yet it’s possible these encounters were consensual.
The 1950’s and 1960’s were a time of growth and change for John Wayne Gacy. His job as his wife’s relative’s manager of the Kentucky Fried Chicken manager had given Gacy a chance to shine as a cook. With the social parameters of a prison stint fulfilled by cooking in the prison kitchen and the social components served by commingling with inmates, staff, and warden, Gacy’s father’s death hit John Wayne Gacy hard. Prison was a difficult place to withstand both the desire for homosexual encounters and the sight of them, as violent encounters proved.
John Wayne Gacy became a different individual after prison and the death of his father. A brilliant social player, Gacy returned to Chicago. At 28, Gacy faced a divorced family and children he would never see again. Using the social skills he had mastered to cover his tainted urges, Gacy forged a new life. Short order cooking while living with his aging mother, Gacy resumed the life of “normalcy”. By 1971 he was in business for himself, manifesting a painting and decorating company. Gacy’s suppressed homosexual tendencies would surface paired with fits of rage and the urge for subjugation of the victim and their sexual humiliation.
Carol Hoff and her two daughters welcomed the relationship with Gacy, who formed a family with them. Yet the hidden compulsion for teenage youths Gacy preferred in a sexual manner could not be stoppered. Gacy picked up a young man at a bus stop and engaged in an homosexual encounter with him. This was followed with an impulsive swing of a kitchen knife. Thus Gacy created a a murder where a mere moral crime had been. On January 2, 1972 Tim McCoy had got into the wrong car and ended up with his remains hidden in a crawlspace behind Gacy’s home.
It should be known that Gacy’s encounters were not simply homosexual episodes, but homosexual incidents of torture and violence as well as sexual assault. Gacy’s marriage to Carol Hoff involved Gacy’s mother to move out. Gacy had learned to eliminate grounds for charges as well as empowering himself to act in power. In concert with sexual needs Gacy could exorcise the stigma of taboo fantasies under private conditions and enjoy suppressed urges and childhood rage at his father.
By the time of Gacy’s arrest in 1978, he had aggressively framed a harassment case against local police. The leads in the case led to the marijuana arrest that kept Gacy in custody while investigators surveyed the crime scene and corpse storage area at Gacy’s home. The twenty-nine bodies found there and the others found in the Des Plaines River created a media and public sensation. In all John Wayne Gacy was responsible for raping and murdering a shocking 33 young men and boys.
Article by
Roy Whyte
. Visit his Google+ page for more.
