Original subtitles

[intense suspenseful music]

[laughs]

[intense suspenseful music]

- Ramirez, otherwise known as the Night Stalker.

- He's the sadistic killer

wanted for a series of murders and rapes.

[intense suspenseful music]

- Her throat was horribly slashed, almost to the bone.

- This was a very, very personal attack on this woman.

[tense brooding music]

- Intrusions, murders, rapes.

This was one of the most dangerous people I've ever seen.

- We felt they wouldn't catch him

before he killed a lot more people.

- Who wants to be next? I don't.

[tense suspenseful music]

- He encounters the sleeping victim,

bristling with hostility.

[gentle foreboding music]

- It was very, very hot.

It was that summer of unbelievable heat

in Los Angeles County.

Most people at that time were not

hesitant to leave windows open.

[intense suspenseful music]

[birds chirping]

[dogs barking]

- That day, Jack Vincow walks up to his mother's apartment,

the window is open and the front door is unlocked.

Jack proceeds through the front door

and saw that the living room had been completely ransacked.

- It looked like somebody had gone through

and taken property, or at least looking for property.

[intense suspenseful music]

- Jack continues through the apartment

to his mother's bedroom,

in here he finds his mother partially covered by a sheet.

[intense foreboding music]

- Her throat was horribly slashed, almost to the bone.

Blood all over the place.

It's just a horrible, horrible scene.

- He phones LAPD's 911 line

and tells them, "Someone has murdered my mother,

please come quick."

[siren wailing]

- The police learned that Jennie Vincow was 79 years old.

She had immigrated from the USSR to New York City.

She raised two sons and managed a rental property,

and later moved out to Los Angeles

to be near her son, Jack.

- Jack was undoubtedly horrified,

who would do this kind of horrific thing

to an elderly woman?

[upbeat music]

After the responding officers had secured the crime scene,

the detectives proceed to the bedroom.

- What stood out to me most was the amount of blood.

There were both slashes and stab wounds.

- And there were indications that the victim

had also been sexually assaulted.

This was a very, very personal attack on this woman.

[tense brooding music]

- It appeared that whoever did this came in

through a living room window, had removed a window screen.

- The fingerprint was successfully lifted

around the metal rim of the screen.

[tense brooding music]

Duty and shock, and the emotions compete with one another.

And at least for me, duty always won out.

We gotta make sure somebody's brought to justice for this.

[intense suspenseful music]

[upbeat music]

- Richard Ramirez was the youngest of five children

to a couple living in El Paso, Texas.

I would take care of him when my mom was doing something else

[intense suspenseful music]

- It's unclear whether that might have had an effect

on the development of Richard's brain areas

associated with impulse control, morality,

judgment, executive functioning.

- His father was often working and when he was around,

he was reportedly quite aggressive

and explosive, judgemental.

- My dad,

[tense foreboding music]

- He felt that being physically tough or actually brutal

was the thing you have to do

in order to keep the kids in line.

[tense foreboding music]

[tense suspenseful music]

- I think Richard felt very detached from his father

and probably had a longing

for a structuring relationship with a male figure.

[tense foreboding music]

[tense suspenseful music]

[light music]

[siren wailing]

- Jennie Vincow was not your typical homicide victim

here in Los Angeles.

So much of the crime were related to gang issues,

narcotic issues, drug issues.

And this just didn't appear to be the case

with Jennie Vincow.

[tense music]

The detectives continue their investigation,

canvasing neighborhoods, re-interviewing people.

- But none of those techniques worked.

So that case went unsolved.

I don't think anybody could have predicted

what would happen next.

- Dads were like legends, right?

My dad was like that. World War II vet.

He was in the Battle of the Bulge with General Patton.

I joined the military too.

And that's how we became, you know, really close.

And Maxine, my stepmother was a great role model too.

She was a CPA and an attorney at the time.

- They were successful business owners.

They owned a couple of pizza restaurants.

[tense brooding music]

- Upon their arrival at the front,

the men saw the door to be ajar,

peeked around the door.

- Mr. Zazzara was in a living room area,

dead from a bullet wound to the head.

- God only knows why it happened like that,

but this is the ultimate in evil.

[tense suspenseful music]

[police radio chatter]

- When the police arrive on the scene,

they contacted the two callers who tell them,

that the home was owned by Vincent and Maxine Zazzara.

The police officers find Vincent Zazzara dead on a sofa.

[tense suspenseful music]

He had a single gunshot wound to the head

that appears to have been fired at a close range.

And then the officers find Maxine Zazzara, partially nude.

And she appears essentially to have been butchered

in the bedroom.

[tense suspenseful music]

- They thought she may have been sexually assaulted as well.

So it's just a horrendous, horrendous crime scene.

- I went to the house right away and it was cops everywhere.

And they told me I couldn't go in

because you know, it was a crime scene and all that.

My dad, he was the glue that held our family together.

For holidays, he would like, make huge plates of lasagna.

And if he came over to the house, he goes,

"What are you, you look like you're starving to death.

Get over here."

After this happened, every time there's a holiday,

it's a bad day.

[gentle somber music]

[tense foreboding music]

- I noticed that there was a bucket right under the window.

- On that bucket was a shoe print,

in the adjacent flower bed

a similar shoe print was discovered.

It was huge.

It could turn out to be compelling evidence and a lead

that helps identify the killer.

[dramatic music]

[tense foreboding music]

[tense foreboding music]

[airplane engine roaring]

- Miguel, oh man, that guy, when he came back from Vietnam.

- He bragged about killing women, Vietnamese

and Vietcong women as well, molesting them,

decapitating some of them with a machete.

[tense brooding music]

[tense dramatic music]

[gun shooting]

- He's got puberty overlapping with exposure to violence.

And I think he started to realize

that he was sexually aroused by images of violence.

- So there was a tragic incident

where Ramirez was spending time with his cousin.

[tense foreboding music]

- For a healthy, average individual,

that would've been a horrendous and traumatic experience.

I think for somebody like Ramirez,

all of the gore and violence of the moment

was probably profoundly exciting.

- Unfortunately Miguel became something

of a surrogate father figure to Ramirez.

And I think really inspired him.

[dramatic music]

[upbeat music]

- The particularly brutal nature of the murders

of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara drove an urgency.

- But there was no suspect, and at the time,

there was no connection between the Zazzara murder scene

and the Vincow murder scene.

[tense suspenseful music]

- There's a whole grouping of murders.

They seem to dominate in the suburban areas,

but there's no real commonality to it.

Some are by gunshot, some by stabbing weapons.

- Victims of different ages, different races,

certainly different communities.

[dramatic suspenseful music]

On one of the locations,

there was a pentagram drawn up on the wall.

[tense foreboding music]

- So many of the descriptions pointed

to this being the same man.

He was described as a rather tall, thin, Mexican

or white male, stringy dark hair.

- By July, things were heating up literally

and figuratively.

It almost seemed like every weekend,

there was another attack, another murder,

people were really scared.

- [Man] Lock your doors, lock your windows.

- Who wants to be next? I don't.

[siren wailing]

[low dramatic music]

- In July of 1985, nobody felt safe.

This was the summer of horrible murders

that left the people, uneasy, afraid,

and unsecure in their very own homes.

[siren wailing]

- I was concerned, very concerned.

They were suspecting that it was somebody

breaking into houses at nighttime.

I was 19 at the time.

I said, "Grandma, you need to lock your doors.

Please just lock the doors at night."

"I'm not going to lock the doors."

They were mid-westerners who left their back door open

because their neighbor might need something.

- My parents were just the most wonderful parents

anybody can have.

My father was a mechanic and he owned several

service stations all over from Hollywood to East LA.

My mother worked as a security guard.

- What I really remember was more than anything else,

their family meant everything to them.

[tense foreboding music]

- I remember that we pulled up in front of my parents' home,

I went to the back door, and I noticed that it was open.

[tense foreboding music]

Then I walked down the hall and to the left of the hall

was their bedroom.

And that's where they were.

[tense foreboding music]

The room was covered with blood.

My father was laying back on the bed.

[tense foreboding music]

- He was struck with a machete and he was shot with a 22.

Lela was shot three times in the face.

[tense foreboding music]

- I went to the front. I was screaming.

My five-year-old was standing on the curb.

To this day, I'll never forget her face. She was just.

[tense somber music]

- One day changed everybody's life forever.

The trust and innocence, and it's all gone,

and it never comes back the same way ever.

[tense foreboding music]

[dramatic music]

[light music]

- It does seem that about age 14,

that here were glimmers of anti-social behavior

being very drawn to romantic, gothic imagery

from horror movies, like vampires that break in the night

and prey upon individual.

And I think it really started to gel into his personality.

[film reel whirling]

- Hunting women, dismembering people,

for Ramirez these were fantasies

that were being played out on the screen

and then he would take them home.

And his fantasy life would take over.

[dramatic intense music]

Ramirez began working at a local hotel, doing various jobs.

He was learning how to peep on people,

which I think must have had a kind of godlike feeling

for him.

There's an incident that I think he starts to show

the progression into growing violence

where Ramirez, using his master key goes into a room

where there is a woman who comes out of the bathroom.

[tense foreboding music]

He ultimately begins to assault her sexually.

The woman's husband comes into the room,

and winds up severely beating Ramirez, leading to him,

winding up in a hospital.

Reportedly, no charges were pressed.

And ultimately, Ramirez got away with this.

[tense music]

[dramatic music]

[tense foreboding music]

- By then, the police at a task force.

As these murders occurred, the investigators

noticed similarities in the crimes.

There was a plethora of clues, including a pentagram

that started appearing at some of the crime scenes.

And at the Kneiding scene, there was a bullet recovered

that matched one of the other crime scenes.

[light music]

- The same day the Kneidings were murdered,

there was another murder, just 11 miles away in Sun Valley.

[tense foreboding music]

In this case they spoke of a killer

who demanded them to hail Satan.

[fire burning]

- The survivors described the tall, thin individual,

long black, greasy hair, kind of bad skin

and really bad teeth.

The word was out, the news media even gave it a nickname.

- Officials in Los Angeles are offering a $10,000 reward

for information leading to the capture

of the so-called Night Stalker.

He is the sadistic killer wanted for a series of murders

and rapes.

- And when he got a name, the Night Stalker,

he had to live up to it.

[light music]

- It's been more than a year since the Jennie Vincow murder

and the entire region is living in fear.

- We felt that they wouldn't catch him

before he killed a lot more people.

The fear just consumes you.

[tense music]

[tense foreboding music]

[dogs barking]

- They ask us to look at 30 or 40 cases

that might be put together.

Child abductions, intrusions, murders, rapes,

different types of weaponry.

There seem to be no similarities in victims.

- But there were similarities

in the method of operation of going into the residence,

killing the male, sexually assaulting the woman.

[dramatic music]

- Found in several of the murders was a shoe print.

- Then of course there is the pentagrams.

There's the discussion of Satan.

There's a lot of linkages there. There's no doubt about it.

- And the only question left was, who was it?

[dramatic music]

[light music]

[tense foreboding music]

And people were telling me

that he was going through the garbage cans and eating,

I go, "No way, no way,

he wouldn't do that."

- I think at this time, Ramirez is also transient, homeless.

And drug use was really just ramping up more and more.

- Cocaine is extremely destabilizing,

causing a diminished sense of self control

over one's more improper urges.

- He's basically supporting himself and a serious drug habit

with repeat burglary.

And then ultimately I think falls in love with Satanism.

- Ramirez's clearly was searching for a structured

sense of self to give him personal identity.

And first I think he latched onto Miguel,

and then, Satan becomes something of a father figure.

[dramatic music] [airplane engine roaring]

[siren wailing]

[dramatic music]

- On August 24th, the Night Stalker strikes again.

He commits crimes in Orange County,

but both the victims survive.

- Right before the attack,

a young boy saw the suspect in an orange Toyota.

- Law enforcement was able to identify the specific car

and it was found, dumped about three miles

from where it was originally stolen.

- There was a fingerprint found on the rear view mirror.

It was a huge break in the case.

- Utilizing relatively new fingerprint technology,

the fingerprint was linked to a prior arrest in Los Angeles

for auto theft and his photograph was on file.

- It was a pretty good likeness of the sketch developed

by some of the survivors.

- The suspect was Richard Ramirez.

- An alert is going out to all law enforcement agencies

and the state of California and surrounding regions

to be on the lookout for this individual

who is to be considered armed and extremely dangerous.

- And I called my mom and I hadn't told her, you know,

"Turn on the TV, Richie is on TV."

Richie was the Night Stalker. They couldn't believe it.

- It was a bombshell.

Everybody was looking out for him.

- And the community at large

was hunting for a serial killer.

[tense foreboding music]

- Ramirez's photo was all over the media,

both locally and nationally

because of the number of crimes that he had committed.

- We became aware that Richard Ramirez was known to frequent

the terminal of the Greyhound Bus Line

in downtown Los Angeles.

- They set up an undercover operation there

where they staked it out.

[dramatic music]

- He went into a little store to buy something,

and the people in there said it was him,

and it started as a whisper and then ended up a yell.

And then of course they called the police.

[siren wailing]

He got on the bus and people were reading the newspaper

and he was sitting right there.

"Oh, that's him right there."

- And he went out and ran two or three miles

through 12 lanes of traffic, climbed over fences.

- And then Ramirez was in East Los Angeles,

when he attempted to steal a car from a pregnant woman.

- There was a mob of citizens in East LA,

and they went after him.

- They risked their own selves to go after him.

They did not know whether he had a weapon.

They were heroes.

[dramatic music]

[tense foreboding music]

- So it was a hot night,

Ramirez is really, very high on cocaine.

He doesn't have a place to sleep.

He's just kind of driving around in a stolen car.

- He's trying to put together enough money

through his various illegal activities

to possibly pick up a sex worker.

He winds up in Glassel Park.

- There is the trope that a vampire requires

your invitation to enter.

And in the case of Ramirez,

there was the quality of interpreting things

like open windows as almost being inviting to him.

And one particular home, there's a open window.

[tense foreboding music]

- Ramirez enters the home and begins to rifle through

the things that are in the home.

- But there appeared not to be very much that

he could steal.

It may have angered him.

- And in that moment, you have somebody

who was looking for an outlet, for aggression

and sexual excitement earlier in that evening.

And didn't have it.

And he encounters the sleeping victim

kind of opportunistically.

- At this point, you know,

he's in a soup of different things that have been present

since he was young.

This attraction towards gore and violence, the use of drugs.

- From the father's maltreatment, the witnessing of

his own cousin killing his wife for a trivial reason.

The tendency to psychopathy is multiplying.

[tense music]

- He's now broken in to get money,

here he finds this sleeping victim,

Jennie Vincow.

Imagine somebody bristling with hostility

who would really think of you only

in terms of how they could take advantage of you,

make use of you.

And he finds a knife there in the apartment,

and then winds up exploding

into a kind of a frenzy of violence.

- Jennie Vincow, even at 79 years old,

tried to fend off her attacker.

She was doing everything she could to save her own life.

- Ramirez winds up butchering Jennie Vincow.

She was really ultimately mutilated by him.

[tense foreboding music]

He probably had a kind of orgasmic sexualized thrill

from the entire frenzy.

And I think would've been left with a feeling of control,

power, domination, feeling on top of the world.

[dramatic music]

- It was a really long trial.

Yeah. It just seemed like a circus.

- He made faces, he made hand gestures,

but when I testified, I looked him straight in the eyes

and he just put his head down.

He's nothing more than a coward.

[dramatic music]

That was what we wanted. We wanted him put to death.

Justice will never, ever really be done,

but justice was done to the extent that it could be.

- He didn't care who, he didn't care when,

he just played God, rather than Satan,

and decided who lived and who died.

- He's a psychopath,

partly because of inherited tendencies,

coupled with the brutalization,

by the father, coupled with the drug abuse.

And he'd witnessed his cousin, you know, killing his wife.

- His cousin pillaged and killed in Vietnam

in small villages probably and got away with it.

For Richard, his villages were the bedrooms

on the ground floors of houses that left their doors

and windows open.

He probably thought Miguel would be proud of him.

[tense music]

- I have a tremendous amount of anger

with regard to how society glorifies serial killers,

how I guarantee you there won't be too many people

that know the name of victims,

but they'll know the name of the killer.

- It's hard to have faith when you've lost so much.

I just try to live.

Remember the good things.

- Do I forgive him? I will never forgive him.

He took my parents.

- They were the light, they were the glue, they were..

Thank God I had them for the nineteen years I had 'em.

That was a gift.