These girls below were regular visitors in San Quentin State Prison performing sex acts on themselves behind the glass while the prisoner was watching. Plus stuff they received in the mail.
The murders attributed to Richard Ramirez officially began on June 27, 1984. However, there is nothing that indicates that the stabbing death of Jennie Vincow in Glassel Park that night had anything to do with the killings that came later; Vincow’s murder took place nearly a year before the others, which were all committed in fairly rapid succession. Ramirez’s defense team later implied that Vincow’s own sons had killed her, or had had her killed, for her money. One of the sons was an unemployed pharmacist who was known to have hit his mother in the past. He was described by investigators as evasive and difficult to interview, and he refused to take a polygraph exam. When Ramirez was ultimately brought to trial for Vincow’s murder, Michael Tynan, the presiding judge, refused to allow any questions pertaining to Vincow’s financial affairs.
Dads were like legends, right? My dad was like that. World War 2 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.
Following the shootings, the Zazzara home was frantically ransacked and Maxine was hideously mutilated. Her eyes were gouged out and an inverted cross was carved into her left breast. A search of the crime scene revealed that Maxine had a .45 caliber handgun in her purse. That search also uncovered a fingerprint at the point of entry that had not been left by either of the Zazzaras or by Ramirez. Peter Zazzara, a son of the slain couple, told at least two officers that the killings were a drug-related mob hit. Nevertheless, all evidence and testimony pertaining to drug trafficking and organized crime was later stricken from the pre-trial record, and no questions were allowed at trial about Vincent Zazarra’s prison time, the guns found in the house, or the family’s ties to organized crime.
On July 20, Max and Leila Kneiding were butchered in their Glendale home. The crime scene was a veritable bloodbath. Both had been shot multiple times with a .22 and viscously hacked with a machete. Blood was splattered in all directions, indicating that the attack came from a number of different angles. That fact strongly suggested multiple assailants. The bodies of the Kneidings were autopsied by Dr. Irwin Golden, who was later discredited during the OJ Simpson trial, much to the embarrassment of the prosecutors on that case. Hairs found on both the nightstand and atop the pillows did not come from Ramirez.
My father was a mechanic and he owned several service stations all over from Hollywood to Eat LA. My mother worked as a security guard.
Two jurors in the trial later had to be replaced, one within a week of beginning deliberations, after having sat through a nearly year long trial. One of the two, Phyllis Singletary, was murdered in a brutal, Night Stalker-style attack. She was purportedly killed by her boyfriend for reasons unconnected to her jury service. The boyfriend, conveniently enough, allegedly killed himself before police could get to him.
(Sources: Programmed To Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder by author David McGowan & A&E's First Blood series Season 1)
In the late 1940’s the U.S. government was conducting nuclear bomb tests in nearby Los Alamos, New Mexico. Little was known about the detrimental effects of nuclear fallout in 1949. Juarez was about 200 miles from Los Alamos, and when the winds were right, fallout from the bombs was regularly carried to Juarez and El Paso, where it settled on the populace and the cattle and in the milk and water. During the years when the testing was most frequent, 1950 to 1954, there was an unusually high rate of birth defects: babies born with too few limbs, half-formed hearts, and deformed heads—a host of physical as well as mental problems and abnormalities. In years to come, it would become common knowledge that nuclear fallout causes birth defects, but then there were only rumors about it. The A-bomb had won the war and the government did not want to publicize any complications the testing had caused.
Julian thought long and hard about the atomic bomb tests and began asking questions around Juarez and El Paso. He soon learned there were many children, in both towns, who’d been born with strange deformities. He learned there was a camp in Arizona where these children were being kept in secret. The government knew the bombs were very dangerous to the unborn, yet they tried to keep it from the public.
Ruben Ramirez, then Robert Ramirez, had been put in the slow class at Bowie Junior High School for children with learning disabilities. The class was headed by a teacher named Frank McMan. He was a ruddy-faced, dark-haired man, seemingly a concerned teacher whose only interest was in helping the troubled children under his care do well and toe the line. In truth, McMan was an obsessed child molester who, over the years, sexually abused dozens of kids who’d passed through his classes. This was during a time when the extent to which child molesters had permeated society was unknown. None of the children in his classes ever told anyone about McMan’s obsession.
He had a particular fondness for Ruben, then Robert. He even began going to the Ramirez home when Mercedes and Julian were working, and he abused Ruben and Robert there. Both brothers knew it was wrong, but it felt good, and it was a way to stay on Mr. McMan’s good side. “He would,” Robert would later say, “come over to our house in the afternoon, do things, and take us back to his place. Like a couple of times a week, for a while. My mother and father knew, but we told them we were doing work for him at his house and that he was helping us with schoolwork. But he was sucking our cocks and getting us off.” When asked if McMan had gotten to Richard, Robert said: “I don’t know . . . Richie used to be there a lot, you know, but I never saw him do it. Maybe . . . I think so. He would even give us blow jobs in the bathroom at school. It felt good; what the fuck—so I never told anyone.
When Richard was recently asked if McMan had in fact sexually accosted him, he said he didn’t remember. He would have been seven or eight and it was an event which, he quickly concedes, he may have blocked out. He does, however, remember a degenerate pedophile who lived on Sapian Street, one block east of Ledo. He says he saw the man stick a candle in a boy’s rectum as the boy screamed. Then he sodomized the boy very hard while he continued screaming. Richard says he left at that point and saw no more.
Cousin Miguel or, “Mike” as he was often called, returned from Vietnam a war hero with two tours of duty under his belt and four medals on his thickly muscled chest. His Green Beret platoon of twenty men had been surrounded by the Vietcong at one point, and Mike and another soldier had been the only ones who’d made it out alive. Mike took to guerilla fighting like a champion boxer to the ring. It was a situation in which he could vent his anger and aggression—kill and not get into any kind of trouble. According to Richard, Mike had twenty-nine known kills. Mike grew to actually enjoy war. When the American soldiers learned the Vietcong believed they wouldn’t ascend to heaven if they lost a body part before dying, the soldiers began mutilating their bodies. It was not uncommon to see an American soldier with a necklace of human ears. The raping of the enemy’s women was commonplace, too, and Mike had more than his share of Vietcong women. When Mike returned from Vietnam, Richard began hanging out with him. He was twelve. To Richard, Mike was special—a bona fide, real life hero, a man who’d gone into battle and come back victorious, with medals and Polaroid photos to prove he had been there and done it. In these pictures—which Mike showed Richard many times—there were Vietnamese women on their knees being forced to perform fellatio on Mike. In each he looked grimly at the camera and held a cocked .45 to the woman’s head, genuine fear in the woman’s eyes. Mike kept these black-and-white pictures, all bent by handling, in a shoebox at the top of a closet. He also kept eight shrunken heads he’d brought back from Nam in a battered suitcase under his bed. He told Richard he’d used the heads as pillows in Vietnam.
Mike was married to a shapely Mexican-American redhead named Jessie with a full figure and strong personality. He needed a strong woman as he was not an easy man to get along with. Jessie and Mike had two boys, Paul and Orado. Mike hadn’t received the kind of psychological counseling he’d needed when he’d returned from battle. In a war setting, he had no problem getting along. He’d been trained to kill with stealth and finality, and he realized he’d enjoyed it. “Having power over life and death was a high, an incredible rush. It was godlike. You controlled who’d live and who died—you were God,” he told Richard. To Richard, in a sense, Mike was a god. He listened to his older cousin’s war stories of rape and killing wide-eyed, fascinated beyond normal curiosity. The photos had a profound effect on Richard. They aroused him sexually in a way far more intense than the girlie magazines his brothers had. In some of the pictures Mike was holding the decapitated head of a woman. It was the same woman who had been forced to fellate him in another photograph. Richard didn’t know why these pictures excited him so much; he knew it was wrong for him to be aroused by such brutality, but he would often masturbate thinking about those pictures. The Church and Jesus, he knew, would frown deeply on such things, but he had no control over the whole process. He couldn’t help becoming excited by Mike’s photographs and stories. Satan, he began to vehemently believe, would have approved of the thoughts and feelings he was having, and he started to think maybe Satan would be a more appropriate god, a power, for him to follow and worship.
Richard and Cousin Mike would cruise up and down Alameda Street in El Paso. They’d smoke pot and listen to the radio, and Mike would regale the boy with colorful, bloody, sexually sadistic war stories. Richard had been smoking pot steadily from the time he was ten. His siblings were always lighting up joints in the house, and Richard was quick to pick up the habit. It made him feel grown up. Pot was cheap in El Paso and easy to come by. Richard’s brother Robert had belonged to a Chicano movement called the Brown Berets. They would protest vocally and stage rallies about how unjustly Chicanos were being treated by the U.S. government. Ruth joined the group and talked of how inequitably Mexican-Americans were treated, a subject hotly discussed in the Ramirez house. Richard became Mike’s pupil. All his older brothers were away from the house, and Mike took it upon himself to show Richard the ways of the world—and the ways of war: how to fight to win, and how to protect himself. “It’s us,” he told Richard, “the poor and downtrodden, against them, the rich and influential.” He taught the boy the tricks and nuances of jungle warfare: showed him how to become invisible; how to kill with stealth and absolute certainty. Richard was a willing, particularly bright pupil.
Jessie was not happy with Mike or the lifestyle he’d chosen for himself. All he wanted to do was work out, drive around with Richie, smoke pot, and brag about the things he’d done in ’Nam. Jessie told him to get a job, stop hanging around with a kid—and stop smoking pot. Mike was not the type to do anything but what he wanted to do. Jessie complained to her mother, Larcerda, who was a tough, determined woman with a sharp tongue, and she, too, got on Mike to get a job. Mike and Jessie and their two sons lived on Fruta Avenue in a small, one-story red brick building located in a residential complex called Truth Apartments. It was on a quiet, dusty street. On May 4, 1973, Richard was in Mike’s house, playing miniature pool. Thirsty, he went to get a Coke from the refrigerator. It was late afternoon and Jessie was out shopping. Inside the fridge, he saw Mike’s gun, a .38-caliber with a two-inch barrel, on the top shelf. “Hey,” he called to Mike, “what’s that doing in the refrigerator?” “I may be using it, and I want it to be cool,” Mike said. Richard wasn’t sure what the hell Mike meant and went back to the pool table. His long, nimble fingers and steady hand made him a naturally good pool player. As he was about to take a shot, Jessie came in carrying groceries. Immediately she started complaining about money and Mike’s not working. Mike was not lazy; he just wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of a job yet. Why should he work unless a job that suited him came along? He told Jessie to shut up—that he was sick and tired of her complaining, whining bullshit. She continued to nag him. He walked calmly, to the refrigerator, took out the .38, and faced Jessie. She wasn’t frightened. She demanded to know what he was going to do with the gun. He told her he’d kill her if she didn’t put a lid on it. She didn’t believe him and she dared him to shoot her, spreading her legs defiantly, sticking her chin out. In one quick move, Mike raised the pistol and shot Jessie right in the face at point-blank range. The bullet entered just above her lip and exited the back of her head. Dead, she hit the ground hard, a finger of blood squirting from her wound as her body shook, trembled, and quaked in death’s final embrace. The report of the .38 sounded like a cannon in the small, cramped apartment, and Richard’s ears were ringing. The room reeked of gunpowder and blood. Mike’s two sons were crying. Mike told a wide-eyed Richard to leave and not tell anyone he was there when it happened. He didn’t want Richard to be involved in any way. “You don’t ever say you saw this!” he said. “You understand?” Numb, shocked, Richard left the house and began walking back to Ledo, along one of the many Santa Fe Railroad and Southern Pacific tracks crisscrossing much of El Paso. The day was gray, overcast and windy. Clouds of dust made it hard to see. Richard was very upset, but he said nothing to Ruth, Mercedes, or his father when he arrived home.
Just before dinner, the phone rang. It was Julian’s sister, Victoria, telling Julian about the killing and asking him to come to the police station to help. Julian went to see what he could do. Mike’s father had been gone for years, and it was Julian’s place to help his sister’s son. Richard remained mute when he heard his father tell Mercedes of the shooting, the death, and the arrest of his cousin. Richard stayed home that night, sullen, quiet, and withdrawn. Everyone thought it was because Mike was in jail, charged with murder. Richard wanted to go see him, but he was too young. Mike did well in jail. He became the boss of the section he was in while he awaited trial. El Paso jails are notoriously tough, but Mike had everything he wanted. In jail, as in war, “kill or be killed” was the order of the day—something Mike understood and had mastered quite well.
A few days after Mike killed Jessie, Richard returned to the Truth Apartments with his parents. Mike had called Julian from jail and asked him to go to the apartment and retrieve some pieces of jewelry. It was late afternoon, the sun shining brightly, the day very hot. When Julian opened the front door and saw Jessie’s blood in a large circle on the floor, he told Mercedes to wait in the car, but he let Richard come inside to help him find what Mike had asked for. Now, for maybe the first time, Richard realized there was something very different about him. He recently said: “That day I went back to that apartment, it was like some kind of mystical experience. It was all quiet and still and hot in there. You could smell the dried blood. Particles of dust just seemed to hover in the air. I looked at the place where Jessie had fallen and died, and I got this kind of tingly feeling. It was the strangest thing. Then my father told me to look in her pocketbook for this jewelry my cousin wanted, and I dumped Jessie’s pocketbook on the bed and looked through her things. It gave me the weirdest feeling—I mean, I knew her, and these were her things, and she was dead. Murdered. Gone. And I was touching her things. It made me feel . . . in contact with her.” Richard had never told anyone he’d seen Jessie murdered. Richard, a very impressionable twelve-year-old at the time of the shooting, should have gotten therapy, but that luxury was never made available to him. Julian found the slug which had killed Jessie; it had gone clear through her head, hit the wall, and fallen to the floor. He’d figured out the trajectory and located the slug within two minutes. He showed it to Richard, both marveling over its destructive force, and Julian put it in his pocket. They retrieved what Mike wanted and left the still, hot silence of the place where there had been a murder. Seven months after the incident, Mike went to trial for the killing. His defense was temporary insanity. His lawyer argued that Mike had been exposed to too much combat, had never gotten therapy, and was not legally sane. The prosecutor argued that war or not, Mike had killed his wife in cold blood and should be sent to jail, not to an asylum where he could be released when and if the doctors deemed him cured. The jury, sympathetic toward Mike, a hero who had fought gallantly for his country against the dreaded Communists, found Mike innocent by reason of insanity, and he was committed to a Texas state mental hospital.
Mike was released from the Texas State Mental Hospital in late 1977, four and a half years after killing Jessie. The doctors felt he had stabilized and was fit to be returned to society. The doctors reasoned that his not having gotten extensive therapy after the horrors of Vietnam was to blame. He deserves another chance.
Richard stole a car and drove to San Francisco to meet LaVey. It was important for Richard to see and be among others who were followers of Satan. He believed in his heart that LaVey was the real thing, that he had a personal rapport with Lucifer. LaVey had opened a second church of Satan in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Many of the prostitutes hustling sex from store windows became members, as did some sexual deviants who called Amsterdam home and some transient perverts. Richard was deeply impressed when he met LaVey and treated him as though he was something holy. “I thought Richard was very nice—very shy. I liked him,” LaVey would say of Richard years later. Richard said he attended a ceremony over which LaVey presided. Everyone was naked, and LaVey did a ritual above the unclothed body of a woman. During the ceremony, Richard felt the ice-cold hand of Satan touch him and he felt Satan’s presence. It shook him to his core.
Soon after, Richard was arrested for driving a stolen car. He spent several months in jail, where he met a long-haired blond man with tattoos and bleeding gums who was also an avowed Satanist, and who did not shut up about how great Satan was.
He said Satan would protect and help anyone who was true to him. “You don’t ever have to feel guilty about anything. The only law is that you are true to your inner self. If you want to kill somebody, that’s okay. What’s bad to them is good for us. Get it?
Richard “got it” only too well, for when he was released from jail, he became what is known as a “lone practitioner.” He did not make it a secret that he followed Satan; in fact, he drew perfectly shaped pentagrams on his hands and arms, but he stayed away from groups and cults. He was untrusting of them. He felt that they (including Anton LaVey) might have been compromised by police infiltration.
Zeena LaVey, Anton’s daughter, went to the jail to visit Richard. She wore a long, skin-tight black dress over her intense hourglass figure and had bright blood-red lipstick on her full lips and long fingernails. She was with her then-boyfriend, a tall blond named Nicholas Shreck, who had cut off his left ear as a token of his devotion to Satan. Nicholas also wore all black and sported an ankle-length black leather coat. Zeena told Richard that her father and the Church sent their blessings and were praying to Satan for him; they were making him an honorary member of the Church. That made Richard’s spirits soar. He held LaVey in high esteem, and Zeena’s visit made him feel the forces of darkness were being marshalled behind him.
Carlo: You once told me that—(Tape shuts off.)—about what they call “the devil’s dandruff”—cocaine, which is really prevalent in society today. What are your thoughts on cocaine,
Richard? Ramirez: I love it! (laughs) No, well ... if you look at it in broad views, it’s a supply-and-demand type of thing. I saw a show not too long ago where the CIA, I believe, actually had been working with this stuff to get arms to the Contras and stuff like that. That’s on a big scale, but on a street level, I think cocaine is addictive and I think it’s very harmful to the body.
Carlo: What about the mind?
Ramirez: To the mind, sure. It depends on how you ingest it. If you mainline it, I’ve heard and read that it can cause brain clots that lead to strokes. Sure, it’s harmful, but the sense of pleasure it gives is very profound!
Carlo: What could you compare that sense of pleasure to, Richard?
Ramirez: There is nothing . . . to me, anyway, that comes near it.
Carlo: You once described it to me as an intense euphoric heat, a rush, a light tingling that goes to the brain.
Ramirez: Exactly.
Carlo: Your feelings about capital punishment in this country are very profound.
Ramirez: You better take away that CIA shit—(Tape shuts off.)
(Source: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez by author Philip Carlo)
The Appeal of the Night Stalker: The Railroading of Richard Ramirez
Emily Zola (Author), Jay Roslyn (Author), K.C. Graham (Author), Hector Conrad (Editor) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CTHRT7QF?ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_mwn_dp_XTSQ5FKT8Z1B33CN77X6&bestFormat=true&language=en-GB&previewDoh=1 I am in contact with this lady for a long time. She now wrote a book about the Richard Ramirez case! Can't wait to read it! And hopefully you all will do also! 🙂
(Source: A special thanks to George from https://cavdef.org/ - https://archive.org/details/TheConspiracyTracker/ConspiracyTracker_issue22/mode/2up)
These girls below were regular visitors in San Quentin State Prison performing sex acts on themselves behind the glass while the prisoner was watching. Plus stuff they received in the mail.
From reddit
''Maria Hernandez''
''An early Night Stalker composite sketch''
The murders attributed to Richard Ramirez officially began on June 27, 1984. However, there is nothing that indicates that the stabbing death of Jennie Vincow in Glassel Park that night had anything to do with the killings that came later; Vincow’s murder took place nearly a year before the others, which were all committed in fairly rapid succession. Ramirez’s defense team later implied that Vincow’s own sons had killed her, or had had her killed, for her money. One of the sons was an unemployed pharmacist who was known to have hit his mother in the past. He was described by investigators as evasive and difficult to interview, and he refused to take a polygraph exam. When Ramirez was ultimately brought to trial for Vincow’s murder, Michael Tynan, the presiding judge, refused to allow any questions pertaining to Vincow’s financial affairs.
Dads were like legends, right? My dad was like that. World War 2 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.
Following the shootings, the Zazzara home was frantically ransacked and Maxine was hideously mutilated. Her eyes were gouged out and an inverted cross was carved into her left breast. A search of the crime scene revealed that Maxine had a .45 caliber handgun in her purse. That search also uncovered a fingerprint at the point of entry that had not been left by either of the Zazzaras or by Ramirez. Peter Zazzara, a son of the slain couple, told at least two officers that the killings were a drug-related mob hit. Nevertheless, all evidence and testimony pertaining to drug trafficking and organized crime was later stricken from the pre-trial record, and no questions were allowed at trial about Vincent Zazarra’s prison time, the guns found in the house, or the family’s ties to organized crime.
On July 20, Max and Leila Kneiding were butchered in their Glendale home. The crime scene was a veritable bloodbath. Both had been shot multiple times with a .22 and viscously hacked with a machete. Blood was splattered in all directions, indicating that the attack came from a number of different angles. That fact strongly suggested multiple assailants. The bodies of the Kneidings were autopsied by Dr. Irwin Golden, who was later discredited during the OJ Simpson trial, much to the embarrassment of the prosecutors on that case. Hairs found on both the nightstand and atop the pillows did not come from Ramirez.
My father was a mechanic and he owned several service stations all over from Hollywood to Eat LA. My mother worked as a security guard.
Two jurors in the trial later had to be replaced, one within a week of beginning deliberations, after having sat through a nearly year long trial. One of the two, Phyllis Singletary, was murdered in a brutal, Night Stalker-style attack. She was purportedly killed by her boyfriend for reasons unconnected to her jury service. The boyfriend, conveniently enough, allegedly killed himself before police could get to him.
(Sources: Programmed To Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder by author David McGowan & A&E's First Blood series Season 1)
2008 Federal petition/declaration of forensic specialist Lisa Dimeo https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HrRRoyO1SzHQLOqnPa3Iak4wTf8tXibS/view
In the late 1940’s the U.S. government was conducting nuclear bomb tests in nearby Los Alamos, New Mexico. Little was known about the detrimental effects of nuclear fallout in 1949. Juarez was about 200 miles from Los Alamos, and when the winds were right, fallout from the bombs was regularly carried to Juarez and El Paso, where it settled on the populace and the cattle and in the milk and water. During the years when the testing was most frequent, 1950 to 1954, there was an unusually high rate of birth defects: babies born with too few limbs, half-formed hearts, and deformed heads—a host of physical as well as mental problems and abnormalities. In years to come, it would become common knowledge that nuclear fallout causes birth defects, but then there were only rumors about it. The A-bomb had won the war and the government did not want to publicize any complications the testing had caused.
Julian thought long and hard about the atomic bomb tests and began asking questions around Juarez and El Paso. He soon learned there were many children, in both towns, who’d been born with strange deformities. He learned there was a camp in Arizona where these children were being kept in secret. The government knew the bombs were very dangerous to the unborn, yet they tried to keep it from the public.
Ruben Ramirez, then Robert Ramirez, had been put in the slow class at Bowie Junior High School for children with learning disabilities. The class was headed by a teacher named Frank McMan. He was a ruddy-faced, dark-haired man, seemingly a concerned teacher whose only interest was in helping the troubled children under his care do well and toe the line. In truth, McMan was an obsessed child molester who, over the years, sexually abused dozens of kids who’d passed through his classes. This was during a time when the extent to which child molesters had permeated society was unknown. None of the children in his classes ever told anyone about McMan’s obsession.
He had a particular fondness for Ruben, then Robert. He even began going to the Ramirez home when Mercedes and Julian were working, and he abused Ruben and Robert there. Both brothers knew it was wrong, but it felt good, and it was a way to stay on Mr. McMan’s good side. “He would,” Robert would later say, “come over to our house in the afternoon, do things, and take us back to his place. Like a couple of times a week, for a while. My mother and father knew, but we told them we were doing work for him at his house and that he was helping us with schoolwork. But he was sucking our cocks and getting us off.” When asked if McMan had gotten to Richard, Robert said: “I don’t know . . . Richie used to be there a lot, you know, but I never saw him do it. Maybe . . . I think so. He would even give us blow jobs in the bathroom at school. It felt good; what the fuck—so I never told anyone.
When Richard was recently asked if McMan had in fact sexually accosted him, he said he didn’t remember. He would have been seven or eight and it was an event which, he quickly concedes, he may have blocked out. He does, however, remember a degenerate pedophile who lived on Sapian Street, one block east of Ledo. He says he saw the man stick a candle in a boy’s rectum as the boy screamed. Then he sodomized the boy very hard while he continued screaming. Richard says he left at that point and saw no more.
Cousin Miguel or, “Mike” as he was often called, returned from Vietnam a war hero with two tours of duty under his belt and four medals on his thickly muscled chest. His Green Beret platoon of twenty men had been surrounded by the Vietcong at one point, and Mike and another soldier had been the only ones who’d made it out alive. Mike took to guerilla fighting like a champion boxer to the ring. It was a situation in which he could vent his anger and aggression—kill and not get into any kind of trouble. According to Richard, Mike had twenty-nine known kills. Mike grew to actually enjoy war. When the American soldiers learned the Vietcong believed they wouldn’t ascend to heaven if they lost a body part before dying, the soldiers began mutilating their bodies. It was not uncommon to see an American soldier with a necklace of human ears. The raping of the enemy’s women was commonplace, too, and Mike had more than his share of Vietcong women. When Mike returned from Vietnam, Richard began hanging out with him. He was twelve. To Richard, Mike was special—a bona fide, real life hero, a man who’d gone into battle and come back victorious, with medals and Polaroid photos to prove he had been there and done it. In these pictures—which Mike showed Richard many times—there were Vietnamese women on their knees being forced to perform fellatio on Mike. In each he looked grimly at the camera and held a cocked .45 to the woman’s head, genuine fear in the woman’s eyes. Mike kept these black-and-white pictures, all bent by handling, in a shoebox at the top of a closet. He also kept eight shrunken heads he’d brought back from Nam in a battered suitcase under his bed. He told Richard he’d used the heads as pillows in Vietnam.
Mike was married to a shapely Mexican-American redhead named Jessie with a full figure and strong personality. He needed a strong woman as he was not an easy man to get along with. Jessie and Mike had two boys, Paul and Orado. Mike hadn’t received the kind of psychological counseling he’d needed when he’d returned from battle. In a war setting, he had no problem getting along. He’d been trained to kill with stealth and finality, and he realized he’d enjoyed it. “Having power over life and death was a high, an incredible rush. It was godlike. You controlled who’d live and who died—you were God,” he told Richard. To Richard, in a sense, Mike was a god. He listened to his older cousin’s war stories of rape and killing wide-eyed, fascinated beyond normal curiosity. The photos had a profound effect on Richard. They aroused him sexually in a way far more intense than the girlie magazines his brothers had. In some of the pictures Mike was holding the decapitated head of a woman. It was the same woman who had been forced to fellate him in another photograph. Richard didn’t know why these pictures excited him so much; he knew it was wrong for him to be aroused by such brutality, but he would often masturbate thinking about those pictures. The Church and Jesus, he knew, would frown deeply on such things, but he had no control over the whole process. He couldn’t help becoming excited by Mike’s photographs and stories. Satan, he began to vehemently believe, would have approved of the thoughts and feelings he was having, and he started to think maybe Satan would be a more appropriate god, a power, for him to follow and worship.
Richard and Cousin Mike would cruise up and down Alameda Street in El Paso. They’d smoke pot and listen to the radio, and Mike would regale the boy with colorful, bloody, sexually sadistic war stories. Richard had been smoking pot steadily from the time he was ten. His siblings were always lighting up joints in the house, and Richard was quick to pick up the habit. It made him feel grown up. Pot was cheap in El Paso and easy to come by. Richard’s brother Robert had belonged to a Chicano movement called the Brown Berets. They would protest vocally and stage rallies about how unjustly Chicanos were being treated by the U.S. government. Ruth joined the group and talked of how inequitably Mexican-Americans were treated, a subject hotly discussed in the Ramirez house. Richard became Mike’s pupil. All his older brothers were away from the house, and Mike took it upon himself to show Richard the ways of the world—and the ways of war: how to fight to win, and how to protect himself. “It’s us,” he told Richard, “the poor and downtrodden, against them, the rich and influential.” He taught the boy the tricks and nuances of jungle warfare: showed him how to become invisible; how to kill with stealth and absolute certainty. Richard was a willing, particularly bright pupil.
Jessie was not happy with Mike or the lifestyle he’d chosen for himself. All he wanted to do was work out, drive around with Richie, smoke pot, and brag about the things he’d done in ’Nam. Jessie told him to get a job, stop hanging around with a kid—and stop smoking pot. Mike was not the type to do anything but what he wanted to do. Jessie complained to her mother, Larcerda, who was a tough, determined woman with a sharp tongue, and she, too, got on Mike to get a job. Mike and Jessie and their two sons lived on Fruta Avenue in a small, one-story red brick building located in a residential complex called Truth Apartments. It was on a quiet, dusty street. On May 4, 1973, Richard was in Mike’s house, playing miniature pool. Thirsty, he went to get a Coke from the refrigerator. It was late afternoon and Jessie was out shopping. Inside the fridge, he saw Mike’s gun, a .38-caliber with a two-inch barrel, on the top shelf. “Hey,” he called to Mike, “what’s that doing in the refrigerator?” “I may be using it, and I want it to be cool,” Mike said. Richard wasn’t sure what the hell Mike meant and went back to the pool table. His long, nimble fingers and steady hand made him a naturally good pool player. As he was about to take a shot, Jessie came in carrying groceries. Immediately she started complaining about money and Mike’s not working. Mike was not lazy; he just wasn’t ready to take on the responsibility of a job yet. Why should he work unless a job that suited him came along? He told Jessie to shut up—that he was sick and tired of her complaining, whining bullshit. She continued to nag him. He walked calmly, to the refrigerator, took out the .38, and faced Jessie. She wasn’t frightened. She demanded to know what he was going to do with the gun. He told her he’d kill her if she didn’t put a lid on it. She didn’t believe him and she dared him to shoot her, spreading her legs defiantly, sticking her chin out. In one quick move, Mike raised the pistol and shot Jessie right in the face at point-blank range. The bullet entered just above her lip and exited the back of her head. Dead, she hit the ground hard, a finger of blood squirting from her wound as her body shook, trembled, and quaked in death’s final embrace. The report of the .38 sounded like a cannon in the small, cramped apartment, and Richard’s ears were ringing. The room reeked of gunpowder and blood. Mike’s two sons were crying. Mike told a wide-eyed Richard to leave and not tell anyone he was there when it happened. He didn’t want Richard to be involved in any way. “You don’t ever say you saw this!” he said. “You understand?” Numb, shocked, Richard left the house and began walking back to Ledo, along one of the many Santa Fe Railroad and Southern Pacific tracks crisscrossing much of El Paso. The day was gray, overcast and windy. Clouds of dust made it hard to see. Richard was very upset, but he said nothing to Ruth, Mercedes, or his father when he arrived home.
Just before dinner, the phone rang. It was Julian’s sister, Victoria, telling Julian about the killing and asking him to come to the police station to help. Julian went to see what he could do. Mike’s father had been gone for years, and it was Julian’s place to help his sister’s son. Richard remained mute when he heard his father tell Mercedes of the shooting, the death, and the arrest of his cousin. Richard stayed home that night, sullen, quiet, and withdrawn. Everyone thought it was because Mike was in jail, charged with murder. Richard wanted to go see him, but he was too young. Mike did well in jail. He became the boss of the section he was in while he awaited trial. El Paso jails are notoriously tough, but Mike had everything he wanted. In jail, as in war, “kill or be killed” was the order of the day—something Mike understood and had mastered quite well.
A few days after Mike killed Jessie, Richard returned to the Truth Apartments with his parents. Mike had called Julian from jail and asked him to go to the apartment and retrieve some pieces of jewelry. It was late afternoon, the sun shining brightly, the day very hot. When Julian opened the front door and saw Jessie’s blood in a large circle on the floor, he told Mercedes to wait in the car, but he let Richard come inside to help him find what Mike had asked for. Now, for maybe the first time, Richard realized there was something very different about him. He recently said: “That day I went back to that apartment, it was like some kind of mystical experience. It was all quiet and still and hot in there. You could smell the dried blood. Particles of dust just seemed to hover in the air. I looked at the place where Jessie had fallen and died, and I got this kind of tingly feeling. It was the strangest thing. Then my father told me to look in her pocketbook for this jewelry my cousin wanted, and I dumped Jessie’s pocketbook on the bed and looked through her things. It gave me the weirdest feeling—I mean, I knew her, and these were her things, and she was dead. Murdered. Gone. And I was touching her things. It made me feel . . . in contact with her.” Richard had never told anyone he’d seen Jessie murdered. Richard, a very impressionable twelve-year-old at the time of the shooting, should have gotten therapy, but that luxury was never made available to him. Julian found the slug which had killed Jessie; it had gone clear through her head, hit the wall, and fallen to the floor. He’d figured out the trajectory and located the slug within two minutes. He showed it to Richard, both marveling over its destructive force, and Julian put it in his pocket. They retrieved what Mike wanted and left the still, hot silence of the place where there had been a murder. Seven months after the incident, Mike went to trial for the killing. His defense was temporary insanity. His lawyer argued that Mike had been exposed to too much combat, had never gotten therapy, and was not legally sane. The prosecutor argued that war or not, Mike had killed his wife in cold blood and should be sent to jail, not to an asylum where he could be released when and if the doctors deemed him cured. The jury, sympathetic toward Mike, a hero who had fought gallantly for his country against the dreaded Communists, found Mike innocent by reason of insanity, and he was committed to a Texas state mental hospital.
Mike was released from the Texas State Mental Hospital in late 1977, four and a half years after killing Jessie. The doctors felt he had stabilized and was fit to be returned to society. The doctors reasoned that his not having gotten extensive therapy after the horrors of Vietnam was to blame. He deserves another chance.
Richard stole a car and drove to San Francisco to meet LaVey. It was important for Richard to see and be among others who were followers of Satan. He believed in his heart that LaVey was the real thing, that he had a personal rapport with Lucifer. LaVey had opened a second church of Satan in Amsterdam’s red-light district. Many of the prostitutes hustling sex from store windows became members, as did some sexual deviants who called Amsterdam home and some transient perverts. Richard was deeply impressed when he met LaVey and treated him as though he was something holy. “I thought Richard was very nice—very shy. I liked him,” LaVey would say of Richard years later. Richard said he attended a ceremony over which LaVey presided. Everyone was naked, and LaVey did a ritual above the unclothed body of a woman. During the ceremony, Richard felt the ice-cold hand of Satan touch him and he felt Satan’s presence. It shook him to his core.
Soon after, Richard was arrested for driving a stolen car. He spent several months in jail, where he met a long-haired blond man with tattoos and bleeding gums who was also an avowed Satanist, and who did not shut up about how great Satan was.
He said Satan would protect and help anyone who was true to him. “You don’t ever have to feel guilty about anything. The only law is that you are true to your inner self. If you want to kill somebody, that’s okay. What’s bad to them is good for us. Get it?
Richard “got it” only too well, for when he was released from jail, he became what is known as a “lone practitioner.” He did not make it a secret that he followed Satan; in fact, he drew perfectly shaped pentagrams on his hands and arms, but he stayed away from groups and cults. He was untrusting of them. He felt that they (including Anton LaVey) might have been compromised by police infiltration.
Zeena LaVey, Anton’s daughter, went to the jail to visit Richard. She wore a long, skin-tight black dress over her intense hourglass figure and had bright blood-red lipstick on her full lips and long fingernails. She was with her then-boyfriend, a tall blond named Nicholas Shreck, who had cut off his left ear as a token of his devotion to Satan. Nicholas also wore all black and sported an ankle-length black leather coat. Zeena told Richard that her father and the Church sent their blessings and were praying to Satan for him; they were making him an honorary member of the Church. That made Richard’s spirits soar. He held LaVey in high esteem, and Zeena’s visit made him feel the forces of darkness were being marshalled behind him.
Carlo: You once told me that—(Tape shuts off.)—about what they call “the devil’s dandruff”—cocaine, which is really prevalent in society today. What are your thoughts on cocaine,
Richard? Ramirez: I love it! (laughs) No, well ... if you look at it in broad views, it’s a supply-and-demand type of thing. I saw a show not too long ago where the CIA, I believe, actually had been working with this stuff to get arms to the Contras and stuff like that. That’s on a big scale, but on a street level, I think cocaine is addictive and I think it’s very harmful to the body.
Carlo: What about the mind?
Ramirez: To the mind, sure. It depends on how you ingest it. If you mainline it, I’ve heard and read that it can cause brain clots that lead to strokes. Sure, it’s harmful, but the sense of pleasure it gives is very profound!
Carlo: What could you compare that sense of pleasure to, Richard?
Ramirez: There is nothing . . . to me, anyway, that comes near it.
Carlo: You once described it to me as an intense euphoric heat, a rush, a light tingling that goes to the brain.
Ramirez: Exactly.
Carlo: Your feelings about capital punishment in this country are very profound.
Ramirez: You better take away that CIA shit—(Tape shuts off.)
(Source: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez by author Philip Carlo)