Richard Ramirez
Ricardo "Richard" Leyva Muñoz Ramírez (; February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), dubbed the Valley Intruder (as his attacks were first clustered in the San Gabriel Valley), the Walk-in Killer, and most infamously, the Night Stalker, was an American serial killer, serial rapist, kidnapper, child molester, and burglar, convicted in 1989.
Born in El Paso, Texas, Ramirez's childhood is considered an influence on his crimes. Abused by his father, Ramirez began developing gruesome, macabre interests in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin, Miguel ("Mike") Ramirez who also taught Ramirez some of his military skills that he would go on to use during his year-long killing spree. He also cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. By the time Ramirez had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, he had begun frequently using cocaine, and would often commit burglaries to support this particular drug addiction, which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders, rapes, and assaults.
Ramirez's highly publicized home invasion and murder crime spree terrorized the residents of the Greater Los Angeles area and later the residents of the San Francisco Bay Area from June 1984 until August 1985. However, his first known murder occurred as early as April 1984, but wasn’t connected to Ramirez and known to be his doing until 2009. Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons and different murder methods, including handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a claw hammer. He was also known to attack by punching, pistol-whipping, and strangling many of his victims, both manually with his hands and in one instance a ligature, stomped to death at least one of his victims, Joyce Nelson, in her sleep, and in one case, even tortured an elderly woman, Mabel Bell, by shocking her with a live electrical cord after severely bludgeoning her with a hammer, injuries which Bell died of in the ICU. Ramirez also enjoyed frequently degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill, by forcing them to profess that they loved Satan, or telling them to “swear on Satan” there was no more valuables left in their homes he had broken into and burglarized. In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld Ramirez's nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Ramirez, who never expressed any remorse for his crimes, died on June 7, 2013 of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on California's death row. Richard Ramirez had spent roughly 24 years on death row before his death from cancer in prison.
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