Richard Ramirez

Ricardo "Richard" Leyva Muñoz Ramirez (February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), dubbed the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer and the Valley Intruder, was an American serial killer and sex offender whose crime spree took place in California from June 1984 until his capture in August 1985.

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, to Julián Tapia Ramirez (February 16, 1927 – August 19, 1991) and Mercedes Muñoz Ramirez (April 10, 1927 – April 12, 2016), the youngest of their five children.

His father, a Mexican national and former policeman who later became a laborer on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway, was an alcoholic who was prone to fits of anger that often resulted in physical abuse towards his wife and children.

Ramirez began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at the age of 10.

Psychiatrist Michael Stone describes Ramirez as a "made" psychopath as opposed to a "born" psychopath.

He says that Ramirez' schizoid personality disorder contributed to his indifference to the suffering of his victims and his untreatability.

Stone also stated that Ramirez was knocked unconscious and almost died on multiple occasions before he was six years old, and as a result "later developed temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality."

At age 12, Ramirez was taken under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel "Mike" Valles, a decorated Green Beret who himself had already become a serial killer and a rapist during his service in the Vietnam War.

Mike often boasted of committing brutal war crimes and shared Polaroid photos with Ramirez showing Vietnamese women whom he had raped, murdered and dismembered or decapitated.

Ramirez would later state while incarcerated that he was fascinated, rather than repulsed, by the images and stories Mike shared with him.

Mike taught his young cousin some of his military skills, including stealth and kill tactics.

Around this time, Ramirez began to seek escape from his father's violent temper by sleeping in a local cemetery.

Ramirez was present on May 4, 1973, when Mike fatally shot his wife, Jessie, in the face with a handgun during a domestic argument.

Like the graphic photos and stories of his cousin's war crimes in Vietnam, Ramirez would later similarly remark that witnessing the murder was not traumatic for him in any traditional sense, but rather a subject of fascination.

After the shooting, Ramirez became sullen and withdrawn from his family and peers.

Mike was later found not guilty of Jessie's murder by reason of insanity, with the shooting attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service; he was confined for several years at the Texas State Mental Hospital.

Shortly after the shooting, Ramirez moved in with his older sister, Ruth, and her husband, Roberto, an obsessive peeping tom who took Ramirez along on his nocturnal exploits.

By the time Ramirez had turned 14 in early 1974, he began using LSD frequently.

He and Mike resumed bonding over their shared use of drugs and alcohol.

It was during this period that Ramirez began to cultivate an interest in Satanism and the occult.

When he reached adolescence, Ramirez began to meld his burgeoning sexual fantasies with graphic violence, including forced bondage, murder, mutilation and rape.

While still in school, he took a job at a local Holiday Inn and used his master key to rob sleeping patrons.

On at least one occasion, Ramirez molested two children in an elevator at the hotel, but he was never reported or prosecuted for this act.

His employment ended abruptly after Ramirez attempted to rape a woman in her hotel room and was caught in the act by the victim's husband.

After Mike was released from the mental hospital in 1977, he sometimes accompanied Ramirez and Roberto on these voyeuristic walks, spying on women in the nearby areas through their windows.

However, his first known murder occurred as early as April 1984; this crime was not connected to Ramirez, nor was it known to be his doing, until 2009.

Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, various types of knives, a machete, a tire iron and a claw hammer.

He punched, pistol whipped, and strangled many of his victims, both with his hands and in one instance a ligature; stomped at least one victim to death in her sleep; and tortured another by shocking her with a live electrical cord.

Ramirez also frequently enjoyed degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill.

He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989, and died while awaiting execution in 2013.

Ramirez' crimes were heavily influenced by a troubled childhood.

Frequently abused by his father, he began developing horrid and macabre interests in his early and mid-teens from an older cousin who taught him military skills that he would later employ during his killing spree.

He also cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult.

By the time he had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, Ramirez began to frequently use cocaine.

Ramirez would often commit burglaries to support his drug addiction, many of which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders, rapes, attempted rapes and battery.

Ramirez' murder spree terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles, and later the San Francisco Bay Area, over the course of fourteen months.

In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults and fourteen burglaries.

The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding."

Ramirez never expressed any remorse for his crimes.

He died on June 7, 2013, of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on California's death row.