Law Enforcement Aided by Public : Search for the Stalker--Unity Born of Fear

“It will take a combination of police and citizen effort to break this case . . . . Be our eyes out there.”

--Monterey Park Police Chief Jon D. Elder, July 11, 1985

And that’s the way it happened: The police and the community together stalked the Night Stalker.

As the killer blazed a trail of violence from the Southland to San Francisco, homicide detectives relied on high-tech crime analysis, old-fashioned shoe leather and their own gut hunches to track him. But it was the public’s survival instincts--and more than a little luck--that finally snared a suspect--Richard Ramirez, a 25-year-old Texas drifter--to end one of the most intense manhunts in California history.

It was a race against death. Police feared that the stalker would strike again; citizens feared that they might be next.

While detectives, desperate for leads, scrutinized thousands of clues, tipsters called in thousands more. While policemen staked out Skid Row hotels and a Chinatown dentist, homeowners patrolled their own backyards and alleys.

As investigators questioned construction workers and searched remote hillside farms for distinctive tennis shoe prints left by the stalker, families turned on floodlights, barricaded doors and bought guns. And eight days ago, as a panicked Ramirez fled through the streets of East Los Angeles after glimpsing his picture in a newspaper, citizens using their fists and a steel rod caught up with him first, minutes ahead of the lawmen.

Detectives hugged each other and hundreds of bystanders cheered as the suspect was hauled off to jail.

Last Tuesday, Ramirez was arraigned on a single murder count and seven other charges stemming from two late-night attacks in early May in the San Gabriel Valley. Authorities in San Francisco charged him with an Aug. 17 murder there. Ramirez has not yet entered pleas to these charges.

The stalker investigation, even larger than the infamous 1977-79 Hillside Strangler case, was puzzling from the start.

Unlike other serial murder cases, this one seemed to have no distinct pattern.

At least 15 people died in the stalker’s bloody rampage, which may have begun as early as 1981, investigators believe. At least 21 victims survived his assaults.

Prowling the freeway corridors of Los Angeles and beyond, the stalker preyed upon businessmen, Asian immigrants, grandmothers and retired couples. He kidnaped children off streets and sexually assaulted them; he dragged one woman from her car and shot her repeatedly. Most often, he crept into tidy tract homes through unlocked windows and doors before dawn, cut telephone wires and attacked his victims while they slept.

In serene middle-class neighborhoods, he killed men first, then turned to their women. He bludgeoned, slashed throats, raped, sodomized and shot his prey, using .22-caliber and .25-caliber pistols--easily concealed weapons that make relatively little noise, police said.

Wearing soft cotton gloves, he also killed and maimed with a tire iron and a claw hammer. Some victims were handcuffed to door knobs or bound with electrical extension cords and brutalized.

Snacked on Leftovers

Afterward, according to a police source, the stalker “stuck the shiv in even further,” casually snacking on leftovers in the kitchens of some victims. He raped one woman and then ordered her to cook him a meal. He gouged out the eyes of another victim.

He sometimes stole their jewelry, television sets, cameras and even their suitcases.

Police first suspected in April that at least four unsolved murders in the San Gabriel Valley had been committed by the same killer. It was four more months, however, before authorities publicly disclosed their ominous suspicions: that a serial killer was on the loose.

For Lt. Joe Santoro of the Monterey Park Police Department, the suspicions became reality July 7, with the investigation of the murder of Joyce Nelson, a 61-year-old grandmother and assembly line worker found beaten to death in her modest white-shuttered home.

“When we went out to the Nelson house, we all had a sick feeling that these were not coincidences, there was someone really terrible and bad out there killing and killing and killing,” Santoro said.

Monterey Park Police Chief Jon D. Elder and Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block talked urgently by phone that day--and the concept of a multiagency task force to investigate the string of murders was born. A few nights later, Elder addressed a jammed City Council chambers to plead with 650 anxious residents, “It will take a combination of police and citizen efforts to break the case,” he said. “Help us. Be our eyes out there.”

‘Unity of the People’

Obsessed with the case, Elder worked behind his desk during the day and went out on patrol at night.

“Even we didn’t understand completely at that time what would come from the unity of the people, and the law enforcement agencies,” Santoro recalled.

It came to be known as the Night Stalker Task Force, but that was a misnomer. They cooperated, but the more than 60 detectives assigned to the case from police agencies throughout Los Angeles County did not work out of the same squad room. There was no central headquarters, no single commander.

Homicide detectives are regarded by their peers as an egotistical, fiercely independent lot, loyal to their departments. Those traits held true in the massive hunt for the stalker.

The 20 Los Angeles police officers assigned to stalker-related murders in the city pursued their own leads, as did the 35 detectives from the Sheriff’s Department. Investigators from Glendale, Monrovia, Monterey Park, Whittier, San Gabriel and Arcadia performed similarly.

“It’s not a task force really,” Cmdr. William Booth, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman, said early in the investigation. “We (the Police Department) have our group and they (the Sheriff’s Department) have their group.”

Nonetheless, with the Sheriff’s Department coordinating efforts, investigators put aside interagency rivalries to compare notes. At first weekly, and later more often, they met in the Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau to map their strategy.

Few Animosities

The investigators, despite their different affiliations, developed few personal animosities. Sometimes, however, relations were strained.

Police chiefs from smaller departments participating in the case complained privately that the news media often were briefed by the Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles police before they could be told of the latest development in the fast-breaking investigation.

Communications between the Sheriff’s Department and Police Department also seemed poorly coordinated at times.

At one point, Los Angeles police put out a bulletin announcing that they had linked three more murder cases to the stalker, bringing the number of victims to 17. Police refused to provide details on those new cases, except to say that one of the murders involved William Carns, a Mission Viejo man shot in the head in an attack on Aug 25.

Carns was not killed, however. He suffered grave head wounds and remains hospitalized; his condition is reported to be improving.

“They made a boo-boo; they miscounted and added (non-fatal) assaults to the list of murders and then they wouldn’t admit that they screwed up,” said a Sheriff’s Department source close to the investigation. “We had been saying all along that we had 14 murders at the time, but we backed them up anyway because we felt it was important not to show disunity.”

Only last week did police officials back away from their earlier tally. “We’re not going to talk numbers now,” Booth told a reporter.

‘Kidnaped His Prisoner’

Jurisdictional rivalry even surfaced on the day Ramirez was caught by citizens in East Los Angeles, just outside Los Angeles city limits, in the Sheriff’s Department patrol area. Ramirez was handcuffed by a lone deputy who had arrived on the scene moments before, but half a dozen Los Angeles police officers took the suspect into custody and drove him to the Police Department’s Hollenbeck station.

“They made our guy look idiotic because they practically overpowered him and kidnaped his prisoner,” said a ranking Sheriff’s Department official. “We were all a little unhappy with that.”

The Sheriff’s Department also was privately miffed because the Police Department staged its own press conference immediately after the arrest.

Discord proved a rarity. If anything, authorities were too busy to squabble.

“There was a concern to get (the suspect) off the streets,” said Capt. Robert Grimm, head of the Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau. “Everyone became involved when they saw all the hurt, the wounds on the bodies, the devastation in the homes, what it was doing to the community.”

Many investigators assigned to the case worked seven days a week, and 16-hour days were not uncommon. There were not many days off.

One veteran Sheriff’s Department homicide detective, Sgt. Frank Salerno, “had to be kicked out the office to go to his son’s wedding reception,” Grimm said. Another investigator spent so little time at home that his wife and family, fearful of the stalker, moved in with relatives.

‘Everyone ... Knew Him’

The detectives’ job of sifting through mountains of evidence grew even tougher after a composite drawing of the suspect was released in August and hundreds of tips began coming in each day from frightened citizens.

“Everyone in town thought they’d had dinner with him, seen him in a gas station or knew him at church,” said one officer.

The public’s seemingly frenzied attempts to help produced an assortment of bizarre tips. Even they were not ignored.

The killer had been described as tall, thin, smooth-shaven, curly-haired and gapped-toothed. That did not stop people from reporting suspicious characters who were short, fat, bearded, bald and had good teeth.

“We had to work every scrap of information,” Grimm said. “As an investigator, you cannot ever invalidate any tip until you check it out. . . . If you don’t, it will kill you.”

Information about unsolved murders, assaults, rapes and burglaries that seemed even remotely linked to the stalker’s modus operandi were fed into a computer. More important, the bits of information were cross-indexed, much as books in a library are, so that obvious connections were not missed.

Detectives had learned their lesson about cross-indexing during the Hillside Strangler case. In that investigation, one of the killers was interviewed three times by police agencies that were unaware that he had been questioned before because the information was not properly filed, Salerno said.

Salerno’s partner, Detective Gil Carrillo, was among the first lawmen to examine the stalker’s handiwork.

AC/DC Baseball Cap

On March 17, Carrillo got a call to investigate a murder at a Rosemead condominium. Dayle Okazaki, a 34-year-old county worker, had been found on her kitchen floor by her roommate. She had been shot in the head. Her roommate was wounded.

In the garage, investigators found a baseball cap bearing the logo of the rock band AC/DC. The band ‘s music, according to some, contains musical themes with satanic overtones.

Informants told police after Ramirez’s capture that the suspect is a fan of AC/DC and is particularly enamored of the band’s 1979 “Highway to Hell” album. One of the songs on the album, entitled “Night Prowler,” is hauntingly prophetic:

Was that a noise outside the window? What’s that shadow on the blind? As you lie there naked like a body in a tomb, suspended animation as I slip into your room. I’m your night prowler . . . .

As authorities probed deeper, they began to discover other clues that suggested involvement in satanic activities.

The stalker, investigators believe, drew pentagrams on the walls at some murder scenes. Such symbols are said to suggest the devil’s horns.

Another lead sent detectives to a La Habra Heights farm in east Los Angeles County, where satanic rituals had been conducted. There, and at several stalker murder scenes, investigators found the imprint of an expensive tennis shoe, a distinctive octagonal pattern.

The stalker is believed to have worn those shoes on May 14 when he slipped into a Monterey Park home to fatally shoot William Doi in the face. Handcuffs used to restrain Doi’s wife while she was savagely assaulted were left at the scene.

Ballistics Evidence

The ballistics from the gun used to shoot Doi were linked to other murders attributed to the stalker.

Although the shoes have not been found, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner used other evidence left at the Dois’ house in filing murder charges against Ramirez last week.

In July, Doi’s next door neighbor, Neil Barbanell, became part of the large citizen Neighborhood Watch program that expanded dramatically in Southern California because of the stalker threat.

The 58-year-old pharmaceutical salesman vowed to do as much as he could when Monterey Park’s police chief made his plea for civilian assistance. “I could tell they were desperate,” he said.

He and his neighbors stood watch from midnight to dawn, staying inside their homes as police suggested.

Recalling his lonely vigils, he said: “I would stand at my kitchen window, lean on the sink, listen to the radio and look out into the dark. Then I’d move to the south bedroom window and do the same. I kept telling myself he wouldn’t come back here, that I shouldn’t be afraid, but it was always there at the back of my mind. . . .”

On Aug. 9, Block disclosed the names of more murder victims thought to be linked to the serial killer. Grimly, he offered reporters a fateful prediction: “I would suspect that this guy may wind up getting caught by a homeowner. . . .”

The investigation was by then moving in several directions.

For weeks, investigators had staked out a walk-in dental clinic in Los Angeles’ Chinatown where a man identifying himself as Richard Mena had sought treatment for his decaying teeth. Authorities suspected early on that Mena might be the stalker.

That lead had developed June 15, when a man was stopped by Los Angeles police in the department’s Northwest Division. He had been driving a stolen car and fled on foot, leaving behind a business card from the Chinatown dentist, who was able to provide authorities with the name Richard Mena.

Mena had visited the clinic six times from March to May 30. He had undergone root canal work and had temporary caps placed on some of his teeth.

“He had terrible decay in most of his teeth, but it wasn’t from disease,” said Dr. Kenneth K. Tse, who heads the dental clinic. “It was from neglect.”

Those who know Ramirez said after his arrest that he made meals of Pepsi and chocolate and never brushed his teeth.

Although detectives checked the Mena name through a myriad sources, they were unable to find the suspect. The name Mena, police eventually discovered, was only one of many used by Ramirez. Other aliases included Richard Moreno, Noah Jimenez, Nicholaus Adame and Richard Munoz.

Although investigators hoped that he would return to the clinic for permanent dental caps, he did not.

Other leads were explored.

2,000 Pieces of Jewelry

Los Angeles area pawnshops, particularly those in the San Gabriel Valley, were alerted in hopes that the stalker would try to sell some of the more than 2,000 pieces of jewelry he had taken from his victims.

Several of the murder scenes were near construction sites, so detectives combed unsuccessfully through employee lists to see if the suspect might have worked as a laborer.

In late August, about a week before Ramirez’s capture, authorities received another important tip from the public.

A Los Angeles resident told them that the stalker was named Rick and that he frequented Skid Row hotels. Lawmen began yet another stakeout, this time downtown.

It was 60 miles away on Aug. 25, in the Orange County community of Mission Viejo, that a 13-year-old boy gave police one of their most important leads.

The observant teen-ager, James Romero III, was in his parents’ garage working on a motorbike when he spotted an orange Toyota station wagon that he thought was suspicious. He called police and gave them a partial license number.

Ninety minutes later and a mile away, police believe, the stalker slipped into yet another house and shot William Carns in the head and raped his girlfriend.

The next morning, Jon Quinn Jr., who runs a health food store at 6th and Alexander streets west of downtown Los Angeles, spotted the car parked in the lot of his small shopping center. Quinn regularly takes down license plates of cars in the lot because of illegal parking there. On Tuesday, the car was still there and authorities were notified.

Scientific Methods

Four plainclothesmen staked out the Toyota until the next morning, hoping that the person who stole it would return. When he did not, it was taken by flatbed truck to Orange County Sheriff’s Department facilities, where two of the latest scientific methods were used to retrieve evidence.

The first involved using Superglue fumes, which react to moisture in fingerprints, turning the prints white. The other, a laser, enhances prints that are partly wiped clean. A partial print was found on a window of the station wagon and sent to the state Department of Justice in Sacramento.

It was a fluke that Ramirez’s fingerprints, taken in December, 1984, after his arrest on stolen vehicle charges, showed up in the computer’s memory banks. The only prints that have been fed into the new system are those of offenders born after Jan. 1, 1960. Ramirez was born on Feb. 28 of that year.

The same day the state’s computer identified Ramirez’s prints, a San Pablo woman told Lompoc police that her family had purchased jewelry in San Francisco from a man whom she knew only as Rick. The man, she said matched a description of the stalker.

Police determined that the jewelry had been stolen Aug. 15 in a San Francisco burglary that occurred two days before San Francisco accountant Peter Pan, 66, was shot dead in a slaying that has been linked to the stalker.

The woman provided authorities with the names of two men who ultimately provided Ramirez’s true identity.

Debate Over Information

That afternoon, Block, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates debated whether to release Ramirez’s name and his police mug shot to the public.

Officials worried that the plan might have devastating effect on the case.

On one hand, they would be giving the killer an opportunity flee and destroy evidence. On the other, the public had been unable to identify him from the composite drawing that was released more than a month earlier. Identifying him by name and picture could possibly lead to a quick arrest.

Less than 12 hours later, Ramirez walked into an East Los Angeles grocery store and saw his face on the front page of a Spanish-language newspaper. He fled, and within minutes everyone along his path seemed to recognize him and call police.

When he turned onto Hubbard Street, he tried to steal cars and hit one woman in the stomach in an attempt to get her keys. She screamed, and her husband and several neighbors took after the suspect, flaying him with a fence rod. Exhausted, Ramirez slumped to a curb; neighbors held him for police.

The partnership between authorities and the community had succeeded.

Times staff writers Mark Arax and Marita Hernandez contributed to this story.