Witness Tells of Pentagrams : Officer Says Alleged Stalker Victim Bore Marks

Pentagrams--apparently drawn in lipstick--were discovered on a bedroom wall and on the thigh of an alleged victim of accused Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, according to testimony Wednesday at Ramirez’s preliminary hearing.

With the defendant listening calmly, Monrovia Police Officer James Olds described a “circle with a star--a pentagram” on the thigh of Mabel Bell, 83, who, along with her invalid sister, Florence Lang, 79, were beaten in a vicious May, 1985 attack in their Monroviahome.

A second pentagram was discovered on Lang’s bedroom wall, according to Olds, and an open lipstick container was found in the room. Both women appeared to have been beaten with a bluntobject, possibly a broken hammer that was found in Lang’s bedroom, police, doctors and paramedics testified.

Lang, who survived the attack, was found bound with a wire cord and with electric tape around her ankles. Bell, a Kentucky native who had lived for 25 years in the modest hillside home, died in July.

The gruesome evidence was in keeping with the tenor of the testimony presented thus far in the four weeks of the hearing for Ramirez, the 26-year-old drifter from El Paso charged with 14 murders and 54 other felonies in Los Angeles County during 1984 and 1985. Wednesday’s testimony, however, was the first dealing with pentagrams or other Satanic figures.

Ramirez, according to interviews with acquaintances after his August, 1985 arrest, was said to hold a fascination with Satan and devil worship.

Moreover, at a court appearance last October in which he pleaded not guilty to the charges, Ramirez shouted “Hail Satan!” as he was led from the courtroom. He also flashed a circumscribed, five-pointed star inked on his palm toward the audience at that session.

A pentagram also appears, among other graffiti, on the wall of Ramirez’s Los Angeles Municipal Court holding cell, it was learned Wednesday, when reporters and photographers were allowed to tour the area. Ramirez’s lawyers, Arturo Hernandez and Daniel Hernandez, said later they had “no idea” whether their client had drawn the symbol.

Daniel Hernandez said no evidence links Ramirez to the pentagrams found in the Bell home.

“I don’t think there is any reliable evidence that can connect his pentagram (on his hand last October) to the ones found . . . at the scene,” the attorney said outside the courtroom. “I think publicly there’s going to be some curiosity, some speculation . . . (But) unless they come up with some more solid connections . . . more real links, I don’t see it as having that much significance.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. P. Philip Halpin, who is prosecuting the case, declined to characterize the significance of the pentagram testimony. “I don’t characterize evidence as important or not,” he told reporters.

As for the significance of the Satanic symbols, Halpin said, “I don’t know.”

Bell and Lang were discovered by their gardener, Carlos Valenzuela, 79, who had found their door unlocked when he arrived for work June 1.

The gardener testified that Bell was lying on the floor of her bedroom, with a small table lodged on her chest. Lang, meanwhile, was sprawled on top of her bed in another room. Other witnesses said the house had been ransacked, with a TV set missing and a half-eaten banana still lying on the dining room table.

Attending doctors indicated that the women may have actually been attacked two days before they were finally discovered, lying semi-conscious, in the tiny house. Ramirez is charged with murder, attempted murder and burglary in the incident.

Bell, a retired secretary who had taken her invalid sister into her home so she would not have to be institutionalized, had been described by friends as a “gutsy, independent old lady.” She had 12 grandchildren and had helped put two of them through college.