Mother Identifies Ramirez as Her Rapist at Hearing

A Burbank mother of two Monday dramatically identified accused Night Stalker Richard Ramirez as the man who raped her last May after binding her hands with panty hose and handcuffing her 12-year-old son in a hallway closet.

“He’s sitting on the end of the table,” said the woman of about 40, speaking calmly from the witness stand at Ramirez’ preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court, which entered its fifth week Monday.

As the woman motioned toward Ramirez, the 26-year-old drifter from El Paso, who is charged with 14 murders and 54 other felonies in Los Angeles County, stared toward the floor.

Testifying in graphic detail for more than two hours, the woman, whose name is being withheld, recalled a night of terror that began when she was awakened in bed by a man pointing a flashlight and a gun at her head.

“He was nervous, yes, he was angry, he was excited,” she said, noting that the assailant threatened to shoot her if she looked directly at him.

The attacker, she said, proceeded to wake her son in a nearby bedroom, handcuff the pair together and ransack the house, apparently searching for money, jewelry and other valuables.

Repeatedly, the man yelled, “ ‘Where is it?. . . . Where’s your jewelry.’ ”

Eventually, he placed the son in the closet, told the woman to lie down on her bed “and proceeded to kiss me and rape me.”

Afterward, she said, she sought to calm the attacker, telling him, “You must have had a very unhappy life to do this to people, to have done this to me.”

During cross-examination, the woman explained that her purpose in calming the intruder after the attack was “to get him out of there and keep us alive. . . . I instinctively tried to have him care about us enough to leave us alone.”

The strategy worked, with the assailant actually volunteering to fetch a robe for her from her closet after the attack.

“He laughed and said, ‘I guess it wouldn’t be very good to have your son see you like this.”’

Pillowcase of Valuables

Before leaving with a pillowcase full of valuables, the attacker handcuffed the two victims to a bedpost and left a key to the handcuffs in the living room. He had been told by the woman that her daughter, who had spent the night at a friend’s house, was due home after 6 a.m., shortly after the assailant departed.

Ramirez is charged with rape, burglary, oral copulation, sodomy and robbery in the May 20, 1985, incident. The preliminary hearing is to determine if he will stand trial on the charges in Superior Court.

Ramirez was first identified by the woman at a police lineup a few days after his August, 1985, arrest. She also identified several pieces of jewelry that police displayed that day in a nearby room. The items had been confiscated by authorities in Los Angeles County, San Francisco and El Paso.

The woman was the fourth eyewitness among 57 police officers, medical authorities and victims called thus far in the preliminary hearing by Deputy Dist. Atty. P. Philip Halpin. She was the first person who had more than a fleeting glance at her assailant during the commission of a crime to identify Ramirez in court.

Outside the courtroom, defense attorneys sought to cast aspersions on her statements. Arturo Hernandez, Ramirez’ co-counsel, questioned why the woman did not phone police after first seeing Ramirez’ photo on TV the day before his arrest last August.

“She had seen this person (on TV) for several days . . . but she waited until she was contacted five or six days later,” Hernandez asserted. “There’s a lot of doubts, there’s a lot of questions.”

In court, the woman said that her identification was not influenced by the media.