Stalker Suspect and Friends Have a Reunion of Sorts

For accused Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, charged with randomly killing, raping and robbing members of 19 Los Angeles County households in 1984 and 1985, it was like a reunion last week as three friends appeared in court to testify at his preliminary hearing.

Unfortunately for Ramirez, the trio was testifying on behalf of the prosecution.

One of them, a San Francisco area woman named Donna Myers, stated that Ramirez frequently declared that Satan was his “supreme being” and once asked her if she thought he was the Night Stalker.

Myers, furthermore, swore that Ramirez gave her several pieces of jewelry he said he had stolen last year. The items, which she turned over to authorities, have been identified in court as being taken from the homes of victims in the brutal series of 14 murders and 54 other felonies of which Ramirez stands accused.

Laying Out Evidence

The damaging testimony came as Deputy Dist. Atty. P. Philip Halpin began his efforts to tie Ramirez to the crime scenes via physical, scientific and circumstantial evidence.

During the previous seven weeks of the hearing, Halpin had called more than 100 crime scene witnesses including police investigators, pathologists and eyewitnesses. In all, six surviving victims dramatically identified Ramirez in court as their assailant.

Last week, Halpin turned to witnesses who could tie Ramirez to stolen items recovered in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and El Paso. The prosecutor also appeared to be laying a foundation for the introduction of incriminating ballistics and shoe-print evidence.

For example, one-time Ramirez acquaintances Jesse Perez of Los Angeles and Earl Gregg of Lompoc identified a handgun they said Ramirez offered to sell to each of them last year. Perez, 62, said he bought the weapon from Ramirez for $50 several months before the defendant’s arrest last Aug. 31. It was later surrendered to authorities by Perez’s girlfriend in Tijuana.

An official of the Oregon-based Avia Athletic Footwear Co., meanwhile, testified that, based on the patented pattern of Avia’s shoe soles, the prints found at several crime scenes were made with a relatively uncommon pair of aerobics shoes manufactured by his firm.

Halpin is expected to conclude his case later this week after presenting expert ballistics, blood, fingerprint and shoe-print witnesses to tie these elements together. Unless Ramirez’s attorneys take the unusual step of presenting an affirmative defense--an action the defense has recently indicated it may forgo--Los Angeles Municipal Judge James F. Nelson would rule shortly thereafter whether Ramirez must stand trial.

As his former friends paraded to the stand last week, Ramirez grew particularly animated at the sight of Gregg, with whom he had once shared an apartment. Ramirez sneered, shook his head and appeared to mouth obscenities at Gregg before he began his testimony. Gregg, for his part, grinned back, and when asked to identify Ramirez, said he was the man in “a monkey suit” at the defense table.

But last week’s most gripping testimony came from Myers, who is Gregg’s mother-in-law and a San Pablo resident who has known Ramirez since 1979.

Myers said that during a visit to her home several weeks before his arrest, Ramirez brought up the subject of the Night Stalker after watching a TV news report on the gruesome series of slayings.

Doubted His Bravery

“He said, ‘Donna, Donna, do you think I’m the Night Stalker?’ ” Myers recalled. “I told him, ‘I don’t think you have enough guts to kill somebody.’ ”

Ramirez, a 26-year-old drifter from El Paso, was so enamored with devil worship, she continued, that he wore “a pentagram drawn on his left arm,” and he often told her that “Satan watched over him.”

At the scene of one murder attributed to the Night Stalker, a pentagram was found scrawled in lipstick on the wall. Also, a surviving victim of a rape attack has testified that her attacker, whom she identified in court as Ramirez, repeatedly ordered her to pray to Satan rather than to God.

Ramirez, who told Myers that he customarily wore dark clothes so “he couldn’t be seen at night,” once jokingly asked her whether she was afraid of him, she testified.

“You know I could kill you and nobody would ever know the difference,” Myers said the defendant told him.

Testimony last week also revealed that Ramirez’s own family voluntarily surrendered evidence to authorities shortly after his arrest.

Jewelry Identified

Nineteen pieces of jewelry were recovered from the El Paso home of Ramirez’s sister, Rosa Flores, three days after Ramirez was arrested. The items were later identified in court as having been stolen from the homes of a Burbank rape victim, a Monterey Park rape victim and a Sun Valley murder victim.

In all, sheriff’s deputies testified, 84 stolen items identified in court were recovered in the San Francisco area, in El Paso and in Los Angeles. More than 60 of them--including a television taken from a Diamond Bar murder victim, a radio taken from a Monrovia murder victim and rings taken from a murdered Glendale couple--were surrendered by Felipi Solano, an Echo Park laborer who said he bought them from Ramirez on several occasions last year.

In addition, authorities testified, Ramirez’s brother Julian disclosed the location of Ramirez’s Pontiac in East Los Angeles the day after his arrest. A pair of handcuffs was found in the car and a pentagram was inscribed on the dashboard.

Defense attorney Daniel Hernandez conceded that it was not a good week for his client, who also was pummeled in the courtroom Wednesday by bailiffs who apparently became upset when he turned his head in the direction of a witness who was being escorted past him.

Difficult to Explain

While co-counsel Arturo Hernandez argued that other unnamed associates of Ramirez may be trying to unfairly pin blame on Ramirez, Daniel Hernandez acknowledged that much of the specific evidence against Ramirez is difficult to explain.

“We can’t defend individual things,” he said. “We defend the (entire) case.