‘I Did It,’ Officer Quotes Ramirez as Saying

Hours after his 1985 arrest, Night Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez told a Los Angeles Police Department officer, “I did it, you know. You guys got me, the Stalker,” the officer testified Tuesday.

Sgt. George Thomas told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury that Ramirez had spontaneously made numerous statements confessing his guilt but suddenly clammed up when he lifted his head from a table and saw Thomas writing down his words.

According to Thomas, Ramirez said, “Of course I did it. So what? Shoot me. I deserve to die.”

No one else was in the interview room at the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division when Ramirez made the statements, Thomas said. He added that he had made no attempt to interview Ramirez except to ask the suspect his name.

Thomas said his assignment was simply to watch over the suspect until superiors arrived. At that point, Ramirez had not been advised of his constitutional right to remain silent.

Thomas said Ramirez, handcuffed to a chair, had his head down on the table as he began talking. But when he looked up and saw Thomas taking notes, he said, “Are you writing down everything?”

Then Ramirez stopped talking and softly banged his head on the table up to 10 times.

Earlier, Ramirez, a self-proclaimed devil worshiper, also showed Thomas a pentagram on his upper left arm, saying as he laughed: “You guys think I’m crazy, but you don’t know Satan.” Drawings of pentagrams have been found at several alleged Night Stalker crime scenes, including on one victim’s thigh.

At another point, Thomas said, Ramirez began humming a tune from a song by a heavy metal rock group, AC-DC, called “Night Prowler.” Thomas said he recognized the tune because, as a member of the interagency Night Stalker task force, he had spent many hours listening to that tune, among others.

Ramirez was taken to the Hollenbeck Division shortly after residents of East Los Angeles apprehended him and turned him over to police on the morning of Aug. 31, 1985.

Also on Tuesday, Police Officer James R. Kaiser said authorities quickly took Ramirez away because they feared for his safety since up to 200 angry people had gathered at the arrest scene.

Kaiser, who drove Ramirez to the station, testified that during the 10-minute ride Ramirez said to Kaiser and his partner, “Why don’t you just shoot me? I want to die.”

Daniel V. Hernandez, one of Ramirez’s lawyers, attempted during cross-examination to suggest that his client might have mistaken Thomas for a lawyer, but Judge Michael A. Tynan refused to allow such questioning, saying that would have called upon Thomas to speculate.

Outside court Monday, Ray G. Clark, another attorney for Ramirez, said the defense in the case, expected to get under way next month, will be that “it’s a case of mistaken identity.”

Clark, for the first time suggesting the defense strategy, added: “It wasn’t him. He’s no choirboy, but Mr. Ramirez was nowhere near these incidents.”

The 29-year-old suspect is charged with 13 murders and 30 other felonies growing out of a spree of nighttime residential attacks throughout Los Angeles County, mostly in the spring and summer of 1985.