THE NIGHT STALKER VERDICTS : Night Stalker’s Attacks Leave Lingering Legacy of Suffering

After 60-year-old Joyce Nelson was murdered in her Monterey Park home four years ago--a victim of a serial killer known as the Night Stalker--the mourners included a boy named Jeff and a man named Steb.

Jeff was Nelson’s 13-year-old grandson. Steb was her gentleman friend and had been for decades. Not long after Nelson’s death, Steb died too, of heart failure.

“We don’t say heart attack,” Jeff Nelson, now 17, said Wednesday. “We say it was a broken heart.”

Jeff recounted the sad love story upon learning that a jury had convicted Richard Ramirez of 13 murders, including that of his grandmother.

As Jeff knows too well, the Night Stalker had many victims whose names never appeared in police reports. People like Steb.

And in a sense, Ramirez stalked victims long after his arrest. For hundreds of people who found themselves within the spectrum of his evil, nightmares, depression and enduring grief remain Ramirez’s legacy.

The worst is felt by people who actually survived his attacks. There were several rape victims and people who survived gunshots. A 16-year-girl was bludgeoned with a tire iron but lived.

William Carns of Mission Viejo lived despite taking three bullets to the head. Orange County prosecutors say the Night Stalker fired the shots, but the case might never be put to a jury.

Now in recuperative therapy in Minnesota, Carns was left with a bullet lodged inside his skull, with a damaged memory, paralysis of his left arm and left leg and tear ducts that do not work.

It was not clear Wednesday whether Ramirez will be brought to trial for related charges in other counties.

If Ramirez receives a death sentence for his Los Angeles crime rampage, he may not be prosecuted in the Carns case, Orange County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright said Wednesday.

Money and Pain

The charges might be dropped to save time, money and the pain it would inflict on Carns’ then-fiancee, who was raped in the attack.

The woman, who is now 33 and living in Northern California, told The Times that the verdict, although just, can never eliminate the emotional scars.

“It feels good to know justice has been done, but it doesn’t change what’s happened to Bill or to me or to the other victims, or put our lives back the way they were,” she said. “It brings up a lot of old, hard memories. . . .

“Even after this many years,” she said, “it’s still a big part of my life. It changes you forever. You can never go back to the way you were.”

Families and friends of the victims on Wednesday expressed hope that the verdict and sentencing to come will help them get beyond their own anguish.

“I hope I can sleep now; I haven’t in four years,” said Jean Camou, a sister-in-law of murder victim Mary Cannon. “I was extremely happy with the verdict. But I don’t think one ever gets over something like that.”

She added that her late husband, Edmond Camou, hardly ever talked about his sister after she was found with her throat slashed on July 1, 1985.

“It was very, very difficult for him to even mention her name or read about the trial in the newspaper,” Camou said.

On yet another level, several people who encountered Ramirez through the legal process--from investigators to lawyers to journalists--found their own lives and psychic well-being profoundly affected by the experience, so vivid and troubling were the accounts of his crimes. During the trial, Ramirez frequently turned to watch his audience, sometimes with a smirk, sometimes with a chilling stare.

Jurors devoted months to the trial. Some people openly wondered whether the August murder of juror Phyllis Singletary in a domestic dispute--and the subsequent suicide of her suspected killer, James C. Melton--may have been in some way influenced by the pressures of the trial.

When one of Ramirez’s attorneys, Daniel V. Hernandez, asked to excused from the case last March, saying that he was emotionally drained, Judge Kenneth Tynan was unsympathetic.

“Some of us have chest pains, some of us have bellyaches, but the point is that we all suffer stress in these cases,” Tynan told Hernandez.

Members of the news media had their own stories. One reporter planned to write a book on the case, but as the grim testimony moved on, he said, he would lie awake nights and double-check the locks on doors and windows to make sure his family was safe. He abandoned plans for a book.

News Programs

Mary Chaney, a free-lance artist who made more than 100 sketches of Ramirez for television news programs, spoke of nightmares--awakening with a chill and seeing the Night Stalker at her bedside.

“He’d just be standing there,” Chaney recalled.

Usually, she said, nothing happened--”but in another nightmare, he did kill me.”

The verdict, Chaney said, was a relief.

“You could never get over the testimony of Judith Arnold, who found her parents. Or her sister that identified the mother’s wedding ring,” Chaney said. “Or even the policeman--policemen who have seen too much. Too many murders. There’s just something in their eyes, in their expression.”

Jeff, whose family lives in Chino, said that he is gradually coping with the loss of his grandmother. He remembers still how she often told him how much he was like her own boy, his father.

“I could talk to her,” he said.

Jeff remembered the night of the phone call. He remembered his father, in hushed tones, telling his stepmother, “Don’t tell him, don’t tell him.”

He remembered also how his father came into the living room, sat down beside him and said that his grandmother was dead--that she had been murdered.

“I started crying, and he started crying too. . . . Until then, he had been stoic,” Jeff remembered, his tone subdued.

Upon learning about the evidence, the family never doubted Ramirez’s guilt, he said.

“We’re constantly saying the gas chamber’s not good enough for him,” Jeff said.

Jeff said he thinks often about his grandmother, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Christmas is still a big event in the family--”same people, but one less.” Thanksgiving is another story. His grandmother used to cook a turkey with stuffing--”everything,” Jeff recalled.

Now, Jeff said, “Thanksgiving is pretty much down the tubes.”

Times staff writers Catherine Gewertz and Carol McGraw contributed to this story.