Nightmares Continue for Some Jurors

Cynthia Haden was watching television last August when a news flash interrupted the late-night movie with the news that a fellow Night Stalker juror had been murdered.

“My first thought was that we were all going to be picked off one by one. Who’s next?” Haden recalled on Wednesday.

Her roommate got his gun out and kept it handy. They live two blocks from the scene of a double Night Stalker homicide.

Moments later, Haden got a frantic call from Chakalit Harris, another juror, expressing the same concern.

But Harris was less fearful for her own safety. During the course of the six-month trial, filled with gruesome, hair-raising testimony, she had installed window bars on her home--and had bought a third dog, a Great Dane.

When jury foreman Felipe Rodriguez heard the news, while watching an Angels baseball game, he quickly gathered up his two children and locked up the house. His wife was still at work.

One after another, the 12 jurors who voted to condemn Richard Ramirez to the gas chamber on Wednesday relived their personal horrors inspired by the chilling case. Almost every one said they have had countless nightmares about the Night Stalker crimes.

“I still have them,” Haden said.

“My nightmares--I can’t even talk about them,” added Arthur V. Johnson.

Mary Helen Herrera said she still awakens in the middle of the night and would gently touch her husband’s head, as if to assure herself that he had not been shot, as had six of Ramirez’s victims.

Many others said they have become extremely light sleepers as a result of the Night Stalker crimes, in which Ramirez often gained entry into a residence through an unsecured door or window.

“I hear everything now,” Haden said.

Hours after returning their 19 death penalty verdicts in Los Angeles Superior Court, 11 of the jurors, along with several alternate jurors, met at the home of Shirley Zelaya in South-Central Los Angeles.

Over beer, wine and spaghetti, they spoke of their trials and tribulations with pride, hilarity, curiosity and, most of all, sadness, an emotion brought by the murder of Phyllis Singletary, a fellow juror who was killed by her boyfriend as a result of a domestic dispute after the jury had gone into deliberations.

“We have really become a family,” said Arlena Wallace.

They also mourned for the victims and relatives of Ramirez’s rampage. “My heart goes out to those people,” McGee said.

Despite what some of the jurors called the “total, sheer brutality” of Ramirez’s crimes, many said they had had great difficulty in reaching the death penalty verdicts.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” said Martha Salcido. “Have you ever had to decide that someone should die?”

Many jurors also said they were surprised that Ramirez’s lawyer did not call any witnesses during the penalty phase of the trial who might have testified sympathetically about Ramirez.

“We were absolutely surprised,” said Donald McGee. “We had expected something, to have something to sift through. But there was nothing there.”

McGee was the lone juror who did not attend the party. He went back to work.

The jurors also recounted how they methodically reviewed all the evidence and then debated at great length before reaching their guilty verdicts on all 43 felony counts against Ramirez, including the 13 murders.

“The evidence was so involved,” McGee said in a separate interview. “That made it really a struggle.”

Many jurors said they bought the prosecution theory that, in killing the men in the house before robbing and assaulting the women, Ramirez had committed the “ultimate acts of cowardice.”

McGee said he often found himself asking why Ramirez had committed such “wanton brutality,” adding:

“Was it necessary to kill to burglarize? It just wasn’t necessary to be that brutal just to rob some trinkets.”

Despite the gruesome nature of the evidence, jurors agreed that Singletary’s slaying in mid-August was the hardest part of their ordeal.

“We had been together for a long time,” McGee said. “It really hurt us.

McGee, Haden and others said they appreciated having been granted a day off for mourning by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael A. Tynan. Without it, McGee said, “it could have been a real turning point.”

A day later, they resumed deliberations anew after Herrera, then an alternate juror, was randomly selected to replace Singletary.

Once back in the jury room, McGee recalled, there was total silence.

“I was in kind of a shock,” he said. “I just wanted to get away. I sat there and looked at Phyllis’ seat in the jury room and saw her face.”

Finally, foreman Rodriguez encouraged all to discuss their feelings. Gradually, one juror after another spoke up. “We just talked about her for a while,” Haden recalled. Only then, McGee added, “were we able to get over our grief. But we just had to go on. We had a job to do.”

The jurors sent a bouquet of flowers to Singletary’s family.

Then they began deliberating from scratch, as required by law whenever a new juror is seated.

The addition of Herrera and Verbe Sutton--who had been appointed a day earlier to replace a juror who kept falling asleep--assisted the deliberations noticeably, according to Wallace.

Initially, she said, she and the other nine jurors deliberately hung back and waited for Herrera and Sutton to express their views and questions, which often injected new insights into the discussions.

In their deliberations, jurors said, they gave Ramirez every benefit of the doubt. The hardest case to decide, they said, was the murder of 79-year-old Jennie Vincow in Glassell Park.

She was murdered in late June, 1984, almost a year before the string of other murders had begun. Even though Ramirez’s fingerprints were on a window screen that was found in Vincow’s living room, McGee said, some jurors wondered if maybe Ramirez had left that print there earlier.

“A lot of people were saying, maybe, maybe, maybe,” he recalled. “There were a lot of questions--like, are you sure? There was a lot of arguments back and forth. But it was never personal.”

When it became clear that there was no unanimity on this first so-called Night Stalker incident, jurors abandoned any notion of taking votes by incident in chronological order.

Instead, they meticulously reviewed all the hundreds of pieces of evidence in each of the 15 incidents. “We went through the entire package,” McGee said. Only then, he added, did it become clear to all of them that Ramirez had slain Vincow.

“She had been stabbed with almost the exact type of wounds” as in many of the other cases, McGee said.

In the end, he continued, there was enough hard evidence, along with circumstantial evidence, to convict Ramirez on all counts.

McGee, Salcido, Wallace and others said one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Ramirez was a Monrovia burglary for which Ramirez was not charged. It was the only scene of a crime where a Ramirez palm print and the distinctive Avia shoe prints both appeared.

At half a dozen Night Stalker crime scenes, police investigators found the shoe prints, but the Avia shoes were never found.

At the post-verdict party Wednesday afternoon, the jurors and alternates appeared at once drained and festive. Many spoke of reunions. Halloween would be an appropriate first reunion, several suggested laughingly.

There was also talk of group appearances on local TV talk shows.

Balancing a drink and a plate of food, Haden said wistfully of the man she voted to send to Death Row: “We still don’t really know very much about him.”