Ramirez Won’t Face Trial in Orange County Case

“Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, sentenced to death in Los Angeles for 13 murders, will not be prosecuted in Orange County on rape and attempted murder charges in a 1985 attack on a Mission Viejo couple, but will be tried for murder in San Francisco, officials said Wednesday. “We didn’t want to put our (rape) victim through the ordeal of testifying again unless we had to,” said Orange County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright. “Now that Ramirez has received a death sentence, it’s simply not necessary.”

At a preliminary hearing two years ago, the young woman took the witness stand to identify Ramirez as the man who broke into her home Aug. 25, 1985.

She testified that the assailant told her before raping her that he was the Night Stalker and made her declare that she loved Satan. Her fiance was shot three times in the head and has been in recuperative therapy since then.

Ramirez, 29, a devil-worshipping Texas drifter, was sentenced Tuesday to die in the gas chamber.

He is next scheduled to be tried in San Francisco for shooting and killing Peter Pan, 66, and beating his wife, Barbara, 64, in their San Francisco home Aug. 17, 1985, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Eugene Sweeters.

With the Los Angeles case wrapped up, Ramirez is expected to be transferred to San Quentin Prison’s Death Row. He then will be placed in the custody of San Francisco authorities once a preliminary hearing in the Pan case gets under way.