Richard ramirez crime scene photos

Richard Ramirez was known by many names. His family called him Richie. Los Angeles' KNBC called him the Walk-In Killer. To others, he was the Valley Intruder, but the name that stuck, the one that the news media (and Ramirez himself) latched onto, was the Night Stalker.

As far as authorities know, he was 24 the first time he took a life. June 2021 marks 37 years since Ramirez's first murder — or, least, the first one that earned him a conviction.

Before his 26th birthday, he would kill at least 13 more people and commit at least 11 sexual assaults, in a wave of seemingly random attacks that terrified residents of Southern California in the summer of 1985.

His crimes were deemed so cruel and callous that they earned him a whopping 19 death penalties. He died in prison on June 7, 2013, while awaiting execution.

But let's go back to the beginning of the story.

A broken home

Richard Ramirez grew up in El Paso, Texas — the product of a violent family. According to a 1996 biography, Ramirez's father was physically abusive.

Richard's older cousin, Miguel Ramirez, often bragged about crimes he committed in Vietnam, even showing young Richard a photo of himself posing with the severed head of a Vietnamese woman he had abused. 

When Richard was 13, he watched as Miguel shot and killed his wife, Jessie, during an argument. Miguel was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was released four years later.

California dreaming

In 1982, when Ramirez was 22, he moved from Texas to California. His crimes may have begun sooner than authorities first thought.

In 2009, police matched Ramirez's DNA with a sample collected at the scene of an unsolved murder of a 9-year-old girl in San Francisco in 1984. 

First Night Stalker killing

On June 28, 1984, Jack Vincow visited his mother's apartment in Los Angeles' Glassell Park neighborhood. He noticed a window screen missing, the front door unlocked and his mother's belongings scattered around th

For over a year, a serial killer terrorized Los Angeles — until its residents took him down.  

Richard Muñoz Ramirez, dubbed by the media as the Night Stalker, killed at least 15 people and robbed, raped and beat many others between April 1984 and August 1985. His attacks were brutal and unpredictable. Ramirez rarely used the same weapon and picked his victims seemingly at random, even choosing to leave some of them alive. 

The Peacock docuseries Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes, out Dec. 10, explores the life and crimes of the notorious killer. It even includes recorded interviews with Ramirez, who died in 2013.

After a year of harrowing killings, the Texas-born murderer left enough clues for police to identify him to the public. According to NBC Los Angeles, someone soon reported a suspicious man with the suspect’s liking on Aug. 31, 1985. Ramirez attempted to flee via car-jacking but was held down by an angry mob hell-bent on his capture. When police finally arrived, they had beaten him bloody with a steel rod. 

“We were saying that if he got caught around here in East L.A. he’d probably get his butt beat up because all the guys around here all know about him,” neighbor Eloise Cabral told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “They would just love to get their hands on him. And now we wake up the next morning and find him across the street.”

So how was the Night Stalker caught? Here’s everything to know about Richard Ramirez and the mob that captured him. 

Who was the Night Stalker?

In the 1980s, a serial killer who local media named the Night Stalker, terrorized cities across L.A. County. Police eventually identified this violent criminal as Richard Ramirez, a drifter from El Paso, Texas, with a history of drug abuse and auto theft.

According to his obituary in The New York Times, Ramirez was exposed to extrem

American serial killer and sex offender (1960–2013)

For the noise musician, see Richard Ramirez (musician).

"The Night Prowler" redirects here. For the Patrick White film, see The Night the Prowler. For the AC/DC song, see Night Prowler (song).

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez (; February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), better known as Richard Ramirez, and nicknamed the Night Stalker, was an American serial killer and sex offender whose killing spree occurred in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the state of California. From April 1984 to August 1985, Ramirez murdered at least fourteen people during various break-ins, with his crimes usually taking place in the afternoon, leading to him being dubbed the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer, and the Valley Intruder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 and died while awaiting execution in 2013.

Ramirez's crimes were heavily influenced by a troubled childhood. Frequently abused by his father, he developed brain damage and started abusing drugs at the age of 10. He began developing macabre interests in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin, a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD, who extensively bragged about the war crimes he had committed, and who killed his wife in front of h