Biographies: Lopez and Ramirez
In Ambata, Colombia, dozens of little girls between the ages of eight and twelve had been vanishing and people were growing increasingly concerned. At first, the police didn't take the disappearances seriously. And then the bodies of some of the girls arose, proving that they had been raped and strangled. But the police didn't have any leads. On March 9th, a man approached a vendor and asked her to sell him food, attempting to gain the attentions of her daughter, Carlina. Suspicious, the girl and her friends captured the man and dragged him back, accusing him of the murders and rapes.
The townspeople weren't convinced and so they held him until the police arrived.
In March, 1980, after a couple of hours in custody, Lopez confessed his story to the captain of the police. The man explained that he spent the last seven years wandering through Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, during which time he raped as many as three hundred little girls. The captain was stunned. News of his capture spread and the killer relished in the attention, enjoying discussing the murders. Through these stories, he wanted to gain a dark sort of immortality.
He claimed that the grave-sites were all over the country and offered to lead officials to each location. During this time, he had to travel in disguise because the Colombian people wanted to lynch him; on some occasions, he would take on the appearance of a police officer. Over the next six weeks, he led them from site to site, remembering each and every instance and, by the conclusion of this phase, law enforcement would journey across eleven provinces. In all, the investigation would unearth fifty-seven of the man's child victims.
Why had Lopez done this?
His father died while the boy was still within his stomach. According to his mother, he was a good boy who wanted to be a teacher and, as a youth, he did indeed teach other kids. Lopez, however, claimed that his mother was a prostitute and abusive. Feeling abandoned, he lived in utter filth and fear. At age eight, Lopez ran away from home and his mother claims that she believed that he was kidnapped by a neighbor.
Lopez, in fact, headed for the vicious city of Bogota. It would be there that he learned to survive through cruelty and violence, and a serial killer was borne. He dug through garbage to eat and obtain clothing, smoked basuco, and joined a street gang for protection and assistance. Lopez and his gang fought with other gangs for sleeping spots, and so violence became a standard aspect of one's life.
It was during this time he was sexually victimized by a grown man. According to him, this affected him greatly and generated such anger, a desire to harm.
Then, he would only go outside at night.
He was offered a home by an elderly American couple and enrolled into a school, where he enjoyed his life for some time. However, a male teacher sexually molested him and he reacted harshly, stealing money from the school and heading back to the streets. And he lived there for thirteen years before being arrested for stealing a car. In jail, he was brutally raped by two older inmates and Lopez murdered the two; it was marked as defense and no further prison time was added.
In 1971, 23 year old Lopez was released from prison and, supposedly, he wanted revenge - so he sought easy targets to attack. He chose young girls, poor, never white, and posed as a lost salesman in need of help. First he would sexually assault them, spending entire nights, and end them, and this, he says, was to help them. It would put them out of their misery.
On May 5th, 1979, he paid a young girl ten dollars to be his guide and then raped and murdered her.
Although many girls went missing, the police claimed that they were simply runaways because the victims were of such "little importance". Lopez selected the daughter of a wealthy baker, unfortunately, and so the police now became involved in the disappearances. A body was found shortly after.
This is about the time when Lopez was captured by Peru officials.
As it turns out, the laws were on his side. Regardless of the number of murders one committed, one would be sentenced to the same punishment since the law didn't allow for consecutive sentences. His punishment amounted to four months per girl. Sixteen years overall.
He was released two years earlier than his sentence on good behavior, so he spent fourteen years in prison.
One hour after his release, he was taken back into custody and deported to Colombia as an illegal. Shortly after arriving, he was processed and charged with a decades-old murder, in hopes of detaining him further under Colombia's harsher laws. In 1995, he was declared insane - and just months later, he was declared sane. Fifty dollars bail released the serial killer.
He resumed his travels, never to be seen again.
Twenty years after his arrest, Peru changed the laws so that the sentence for murder would be twenty-five. At some point, they sought Lopez again, believing that a new murder resembled his earlier work and yet nobody has seen him since.
---
The Night Stalker's reign of terror began on July 27th, 1984, in Glasgow Park, CA, with Jennie Vincow. In the middle of the night, he broke in and stabbed the elderly female violently, sloppily leaving a fingerprint. Unfortunately, fingerprints served little use without prints to compare in that day and age. On March 17th, 1985, Maria Hernandez was followed into her garage by a a man in all black and shot. The intelligent woman feigned dead and survived the ordeal, but her female roommate was not equally lucky.
The same night, he trailer another woman along the freeway and, when she pulled over to confront him, Ramirez shot her.
On March 28th, 1985, he drove to the Zazarra home and located an opening to slip in quietly. The killer shot Vincent Zazarra in the head while the man was sleeping and bound his wife, Maxine Zazarra. She managed to free herself, snatched a gun and shot her captor, and was rewarded with several lethal shots in return. Ramirez was so angry with her audacity that he knived out Maxine's eyes - which tend to be a particular source of fascination to paranoid murderers.
On May 14th, 1985, in Monterey Park, Bill Doi was shot and his wife, Lillian Doi, raped and permitted to live. Here, he left a footprint of a new shoe. Two weeks later, in Monrovia, Mabel Bell was bludgeoned to death with a hammer and her invalid sister, an 81 year old woman, was raped brutally and discarded. Here, he left symbols reflective of a satanist world view at the crime scene.
Ramirez's mother worked at a boot factory, mixing chemicals, where she inhaled fumes regularly and, unsurprisingly, two of her children were born with birth defects. Her pregnancy with Ramirez was especially hard, yet she gave birth to a cheerful baby boy in El Paso, Texas. There was only one thing that set him apart from other kids: epileptic attacks. Because of these episodes, he was not allowed to play football and this angered him greatly.
Ramirez's father was also very violent, abusing his brothers and the young child - and, on occasion, taking out his frustrations on himself.
As a child, his mother enforced a strict Catholic upbringing and, accordingly, Ramirez attended church regularly.
On May 30th, 1985, Ramirez drove up to a house in Burbank, tried all the houses and doors, and eventually gained entry. Ramirez forced one Ruth Wilson into her son's room, locked the child in a closet, proceeded to rape the woman and left her alive. Over the next few days, he raped a six year old girl and mutilated and killed two other women, proving that age was irrelevant. The victim need only be weak.
Despite this, in childhood, he often defended his brother, Joseph (who suffered a birth defect), from bullies. However, when his brothers were put into a slow-learners' class, a pedophile allegedly took advantage of the young boy and Ramirez.
As a finishing blow, his psychopathic cousin, Miguel, a war veteran, took Richard under his wing and revealed wartime stories, practically indoctrinating the impressionable youth. During his service, he would bind women and rape them, going so far as to take photographs, which he reportedly showed the young Ramirez. One day, his relative murdered his wife in front of the boy; Ramirez never admitted his presence in the room during the murder, though his behavior altered drastically.
At twelve, Ramirez roamed the neighborhood at night and peeked in women as they changed. With many dark thoughts filling his head, the boy decided to convert to Satanism and dropped out of high school. He took a job a hotel, thus earning the master key, and would hide out in the hotel rooms in order to peek on female customers. While a woman was beginning to shower, Ramirez decided he wanted her and attempted to rape her; fortunately, her husband, who had been parking the car, arrived and beat the little shit to a pulp. He was booked in the morning, but the charges were dropped when the out-of-town couple wanted nothing more to do with the incident.
This immunity to punishment convinced him that his darkest fantasies could become reality without consequences.
On July 20th, 1985, Ramirez entered the home of Chainarong Khovananth and his wife, and, as usual, murdered the husband and raped the wife - and then he raped their eight year old son.
The media dubbed him the "Night Stalker".
Ramirez was a coke addict and petty thief, but Satan remained an important part of his life. By 1983, his family knew something was wrong because he ceased sending letters, answering calls and his sister begged him to return home. He refused. And shortly after, he was arrested for car theft, prints taken and photographed before being sent off to jail.
On August 8th, 1985, Ramirez drove to a town called Diamond Bar and slipped into the house of Elyas Abowath, who he murdered. He then repeatedly raped Mrs. Abowath and, before leaving the house, calmly indulged in a melon from the fridge. On August 19th, he murdered a Taiwanese couple in San Franciso. The San Francisco mayor released critical information that connected the killer's crimes, infuriating police - and that information regarded the murderer's unusual footwear: Avila. Ramirez tossed his shoes and gun from the Golden Gate Bridge shortly after.
On August 24th, 1985, he drove south to Mission Viejo where he shot Bill Carns and raped his fiance. Unpredictable succinctly described this serial killer. He murdered using crow bars, guns, and in one instance, he stomped a woman to death. Unbeknownst to Ramirez, a teenager had seen the man drive by and so he took down the license plate number. Meanwhile, he left town in the stolen car and abandoned it in Orange County, taking a bus to Arizona. As it turns out, he accidentally left fingerprints in this car.
As it turns out, the Californian fingerprinting system was now online and, when the processed his prints, they matched a petty thief's prints who stole a car in 1984.
The Night Stalker now had a name: Richard Ramirez.
The media released his face and everyone was on the search for Richard Ramirez, not knowing that the man had just been arriving in Arizona. When he saw the detectives, he remained calm and they didn't recognize him immediately until several civilians pointed him out. He panicked and ran. Forty police cars and seven helicopters arrived on the scene and yet he continued running - to no avail. The civilians were stomping and beat on him, but the police managed to steal him away, practically saving his life.
The police recovered a handgun, stolen jewelery and bullets that matched those found at the crime scenes. He was charged with fourteen murders and numerous other felony charges related to his rapes and burglaries.
It took two years to take the trial to a preliminary hearing. His trial was, again, delayed until 1989. Throughout the trial process, he displayed no remorse and, instead, relished the crime scenes and attention. Ramirez deliberately laughed and sneered in order to draw pain from the victims and their families in the court. His charisma even attracted groupies.
On September 20th, 1989, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of sixty-seven felonies and sentenced to nineteen death sentences. He was placed on death row in San Quentin.
Shockingly, he married Doreen Lioy in 1996. According to Lioy, she will kill herself the day that Ramirez is executed.
Ramirez remains living on death row today.
Damn, Ramirez, you're nuts. But with that childhood, oi.
The townspeople weren't convinced and so they held him until the police arrived.
In March, 1980, after a couple of hours in custody, Lopez confessed his story to the captain of the police. The man explained that he spent the last seven years wandering through Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, during which time he raped as many as three hundred little girls. The captain was stunned. News of his capture spread and the killer relished in the attention, enjoying discussing the murders. Through these stories, he wanted to gain a dark sort of immortality.
He claimed that the grave-sites were all over the country and offered to lead officials to each location. During this time, he had to travel in disguise because the Colombian people wanted to lynch him; on some occasions, he would take on the appearance of a police officer. Over the next six weeks, he led them from site to site, remembering each and every instance and, by the conclusion of this phase, law enforcement would journey across eleven provinces. In all, the investigation would unearth fifty-seven of the man's child victims.
Why had Lopez done this?
His father died while the boy was still within his stomach. According to his mother, he was a good boy who wanted to be a teacher and, as a youth, he did indeed teach other kids. Lopez, however, claimed that his mother was a prostitute and abusive. Feeling abandoned, he lived in utter filth and fear. At age eight, Lopez ran away from home and his mother claims that she believed that he was kidnapped by a neighbor.
Lopez, in fact, headed for the vicious city of Bogota. It would be there that he learned to survive through cruelty and violence, and a serial killer was borne. He dug through garbage to eat and obtain clothing, smoked basuco, and joined a street gang for protection and assistance. Lopez and his gang fought with other gangs for sleeping spots, and so violence became a standard aspect of one's life.
It was during this time he was sexually victimized by a grown man. According to him, this affected him greatly and generated such anger, a desire to harm.
Then, he would only go outside at night.
He was offered a home by an elderly American couple and enrolled into a school, where he enjoyed his life for some time. However, a male teacher sexually molested him and he reacted harshly, stealing money from the school and heading back to the streets. And he lived there for thirteen years before being arrested for stealing a car. In jail, he was brutally raped by two older inmates and Lopez murdered the two; it was marked as defense and no further prison time was added.
In 1971, 23 year old Lopez was released from prison and, supposedly, he wanted revenge - so he sought easy targets to attack. He chose young girls, poor, never white, and posed as a lost salesman in need of help. First he would sexually assault them, spending entire nights, and end them, and this, he says, was to help them. It would put them out of their misery.
On May 5th, 1979, he paid a young girl ten dollars to be his guide and then raped and murdered her.
Although many girls went missing, the police claimed that they were simply runaways because the victims were of such "little importance". Lopez selected the daughter of a wealthy baker, unfortunately, and so the police now became involved in the disappearances. A body was found shortly after.
This is about the time when Lopez was captured by Peru officials.
As it turns out, the laws were on his side. Regardless of the number of murders one committed, one would be sentenced to the same punishment since the law didn't allow for consecutive sentences. His punishment amounted to four months per girl. Sixteen years overall.
He was released two years earlier than his sentence on good behavior, so he spent fourteen years in prison.
One hour after his release, he was taken back into custody and deported to Colombia as an illegal. Shortly after arriving, he was processed and charged with a decades-old murder, in hopes of detaining him further under Colombia's harsher laws. In 1995, he was declared insane - and just months later, he was declared sane. Fifty dollars bail released the serial killer.
He resumed his travels, never to be seen again.
Twenty years after his arrest, Peru changed the laws so that the sentence for murder would be twenty-five. At some point, they sought Lopez again, believing that a new murder resembled his earlier work and yet nobody has seen him since.
---
The Night Stalker's reign of terror began on July 27th, 1984, in Glasgow Park, CA, with Jennie Vincow. In the middle of the night, he broke in and stabbed the elderly female violently, sloppily leaving a fingerprint. Unfortunately, fingerprints served little use without prints to compare in that day and age. On March 17th, 1985, Maria Hernandez was followed into her garage by a a man in all black and shot. The intelligent woman feigned dead and survived the ordeal, but her female roommate was not equally lucky.
The same night, he trailer another woman along the freeway and, when she pulled over to confront him, Ramirez shot her.
On March 28th, 1985, he drove to the Zazarra home and located an opening to slip in quietly. The killer shot Vincent Zazarra in the head while the man was sleeping and bound his wife, Maxine Zazarra. She managed to free herself, snatched a gun and shot her captor, and was rewarded with several lethal shots in return. Ramirez was so angry with her audacity that he knived out Maxine's eyes - which tend to be a particular source of fascination to paranoid murderers.
On May 14th, 1985, in Monterey Park, Bill Doi was shot and his wife, Lillian Doi, raped and permitted to live. Here, he left a footprint of a new shoe. Two weeks later, in Monrovia, Mabel Bell was bludgeoned to death with a hammer and her invalid sister, an 81 year old woman, was raped brutally and discarded. Here, he left symbols reflective of a satanist world view at the crime scene.
Ramirez's mother worked at a boot factory, mixing chemicals, where she inhaled fumes regularly and, unsurprisingly, two of her children were born with birth defects. Her pregnancy with Ramirez was especially hard, yet she gave birth to a cheerful baby boy in El Paso, Texas. There was only one thing that set him apart from other kids: epileptic attacks. Because of these episodes, he was not allowed to play football and this angered him greatly.
Ramirez's father was also very violent, abusing his brothers and the young child - and, on occasion, taking out his frustrations on himself.
As a child, his mother enforced a strict Catholic upbringing and, accordingly, Ramirez attended church regularly.
On May 30th, 1985, Ramirez drove up to a house in Burbank, tried all the houses and doors, and eventually gained entry. Ramirez forced one Ruth Wilson into her son's room, locked the child in a closet, proceeded to rape the woman and left her alive. Over the next few days, he raped a six year old girl and mutilated and killed two other women, proving that age was irrelevant. The victim need only be weak.
Despite this, in childhood, he often defended his brother, Joseph (who suffered a birth defect), from bullies. However, when his brothers were put into a slow-learners' class, a pedophile allegedly took advantage of the young boy and Ramirez.
As a finishing blow, his psychopathic cousin, Miguel, a war veteran, took Richard under his wing and revealed wartime stories, practically indoctrinating the impressionable youth. During his service, he would bind women and rape them, going so far as to take photographs, which he reportedly showed the young Ramirez. One day, his relative murdered his wife in front of the boy; Ramirez never admitted his presence in the room during the murder, though his behavior altered drastically.
At twelve, Ramirez roamed the neighborhood at night and peeked in women as they changed. With many dark thoughts filling his head, the boy decided to convert to Satanism and dropped out of high school. He took a job a hotel, thus earning the master key, and would hide out in the hotel rooms in order to peek on female customers. While a woman was beginning to shower, Ramirez decided he wanted her and attempted to rape her; fortunately, her husband, who had been parking the car, arrived and beat the little shit to a pulp. He was booked in the morning, but the charges were dropped when the out-of-town couple wanted nothing more to do with the incident.
This immunity to punishment convinced him that his darkest fantasies could become reality without consequences.
On July 20th, 1985, Ramirez entered the home of Chainarong Khovananth and his wife, and, as usual, murdered the husband and raped the wife - and then he raped their eight year old son.
The media dubbed him the "Night Stalker".
Ramirez was a coke addict and petty thief, but Satan remained an important part of his life. By 1983, his family knew something was wrong because he ceased sending letters, answering calls and his sister begged him to return home. He refused. And shortly after, he was arrested for car theft, prints taken and photographed before being sent off to jail.
On August 8th, 1985, Ramirez drove to a town called Diamond Bar and slipped into the house of Elyas Abowath, who he murdered. He then repeatedly raped Mrs. Abowath and, before leaving the house, calmly indulged in a melon from the fridge. On August 19th, he murdered a Taiwanese couple in San Franciso. The San Francisco mayor released critical information that connected the killer's crimes, infuriating police - and that information regarded the murderer's unusual footwear: Avila. Ramirez tossed his shoes and gun from the Golden Gate Bridge shortly after.
On August 24th, 1985, he drove south to Mission Viejo where he shot Bill Carns and raped his fiance. Unpredictable succinctly described this serial killer. He murdered using crow bars, guns, and in one instance, he stomped a woman to death. Unbeknownst to Ramirez, a teenager had seen the man drive by and so he took down the license plate number. Meanwhile, he left town in the stolen car and abandoned it in Orange County, taking a bus to Arizona. As it turns out, he accidentally left fingerprints in this car.
As it turns out, the Californian fingerprinting system was now online and, when the processed his prints, they matched a petty thief's prints who stole a car in 1984.
The Night Stalker now had a name: Richard Ramirez.
The media released his face and everyone was on the search for Richard Ramirez, not knowing that the man had just been arriving in Arizona. When he saw the detectives, he remained calm and they didn't recognize him immediately until several civilians pointed him out. He panicked and ran. Forty police cars and seven helicopters arrived on the scene and yet he continued running - to no avail. The civilians were stomping and beat on him, but the police managed to steal him away, practically saving his life.
The police recovered a handgun, stolen jewelery and bullets that matched those found at the crime scenes. He was charged with fourteen murders and numerous other felony charges related to his rapes and burglaries.
It took two years to take the trial to a preliminary hearing. His trial was, again, delayed until 1989. Throughout the trial process, he displayed no remorse and, instead, relished the crime scenes and attention. Ramirez deliberately laughed and sneered in order to draw pain from the victims and their families in the court. His charisma even attracted groupies.
On September 20th, 1989, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of sixty-seven felonies and sentenced to nineteen death sentences. He was placed on death row in San Quentin.
Shockingly, he married Doreen Lioy in 1996. According to Lioy, she will kill herself the day that Ramirez is executed.
Ramirez remains living on death row today.
Damn, Ramirez, you're nuts. But with that childhood, oi.