A youth named Stephen Parent, who had been visiting the house boy, drove down the drive on his way home and called to ask the dark figures what was happening. Tex Watson shot him five times in the head. Then they broke into the house by cutting through a screen window.
Frykowski had fallen asleep on the settee under the influence of drugs; Abigail Folger had retired to bed for the same reason. Sebring was talking to Sharon Tate in her bedroom. Watson woke Frykowski up and ordered Susan Atkins to tie his hands. Sebring came downstairs asking what was happening and made a grab for the gun; Watson shot him in the lung. Then a rope was thrown over a beam and tied round the necks of Sebring, Abigail Folger and Sharon Tate. As Sebring began to struggle, Watson stabbed him several times. Frykowski began to run, and was shot in the back, then clubbed. Abigail Folger, also running, was stabbed by Patricia Krenwinkel. Out in the garden, where Linda Kasabian was keeping watch, Frykowski was stabbed to death by Watson. Then, back in the house, Watson ignored Sharon Tate’s pleas for mercy and stabbed her in the breast. Finally, Susan Atkins wrote “Pig” in blood on the door, and they left.
They stripped off their bloody clothes and washed themselves with a grass sprinkler on someone’s lawn; the elderly house owner came out and shooed them off, noting the number of their car as they drove away.
Later that night, Manson seems to have come to the house to make sure everyone was dead. And the next morning, the family watched with delight as news of the murders was broadcast on television.
The aim of Helter Skelter was to make whites believe that blacks were about to start a massacre, and to massacre them in turn. It seemed logical to Manson that if this was to be achieved, the murders had to be followed up as soon as possible. That evening, seven family members, all high on “acid”, set out for a well-to-do area of Los Angeles, Los Feliz, and chose a house at random. But when Manson saw pictures of children through the window, he ordered them to move on to a house with an expensive car and a boat trailer outside. It was the home of a middle-aged couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.
The LaBiancas had gone to bed when Charles Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and ordered them to get up. He tied them up, then went back to the car and ordered Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten to go into the house and kill them. He, meanwhile, would go off with the others and kill someone else.
Watson and his helpers found the LaBiancas lying quietly. Mrs LaBianca was led to a bedroom and tied with electric flex; then her husband was stabbed in the throat. When Rosemary LaBianca screamed “What are you doing to my husband?”, Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed her in the back, severing her spine. Watson slashed the word “War” on LaBianca’s chest while Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed both bodies with a carving fork After it was clear the victims were dead, they scrawled “Death to pigs” and “Rise” – and a mis-spelled version of “Helter Skelter” – on the wall, then took a shower, and fed the dogs (who had watched the murders without barking, and even licked their hands). They then hitch-hiked back to the Spahn ranch where Manson was waiting. The murders he had intended to commit had been abandoned; in fact, he had left the girls in an apartment block with orders to kill a film actor, but they had deliberately knocked on the wrong door and went away again.
The slaughter created the sensation Manson had hoped for – suddenly the sale of handguns and burglar alarms soared in Los Angeles. Six days later, the stolen car used in both crimes was seized by the police – but not in connection with the murders; they had decided to swoop on the hippie commune in search of drugs, guns and stolen vehicles. Unfortunately, the man who had chased the Sharon Tate killers off his lawn failed to report the incident to the police, otherwise the case would probably have been solved immediately. Manson and twenty-four other people were arrested, but released three days later for lack of evidence.
On 26 August, less than two weeks after the murders, a Spahn ranch hand named Shorty O’Shea vanished; his body was never found, but it is believed that he was tortured and killed by the family because he had married a negro woman, and because he knew too much.
In 12 September 1969, the family moved back to Death Valley. There they courted the attention of the police by wantonly burning a bulldozer belonging to the local rangers. Tyre tracks led them to a stolen car, and a miner told them about the family (who had made an unsuccessful attempt to kill him). On 9 October police surrounded the Barker ranch, then arrested everyone on it – mostly girls, who tried to disconcert them by removing their clothes and urinating. Manson returned to the ranch three days later, to be told about the arrests by a few girls who had escaped the raid. While he was eating, the police descended again. Manson almost escaped by hiding in a tiny cupboard under the kitchen sink, but was detected.
It was Susan Atkins, in prison in Los Angeles on suspicion of knowing something about the Gary Hinman murder, who betrayed the family. She began to drop hints to fellow prisoners ahout the Sharon Tate killings, and finally described them to her cellmate in detail. The cellmate reported this to another prisoner, who reported it to the police. Under questioning, Susan Atkins was soon confessing the whole story.
The trial was one of the most expensive in Los Angeles history (although in this respect it was surpassed by the trial of the Hillside Stranglers, Buono and Bianchi, ten years later). It had a slightly surrealistic air, since Manson seemed to have no regard for normal logic, and insisted that they were innocent because society was guilty. Asked if she thought the killing of eight people unimportant, Susan Atkins asked if the killing of thousands of people with napalm was important. Manson became a hero of the hippies, who saw him as a figure of social protest; there can be no doubt that if he had been released, he would soon have had as huge a following as any messiah in history.
Even after the arrests, the murders went on. Defence attorney Ronald Hughes disappeared eight days into the trial; his badly decomposed body was found in the desert at about the time of the sentencing; he had strongly disagreed with the decision of Manson’s co-defendants to insist that he was not guilty. In his book Helter Skelter, prosecution attorney Vincent Bugliosi lists a dozen other murders connected with the family, including those of two family members believed to have killed Hughes.
On 30 March 1970, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel were sentenced to death; in 1971 Watson received the same sentence. In effect, this meant life imprisonment.
In September 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, but her gun misfired; she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In April 1992, Manson – now housed in a maximum security prison in the San Joaquin Valley – made his eighth appeal for parole, but was turned down by the board.
Richard Ramirez
Throughout 1985 handgun sales in Los Angeles soared. Many suburbanites slept with a loaded pistol by their beds. A series of violent attacks upon citizens in their own homes had shattered the comfortable normality of middle-class life. Formerly safe neighbourhoods seemed to be the killer’s favourite targets. The whole city was terrified.
The attacks were unprecedented in many ways. Neither murder nor robbery seemed to be the obvious motive, although both frequently took place. The killer would break into a house, creep into the main bedroom and shoot the male partner through the head with a .22. He would then rape and beat the wife or girlfriend, suppressing resistance with threats of violence to her or her children. Male children were sometimes sodomized, the rape victims sometimes shot. On occasion, he would ransack the house looking for valuables while at other times he would leave empty-handed without searching. During the attacks he would force victims to declare their love for Satan. Survivors described a tall, slim Hispanic male with black, greasy hair and severely decayed teeth. The pattern of crimes seemed to be based less upon a need to murder or rape but a desire to terrify and render helpless. More than most serial killers the motive seemed to be exercising power.
The killer also had unusual meth
ods of victim selection. He seemed to be murdering outside his own racial group, preferring Caucasians and specifically Asians. He also seemed to prefer to break into yellow houses.
In the spring and summer of 1985 there were more than twenty attacks, most of which involved both rape and murder. By the end of March the press had picked up the pattern and splashed stories connecting the series of crimes. After several abortive nicknames, such as “The Walk-In Killer” or “The Valley Invader”, the Herald Examiner came up with “The Night Stalker”, a name sensational enough to stick.
Thus all through the hot summer of 1985 Californians slept with their windows closed. One policeman commented to a reporter: “People are armed and staying up late. Burglars want this guy caught like everyone else. He’s making it bad for their business.” The police themselves circulated sketches and stopped anyone who looked remotely like The Night Stalker. One innocent man was stopped five times.
Despite these efforts and thorough forensic analysis of crime scenes there was little progress in the search for the killer’s identity.
Things were obviously getting difficult for The Night Stalker as well. The next murder that fitted the pattern occurred in San Francisco, showing perhaps that public awareness in Los Angeles had made it too taxing a location. This shift also gave police a chance to search San Francisco hotels for records of a man of The Night Stalker’s description. Sure enough, while checking the downmarket Tenderloin district, police learned that a thin Hispanic with bad teeth had been staying at a cheap hotel there periodically over the past year. On the last occasion he had checked out the night of the San Francisco attack. The manager commented that his room “smelled like a skunk” each time he vacated it and it took three days for the smell to clear.
Though this evidence merely confirmed the police’s earlier description, The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to prove more revealing. A young couple in Mission Viejo were attacked in their home. The Night Stalker shot the man through the head while he slept, then raped his partner on the bed next to the body. He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for money and jewellery. Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head. Unfortunately for the killer, however, his victim caught a glimpse of him escaping in a battered orange Toyota and memorized the licence plate. She immediately alerted the police. LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in Los Angeles’s Chinatown district while the owner was eating in a restaurant. An all-points bulletin was put out for the vehicle, and officers were instructed not to try and arrest the driver, merely to observe him. However, the car was not found. In fact, The Night Stalker had dumped the car soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in Los Angeles’s Rampart district. After plain-clothes officers had kept the car under surveillance for twenty-four hours, the police moved in and took the car away for forensic testing. A set of fingerprints was successfully lifted.
Searching police fingerprint files for a match manually can take many days and even then it is possible to miss correlations. However, the Los Angeles police had recently installed a fingerprint database computer system, designed by the FBI, and it was through this that they checked the set of fingerprints from the orange Toyota. The system works by storing information about the relative distance between different features of a print, and comparing them with a digitized image of the suspect’s fingerprint. The search provided a positive match and a photograph. The Night Stalker was a petty thief and burglar. His name was Ricardo Leyva Ramirez.
The positive identification was described by the forensic division as “a near miracle”. The computer system had only just been installed, this was one of its first trials. Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after 1 January 1960. Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.
The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news. At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo. On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph all over their front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.
He arrived safely and went into the bus station toilet to finish off the cocaine he had bought. No one seemed to be overly interested in him as he left the station and walked through Los Angeles. Ramirez was a Satanist, and had developed a belief that Satan himself watched over him, preventing his capture.
At 8.15 a.m. Ramirez entered Tito’s Liquor Store at 819 Towne Avenue. He selected some Pepsi and a pack of sugared doughnuts; he had a sweet tooth that, coupled with a lack of personal hygiene, had left his mouth with only a few blackened teeth. At the counter other customers looked at him strangely as he produced three dollar bills and awaited his change. Suddenly he noticed the papers’ front pages, and his faith in Satan’s power must have been shaken. He dodged out of the shop and ran, accompanied by shouts of, “It is him! Call the cops!” He pounded off down the street at a surprising speed for one so ostensibly unhealthy. Within twelve minutes he had covered two miles. He had headed east. He was in the Hispanic district of Los Angeles.
Ever since the police had confirmed that The Night Stalker was Hispanic there had been a great deal of anger among the Hispanic community of Los Angeles. They felt that racial stereotypes were already against them enough without their being associated with psychopaths. Thus more than most groups, Hispanics wanted The Night Stalker out of action.
Ramirez, by now, was desperate to get a vehicle. He attempted to pull a woman from her car in a supermarket lot until he was chased away by some customers of the barber’s shop opposite. He carried on running though exhausted, into the more residential areas of east Los Angeles. There, he tried to steal a 1966 red Mustang having failed to notice that the owner, Faustino Pinon, was lying underneath repairing it. As Ramirez attempted to start the car Pinon grabbed him by the collar and tried to pull him from the driver’s seat. Ramirez shouted that he had a gun, but Pinon carried on pulling at him even after the car had started, causing it to career into the gatepost. Ramirez slammed it into reverse and accelerated into the side of Pinon’s garage, and the vehicle stalled. Pinon succeeded in wrenching Ramirez out of his car, but in the following struggle Ramirez escaped, leaping the fence and running off across the road. There he tried to wrestle Angelina De La Torres from her Ford Granada. “Te voy a matar! (I’m going to kill you!)” screamed Ramirez. “Give me the keys!”, but again he was thwarted and he ran away, now pursued by a growing crowd of neighbours. Manuel De La Torries, Angelina’s husband, succeeded in smashing Ramirez on the head with a gate bar and he fell, but he managed to struggle up and set off running again before he could be restrained. Incredibly, when Ramirez had developed a lead, he stopped, turned around and stuck his tongue out at his pursuers, then sped off once more. His stamina could not hold indefinitely however, and it was De La Torres who again tackled him and held him down. It is possible that Ramirez would have been lynched there and then had not a patrolman called to the scene arrived. Coincidentally the patrolman was the same age as the killer, and he too was called Ramirez. He reached the scene just as The Night Stalker disappeared under the mob. He drove his patrol car to within a few feet of where Ramirez was restrained, got out and prepared to handcuff the captive.
“Save me. Please. Thank God you’re here. It’s me, I’m the one you want. Save me before they kill me,” babbled Ramirez. The patrolman handcuffed him and pushed him into the back of the car. The crowd was becoming restless, and the car was kicked as it pulled away. Sixteen-year-old Felipe Castaneda, part of the mob that captured Ramirez, remarked, “He should never, never have come to east LA. He might have been a tough guy, but he came to a tough neighbourhood. He was Hispanic. He should have known better.”
“The Night Stalker” was in custody, at first in a police holding cell and then in Los Angeles county jail. While in police care he repeatedly admitted to being “The
Night Stalker” and begged to be killed.
The case against Ramirez was strong. The murder weapon, a .22 semi-automatic pistol, was found in the possession of a woman in Tijuana, who had been given it by a friend of Ramirez. Police also tried to track down some of the jewellery that Ramirez had stolen and fenced, by sending investigators to his birthplace El Paso, a spiralling town on the Texas–Mexico border. Questioning his family and neighbours revealed that Ramirez’s early life had been spent in petty theft and smoking a lot of marijuana. He had never joined any of the rival teenage gangs that fight over territory throughout El Paso, preferring drugs and listening to Heavy Metal. It had been common knowledge that Ramirez was a Satanist; a boyhood friend, Tom Ramos, said he believed that it was Bible-study classes that had turned the killer that way.
The investigators also found a great deal of jewellery, stashed at the house of Ramirez’s sister Rosa Flores. The police were also hoping to find a pair of eyes that Ramirez had gouged from one of his victims that had not been found in any previous searches. Unfortunately they were not recovered.
The evidence against Ramirez now seemed unequivocal. In a controversial move, the mayor of Los Angeles said that whatever went on in court, he was convinced of Ramirez’s guilt. This was later to prove a mainstay in a defence argument that Ramirez could not receive a fair trial in Los Angeles.
The appointed chief prosecutor in the case was deputy District Attorney P. Philip Halpin, who had prosecuted the “Onion Field” cop-killing case twenty years earlier. Halpin hoped to end the trial and have Ramirez in the gas chamber in a relatively short period of time. The prosecutor drew up a set of initial charges and submitted them as quickly as possible. A public defender was appointed to represent Ramirez. However Ramirez’s family had engaged an El Paso lawyer, Manuel Barraza, and Ramirez eventually rejected his appointed public defender in favour of the El Paso attorney. Barrata did not even have a licence to practise law in California.