California’s Night Stalkers: The Crimes of Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. and Richard Ramirez 

        Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was the original night stalker and was later known as the Golden State Killer and by many other monikers.  He murdered at least thirteen, raped over 50 and committed over 120 burglaries during the seventies and eighties in California. Based on DNA evidence, investigators arrested DeAngelo, a former police officer in 2018 charging him with eight counts of first-degree murder and thirteen counts of kidnapping and abduction attempts. In 2020, he pled guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.  

Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was born in 1945 in Bath, New York. His father was a sergeant in the United States Army and was one of four siblings. Allegedly, according to one of the siblings, their father was abusive while they were growing up.  During his teenage years, DeAngelo committed burglaries and liked torturing and killing animals.  In 1964, he joined the U.S. Navy and served over two years before enrolling in college. In 1971, he graduated from Sacrament State University earning a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and later completed a thirty-two-week internship at the Roseville Police Department.  

During the mid-seventies, DeAngelo investigated burglaries with the Exeter Police Department and later transferred to the Auburn Police Department. In October 1979, he was fired from the police department for shoplifting a hammer and a dog repellent from a store. Prior to being fired, DeAngelo threatened the chief of the police department and allegedly stalked his house.  

DeAngelo started his crime spree in the mid-seventies as a residential burglar in the Visalia area committed in over a twenty-month span resulting in one murder and around 120 burglaries.  

On September 11, 1975, DeAngelo illegally entered the home of a journalism professor at a local college wearing a ski-mask when he was confronted by the owner who heard a strange noise. The intruder was attempting to kidnap the owner’s daughter and was shot twice by DeAngelo and later died.  

In 1976, DeAngelo moved to the Sacramento area and escalated from residential burglaries to raping his victims inside these residences. His method of operation was to target single females inside their homes at night in middle class neighborhoods. He later changed after media reports and attacked couples as well. He usually entered through a window or a glass door locating the sleeping occupants then awakening the couple with his flashlight while pointing his handgun at them. He then bound the victims with shoelaces, blindfolded and gagged them with towels he ripped into strips. He often raped the female in the living room area while the male was tied up with dishes on his back and threated to kill everyone in the house if the dishes rattled. Many times, DeAngelo spent hours at the residence eating, drinking and continuously raping the female. These attacks occurred for three years in numerous counties until the summer of 1979 with a total of fifty rapes he committed.  

           In February 1978, DeAngelo shot and killed a couple that fled after a confrontation with him in the Rancho Cordova area. The couple was walking their dog and was chased down and shot to death by him.  The male victim was military policeman at Mather Air Force Base.   

       In July 1979, DeAngelo moved to Southern California and began killing his first victims in Santa Barbara County. At the time, these murders were known as the Night Stalker killings and later changed to the Original Night Stalker since Richard Ramirez was also later known as the Night Stalker.  

In March 1980, DeAngelo killed another couple in their home in Ventura. He raped the female victim and used a log from a woodpile outside the house and clubbed them to death.  Their wrists and ankles were tied in an unusual diamond knot with a drapery cord in the same style used years earlier in other rapes. DeAngelo was briefly referred to as the Diamond Knot Killer.  

There was a lull in the killings after July 1981 when DeAngelo murdered another couple in Goleta a few blocks from another killing he committed in December 1979.  In May 1986, DeAngelo raped and killed an eighteen-year-old female in her residence in Irvine. It is believed he used a pipe wrench to kill the victim. Later, all these cases were linked by DNA testing.  

Investigators used genetic genealogy while comparing online DNA data files of distant relatives of Joseph DeAngelo. In 2017, authorities uploaded DeAngelo’s DNA profile from one of the rapes and murders he committed, eventually leaving him as the main suspect. In April 2018, law enforcement surreptitiously collected DNA samples from DeAngelo, resulting in matches to previously committed rapes and murders. A few weeks later, DeAngelo was arrested by local authorities and charged with eight counts of first-degree murder, and an additional four counts of first-degree murder were added later. According to prosecutors, DeAngelo confessed to the rapes and murders and alluded later while left alone in an interrogation room that another person inside him named Jerry made him kill all these people.  On August 21, 2020, Joseph James DeAngelo pled guilty to thirteen-counts of murder and kidnapping and received multiple life sentences avoiding the death penalty. He is currently incarcerated in protective custody at California State Prison in Corcoran.     

          Richard Ramirez was also dubbed the Night Stalker for his span of murders and rapes in California during the mid-eighties. In 1989, he was convicted of thirteen murders and was sentenced to death. Ramirez died in 2013 from health complications while waiting execution on California’s death row.  

Ricardo “Richard” Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in 1960 in El Paso, Texas. He was the youngest of five children and was subject to physical abuse by his alcoholic father. At age ten, he started drinking and smoking marijuana. Growing up, he was heavily influenced by this older cousin who was a decorated Green Beret during the Vietnam War who committed brutal rapes and murders of Vietnamese women and showed Polaroid pictures to Ramirez of these decapitated and dismembered women. Ramirez learned from his military trained cousin how to effectively kill and stay hidden at night.  

         In May 1973, Ramirez witnessed his cousin fatally shoot his wife in the face with a handgun during a domestic argument. His cousin was later acquitted of the murder by reason of insanity attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder and sentenced to the Texas State Mental Hospital. Ramirez later commented that witnessing the murder was extremely fascinating and not traumatic at all.  

By the late seventies, Ramirez was using LSD and showing interest in Satanism and the occult. He also resumed his relationship with his cousin after his release from the mental hospital. During his teenage years, Ramirez had graphic violent sexual fantasies including forced bondage, murder, mutilation and rape of women. At ninth grade, he dropped out of high school and later started using cocaine and committed thefts and burglaries to sustain his cocaine addiction.  

In April 1984, Ramirez killed a nine-year-old Chinese American girl in the basement of his apartment building in the Tenerloin district of San Francisco. He lured the young girl to his basement with the promise of finding her lost one-dollar bill. Once inside, he strangled, raped and stabbed the girl with his switchblade.  

On March 17, 1985, Ramirez killed two and attempted a third murder all with an hour. He shot a twenty-two-year-old woman in the face outside her home in Rosemead with a .22 caliber handgun. She survived by placing her hands in front of her face while holding her keys causing the bullet to ricochet.  While her roommate, hid under a kitchen counter for cover when she saw Ramirez enter the dwelling. The roommate was shot in the head and killed instantly by Ramirez when she peaked her head to see where he was.  An hour later, Ramirez shot twice and killed a thirty-two-year-old Asian woman that he pulled out of her vehicle in Monterey Park. Extensive news coverage dubbed him the “The Walk-In Killer and “The Valley Intruder.”  

Ten days later, Ramirez entered a residence he had burglarized a year prior outside of Whittier at 2 a.m. He approached the sleeping male victim and shot him in the head with his .22 caliber handgun. The wife was awakened by the gun shot and was beaten and hands were tied. While Ramirez ransacked the bedroom, the female loosened her bonded hands and retrieved a shotgun underneath the couple’s bed. Unbeknownst to her, the shotgun was unloaded, and she attempted to fire the weapon when he turned towards her.  Ramirez in a rage shot her three times then mutilated her body with a carving knife he retrieved from the kitchen. He carved an inverted cross on her chest and then removed her eyes and placed them in a jewelry box which he kept as a keepsake.  Investigators recovered spent casings from the crime scene that matched others murders in the area. Ramirez also left footprints in the flower beds from a pair of Avia sneakers he wore.   

On July 20, 1985, Ramirez stole a vehicle and purchased a machete that he used on his next victims. He chose a home in Glendale and hacked up a couple in their mid-sixties who were sleeping in their bed and then shot them both in the head. He then continued to mutilate their bodies and left with their valuables.                                       

In August 1985, authorities developed good leads from witness description of Ramirez, footprints once again left at a crime scene and fingerprints found in a vehicle that he stole that identified him. Police released his mug shot of a previous arrest, identifying Ramirez as the Night Stalker.   

On August 31, 1985, after returning from Tucson, Arizona and unaware that law enforcement had identified him as the Night Stalker. The news media had his pictures and images all over California. While working into a convenience store in East Los Angeles, he was noticed by a group of elderly Hispanic women. He immediately noticed his face on the front page of a newspaper and fled the store in a panic. He ran across Santa Ana Freeway and attempted to steal the car keys from the owner. The woman’s husband hit Ramirez over the head with a fence post, and a group of residents chased him down the street in Boyle Heights. The group held and relentlessly beat Ramirez until police arrived.  

      On September 20, 1989, Ramirez was convicted of 43 counts to include thirteen counts of first-degree murder.  During the penalty phase of the trial, he was sentenced to death in California by the gas chamber. After the sentence, Ramirez told reporters, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”  The trial cost close to two million dollars and was the most expensive in California’s history until the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994.          

         On June 07, 2013, Richard Ramirez died of complications secondary to B-cell lymphoma at Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, California.  

Psychiatrists believe that Ramirez was a “made” and not born psychopath, and his schizoid personality disorder contributed to him not caring about the suffering he was inflecting on his victims and was untreatable.