Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  The following day, Rick Ortega was brought in for questioning about her disappearance. His open hostility towards her in the weeks before her disappearance made him a prime suspect. Morales was also brought in and while in a cell, confessed his part in Terri’s disappearance and murder to a police informant, Bruce Samuelson, who was also in custody. Morales had already confessed to Raquel Cardenas, his girlfriend, and his housemate, Patricia Flores, but had threatened them not to testify against him at his trial.

  When Morales was arrested on 10 January, police found the broken belt, covered in Terri’s blood, concealed under a mattress. They also found three knives, and hidden in his refrigerator, a hammer on which analysis revealed were traces of blood. In the dustbin were found the blood-stained floor mats from Ortega’s car. They also found Terri Winchell’s purse and credit cards.

  At Morales’ trial, the story of the love triangle emerged. His defence was based on a claim that the murder was not premeditated, although this was hard to believe as Morales had already told Ortega that he would help him and had informed his girlfriend on the day of the murder that he was going to ‘hurt someone’. The prosecution leapt on the fact that Morales had put together the tools he was going to use on the day, the belt, the hammer and the knife. Damningly, it emerged that he had actually practiced for the murder, trying out his strangulation method on two women friends.

  Michael Morales was sentenced to death and the appeal process was launched immediately, one of his lawyers being Kenneth Starr, later known for his tenure as independent counsel while Bill Clinton was president of the United States. His Starr Report into the Monica Lewinsky affair led the way to the attempt to impeach President Clinton. In February 2006, towards the end of the process, the defence team filed papers that claimed that five out of the twelve jurors had doubts about sentencing Michael Morales to death. Prosecutors, however, alleged that these documents were false and the case was damaged when one juror appeared on a radio show expressing surprise that she had been named in this context. Starr and his team withdrew the documents a week later. Eventually one of the defence investigators, Kathleen Culhane, would be sentenced to five years in prison for forging the documents.

  Clemency for Michael Morales was, unsurpris-ingly, denied and the execution date was set for 21 February.

  That night, as Morales prepared to walk to the death chamber and be strapped down on the gurney on which he would die, the court made its decision and the lack of a medical professional willing to carry out the execution meant that the execution could not take place. The state of California had no option but to allow the death warrant to lapse.

  Interestingly, if they ever find a way to make the death penalty work again, the new death warrant may only be issued by the original trial judge. That judge, Charles McGrath, has since announced that he has reservations about the testimony of the police informant Bruce Samuelson in the case. No wonder – the informant testified that Morales confessed to him in Spanish. Although of Hispanic origin, Michael Morales does not speak a word of Spanish. As a result, McGrath has asked California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency to Morales.

  Meanwhile, Michael Morales, now fifty-one years old, claims to have found God in prison and has expressed remorse for his terrible crime.

  Richard Ramirez the ‘Night Stalker’

  The bride was elegant in a white wedding dress with lacey chiffon sleeves. The groom was less elegant, dressed in ill-fitting standard-issue starched prison blues. The ceremony was simple and tasteful (they removed the groom’s restraints) and took place in main visiting room of San Quentin Prison. Present were two attorneys, Ramirez’s brother, sister and seventeen-year-old niece.

  It was 3 October 1996, and forty-one-year-old Doreen Lioy, a freelance editor who worked part-time for teenage magazines and lived on a houseboat, was the bride. The groom was thirty-six-year-old serial killer, Richard Ramirez, known as the ‘Night Stalker’, the murderer of thirteen people, the man who struck terror into the hearts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles between 28 June 1984 and 24 August 1985.

  He had been born Ricardo Leyva in El Paso, Texas in 1960, youngest of a family of five. Outwardly, his family seemed decent and hard-working but behind closed doors, they lived in fear of their father’s terrible temper. When he blew it usually meant a beating for one of them. The young Ricardo would often spend the night in the local cemetery in order to avoid one of those explosions and the inevitable beating that followed. At school, things were not much better and he was set apart by epileptic seizures from which he suffered. He was a loner who found it hard to make friends.

  The person he liked best and looked up to most was his cousin Mike, a Vietnam vet who could talk about what it was like to kill and torture. He had gruesome photographs that were a testimony to his wicked acts during that conflict. He explained to Ricardo as they sat smoking weed and drinking beer that killing made you feel good, it gave you power, made you feel like a god. Ricardo drank it all in, listening wide-eyed to his cousin’s stories.

  Mike also had a bad temper and it got the better of him one day when, tired of his wife’s nagging about getting a job, he pulled a gun and shot her in the face, killing her. Ricardo watched him do it and was sprayed with blood from the dead woman’s wounds. Mike was found to be insane and was consigned to a secure hospital.

  Ramirez was already getting out of control. He dropped out of school at fourteen, smoked too much marijuana and stole to pay for his habit. His diet of junk food rotted his teeth and left him with dreadful halitosis; it would be recalled with horror by many of the women he later attacked and raped. He also had an unhealthy fascination with Satanism, which his father blamed on too much dope. Satanic rock music was his preference as personified by Australian rock band AC/DC’s anthem Night Prowler:

  Was that a noise outside your window?

  What’s that shadow on the blind?

  As you lie there naked like a body in a tomb

  Suspended animation as I slip into your room…

  It was like a blueprint for his future life.

  In 1978, aged eighteen, Ricardo, now calling himself Richard Ramirez, moved to Los Angeles where in his first few years he came into contact with the law a few times, mostly for car theft and drug possession. He began to burgle houses, stealing valuables and sometimes, it is claimed, hanging around a little longer than was necessary, perhaps even photographing their sleeping owners.

  He graduated to murder on 28 June 1984, following a night spent doing cocaine. After removing a screen from a window of an apartment in Glassel Park, he clambered in and found seventy-nine-year-old Jennie Vincow. He slashed her throat so viciously that he almost decapitated her. He then stabbed her repeatedly before rampaging through the apartment searching for valuables. Her son discovered her body the following day and investigators discovered signs of sexual assault. They also found fingerprints on the window screen.

  Eight months later, twenty-two-year-old Angela Barrios arrived home at the condominium she shared with thirty-four-year-old Dayle Okazaki in Rosemead, to the north of Los Angeles. As she got out of her car, she thought she heard a man behind her. She turned to find Ramirez, dressed entirely in black, a baseball cap pulled down low over his face. In his hand was a gun that he fired at her face. She raised her hands in self-defence and remarkably the bullet ricocheted off her key ring. She fell to the ground and pretended to be dead while he went into the condo. As soon as he had gone, she left the garage and went round to the front door, but she encountered her attacker on his way out. As she ducked down behind a car, he again levelled his gun at her. When she begged him not to shoot, he suddenly lowered the weapon and ran away. She ran inside to find her housemate dead on the kitchen floor with her blouse pulled up and a bullet through her forehead. Police found a baseball cap outside with the AC/DC logo on it. He was not finished yet, however. A patrolling police officer came upon a car near Monterey Park in which he found thirty-year-old Tsian-Lian Yu, shot several times. S
he died at the scene.

  He returned to Monterey Park on the night of 26 March, breaking into the home of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara. Sixty-four-year-old Vincent, who owned a pizzeria, was found shot in the left temple on the sofa in his den. Forty-four-year-old Maxine was lying in bed naked. Horrifically, her eyes were gouged out and she was subjected to a frenzied knife attack, although she had also been shot in the head and it is probable that she died instantly before he started stabbing and mutilating her. He had pillaged the house for valuables afterwards.

  Two weeks later, he broke into the house owned by sixty-six-year-old William and sixty-three-year-old Lillian Doi. Mr Doi was shot in the mouth and then savagely beaten. Mrs Doi was warned not to scream, tied and, after he had searched for valuables, raped. Mr Doi, however, was still alive and managed to crawl to a phone and dial 911. He died in hospital, but Lillian Doi lived and was able to provide the first description of the killer.

  On 29 May, eighty-three-year-old Malvia Keller and her invalid eighty-year-old sister, Blancha Wolfe were found in their Monrovia home, both having been beaten viciously with a hammer. An inverted pentagram was found scrawled in lipstick on Ms Keller’s inner thigh and a second pentagram was drawn on the bedroom wall above Ms Wolfe’s bed. They had been there for two days when they were found and only Blancha Wolfe survived.

  Eight people had now been killed and Los Angeles was in a panic. Sales of handguns and alarms went through the roof as Los Angelenos sought to protect themselves against the killer the press were now calling the Night Stalker. The attacks were unprecedented. It seemed that the man just liked breaking in and exercising control. He did not seem to be interested in robbery or murder although valuables were being taken and people were dying. Gender and age seemed to be irrelevant to him; his victims were male and female, old and young. He was described as a thin Hispanic male, with black greasy hair and very bad breath as a result of his seriously decayed teeth. Police stopped anyone who looked remotely like him, but he continued to kill.

  On 30 May, forty-one-year-old Ruth Wilson was awakened by a flashlight being shone in her face in the bedroom of her Burbank home. Holding a gun to her head, Ramirez ordered her to the bedroom of her twelve-year-old son, who he handcuffed and locked in a cupboard. She gave him all the valuables she could find and he took her back to the bedroom where he raped and sodomised her. But he did not kill her and the boy managed to escape from the locked cupboard and call 911. By the time they got there, however, he had fled.

  On 27 June, he raped a six-year-old girl in Arcadia and the following day, in the same area, the body of thirty-two-year-old Patty Higgins was found with her throat brutally cut. The 2 July was the day they found seventy-five-year-old Mary Louise Cannon in Arcadia, beaten and with her throat slit. On 5 July, Whitney Bennett, also of Arcadia, was savagely beaten with a crowbar. She needed four hundred and seventy-eight stitches but survived. Two days later, Joyce Nelson did not. She was beaten to death with a blunt object at home in Monterey Park. The same night he turned up in the house of sixty-three-year-old registered nurse, Sophie Dickman. Pointing a gun at her, he ordered her into the bathroom while he ransacked the house. He tried to rape her, but was unable to maintain an erection. Frustrated and humiliated, he grabbed the valuables he had found, shouting angrily at her as he fled.

  On 20 July, he broke into the home of Lela and Max Kneiding, both aged sixty-six and shot and killed them before butchering their bodies with his new toy, a machete. That same day, he entered the house of thirty-two-year-old Chitat Assawahem whom he shot dead before raping his wife Sakima and forcing her to perform oral sex on him. He then horrifically sodomised their eight-year-old son before leaving with $30,000 of jewellery. On 6 August, he shot a couple, thirty-eight-year-old Christopher and twenty-seven-year-old Virginia Petersen in Northridge. She was hit under the left eye and he was shot in the temple, although, amazingly, the bullet failed to pierce his skull. As Christopher leapt up at Ramirez, he was shot at two more times but both bullets missed The two men wrestled on the floor before Ramirez fled through the sliding doors through which he had initially gained entry. The Petersens both survived.

  Thirty-five-year-old Elyas Abowath was not so lucky. Ramirez shot him in the head while he slept and he then raped and sodomised his thirty-five-year-old wife Sakina before forcing her to perform oral sex on him.

  He was killing increasingly frequently and the violence appeared to be escalating, but as Los Angeles awaited the next horrific attack he headed north to San Francisco where he killed Peter and Barbara Pan in Lake Merced. Sixty-four-year-old Mrs Pan survived but would be an invalid for the remainder of her life. Scrawled on a wall in their house was an inverted pentagram and the words ‘Jack the Knife’. A bullet found at the scene provided a perfect match for one fired by the Night Stalker in Los Angeles. The San Francisco Police Department’s worst nightmare had happened. The Night Stalker had relocated.

  A man who ran a boarding-house in San Francisco came forward to tell police about a young Hispanic man with halitosis and bad body odour who had stayed at his place several times in the past year and a half. In the room he used, a pentagram had been scrawled on the bathroom door. He had vacated the room the day the Pans were attacked.

  Ramirez returned to Los Angeles and attacked a couple in Mission Viejo, fifty miles south of the city, shooting and seriously wounding the man before dragging his fiancé into the next room where he informed her that he was the Night Stalker. He raped her twice but was furious that there was nothing of value in the house. He made her say over and over that she loved Satan and then made her perform oral sex on him before he stepped back, laughed at her and left.

  She crawled to the window and watched as he drove off in an old orange Toyota. Coincidentally, a teenager had earlier become suspicious when he saw the vehicle in the neighbourhood and had scribbled down its licence number. He called the police with it the next morning when he heard about the attack. The car which had been stolen from Chinatown, was found in the Rampart area. Although he never returned to it, there was a fingerprint in it which matched up with one Ricardo ‘Richard’ Leyva Ramirez. Now, at last, they knew who they were looking for.

  They got him seven days later. Looking for another car to steal, he climbed into an unlocked Mustang owned by fifty-six-year-old Faustino Pinon. Unfortunately for Ramirez, he failed to notice that Pinon was actually under the car at the time, working on it. When Ramirez turned the key, Faustino leapt up from beneath the vehicle, reached inside and grabbed him by the throat. Ramirez put his foot down in an attempt to speed away but lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a fence. Pinon dragged him out of the car and threw him to the ground but Ramirez clambered up and took to his heels, trying to steal another car along the road. Angelina Torres, the car’s owner screamed for help and her husband Manuel came out to see what the fuss was. He picked up a metal post and went after Ramirez. By now there was a posse after him and when one said that he looked like the description of the Night Stalker, the cry went up. Eventually, Manuel caught up with him, poleaxing him with the metal post. The Night Stalker had at last been brought to the ground.

  It took four years to finally get Richard Ramirez into court and when he did finall arrive, the gallery was filled by his groupies, a bunch of women who had become ghoulish fans of the Night Stalker. He played to them in the same way that Charles Manson had done decades previously to members of his Family. Ramirez unfailingly dressed in black and sunglasses and occasionally shouted out ‘Hail to Satan!’ during court proceedings. He had tattooed a pentagram on his palm.

  Needless to say, the bad-breathed, malodorous murderer was found guilty of all of the forty-three charges he faced and was given nineteen death sentences.

  Richard Ramirez remains on death row in San Quentin to this day. He is held in the prison’s Adjustment Centre where the so-called ‘worst of the worst’ are kept under heavy guard and always in isolation. His appeals are almost exhausted but he doesn’t care.

&nb
sp; ‘Dying doesn’t scare me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in hell, with Satan’

  Krishna Maharaj

  In 2001, an astonishing array of thirty British politicians, of every political persuasion, wrote a letter to Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. Martin Bell, Sir Menzies Campbell, former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, Ken Livingstone, Charles Kennedy and twenty-four others pointed out to Governor Bush that there were ‘astonishing flaws’ in the murder conviction of Trinidadian born British businessman Krishna Maharaj. They insisted that the governor should call for a retrial. So far, however, it has not been forthcoming.

  It is a strange case.

  At 7 a.m. on Thursday 16 October 1986, security guard Jorge Aparicio arrived at the DuPont Plaza Hotel in downtown Miami. It was still dark outside and inside all seemed quiet.

  On the twelfth floor, a maid was doing her cleaning round, wheeling a trolley from room to room, changing linen, making beds and tidying up. She went into room 1215 and saw nothing untoward. The curtains were pulled shut but the twin beds at the top of the suite’s wooden staircase were undisturbed and had not been slept in. The towels had not been used and the soap remained in its wrapper, unused beside the sink.