ANNA M. GRIFFY – TRUE CRIME WRITER

Night Stalker

By Anna M. Griffy

An El Paso, Texas afternoon is an airless heated inferno in the mind of a young boy. The dust swirls around his shoes as he walks home from school and he looks down at them when suddenly tiny lights and sparks appear before his eyes. He sighs, knowing what will come next: jerking, falling, wetting himself, and biting his tongue. Blackness will consume him completely as he falls, he will not be able to recall later where he was taken or what happened. Future serial killer Richard Leyva Ramirez is about to have an epileptic seizure. It is February 1968; he has just turned 8 years old and feels all alone, even in a crowded room.

As a child, Ricky was small but very bright. This came as a great relief to his mother, Mercedes, who had worked at a Tony Lama boot factory where she mixed chemicals and pigments that dyed the leather for the boots. Between the poor ventilation and smells, she feared her unborn final child would have birth defects and quit in her fifth month. When he was born she was greatly relived that he did not. He had friends, according to the Biography Channel’s documentary “Notorious”. They later were stunned into shock and disbelief that the young man they grew up with could have done the things he was accused of. He had loving parents and was the youngest of six children. Being epileptic made him a little sheltered in his parents’ eyes but they did the best they could and his siblings looked out for him. Traditional Catholic and family proud, Julian Ramirez worked for the railway and in many later interviews has said Ricky was a good child until he came into his early teens. But the neighbors tell a different story. Citing anynonimity, they claim that Julian was abusive and beat not only his wife but his children too, sometimes using a baseball bat. It was around this time Ricky began hiding from Julian in a local cemetery, sometimes sleeping there to escape the anger of his father. It is hard to know who is telling the truth, but soon a huge factor came into Ricky’s life that would change him forever.

About that time he had a cousin named Mike who came home from Vietnam. The experience was all Ricky wanted to hear about. He began to hang around Mike’s shabby apartment every day, and because Mike had a lovely wife named Jessie who had tried to make a home for them, his parents allowed him to spend time there. What they didn’t realize until it was too late was that Mike was showing Ricky more of Vietnam than a young teen needed to see. Mike had been a Green Beret in Vietnam and had taken many Poloroids of the people he had killed in the most violent ways possible. He told Ricky he had raped women and shot children, for fun. As he taught Ricky how to smoke pot, he told him stories more vivid than any movie or book. This was real life, Mike said. And he had the pictures to prove it. Ricky loved it. The pictures fascinated him, and it wasn’t the naked women he dreamed of. It was the killing. The blood in the photos was something he wanted to see in real life and soon that wish would come true.

Mike had come home, as many vets did, to an empty welcome. The psychological effects and the changes in a stateside economy were a great deal to bear, along with a stranger who inhabited his wife’s body. He developed a drug habit in Vietnam and picked it up back home, trying to ease off the pain of the war. Mike showed Ricky how to smoke and to impress him, Ricky started to do it more and more, stealing to finance his low level habit. His parents became worried, seeing the change that Ricky was going through. It was obvious, I’m sure that he was coming home completely stoned out of his mind after sitting around all day smoking joint after joint with his cousin. Unemployed and unmotivated, Mike was suffering post traumatic stress disorder, although they had no one at the time to tell them that. His wife nagged him repeatedly to get a job and change his life, that he was becoming an addict. Argument after argument ensued while Ricky sometimes watched. Finally one day she went to see what they were doing and started another round of complaints while he and Ricky sat there. Wasted, Mike had lost the last part of what he could control. He took out a small revolver he had and shot his wife point blank in the face, murdering her right in front of Ricky. Ricky later told author Phillip Carlo that he felt the blood splatter on his face. She flew back across the room, landing on the bed. Ricky was stunned; he was euphoric. This was the ultimate high.

When Julian took Ricky back to the apartment to get some things since his cousin was now in what Ricky called “a jail” but was more of a mental ward waiting to be sentenced, the bloody bed and the stillness of the room shocked him. “It was death!” He later said in an interview. He quickly went through her purse in the front room while Julian opened the windows to let air in. Ricky probably felt many things at the time, he admits to having known the woman very well. But there was nothing he could do, his escape to cousin Mike’s house was gone and things were about to change again. School had become less and less interesting for him. He was bitterly disappointed when he was kicked off the school football team because of his epileptic seizures. This was more than he could stand, a crushing blow to his young ego. At the age of 13, he went to Los Angeles to spend the summer with his brother Ruben who was reportedly a burglar and a heroin addict. His main goal now was learning how to steal without getting caught so he could get high.

When the summer was over, Ricky went back to El Paso reluctantly. Living in California had been a blast, doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wished. He knew his parents weren’t going to be happy with his pot smoking and stealing. But by that time he had grown to see Julian as something as a tyrant and didn’t want to follow his rules. Julian, for his part was bitterly disappointed in the way Ricky had turned out. He had tried to teach Ricky to be honorable; to educate himself for a better future than Julian had in the railroads, but Ricky seemed to want none of that. After one explosive fight, Ricky finally said no more and went to live with his sister Ruth and her husband Roberto. Unfortunately Roberto was not a good influence on Ricky. He was the neighborhood peeping tom and he and Ricky prowled the streets by night, looking into the master bedrooms of nearby houses to see women undress. If Ruth knew, she did not let on. She has stated Ricky was a raging insomniac who never got more than a few hours of sleep a night during this period and still seemed to have an unending source of energy. There were other drugs by this time, cocaine and the occasional drunk night on rum. Ricky still went to school but didn’t really care what happened there. His grades went downhill and for the first time he began to read about Satanism. It seemed that Jesus; the figure he had been brought up to believe would love and protect you had done nothing of the kind for him. He had a new master and Satan, for what that meant to Ricky, had a new devoted disciple. It should be noted that Ricky never joined the Church Of Satan; he was an individual practitioner.

Ricky had gotten a job in high school at a motel that gave him access to a master key to all the rooms. His burglary skills were in use constantly as he went from room to room, taking what he wanted and making sure the thefts and his shifts did not coincide with his use of the master key. He watched the women coming and going from the motel, his fantasies lingering on the beautiful ones. It has been reported that he snuck into rooms, hid behind heavy drapes and in bathrooms, watching as women undressed and groomed themselves. His fantasies finally spilled over into a dark and violent assault on a hotel guest. Sneaking into the woman’s room with the master key, he surprised her from behind and tied her up. He was raping the woman when her husband came back to the room unexpectedly. Shocked, he grabbed Ricky and began to beat him, punching him in the face repeatedly before calling the police. Ricky was extraordinarily lucky: the man and woman did not want to press charges. That would mean having to come back to El Paso, something they did not want to do. And Ricky lied his way out of the whole thing. He told everyone the woman wanted to have sex with him and they were having consensual sex when the husband burst in. He not only escaped prosecution, his family believed him. Ricky was elated. He knew life was waiting outside El Paso and moved back to Los Angeles. He was 18 years old.

Highway To Hell

California offered many delights for Ricky but none so much as drugs in the beginning. He took LSD and studied Satanism. It has for years been heavily influenced by Anton LeVay, author of The Satanic Bible. Ricky would drop a hit of acid and read, feeling more and more that Satan was his protector. The things he did he would not be caught and punished for. Satan would make sure of that if Ricky’s devotion was complete. Another joint, maybe this one laced with PCP or a few little hits of cocaine and Ricky would go out as the sun went down to look for what he could steal. He had become an accomplished car thief as well, and there were always the prostitutes he could go to when he had the money. There was no way a regular girl could understand the violent sex he craved. Better just to pay a whore. In his eyes, they were all whores anyway. His appearance had changed, as well. He was tall and thin, with very rotted teeth; the result of drinking a six pack or more of Pepsi a day and eating Hershey chocolate bars for dinner. Not many girls would be interested in his lifestyle, or be attracted to his wardrobe of all black t-shirts combined with body odor and unwashed hair. People stared out of complete fear at times, at others, just surreptitious disgusted glances. He just laughed, Ricky thought it was an attraction to his confidence in Satan.

Ricky’s cousin Mike had been released from the institution he was in after killing his wife and Ricky thought about those days a lot. He missed talking about killing people, what it would be like to take someone’s life and watch them bleed as he had seen his cousin’s wife bleed to death. There was no one he could confide in about the fantasies of murdering people, having that absolute control over them in the final moments of their lives. He roamed the streets of Los Angeles when he could not steal a car with a Sony Walkman in his ears, listening to heavy metal music. His favorite band was AC/DC; he was rarely without his tapes ranging from Black Sabbath to Iron Maiden. The song “Night Prowler” was how he saw himself, moving through the darkness while California slept. Getting high and stealing what he needed, he finally made his fantasy a reality. On the night of June 28,1984 after shooting up some cocaine and smoking some pot, he wandered into the small Los Angeles suburb of Glassel Park. Seeing an apartment with a window open, he removed the screen and slipped quietly inside. Sleeping there was 79 year old Jennie Vincow. Ricky went through her things quietly, but the woman had nothing of real value that he could steal. Standing over her bed as she slept, he realized he could fulfill his fantasy: death would be her payment. He stabbed her left breast, then slit her throat, nearly decapitating her. There was so much blood. He ran his hands down the sides of her bed, the blood lubricating the sheets and her skin. At some point, he subjected her to a sexual assault, not thinking about leaving DNA there. Crime scene forensic teams were far away from identification by semen. He laughed softly as he left. The euphoria of killing was like nothing he had ever experienced. He knew it was only a matter of time before he did it again.

And he did. It took ten months but Ricky followed a woman into her garage as she pulled her car in after work. She was surprised to see him there but 22-year-old Maria Hernandez had only moments to think before he raised his pistol to shoot her. Instinctively, she held her hands in front of her face and the bullet deflected her car keys. She dropped to the ground, playing dead as Ricky continued into her condo where her roommate, Dayle Okazaki was cooking a light supper. Maria rolled out from under her car, where she was hiding, and ran across the alley, right as Ricky was coming out of her condo. She begged for her life and for some reason, he spared her. Unfortunately, he did not spare Dayle, who was lying in an ever growing pool of thick blood, so dark it was later described by an officer on the scene as “almost black”. She had been shot in the head and died immediately. But Ricky had left the first of his indelible marks at the crime scene: his baseball cap with the logo of the band AC/DC. Then I believe there was something in Ricky that broke down and left him free to kill unmercifully without thought or expectation of being caught. For the same night, he pulled a woman out of her car after forcing her off the road and murdered her there and then, on the spot. It had begun. The city of Los Angeles was in fear of what the newspapers would soon be calling The Night Stalker.

The killing came easy now. There were more and more. He had it down to a formula: if there was a man in the house, kill him first by shooting him in the head. Then with the wife and sometimes children restrained, he would go through the house for cash or things easily converted to cash, mostly jewelry and rare coins. Then came the fun part. He would beat and sexually assault the women and sometimes children in the house. The angrier he was, the better. The women crying and pleading for their lives were almost erotic for him. Pain was his aphrodisiac, and blood was his orgasm. Some women managed to escape with their lives, but only after being sexually assaulted by Ricky in every way possible: anally, vaginally, orally. He occasionally untied the victim and forced her to cook him a meal or ate food from the kitchen. Los Angeles at night held no terror for him. He was protected completely by Satan, to whom he had pledged his complete allegiance. He could rape a girl and it was in his power to let her live or slit her throat. He was evil incarnate at that moment. Needing of no heavenly God, he could end any life as he wished. Several rapes were reported during this time in different areas of the greater Los Angeles County and several of his victims were raped but not killed. What reason or logic he had while committing the crimes is known only to him. Being under the influence of both cocaine and PCP, one can only speculate. But Ricky ruled the Los Angeles night. Fear gripped the citizens while the police had few clues to go on. There was power in knowing that when the sun went down, people would fear him, his power to end their lives.

Again only a short time later, on the morning of March 27th, 1985, Vincent and Maxine Zazzara were found dead in their home. The brutality shocked the officers on the scene. At that time, they had never seen a murder scene as violent and savage as this. Vincent was in the living room and had been shot in the temple, as had most of the men in the homes Ricky burglarized. It is probable that he died instantly. Ricky asked Maxine where her valuables were. We will never know what her answer was, but at some point he became enraged. When found, her nude body was laid on her bed. Face mutilated with scratches and scrapes, Maxine’s eyes had been crudely gouged out of her head, leaving ragged eye sockets drying with nerves and skin. She had a crudely shaped T through her left breast with the knife sticking out, and 43 stab wounds to her neck, abdomen, pubic area and thighs. An autopsy showed she had been shot in the head with the same caliber weapon and ammunition that killed her husband. Everything Maxine had suffered had been post mortem. There were no screams of pain to excite Ricky as he butchered her lifeless body, feeling her blood. She was already deceased and the excitement was gone. Now there was only vicious rage as he carved her to his liking. The thing the officers feared most was coming true: it was getting worse. Her eyeballs were missing; they speculated the killer might have taken them with him.

Another elderly couple were his next victims. Mr. And Mrs. William Doi were like many others, at home in the middle of the night when Ricky surprised them. After shooting William, proceeded to rob them and rape Mrs. Doi. They were lucky to have survived. A pair of elderly sisters soon after them proved to yield very important evidence in the case. The police had been frustrated by so little evidence but on May 29,1985 in Monrovia, California Ricky chose his next victims: Blanche Wolfe and her sister Malvia Keller were elderly sisters in their 80’s. Ricky selected their house to rob one night and while robbery may have been on his mind, Satan was his calling card at the end of the night. Both women were so savagely beaten with a hammer that the hammer was broken. Ricky took a tube of lipstick and drew an inverted pentagram on Blanche’s thigh. He also used blood to draw a pentagram on the wall of the bedroom, where he had raped Malvia. This was very significant; the police knew they were dealing with a very specialized area of perpetrator. Someone using that symbol was making a statement about Satan, and police knew that would make the next murder worse than this, if that were even possible. And Ricky again, blended away into the muggy Los Angeles night. He was protected. He knew he would never be caught. Victim after victim blended together. More elderly couples sleeping in their beds. Some single women, one of whom actually talked to Ricky for an hour after he raped her and he spared her life. He could not even remember whom he had killed. All he could remember was that when he was killing someone it was the ultimate rush, a high so powerful he wanted the rest of his life to go on like this. The IV drug use made it hard to keep track of everything that had happened. At night, when he went out he knew if the opportunity presented itself, he would kill. But the police had made the public paranoid. The media had jumped on the story calling Ricky “The Night Stalker” and people were fearful of someone breaking in their home as they slept. They were looking for someone, but they didn’t know it was him. He had to get away. And Ricky had a few friends. A road trip was in order. Fresh hunting ground would be just what he needed.

San Francisco was just far enough away to escape all the police crawling over the Night Stalker case. I’m sure he was laughing at that, with no fear, while at the same time watching with great interest. The LAPD had worked tirelessly to try and connect everything and anything they could to the case, for by that time there were 16 victims of murder and rape that they believed he was responsible for. But while all that was happening, Rick was on a bus to San Francisco to hang out at a friend’s house. Little did he know what would be waiting for him on his return to Los Angeles. While in San Francisco, he committed several crimes, including shooting a man by the name of Peter Pan and his wife in the head. He went to Phoenix after San Francisco and while he was on the bus, the LAPD caught a huge break in the case. When they took the fingerprints from the windowsill of the Pan home, the police department had come a long way in computerized fingerprint matching. They put the fingerprints into the database and they connected with Richard Leyva Ramirez, who had been stealing cars and when the prints matched up from the car thefts, they know who they were looking for. Richard was The Night Stalker. Now they just had to find him. The public was unbelievably frightened and the police used that to their advantage. The mug shot that was taken from the car arrest booking was put on the front page of just about every newspaper. Now everyone knew who this person they had been demonizing in their minds was and what he looked like. The Hispanic community in Los Angeles had their own publications in Spanish, The Orange County Register, the Herald Examiner, the Los Angeles Times; practically everyone knew what he looked like.

Ricky got off the bus on August 31,1985 and walked to a nearby convience store to buy his usual breakfast of donuts and a giant Pepsi. Not paying any attention to the people around him, still high off the cocaine he’d taken to Phoenix he reached down to pay for his food when he heard a woman angrily whispering in Spanish to her husband. “I tell you, that’s him! That’s him!” His eyes fell on the newspaper rack beside the cash register and saw his car theft booking shot on the front page of every one. The cashier was holding out his change but Ricky was beyond petrified. He dropped his food and ran out of the store as fast as he could. The couple rushed to the counter and the woman was almost crying. The man yelled, “Call the cops man! What the hell’s wrong with you? That’s the Night Stalker!”
Run, Ricky thought. Run until I find a car to steal. His thoughts were completely incoherent and could not believe he had become practically public enemy #1. Everyone was looking for him, it was only a matter of time before they found him and then he was going to have serious problems. He found he had run into a residential neighborhood, the kind with neatly cut grass and small statues of The Virgin Mary. He smelled barbeque and felt like throwing up. Sweat was pouring down his face; he’d run close to 2 miles in only 12 minutes. He leaned against the side of a building to try and catch his breath but only moments later, he heard a voice screaming, “Call the police!!” He began to run again, but he heard the beginning of a police car siren in the distance. Then another and another, Ricky knew he was trapped. He ran to a nearby home and then through an alley. He could still hear sirens and jumping over the fence of a house, he saw a Ford Mustang parked in the driveway next to it, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition. He jumped in and tried to start it before he realized there was a man underneath it, working on the car’s transmission. Reaching around and grabbing Ricky, he jumped angrily at him, and Ricky was out and running into the street again.

 This time, across the street, 28 year old Angelina De La Torres was getting in her car to go to the mall when Ricky ran up to her and stuck his head in the drivers side window demanding her keys and hissing harshly. She screamed at the top of her lungs and that brought not only her husband but also the man who owned the car he tried to steal.”Te vey a mator!” he screamed at her in Spanish again, meaning,”I’m going to kill you!” While this was happening, two young men from the close-knit neighborhood, Julio and Jaime heard the screaming and their father Jose Burgoin calling them to come quickly and ran over to the driveway of their neighbor. Angelina’s husband had grabbed a piece of metal post and recognizing Ricky as The Night Stalker, took a swung at him as they were running. “El Matador! El Matador!” someone screamed, meaning loosely translated in Spanish, “The Killer”. Ricky knew this was it. Manuel had caught up to him and given him two more fast and smashes to the head and wrist, breaking it. Julio and Jamie had also caught up to Ricky and jumped on him, holding him down while sirens wailed in all directions and helicopters whirred overhead. The whole neighborhood was out in the street by this time and the officer who got there first had to part the crowd to get to him to handcuff him and put him in the backseat. Ricky was crying. For someone who had worshipped Satan, killed men and was being accused of raping an 8-year-old boy, not to mention numerous women, his bravado was gone. Satan, his protector, had turned a blind eye to him. The officer broke protocol after reading Ricky his rights. “You’re The Night Stalker, aren’t you?” he asked. Ricky nodded, snot and tears on his filthy face. “Yeah, man. I’m Richard Ramirez. Shoot me man. Kill me. I don’t deserve to live. Kill me now.” The irony was not lost on the Los Angeles Police Department that the arresting officer was named Officer Andres Ramirez, no relation.

The Trial Circus

Ricky’s family hired a young and hardworking lawyer who was a personal friend of the family back in El Paso to represent him. This was problematic. Competent though he might have been, he was inexperienced in handling a case of this magnitude, not to mention not being licensed to practice law in the state of California. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office assigned Deputy District Attorney P. Phillip Halpin to prosecute the case against Ricky. Judge Elva Soper also assigned a public defender to Ricky’s case, Allen Adashek, so Ricky could not claim he had no representation. Very experienced and very tenacious, Halpin fully expected to lay charges against Ricky by the end of that week that would make him a candidate for the death penalty. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. Ricky rejected the lawyer his family sent, rejected an assortment of public defenders and could not decide which he found to be competent to defend him. It would be 6 months before charges were formally laid against Ricky because of the fiasco concerning every legal counsel that was brought before him. His family argued that Ricky was being “brainwashed” by Adashek and not being able to make his own decisions about what he wanted to do. The family brought in another pair of private practice criminal defense lawyers. Hearing after hearing ensued, but most notably, was the hearing where Ricky had drawn a pentagram on his palm and when a reporter took his picture, he held his hand out, palm upside and showed the Satanic symbol. More hearings, and more antics ensued but finally after jury selection, three and a half years after Ricky had been caught on August 31,1985 Ricky’s trial was about to begin.

Ricky was being charged with 14 counts of first degree murder, and 30 assorted charges including rape, robbery, sodomy, burglary, oral copulation and attempted murder. Because he had been high during most of his activities, he could not or possibly just would not give details on some crimes. Others though, he was more than happy to expound upon. When he requested photos of the bloody crimes scenes from his first lawyer, and received them, he put them up on his cell walls, claiming that the other prisoners needed to know he was a bad ass and that once they saw them, they went away scared. Of course, as soon as the officials found out about this, they were removed from his possession, with him screaming loudly that his rights were being violated. Today, it would be virtually unheard of for an inmate to be in possession of something like that, but at the time his argument seemed ridiculously simple and valid. It was defense material, and he had a right to it. And they served their purpose: they scared the living hell out of hardened criminals twice his age and inside longer than he had been a criminal himself. I believe Ricky knew that he could have never beaten this stunning array of charges, he had asked for famed legal counsel Melvin Belli to take his case, Belli denied him but only from the perspective that the case was far too inundated with prosecutorial misconduct and the state’s medical/psychological bills for Ricky would amass to over $300,000 alone. And that was in 1985. I can’t imagine the cost of such testing for him now.

The court approved the two inept lawyers since that was what Ricky seemed to want, and the trial got underway. Ricky sat behind a pair of aviator sunglasses that he refused to remove, even when asked to do so by the court. He knew what was going to happen, and I believe that he felt the trial was both a waste of time and a way for the public to continue to demonize him. It was being reported that he was responsible for many things he did not do and his Satanic persona was taking a larger than life presence in the media. If that was what the media wanted, so they would receive. He would yell, “Hail Satan!” or glare at the bailiff. He did not participate much, while Halpin produced a mass of 521 exhibits and 137 witnesses all-testifying against Ricky, showing he had committed the crimes he was being charged with. The crime scene photos were in a book in front of Ricky and as he looked through them, I’m convinced this had less to do with indifference and more to do with his actual memories of having committed the actual crimes themselves. And in any case, they most certainly had a negative effect on the jury, who when the case was rested by the state were flabbergasted by Ricky’s defense. The two attorneys defending him simply stated the witnesses were mistaken and it was not their client. He had been in El Paso visiting his father, Julian when one rape had been committed, and produced his father to testify. The physical evidence was not exact. These were four-year-old samples that had thousands of people tramping on them, touching them. They simply were not pristine enough to be connected to their client without a reasonable doubt. DNA profiling was years away from semen sampling and there really was no way to have that happen in the time of the trial. It was all academic to Ricky. He would glance back occasionally and wave at the considerable following of young women following his trial.

On July 26,1989, the jury was instructed to begin deliberations. They had over 8000 pages of trial transcripts and 655 exhibits to consider. The bulk of documents concerned the murder cases, which were special circumstance: meaning Ricky was eligible for the death penalty for each one. There were 14, the one in Orange County had been dropped to try and speed up the process of the trial in Los Angeles. They began but within one week a juror was removed for his continued napping during deliberations. It is little wonder that the accused finds it hard to have faith in a jury when they find out information such as this, when they are facing the death penalty. But there was more, on August 14 a juror named Phyllis Singletary was found shot to death in her apartment. The papers soon reported that her boyfriend, who had soon after killed himself with the same gun in a hotel, had killed her. His suicide note stated that he had argued with her over the trial. The judge called the jury together and told them they must continue and brought in another alternate, whom I’m sure was petrified. Ricky screamed in court that it was, “all fucked up” and his legal team fought hard for a mistrial, which frankly, he should have had. That jury was inexplicably tainted. The shooting had to have a psychological effect on the jurors making it impossible to fairly deliberate his guilt or innocence. But they went on, and on September 20, they announced they had reached a unanimous decision. On each of the 43 counts brought before them they voted guilty, 19 being mitigated special circumstances, making him eligible for the death penalty. Ricky was not in court when the decision was announced. He had chosen not to attend court hearings after the murder of Ms. Singletary. He was sentenced to death, and is in prison in California where death row inmates have been commuted to life sentences.

When we think about serial killers of course Ed Gein and Arthur Shawcross come to mind, they were the originators. But Ricky was the innovator in the sense that he courted the media like a rock star, notorious for the fame and thirsty for the blood he spilled. The sunglasses, the heavy metal, the interviews. Even today, he is infamous for his drawing of a pentagram in his palm and flashing it in an open courtroom. Today such behavior would be unheard of and highly ill advised by any criminal defense attorney. But even if he had been advised against such behavior, I suspect he would have done what he wanted to anyway. The law simply did not apply to him and his code of ethic was, as he said in his statement to the court before he was sentenced over a loudspeaker from his cell, ”beyond good and evil.” There was no remorse and no apology for the victims’ families. He simply stated that there had been lies in the past and there would be lies in the future. We-the people-were incapable of understanding him, he said.” I am beyond your experience.” For many, Richard Ramirez is the original natural born killer.

The Hand Of Death Cult : Fact or Fiction

by Anna M. Griffy

Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were by many accounts the most prolific serial killers in history. They were notorious for the many women they raped and killed and allegedly engaged in a homosexual relationship themselves. But from their humble beginnings, a merging of two minds became a cross-country killing spree that may have been touched by the hand of Satan, and a cult called The Hand Of Death. While there have been many rumors and some killers have suggested to be part of the cult, Lucas and Toole were the most vocal about their participation in the training, crimes and activities.

Lucas was born in Blacksburg, Virginia on August 23, 1936. From all accounts his early years were spent in a miserable, filth-strewn two-room cabin. His parents brewed liquor and his mother, Viola was the local prostitute. Henry later claimed that while she turned the tricks of her trade, she would force him to watch. This, coupled with her grim amusement in dressing Henry in girls dresses, styling his hair in curly ringlets and laughingly parading him about, left a psychological imprint that would result in her bloodshed years later. Henry’s father, Anderson, had suffered a railroad accident, which had taken both his legs. His days were limited to dragging himself around the house, drinking himself into a stupor and avoiding the wrath of Viola as much as possible. Although Henry had 9 siblings, most of them were sent into foster care. Being one of the two children considered lucky enough to remain at home, he suffered abuse, mostly at the hands of Viola. Anderson died from a case of pneumonia after refusing to watch Viola’s sex show, he crawled out into the frigid Virginia night and the hypothermic snow proved to be too much for his drunken state. Henry was with Viola and her lovers. It was up to him to survive, and in a fashion, he did. He was bashed in the head with a plank of wood and was unconscious for several days. He had to be given a glass eye, courtesy of another of Viola’s fits of temper.

But the thing that made the biggest imprint on Henry’s young mind at this time was that he learned about sex. First from Viola, who occasionally beat him if he wouldn’t watch her service the local men who came by to purchase her homemade liquor, then from her live-in lover who moved in after Anderson died. “Uncle Bernie” showed him that animals could be used for sex, torturing and killing them after using them sexually. Having watched his mother for so long, at age 15 Henry finally decided to try and have sex with a girl for the first time. Being inexperienced and far from attractive, Henry picked up a local girl and made advances. When she rebuffed him, Henry strangled her and buried her corpse-after he had made use of her sexually, beginning a practice that would last for many years. A dead woman can’t say no, and Henry realized that becoming a killer was probably the easiest thing he’d ever done. If all he had to do was kill to get his way, then life was going to be easier and a lot more fun than he thought.

Henry knew that a life of crime would be the easiest way to earn a living and he became involved with a number of small-time crooks and petty thieves. He was arrested and spent time in prison for robbing a bank with several others and while he managed to escape twice, he spent about 6 years in prison. When he was released in September of 1959, he went to stay with his half-sister in Tecumseh, Michigan. This would wind up being the scene of his final confrontation with his mother. Viola showed up there, looking for Henry and at age 74, she was hardly in the position to fight him. Still, while drinking and bickering with Henry about returning to the family home in Blacksburg, they became violent. She swore at him that he had a duty to care for her in her old age, and struck at him with a broom. He responded by grabbing a knife and stabbing her to death, then raping her corpse. When he was later confessing to many of his crimes while incarcerated, he said he never raped her that he’d made the whole thing up. But he’d already shown a predilection for necrophilia that makes it hard to know what the truth was. He was convicted in 1960 and given a sentence of 20 to 40 years. He was to spend part of his sentence in a hospital for the criminally insane, and was released in 1970.Heading back to Michigan to stay with family seemed like the best idea to him, and he took a job, briefly marrying the widow of a cousin of his. But traditional home and family was something Henry had never known, and this wasn’t going to work out. He had been accused of molesting not only two teenage girls, but also the two daughters from his wife’s former marriage and she divorced him in the summer of 1977.

Murderous Minds Meet
About this time, in late 1976 Henry met Ottis Toole, a drifter and criminal not unlike himself. Being that he was divorcing his cousin’s widow named Betty, he needed a friend and Ottis turned out to be just that, and much more. Women of course would always be their preference but there has long been speculation that the two were occasional homosexual lovers. Henry boasted to his new friend that he’d slashed a killing field as far as Maryland and beyond. Ottis had many a tale of his own: blazing an arson and murder trail across the country. They smiled at each other, I’m sure and at that moment the blood of hundreds of innocents were destined to be spilled. Some strangers, some prostitutes, some kind souls wanting to help the two drifters, and some relatives, such as Ottis’s own sister, Becky.

Ottis Toole had a childhood full of as much dysfunction as Henry. Born in Florida in 1947, his father saw no reason to stay with the family and leaving his son the legacy of alcoholism, went off for good. But Ottis had the opposite of Henry’s mother: instead of promiscuity, his mother was violently religious and took her beliefs out on everyone in the home. He had a sister who in an interesting parallel to Henry, liked to dress him up in little girl’s clothing and parade him around. His Grandmother however, was reputed to be a Satanist and had decided Ottis was the devil’s child. He later claimed it was because he was an Epileptic and the seizures made him appear possessed. Later both he and Henry talked about being possessed, but at the time Ottis was just a child and an Epileptic. Ottis claimed she took him out on runs to cemeteries for body parts for rituals. He also claimed to be an arsonist as a child, torching empty houses just because he “Didn’t like the look of them.” As he got older, he dropped out of school. It was too difficult with his low IQ and he was too interested in drinking and committing small time crimes. He was arrested for lewd behavior and theft before he started killing. He was suspected in the death of a 24-year-old woman who was shot in the head, and later confessed to it being his first kill. He was accused of 3 other slayings over the next two years before he found himself in a Jacksonville soup kitchen looking for something to eat-and finding Henry Lee Lucas. Ottis took Henry home to stay with his family. Novella Toole, the woman who claimed to be his wife later elaborated that Ottis could not perform sexually with a woman unless there was a man involved as well. Henry was his ideal companion: a partner in crime, in bed and willing to look for the next thrill. By 1978, the two had separated and Novella threw both Henry and Ottis out. It was time for them to enjoy themselves.

When they found themselves without a home, Ottis told Henry he’d done more killing than he told him about. He’d been made a member of the Satanic cult the Hand of Death and wanted Henry to join, too. This wasn’t the first time that Henry would have killed, raped or even possibly cannibalized another human. But this was very detailed and had repercussions that would lead to your death without exception. Lucas later confessed that he wanted to join and told Ottis. He understood he would be killed if he did anything to betray the cult and that the only way out was death. His parents hadn’t taught him about religion, so there was nothing in Henry’s way of   becoming a Satanist. Worshipping the Devil really meant nothing to him. When confessing all this to police years later, many people didn’t believe Henry’s claims. But in other cases, there was evidence and the police were convinced enough to organize a task force.

Ottis told Henry that the Satanic rituals would keep them safe and from being caught. There was a power there they would be protected by, as long as they obeyed the cult. Henry and Ottis went to Florida to have Henry see the training camp that was set up in the Everglades. There, in an isolated spot, they met a man named Don that Ottis seemed to know well. It was becoming clear to Henry that Ottis had already proved himself to the cult many times over and now he must do the same if he wanted to join. They went to a tent where a young man was drinking and smoking. Don looked at Henry and told him, “Kill him. And make it clean. Only then will you be one of us.” The man was a student, had betrayed his oath to the cult and must be killed, Don explained. Ottis had a bottle of whisky and was ready to go. They walked down to the water with the young man, who was still drinking and talking. Henry waited until he stood at the edge of the water and was tipping his head back for a drink, when he grabbed him from behind and slit his throat so deeply that the whisky poured out, mingled with blood, flowing down his hands.
Don smiled at such a clean kill. The body, according to Henry, was used in a cult ritual where the body was mutilitated, the heart cut out and some of the flesh eaten.

After that, Henry was a member and in training, according to him, all new members had a sponsor. The camp had both men and women and had both day and night activities: days were for training in all forms of crime: Murder, kidnapping, rape, drug selling and the making of pornographic movies and photos. At night, there were liquor and drugs for everyone and Henry claimed sex was plentiful. There were evening sacrifices, transient people or sometimes people who had in some way or another betrayed the cult and was considered a liability. It was as if there were no shortage of bodies to kill, and Henry was quite willing to kill as many as he possibly could. Engaging in the training activities with his partner assigned by the cult, Henry was trained for 7 weeks in almost every form of criminal activity imaginable. Shortly after his training was completed, he was assigned to the kidnapping division of the organization. Ottis was there to work with him and they were told they could make a lot of money by kidnapping. There would be no killing and it would be much easier. In 1978 the chances of being caught were much slimmer, the Amber Alert not having been instituted yet. Henry and Ottis took their first job by kidnapping 3 babies and running them across the border of Mexico to a ranch in Chihuahua. Henry claimed he and Ottis also kidnapped several teenage girls that were used in pornographic snuff films. Knowing they would die at the end wasn’t troubling for him. By that time, he’d killed so many people; he said it just didn’t matter anymore. But the stakes were higher in the killing game than in the kidnapping operations and after nearly a year, Henry asked to be transferred there. In a year, he claimed to have carried out 6 high profile executions. Most of these were in Texas and Mexico, with one in Canada. He told the police at the time of his incarceration that he was offered the job of delivering the cyanide to Jim Jones in Guyana and assassinating then President Jimmy Carter. How much all of this is fact and not a figment of Henry’s imagination, one is left to speculate. But what happened next is fact, and not open to interpretation.

Henry and Ottis had traveled extensively, killing and raping at their discretion. But Ottis had a young niece named Becky that Henry had his eye on for a long time. He’d met her when she was 10, when he and Ottis had first started crashing around. But now she was in a youth center, her parents having passed away and being made a ward of the state. Henry went to get her and soon they were on the road together. Becky was young and loved Henry. She had very little experience in the way of men or homicidal cannibals, so there was a shock waiting for her. They obtained work for a couple doing odd jobs, finishing furniture and cleaning for room and board. The couple had the idea to have Henry and Becky move in with their mother, Kate Rich, who at 80 years old needed help By the next week, Kate’s family threw them out and Henry and Becky were hitchhiking down the country road in Texas to find a place to stay. Becky was crying, and telling Henry she wanted to go back to Florida. He didn’t want to hear it. She slapped him across the face and that was a first for him, never being disrespected by a woman. He grabbed a knife and plunged it into her chest, stabbing over and over. There was no one to hear her screams in the cold back woods. There was no one to see him rape her ripped and bloody corpse, cut it into pieces and scatter it across the field they were nearby.

Becky was soon missed: by Kate Rich, by a local young minister who had tried to help her. Henry told Kate they could go look for her and they set off on a drive to do just that. While Kate peppered Henry with questions, he heard little of it. He had a 6 pack of beer and finally, when he’d had enough, he pulled over and did to Kate what he’d done to Becky: ferociously stabbing her as she fell out of the car and then raping her dead body until he was exhausted. None of this meant anything to him. He thought about the cult and Ottis. There is no doubt that he had killed 2 women in a few days time and there were going to be people looking for them. Shortly afterward, Kate Rich’s farmhouse burned down and was quickly dubbed the work of an arsonist. Ottis? He has never confessed but surely his predilection for setting fires that started in his younger days comes to mind. And the fact that Henry had burned Kate’s corpse in her wood-burning stove makes further speculation that the old friends were back in business together. But if they were, it would be a short-lived reunion, indeed.
The police in Stonesburg, Texas were looking and waiting for Henry. That was the closest place anyone had seen Becky alive. Henry at first acted as though he didn’t kill Becky and that he wanted to clear his name. Unfortunately, he had a handgun on him, and was picked up for being an ex-con possessing a firearm and taken to jail. Henry was charged with the murders of Kate Rich and Becky Powell. There was a lot of evidence against him, and he had practically led them to the site of the remains. But still, he told an officer guarding him late one night, “I done some real bad things.” There had to have been visions of blood and bones draining from the bottom of Henry’s cell that night, and in the morning, he was brought before a judge, a roomful of cops and reporters and confessed to killing both Kate and Becky. He told them where the remains were-what little there was left. He admitted to having sex with both dead bodies and while they all stared stunned, he said he’d killed hundreds more. At least, he smiled grimly, at least hundreds more. “Will I be able to go on helping y’all find dead bodies?” he asked. It has been rumored that several reporters had to leave the courtroom, on the verge of becoming physically ill.

Soon, Texas jurisdictions were leapfrogging over each other to clear cold cases that they hadn’t been able to solve for years, all pinning them on Henry. And Henry was as good as his word, going where they wanted him to and pointing out where remains would be and where they would found. He had killed many. It’s hard to say how many because of his penchant for exaggeration. He told the police about The Hand Of Death. His confessions were believed by so many people, even though forensic evidence didn’t always match up that there were two books written on the subject: “The Confessions Of Henry Lee Lucas” by Mike Cox and “Hands Of Death” by Max Call. Over the next 18 months, Henry talked about the cult, probably knowing he would never see the outside of a prison cell, and fearing no retribution, confessed to first 75, then escalating to 150, and finally a whopping 300 body count. By this time, Ottis was in prison for arson and was implicated in many of these murders, being that he was the one who had introduced Henry to the cult. Toole corroborated many of Henry’s tales and told of his taste for human flesh, usually with barbeque sauce.

Ottis and Henry had one last phone call that is telling in nature:
Henry: “I don’t want you to think I’m doing this as a revenge.”
Ottis: “No, I don’t want you to hold anything back about me.”
Henry: “See we got so many of them, Ottis. We got to turn up the bodies. Now this boy and girl I don’t know anything about.”
Ottis: “Well maybe that’s the two I killed my own self. Just like that Mexican that wasn’t gonna let me out of the house. I took an ax and chopped him all up. What made me? I been meaning to ask you? Why’d I do it?
Henry: “ I think it was just the hands doing it. I know a lot of the things we have done in human sight are impossible to believe.”

 There were journalists who tried to discredit Henry and Ottis, but according to Texas law enforcement, it was all about money. Henry was leading them to the sites where there was physical evidence. That was irrefutable. Could he have been hired to assassinate Jimmy Carter? Could he have been a contract killer to fly cyanide to Jim Jones at the   People’s Temple of Guyana? Very doubtful. But he was a murderer, a cold-blooded killer, and with Ottis Toole, they soaked the raw Texas farmland with enough blood to satisfy the thirst of a cult called The Hand Of The Death.