28. The Macabre Mentorship of a War Criminal
Twelve-year-old, Richard Ramirez, bonded with his older cousin, Mike, over marijuana and beer. The former Green Beret and war criminal not only regaled his younger relatives with gruesome war stories of mayhem, murder, and mutilation but also gave him tips and lessons on how to kill with stealth. He told Richard: “Having power over life and death was a high, an incredible rush. It was Godlike. You controlled who’d live and who died.” The macabre mentorship was interrupted in 1973, when Mike got into an argument with his wife and fatally shot her in the face in front of the then thirteen-year-old Richard.
Mike Ramirez was tried for the murder of his wife, but he got away with it because he was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, caused in large part by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from his Vietnam War years. He spent four years in the Texas State Mental Hospital and was released in 1977. He promptly resumed his mentorship of Richard, who by then had fallen under the influence of yet another horrible older relative – this one a peeping Tom.