25. Graduation to Full Blown Serial Killer
Richard Ramirez moved to California in his early twenties, and eventually ended up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. There, on April 10, 1984, he committed the first – or at least the first known – murder in what would become a long list of victims. His victim was a nine-year-old girl, Mei Leung, whom he lured to the basement of the building in which he lived. There, he beat, strangled, assaulted, and stabbed her to death, then hung her corpse from a pipe. The crime differed from what became known as Ramirez’s standard operating procedure and was not attributed to him until 2009.
In June 1984, two months after he killed Leung, Ramirez began to commit a long list of gruesome murders that made him famous – or infamous – as the Night Stalker. In a series of macabre nighttime home invasions that lasted through August 1985, he terrorized first the Greater Los Angeles area, and then the San Francisco Bay area. He assaulted, mutilated, and killed with a variety of weapons that included not only firearms and knives, but also machetes, hammers, and tire irons.