EAST L.A. KICKS THE NIGHT STALKER'S BUTT

8/31/1985 - Tired of the terror the region has been living with for over a year as a monster repeatedly climbs through the open windows he finds at night to indulge in rape, murder, and plunder, a group of East L.A. citizens chases down and then subdues until local law enforcement authorities arrive (in a severe shit kicking that includes one vigilante marrying a metal bar to the killer's head), Richard Ramirez, the serial killer the newspapers have dubbed, The Night Stalker (a name taken from the Darren McGavin TV series of the same name).

Ramirez

Born Ricardo Leyva Munoz Ramirez in El Paso, Texas in 1960, the youngest of five children born to Mercedes and Julian Ramirez (a Mexican National and former Juarez cop, at the time of his killer son's birth, he is working as a laborer on the Santa Fe railroad) is very early in life turned into a monster by the family that bore him ... prone to fits of violence when angered, his father beats Ramirez over and over as the youth is growing up (to the point that to avoid his dad, Ramirez starts sleeping in a local cemetery), he suffers major head injuries when at two years old a dresser falls on him (it will take 30 stitches to close the wound in his head) and at five he is knocked unconscious by a swing at a nearby park (causing him to suffer from epileptic fits until his teens), begins smoking marijuana at the age of 10, he comes under the influence of an older cousin at 12 and is taught stealth killing by the highly decorated Green Beret Vietnam veteran (who also shows the youth Polaroids of people he's killed, including a Vietnam woman the soldier raped), and shown murder in the now when the same cousin gets into a domestic fight with his wife and shoots her in the face with a .38 revolver in front of Ramirez (found not guilty by insanity with his combat record taken into account, the cousin will be released to freedom after spending four years in the Texas State Mental Hospital), moving in with his older sister and her husband, he begins going on nocturnal window adventures with his "Peeping Tom" brother-in-law, and discovers LSD and Satanism before he turns 20 years old.

Monster Clay - #1

Monster Clay - #2

Foulball Cousin - Mike Ramirez

When his hormones kick in during his teenage years, blending his sexual desires with fantasies of violence, forced bondage, and rape, Ramirez begins his criminal journey to a future death behind bars. Still in school (he will drop out of El Paso's Jefferson High School  
in the 9th grade), he uses his job at a local Holiday Inn to break into rooms with passkey and rob sleeping patrons ... profitable fun until he decides to rape a sleeping woman and is beaten senseless when the woman's husband unexpectedly returns to the room (fired, but not in jail yet, the put upon couple are from another state and don't press charges to avoid having to return to Texas to testify at a trial). Texas very lucky in just being the spawning ground of the blossoming maniac, at the age of 22 he moves to California and begins murdering many of the unfortunates that cross his path. 9-year-old Mei Leung of San Francisco is the first to go in April of 1984 ... a victim that Ramirez beats, rapes, stabs to death, and then hangs from a pipe in a hotel basement (not available at the time, the crime is solved in 2009 when Ramirez DNA is matched to the crime scene). And as these things go, a taste developed requires feeding ... and there will be more victims. 

Leung

She will not be the last innocent Ramirez butchers!

Ramirez Crime Scene

Over the course of the next year, along with almost daily breaking numerous drug statutes, Ramirez burglarizes assorted California homes, mixing his home invasions with assault, rape, and murder.
79-year-old Jennie Vincow is murdered in her Glassell Park apartment, stabbed in sleep so violently that her head is almost decapitated.  At a home in Rosemead he shoots 22-year-old Maria Hernandez in the face (she survives when the bullet hits the car keys in her hand that she raises in front of her face) and kills her roommate, 34-year-old Dayle Okazaki, shooting the woman in the forehead.  An hour later, he pulls 30-year-old Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu out of a car in Monterey Park and kills her with two bullets fired at point-blank range.  Burglarizing a home in Whittier at 2:00 in the morning, Ramirez kills 64-year-old Vincent Zazzara with a bullet to the sleeping man's head, then upset that 44-year-old Maxine Zazzara has escaped her bonds and is trying to load a shotgun hidden under the couple's bed, shoots the woman three times, stabs her multiple times with a large carving knife from the kitchen, gouges her eyes out, and places them in a jewelry box. Returning to Monterey Park in May of 1985, Ramirez murders 66-year-old Bill Doi and then rapes his disabled 56-year-old wife, Lillian.  Two weeks later, the community of Monrovia experiences a visit from the maniac ... a home invasion that sees 83-year-old Mabel "Ma" Bell and her sister, 81-year-old Florence "Nettie" Lang, bludgeoned with a hammer, bound with electric cord (Bell receives electric shock torture before being tied up), and the raping of Lang (done, Ramirez will use some of Bell's lipstick to draw a Satanic pentagram on Lang's thigh) ... discovered two days after the assault, Bell will die from her injuries.

Another Crime Scene

Looking for more mayhem, the next day Ramirez enters a home in Burbank where he repeatedly sodomizes 42-year-old Carol Kyle, while her 11-year-old son is locked in a closet.  In July, he bludgeons and stabs to death a widowed 75-year-old Arcadia grandmother named Mary Louise Cannon.  Sleeping in her room in Sierra Madre, 16-year-old Whitney Bennett becomes Ramirez's next victim ... hit over the head with a tire iron (it will take 478 stitches to close the wounds to her head), when he can't find an adequate knife in the kitchen, the monster starts strangling her with a telephone cord, but when sparks fly out of the cord, flees the house believing Jesus Christ has intervened.  Bennett survives, not so however for 61-year-old Joyce Lucille Nelson of Monterey Park ... she is punched and kicked to death on her own living room couch.  New toy purchased, when 66-year-old Lela Kneiding and her 68-year-old husband Maxon are murdered in Glendale, they are both shot in the head ... before and after being hacked to pieces with Ramirez's present to himself ... a razor sharp machete.  The Khovananth Family of Sun Valley experiences an attack that sees the husband murdered by a bullet to the head, the wife sodomized, and their 8-year-old son bound and gagged.  Off to Northridge, Chris and Virginia Peterson are shot in the face and head, but survive when Chris struggles with the madman and forces Ramirez to flee the home.  In Diamond Bar, Ramirez murders 31-year-old Elyas Abowath (a bullet to the head again), then handcuffs, beats, and rapes 27-year-old Sakina Abowath, with her bound and gagged 3-year-old son is in the same room.

Another Crime Scene - Note Blood Pentagram

Deciding his activities deserve a road trip, in August of 1985, Ramirez drives north to his old stomping grounds in San Francisco, and there, murders a couple in their 60s, Peter and Barbara Pan ... Peter dies of a gunshot wound to his temple, while Barbra is beaten, raped, then shot in the head.  Murders completed, Ramirez then brings his rampage back to Southern California, entering the Mission Viejo house of 30-year-old Bill Carns.  Shooting Carns in the head three times, Ramirez then forces Carns' fiance, 29-year-old Inez Erickson, to swear she loves Satan before he binds her with neckties from the closet, beats her, then sodomizes the woman before he flees into the night.  Both Carns and Erickson survive their ordeal at Ramirez's hands ... and the crime proves to be the beginning of the end for the Night Stalker.

'76 Orange Toyota

Unbeknownst to Ramirez, 13-year-old Mission Viejo neighbor, James Romero III, has noticed a "weird looking guy in black" in the area and written down the license plate number of the vehicle the man drives off in.  Located later in Wilshire, despite the killer's attempts to wipe the stolen car clean, police obtain a single fingerprint on the rear view mirror that proves a match to Ramirez. The beast responsible for a year of crimes identified, the police make the decision to go to the media and give them everything they have on Ramirez ... including his picture, which is published in all the local major newspapers, and shown repeatedly on TV ... "We know who you are, and soon everyone else will.  There will be no place you can hide!"  Indeed!

Romero And Reward Yamaha ATV

Unaware that his face has been plastered all over Southern California, on 8/31/1985, Ramirez returns to Los Angles from a bus trip to visit his brother in Tucson, Arizona.  Walking from the bus station (police are there monitoring the buses leaving L.A., thinking Ramirez will flee the attention publishing his picture has brought about), at a nearby convenience store in East L.A., Ramirez becomes aware of a group of women looking at him and calling him "killer," sees his picture on the front page of the L.A. Times, and in a panic, runs across the Santa Ana Freeway, seeking a vehicle that can get him out of the area.  Attempting a car jacking (he punches Angelina De La Torre in the stomach when she refuses to give up her vehicle), Ramirez is thwarted by a group of local bystanders who pursue the killer through backyards and over fences, while two more tries to steal a car are made.  Finally grabbed by local residents, the Night Stalker's reign of terror comes to an end compliments of subduing fists and feet (along with an iron bar which raises several nice knots on the head of the murderer) that control the monster until police arrive on the scene and haul Ramirez away.

Store Owner Armando Lojero and the
Ramirez Newspaper

L.A. Officer & Manual and Angelina De La Torre

Hollenbeck Police Station - Crowds Attempt To See The Killer

The Heroes Who Take Down Ramirez - L to R - Deputy Andy Ramirez, Carmelo Robles, Manual De La Torre, Jose Burgoin, Frank Moreno, and Faustino Pinon

Nuts with a capital "N," Ramirez finally comes to trial in 1988 and immediately shows himself to be mentally defective by drawing a pentagram on his palm and yelling "Hail Satan!" ... good stuff for NOT getting the jury on his side. Week after week after week of wasting the tax payers' money, Ramirez is fnally found guilty of 13 counts of murder, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries on September 20, 1989 (on 11/7/1989 he will be sentenced to die in California's gas chamber) ... the most expensive trial in California history ($1.8 million) until O.J. Simpson decides to slaughter his wife.  After his death sentences are announced, Ramirez states, "Big deal.  Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."

Scum!

But death isn't the territory Ramirez walks for awhile.  Appeal follows appeal and years slide away during which the monster actually finds an idiot willing to be his wife, freelance magazine writer Doreen Lioy.  State unwilling to getting around to doing the obvious, God steps in eventually and after 23 years on Death Row, Ramirez dies at the age of 53 on June 7, 2013 from a bad case of B-cell lymphoma.

Now Rotting In Hell

And on a personal note ... not that long ago actually, I remember what it was like to be in Southern California during this monster's rampage ... every door and window on Brimhall Drive was shut and locked, and in the sweltering heat of that summer, the A/C and fans ran 24/7 (not to mention the hand gun my father kept at the ready on his night stand should Ramirez stop in to say hello) ... and we all breathed a sense of relief when we watched the news and saw a group of L.A. citizens had actually caught the manic!

The Night Stalker

The Night Stalker is stopped thanks to the efforts of savvy 13-year-old and a group of alert East L.A. citizens ... 8/31/1985!

  
   

FIRST CARNAGE ON GUADALCANAL

The Battle of Tenaru River by Tom Lovell

Exactly two weeks after landing, the Marines on Guadalcanal face their first challenge from the Japanese for possession of Henderson Field when Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki, believing promotion and glory will be his with an easy victory, leads his 1,000 man force (the 28th Infantry Regiment that was to have occupied Midway Island) in an night assault, without orders from above (more of the detachment is on its way, but Ichiki attacks anyway), on the American defensive positions near Alligator Creek (the Marine name for the Ilu River and its residents, and a misnomer ... there are no alligators present on the island, only crocodiles!) and the Tenaru River.

  Ichiki

Aware of activity in the jungles to their front along a tidal lagoon where ocean, land, and waterway meet, the 1st and 2nd battalions of Colonel Clifton B. Cates' (who will rise to command of the whole Corps in 1948) 1st Marine Regiment await attack from a defensive line made up of machine gun nests, rifle pits, 37mm anti-tank guns armed with canister shot, and the fire from pre-registered 75mm and 105mm artillery ... and a thin line of barbed wire.  Shortly after midnight the Japanese begin testing the strength of the Marine line.

 Cates

A nightmarish affair, the struggle to break through to Henderson Field becomes a series of clashes over the next sixteen hours in which the pitch dark night and jungle quiet explodes ... and the night is rent with the screams and moans of the dying and the wounded.  Taking place at around 1:30 in the morning, the first Japanese charge consists of 100 men running as fast as they can across the sandbar while screaming "Death to Babe Ruth" and other pithy sayings, and firing their weapons at anything moving to their front.  Repulsed after one hour of fighting that in spots becomes hand-to-hand, assault number two that gets underway with about 200 Imperial troops at 2:30, ends as the first did ... with more Japanese bodies littering the beach. Trying something a little different after two failures, for try number three to break the Marine line, Ichiki sends troops wading into the ocean surf to flank Cates' position ... an effort that is once more greeted and then blunted by artillery rounds, machine gun fire, rifle and pistol slugs, and Marine fists ... resulting in even more Japanese casualties (only 128 men of Ichiki's force will survive the battle)!

Area of Battle

Typical of the ferocity of the fighting, and the Marine efforts that will result in victory are the efforts of one, three-man machine gun crew that is credited with killing 200 Japanese soldiers.  Cpl. Lee Diamond, PFC John Rivers, and Pvt. Albert Schmid all win the Navy Cross for their actions defending the Marine line, but pay a horrific price for their tenacity ... Rivers is killed, Diamond is hit in the arms and hands by bullets and grenade shrapnel, and Schmid is blinded by a grenade explosion, but continues to fire the position's gun with the guidance of Diamond's eyes (an early American hero of the war, Schmid will have a 1945 Warner Brothers movie made about his life called "Pride of the Marines," starring John Garfield as the blinded soldier).

Schmid and Wife

L to R - Anthony Caruso as Rivers, Dane Clark as Diamond,

Garfield as Schmid

Movie Poster

Unwilling to retreat in defeat (or unable in the dark with blistering Marine fire being sent their way), daylight finds the Japanese still clinging to the eastern bank of the creek, sniping at Marines, and making small rushes at the American line ... clinging on to their positions until the Marines launch a counterattack.  Led by Lt. Colonel Leonard B. Cresswell (a CHEESE relative?), the 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment crosses the creek upstream above the battle area, and envelop Ichiki's position from the south and east.  Completely surrounded, the Marines slowly push the remains of the Japanese force into a small coconut grove that is soon turned into an abattoir ... planes from Henderson Field strafe the area, Marine infantry continues to blast away, and in the afternoon five M3 Stuart tanks roll through the grove firing their machine guns, hitting anything that moves with canister fire, and rolling over both dead and living bodies (1st Division Marine commander, Major General Alexander Archer Vandegrift, a Medal-of-Honor winner on Guadalcanal and future Corps commandant, will write that, "the rear of the tanks looked like meat grinders").

Vandegrift in Command Tent - Guadalcanal, 1942

The Coconut Grove

The battle is over by 5:00 in the late afternoon (Colonel Ichiki either commits ritual suicide, or is blown apart by a tank ... his body is never located), but as it will be throughout the war in the Pacific, the killing continues anyway, as the Marines experience for the first time the Bushido code of the Japanese in action ... up close, and very, very personal.  As curious Marines begin to come to the area looking for souvenirs, and policing up the battle area, they discover that dead looking bodies aren't always dead and several soldiers are wounded by Japanese who suddenly rise up and start shooting or throwing grenades.  War to the no-quarter end, lesson learned, for the rest of the war to rather be safe than sorry, Marines will bayonet or shoot corpses before getting too close.

Sandbar Japanese Dead at the mouth of Alligator Creek   

The other lesson from the battle is even more important ... after knowing nothing but victory, the Japanese soldier has been defeated for the first time in the war ... more carnage and tears coming, but the Marines now know what the defenders of Wake Island discovered just days after Pearl Harbor ... given adequate support, the Imperial Army of Japan can be defeated.  

Corpses In The Sand - The Morning After

Why today mattered ... 8/21/1942 ... it mattered because the Marines hold on Guadalcanal!

Guadalcanal 

TRYING TO SPRING MATT WARNER

8/13/1896 - Trying to give up his outlaw ways so his wife (suffering from cancer that will cost her her leg) and young daughter don't leave him, former bandit Matt Warner (real name of Willard Erastus Christianson) makes the mistake of accepting a $100 job packing out equipment from a silver mine owned by a prospecting friend and miner, E.B. Coleman.  They are accompanied to the site by another friend, gambler Bill Wall (the trio has been drinking together in Vernal, Utah's Overholt Saloon).  Arriving at the mine, the true purpose of the job becomes apparent when the trio of men are accosted by claim-jumpers in the form of Ike and Dick Stauton.  Leather slapped immediately, when the gunsmoke from the encounter clears the mine is once more Coleman's and two claim-jumpers are dead on the ground (along with Warner's horse).  Local law enforcement doesn't see the killings as justified homicides though, and all three men are soon arrested and placed in an Ogden, Utah jail to await trial on charges of murder.

Warner

Strapped for cash due to his change to legal activities and paying the doctor bills for his wife, Warner frets to his jail visiting best friend that he can't afford the legal representation he needs to beat the charges ... but the friend tells him not to worry, he has a plan and he'll take care of everything.  The friend is a fellow Mormon gone bad named Robert Leroy Parker that has been staying at Warner's ranch since being released from prison in Wyoming, where he has been spending time behind bars for rustling horses ... time during which he stops going by the name of Parker, and morphs into one of the wildest denizens of the Wild West, the soon-to-be leader of the Hole In The Wall Gang, Butch Cassidy.

Butch's Wyoming Mugshot

Butch's plan is to provide Warner with the best lawyer money can buy in the region, the formidable barrister, Douglas A. Preston (a future state senator and attorney general).  Not a pro bono case, the assets needed to cover Preston's high fees will be paid by Cassidy ... major bucks, but no sweat, Butch will just do what he does best and rob a bank to get the money Warner needs to pay Preston.

Preston 

The bank chosen resides in Montpelier, Idaho ... a small town of a few hundred souls in Bear Lake County, a mountain valley in the southwestern part of the state only a few miles away from the Utah and Wyoming borders.  First known as Clover Creek by travelers on the Oregon Trail, then as Belmont, in 1864 when Mormons pour into the area, the town is rechristened Montpelier by Brigham Young, honoring the capital of the state the religious leader is born in, Vermont.  Farming the chief occupation of the region, the town is connected to the outside world by the Oregon Short Line Railroad ... and has little in the way of a law enforcement presence ... a site ripe for the picking.  

Turn-of-the-Century Montpelier

More than a one-man job, for the robbery Cassidy recruits a buddy from his days of punching cows in Brown's Hole (a rugged region on the border of Colorado and Utah), William Ellsworth "Elzy" Lay, and a cowboy neighbor from his Circleville days named Bob Meeks ... Meeks is assigned to watch the horses during the heist, Lay will hit the teller cages and vault, and Cassidy will trouble shoot the job, doing whatever is necessary as the robbery develops. 

Lay

Riding into town on Thursday, 8/13/1896, the trio first visit the local general store to get a feel for the mood of the community, then pleased that everything seems peaceful, they ride down and hitch their horses to the post outside the bank.  It is about 3:00 in the afternoon when the group dismounts and attacks the bank ... Meeks remains with the horses, Lay tells the five people in the bank to put their hands in the air and line up facing the wall (three bank employees and two town councilmen), and Cassidy stands in the doorway of the bank guiding Lay's activities and watching for trouble. Angered when one of the tellers tells him he has no cash, Lay whacks the man on the head with his revolver ... an act that causes the man to suddenly discover the money the bandit is looking for, and that draws a quick reprimand from Cassidy about using excessive violence.  Sack stuffed with currency in minutes, Lay dumps a stack of coins stacked on a desk into the loot, grabs a Winchester rifle off a peg on the wall, and exits the establishment as Cassidy tells everyone to wait ten minutes before leaving the bank or they could face dire consequences on the street outside.  Satisfied that the gang is ready to go, Cassidy steps out of the doorway, mounts his horse, and at a saunter that says nothing is wrong, leads the men out of town ... town limits reached, the men then break into a gallop for the Wyoming border, 15 miles away.  Montpelier Pass reached (7,610 feet above sea level, the break in the mountains is now known as Salt River Pass), the bandits tired mounts are swapped for a set of fresh horses left at the pass ... a method of escape Cassidy will use over and over again to escape posses as a member of The Wild Bunch.  It is early evening before Bear Lake County Sheriff Jeff Davis can put a posse together and leave town after the outlaws ... men that return to town quickly when it is realized that they have no chance of catching the robbers.  The success needed to support Warner against the murder charges he is facing, the gang leaves Idaho with somewhere between $5,000 and $16,500 in loot.

Building That Once Housed

The Bank

Historical Marker

The success of the robbery doesn't fully roll over to the trial however ... while Warner is found not guilty of murder, a jury, unhappy with his outlaw past, does find him guilty of involuntary manslaughter (Wall will receive the same verdict and sentence, while Coleman is somehow acquitted of all charges) and sentences him to five years at the state pen.  Warner is released in 1900 (his wife dies of the cancer that took her leg while he is serving his sentence), settles in Carbon County, Utah, remarries, has three additional children with his new wife, and eventually is elected a justice of the peace, serves as a night guard and detective in the Utah town of Price, and runs a small bootlegging operation during Prohibition before he dies peacefully in his sleep in 1938 at the age of seventy-four.

Warner After Prison

And the gang that robbed the bank for Warner all have interesting lives afterward too!  Arrested in 1897, Meeks is found guilty of the Montpelier job and sentenced to thirty-five years in the Idaho State Penitentiary in Boise.  On Christmas Eve in 1901, he tries to escape and is shot in the leg by a guard ... a wound grievous enough that the limb has to be amputated.  Not happy missing a piece of himself, two years later, he climbs a prison wall, yells "Hurrah for Hell!" and jumps. Surprisingly not badly injured, Meeks is transferred to a state insane asylum and remains there until 1912, when he then vanishes from any historical records following his release.

Idaho State Penitentiary

Lay goes on to partner with Butch (the duo will next hit the payroll of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company in Castle Gate, Utah on 4/21/1897) and other Wild Bunch members in a series of robberies and shootouts until being captured while buying supplies for the gang in Carlsbad, New Mexico in 1899.  Found guilty of robbery and murder (Sheriff Ed Farr of Huerfano County in Colorado, Dona Ana County Deputy Kent Kearney, and Colfax County Deputy Henry Love, all by Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan following a Wild Bunch train robbery near Folsom, New Mexico), Lay is sentenced to life behind bars (Cassidy explores giving the governor a parole bribe, but the politician is not interested at all), but after keeping his nose clean for over seven years, he is made a prison trustee assigned to the warden ... an assignment which eventually springs him from the prison when he successfully talks a group of inmates into releasing the hostages they've taken while trying to escape ... the warden's wife and daughter!  Out in 1906, Lay establishes a small ranch just north of the Colorado border, near the town of Baggs, Wyoming. There he finds love when he meets and marries a local rancher's daughter, Mary Calverta (the couple will remain married for the rest of their lives and have a son and a daughter).  Moving to California, Lay will transform himself into a mining and oil geologist, and will supervise the building of the Colorado River Aqueduct system called the All American Canal through Riverside and the Imperial Valley.  He dies on 11/10/1934 at the age of sixty-six, and is buried at the Forest Lawn in Glendale, California.

Prisoner Lay

And Butch of course goes on to become a Western legend as the leader of the group of outlaws known as the Wild Bunch ... depending on your point of view, either being gunned down with the Sundance Kid in San Vincente, Bolivia in 1908, or returning to America and living out his life in hiding under an assumed name.  Either way, though outlaw, when he was your friend it was all the way ... as shown in his efforts to free Warner.

Leader of the Wild Bunch

Fort Worth, Texas - 1900

8/13/1896 ... and the bank of Montpelier, Idaho receives a visit from the one-and-only Butch Cassidy!