Criminal. He was the serial killer known as the "Night Stalker". Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1960, the youngest of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez's five children. His father, a Mexican national and former Juarez policeman who later became a laborer on the Santa Fe railroad. As a child, Richard sustained two serious head injuries. When he was two years old, a dresser fell on top of him, causing an injury to his forehead that required thirty stitches to close. When he was five years old, he was knocked unconscious by a swing at a park. He would later experience frequent epileptic seizures, which eventually stopped when he was in his early teens. When he was fifteen, Richard became strongly influenced by his older cousin Miguel ("Mike") Ramirez, a decorated Green Beret combat veteran who often boasted of his gruesome exploits during the Vietnam War and showed him Polaroid pictures of his victims, whom he had raped and beaten among other things. Around this time, Richard began to escape from his father's violent temper by leaving the house at night to sleep in a local cemetery. Richard began experimenting with LSD, and he started to become more fascinated with his interest in Satanism. Richard eventually settled permanently in California at the age of twenty-two. In the mid 1980's horrific tales began to surface of a man breaking into homes, mostly in Southern California, in the wee hours of the morning. On several occasions, a man who happened to be inside was killed quickly. A female might be raped, sometimes more than once. Then the man who'd become known as the "Night Stalker" would ransack the home looking for valuables. While some victims were in their 60s and older, others were in their 20s and 30s. There were reports of pentagrams being scrawled at crime scenes, as well as snippets from heavy metal songs. The killing weapons varied including guns, knives, fists. All were used with evident malice. He attacked again on August 24, 1985 in Los Angeles. After a bus trip to Tucson, Arizona where he'd been visiting his brother he was finally recognized at a store near a downtown L.A. bus station after his image had been splashed across newspapers. Residents of an east Los Angeles neighborhood spotted him trying to steal two cars, they caught and subdued him, then held him down until police arrived. At his first court appearance, Richard raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, "Hail, Satan." On August 3, 1988, the Los Angeles Times reported that some jail employees overheard Ramirez planning to shoot the prosecutor with a gun, which Richard intended to have smuggled into the courtroom. Consequently, a metal detector was installed outside the courtroom and intensive searches were conducted on people entering. On August 14, the trial was interrupted because one of the jurors, Phyllis Singletary, did not arrive at the courtroom. Later that day, she was found shot to death in her apartment. The jury was terrified; they could not help wondering if Ramirez had somehow directed this event from inside his prison cell. However, Richard was not responsible for Singletary's death; she had been shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later committed suicide with the same weapon in a hotel. The jury convicted him of 11 murders in Southern California and two others in the San Francisco area, he was also convicted of 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults and 14 burglaries. A death sentence followed. According to the Los Angeles Times, Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan said Ramirez, during his bloody spree, had displayed "cruelty, callousness and viciousness beyond any human understanding." The rest of his life was spent at the home for many of California's most dangerous felons, San Quentin State Prison, along the bay just north of San Francisco. Richard had many fans who were writing him letters and paying him visits. Beginning in 1985, freelance magazine editor Doreen Lioy, wrote him nearly 75 letters during his incarceration. By 1988, he proposed to her, and on October 3, 1996, they were married in California's San Quentin State Prison. However, Doreen Lioy and Richard Ramirez eventually separated and at the time of his death, Richard Ramirez was engaged to a twenty-three year old writer who was residing between Los Angeles and New York City. He was never executed as sentenced, instead he died of natural causes at Marin General Hospital. He was 53.