JUST IN: Night Stalker Who Faces Execution dies —He Broke Into Homes And Killed Families At Night.

After spending more than 23 years on death row at San Quentin State Prison, Richard Ramirez was never executed. The state of California sentenced him to die in the gas chamber for 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries. He raped women while their husbands bled out on the floor beside them.

He gouged out a woman’s eyes after he killed her. He shot a man three times in the head, walked to the next room, and told the man’s fiance to swear she loved Satan. He was 25 years old when he started. He was 29 when a jury handed him 19 death sentences, and he never spent a single second feeling sorry for any of it.

The state wanted to put him in a gas chamber. Cancer got there first. He died on June 7th, 2013 at 9:10 in the morning at a hospital just north of the prison walls, his body eaten from the inside, nobody watching. In this video, we will talk about his crimes, his capture, his trial, and everything that happened in between.

 To know how he started and how he became the Night Stalker, we need to go back to how it all began. El Paso, Texas, 1960. The city sits at the western tip of Texas, pressed against the Rio Grande, dusty and flat and baking in the sun. It is a working-class city, a border city, a city where families like the Ramirezes come to build something from nothing, racked and where sometimes nothing is exactly what they get.

Julian Ramirez was a railway laborer, a Mexican immigrant, a violent alcoholic whose anger had no floor. He beat his wife Mercedes. He beat his children. When his rage exceeded even his own capacity to control it, he would smash his own head into the wall until he knocked himself unconscious. This was the house Richard Ramirez was born into on February 29th, 1960, a leap year baby, the youngest of five children.

Mercedes had worked in a boot factory during her pregnancies, exposed to chemical fumes, and several of her children were born with physical defects. Richard developed epilepsy, grand mal seizures that dropped him without warning. At age two, a dresser toppled and fell directly onto his head, leaving a laceration that required medical attention.

He was not yet old enough to walk steadily, and the world was already trying to put him in the ground. He started smoking marijuana and drinking at age 10. He started using LSD by 14. When Julian’s rages became unbearable, Richard did not go to a friend’s house. There were no friends to go to. Instead, he walked to the local cemetery and lay down among the headstones and slept.

It was quieter there than home. He grew up understanding that the dead were better company than the living. In 1972, a man came back from Vietnam. His name was Miguel Ramirez. Everyone called him Mike. He was Richard’s older cousin, and he came home with four medals and a chest full of stories that no 12-year-old boy should ever hear.

His platoon of 20 men had been surrounded by Viet Cong in the jungle. Mike and one other soldier were the only ones who walked out. He came home to El Paso without a single hour of counseling, without a plan, without direction. What he had were photographs, Polaroid photographs. Mike sat his 12-year-old cousin down and showed them to him one by one.

They were photographs Mike had taken in Vietnam, photographs of women he had raped, women he had murdered, women he had dismembered and decapitated. Some of the images showed the women tied to posts before and after. Mike described what he had done to them in detail, the way other men talked about hunting trips, the way fathers talked about Saturday afternoon football.

He told Richard there was no thrill like a good kill. He taught him the military stealth techniques he had learned in the jungle. How to move through a space without making a sound. How to enter a room without waking the person sleeping inside. He called it a skill. He called it a gift. Richard was not disturbed by the photographs.

 He later told investigators he was fascinated. The two of them spent their afternoons together smoking marijuana, drinking beer, and talking about what Mike had done overseas while the Texas sun dropped below the desert horizon. And then one afternoon in 1975, Richard was sitting in Mike’s apartment when a domestic argument rose and broke in the space of a single second.

 Mike drew a pistol and shot his wife Jessie in the face at point-blank range. The bullet went through her skull. Blood hit the walls. Blood hit Richard. He was 15 years old. Mike turned to him and said, “Go home. Say nothing.” Richard walked home. He sat at the dinner table with his family. He ate his dinner.

 He kept the secret. His father Julian took him back to the apartment weeks later to help clean up. Richard walked into the room where Jessie had died. He could smell the dried blood before he even crossed the threshold. He stood in the exact spot where she had fallen, and he described it years later from a prison cell as a mystical experience.

 A tingling feeling. Something had shifted inside him in that apartment, and he understood, standing in the smell of a dead woman’s blood, that he was not like other people. Mike was tried for the murder and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Post-traumatic stress from Vietnam.

 He served 4 years in a Texas mental hospital and was released. He found Richard immediately. The mentorship resumed. By the time Richard dropped out of Jefferson High School in the ninth grade, he had been shaped by a father who used violence as a native language, a cousin who used murder as a hobby, and a brother-in-law named Roberto, his sister Ruth’s husband, who took teenage Richard along on his after-dark excursions to peer through the windows of unsuspecting women as they undressed. Richard watched.

 He learned. He cataloged. He was building something inside himself, assembling it piece by piece from the worst of everyone around him, and nobody saw it happening because nobody was looking. He got a job at a Holiday Inn in his teens and used his master key to enter the rooms of sleeping guests and go through their belongings.

 He stole whatever he could find. On at least one occasion, he molested two children in an elevator. He was never reported, never charged. He was eventually fired after attempting to force himself on a female guest in her room. Her husband returned unexpectedly and beat Richard unconscious. Police arrested him. Prosecutors filed charges that could have sent him to prison for years.

 The charges were dropped. He moved to Los Angeles. He developed a cocaine addiction that became the organizing principle of his entire life. Money was for cocaine, sleep was optional, food was candy bars and Pepsi. He was arrested for auto theft in 1981 and again in 1984. Between arrests he stopped bathing.

 His teeth, already neglected, began to rot in his skull. Nine of them were decayed. Several were missing. The smell of his breath became something survivors would mention to police independently, unprompted. The kind of detail that lodges in your memory because it is attached to the worst night of your life. He slept in cheap motels, sometimes in cars, walking the streets of Los Angeles at night with a head full of cocaine and a mind full of things that had been put there by a man with a stack of Polaroids and no conscience at all.

Los Angeles in 1984 had no idea what was coming. In April of 1984, nine-year-old Mei Lon disappeared from the hallway of her apartment building in San Francisco. She was found in the basement. Her body had been beaten, raped, and stabbed. Whoever killed her hung her from a pipe in the ceiling like she weighed nothing.

The case went cold. No arrests, no suspects, no answers. Her family would wait 25 years before the truth came. In 2009, DNA evidence linked the crime to Richard Ramirez. He was never charged. By then, he was already dying. But the girl in the basement in San Francisco in April of 1984 was most likely his first, which means everything that followed was not a beginning.

 It was an escalation. On June 28th, 1984, Richard Ramirez snorted cocaine, climbed through an open window on the second floor of an apartment building in Glassell Park, Los Angeles, and walked into the bedroom of Jennie Vincow. She was 79 years old. She was asleep. He stabbed her repeatedly in the head, neck, and chest.

 He slashed her throat so deeply she was nearly decapitated. He sexually assaulted her body after she was dead. He ransacked the apartment for anything worth selling and left through the same window he came in. Her son Jack found her the next morning when he noticed the screen missing from the window and the front door standing open.

He went inside and found his mother in her bed. A fingerprint was recovered from the window screen. The fingerprint database did not yet have the technology to run it. It sat in a file. Richard Ramirez disappeared back into Los Angeles and was not heard from again for 9 months. The city exhaled.

 The murder of Jennie Vincow went into the pile with everything else. What nobody knew was that he was still there, still walking those streets, still sleeping in those motels, waiting for something that nobody could have named because nobody knew yet that there was anything to wait for. On March 17th, 1985, he came back. Maria Hernandez, 22 years old, was walking from her car to the front door of her Rosemead condominium just after midnight when a man stepped out of the shadows and raised a She threw her hands up instinctively.

The bullet hit her house keys and ricocheted away. She fell to the ground and lay still. He stepped over her body and went inside. Her roommate was Dale Okazaki, 34 years old. She had heard the shot outside and ducked behind the kitchen counter. When she raised her head to look, Ramirez was already standing on the other side of the counter waiting for her.

 He shot her once in the forehead. She was dead before she hit the floor. Maria Hernandez had survived by the width of a house key. She would later give detectives the first physical description of the attacker. “Tall, thin, dark curly hair, bulging eyes, and teeth,” she said, “terrible rotting teeth. A smell you couldn’t forget.” Within 1 hour of leaving that condominium, Ramirez was in Monterey Park, 3 miles away, where he pulled 30-year-old Tsai Lianne Yu from her car at a stoplight, dragged her into the street, and shot her twice. She was

pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Two murders and one attempted murder in a single night in two different cities with the same weapon. The newspapers called him the walk-in killer, the valley intruder. The names changed as the crime spread. None of them stuck. None of them were big enough.

 10 days later on March 27th, Ramirez drove to Whittier and entered the home of Vincent and Maxine Zazzara. He had burglarized the same house a year earlier and knew the layout. Vincent was 64 years old, a retired restaurateur. Maxine was 44, an attorney. Ramirez shot Vincent in the head as he slept. The sound woke Maxine.

 She reached under the bed for a shotgun she kept there. He overpowered her before she could use it. What he did to Maxine Zazzara after she was dead is the kind of detail that changes how investigators look at a case. He stabbed her repeatedly. He carved an inverted cross into her chest. He took a knife and gouged out both of her eyes, placing them in a jewelry box he found on the dresser.

 He took the box with him when he left. The detectives who worked that scene never forgot it. One of them, Gil Carrillo, who would spend the next five months hunting the Night Stalker alongside his partner Frank Salerno, said years later that the Zazzara scene was the moment he understood they were dealing with something he had never encountered before and hoped to never encounter again.

But there was a problem. The murders were not being connected. Different jurisdictions, different weapons, different methods. A woman stabbed in her apartment in Glassell Park. Two women shot in Rosemead and Monterey Park. A couple murdered in Whittier. To the individual detectives handling each case, they looked like separate crimes.

It was Carrillo who first looked at the geography and the pattern and felt the pull of an idea that seemed almost too terrible to say out loud. What if it was one man? His superiors told him it was impossible. Serial killers had a type. They had a method. They had a consistency. This killer shot men and stabbed women.

 He targeted the elderly and the young. He hit apartments and houses, white victims and Asian victims and Latino victims. There was no pattern. There was no profile. There was nothing to hang a theory on except the feeling in Gil Carrillo’s gut that something was connecting these scenes that nobody was seeing yet.

He kept digging. On May 14th, William Doi, 65 years old, was shot in his bed in Monterey Park. His wife, Lillian, was bound, beaten, and sodomized. She survived. When she gave her statement to investigators, she described the attacker. Tall, thin, curly hair, and the teeth. The smell. Two survivors now had independently described the same mouth.

On May 29th, Ramirez walked into a home in Monrovia, where 84-year-old Mabel Bell and her 81-year-old sister, Florence Lang, lived together. He beat both of them with a hammer. He drew a pentagram on Mabel Bell’s thigh in lipstick. He drew another on Florence Lang’s bedroom wall. Mabel Bell died. Florence Lang survived, but she was never the same.

The pentagram. That was the thread. That was the detail that Carrillo brought to Salerno and said, “Look at this. Look at all of it together.” The shoe prints at multiple scenes matched. The same pair of Avia sneakers, size 11 and 1/2. There were only six pairs of that size distributed across the entire country.

One had been shipped to a shoe store in Los Angeles. The bullets were being matched across scenes. The method was becoming clearer. Shoot the man first. Spend time with the woman. Take what you can find. Leave something satanic behind. They brought their theory to the task force. The FBI was called in to assist.

 For the first time, the murders were being treated as the work of a single individual. The press named him the Night Stalker. The name landed in a way the others hadn’t. It fit. It spread. Within days, it was on every television in California. And the fear that followed it was unlike anything the city had experienced in years. Los Angeles stopped sleeping with its windows open.

 Hardware stores sold out of deadbolts. Gun shops sold out of handguns. Neighborhood watch groups formed in every corner of the San Gabriel Valley, the San Fernando Valley, the suburbs that sprawled for miles in every direction from downtown. Parents walked their children to school. Elderly residents called their children to tell them they were scared.

 The summer of 1985 became a season that people who lived through it never fully left behind. You did not have to have been attacked to feel it. You only had to live there. You only had to hear the name. And while the city barricaded itself, Ramirez kept going. On July 2nd, he entered the Arcadia home of 77-year-old Mary Louise Cannon, a widowed grandmother, slashed her throat, and ransacked her house.

On July 5th, he broke into a home in Sierra Madre and found 16-year-old Whitney Bennett asleep in her bedroom. He bludgeoned her with a tire iron, fracturing her skull. When she did not die, he wrapped a telephone cord around her throat and began to strangle her. He later told investigators that electrical sparks came off the cord.

 He said he believed it was a sign that God was intervening to save her. He released the cord and left. Whitney Bennett survived. On July 20th, Chainarong Khovanant was shot dead in his Sun Valley home. His wife Somkid was assaulted, beaten, forced to her knees, and made to swear to Satan that she was not hiding any valuables.

 Their 12-year-old son was locked in a closet. He heard everything through the door. On August 8th, Elias Abowath was shot to death in his Diamond Bar home. His wife Sakina was bound and assaulted. Their two young sons were home. On August 18th, Ramirez drove north to San Francisco. He entered the home of Peter Pan, 66 years old, on Lake Merced Boulevard and shot him in the head as he slept.

 He then attacked Peter’s wife Barbara, shot her, and raped her. She survived. In the kitchen afterward, Ramirez opened the refrigerator and made himself something to eat. He vomited it onto the floor. He walked back to the bedroom and wrote the words Jack the Knife on the wall in lipstick. He drew a pentagram beneath it and ejaculated under the symbol before leaving.

San Francisco Detective Frank Falzon walked into that scene and later said it was the ugliest crime scene he had worked in his entire career. Two days after the Pan murders, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a press conference. She stood before the cameras and publicly disclosed that investigators were tracking the Night Stalker through ballistic evidence and a distinctive shoe print.

 She named the brand. The detectives watching the broadcast felt the bottom drop out of their stomachs. They had been protecting that information specifically because they knew the killer was following his own press coverage. Within days, Ramirez threw his Avia shoes off the Golden Gate Bridge into the bay below.

 Months of forensic work, gone. But he made one mistake he could not walk back. On August 24th, 1985, Ramirez broke into a townhouse in Mission Viejo in Orange County, where 29-year-old Bill Carns and his fiancee Inez Erickson were asleep. He entered the bedroom and cocked his .25 caliber handgun. The sound woke Bill Carns.

 Ramirez shot him three times in the head and left him for dead. Then he turned to Inez. He grabbed her by the hair, pulled her from the bed, and beat her with his fists. He bound her wrists with neckties he pulled from the closet. He told her his name. He said, “I am the Night Stalker.” He forced her to repeat, “I love Satan.

” He searched the house, demanded cash and jewelry, made her swear on Satan that she was not hiding more. Then he raped her. Before he walked out the front door, he turned back to her and said, “Tell them the Night Stalker was here.” Inez Erickson untied herself, found a neighbor, and gave investigators the most detailed description they had yet received.

 She also remembered a partial license plate number from a car she had seen driving slowly through the neighborhood earlier that evening. Investigators traced the plate to a stolen Toyota. They found the car parked outside a shopping center in Los Angeles. Ramirez, for the first time in 16 months of murders, had forgotten to wipe down the rearview mirror.

 A single fingerprint. The LAPD ran it through a newly updated database. The system had just been expanded to include individuals born after January 1st, 1960. Richard Ramirez had been born on February 29th, 1960. He was in the database by 31 days. The fingerprint matched a name. The name matched a face. The face matched every description every survivor had ever given.

 On August 30th, 1985, law enforcement released his photograph to every television station and every newspaper in the state of California. At a press conference, officials looked into the cameras and said, “We know who you are now. There will be no place you can hide.” Richard Ramirez was not in Los Angeles when the announcement was made.

 He was on a bus to Tucson, Arizona, visiting his brother. He did not know his face was on every front page in the state. He did not know that while he was sitting in his brother’s living room, the entire city of Los Angeles was learning his name. On the morning of August 31st, 1985, Ramirez boarded a bus back to Los Angeles.

 He stepped off in East Los Angeles and walked to a nearby liquor store. He reached the newspaper rack outside, picked up a copy of the morning paper, and looked down at his own face staring back at him from the front page. He stood there for a moment. A woman inside the store looked at the paper, looked at him, looked at the paper again. She recognized him.

 She screamed in Spanish, “El Maton!” The killer. Ramirez dropped the paper and ran. He sprinted across six lanes of the Santa Ana Freeway, dodging traffic. He ran into the Boyle Heights neighborhood, jumping fences, cutting through backyards, trying to put distance between himself and anyone who had seen his face.

 He spotted a Ford Mustang parked in a driveway and reached for the door handle. The owner was underneath the car doing mechanical work. He heard the door open and rolled out and grabbed Ramirez and pulled him away. Ramirez ran. He tried to pull a woman out of another car by her keys. She screamed. Her husband came running and hit Ramirez with a metal fence post.

By now, people were coming out of their houses. The neighborhood had been living in fear for 17 months. They had watched the news. They had locked their windows. They had bought guns and installed deadbolts and walked their children to school and lay awake in the dark listening for sounds that should not be there.

And now the man responsible for all of it was running through their neighborhood in broad daylight. They came, dozens of them. They hit him with a crowbar. They hit him with barbecue utensils. They beat him to the pavement and held him there until the police pulled him away. When officers put him in the patrol car, Ramirez said quietly in Spanish, “I’m lucky the cops got here.” He was 25 years old.

The Night Stalker was in custody. The trial of Richard Ramirez began on July 22nd, 1988 in a Los Angeles courtroom that would become one of the most watched legal proceedings in the history of the state. The prosecution had built a case that was overwhelming by any standard. Physical evidence connecting him to multiple crime scenes, ballistic evidence linking the same weapon across murders, fingerprints, shoe prints, the testimony of survivors who had looked into his face and lived.

More than 100 witnesses took the stand over the course of more than a year of proceedings. Ramirez treated the whole thing like a performance. He arrived at court each morning knowing that cameras were waiting for him outside and that every network in California was covering the trial.

 He drew pentagrams on his palm and flashed them at the gallery. He threw devil’s horn signs at photographers. He shouted “Hail Satan” in the middle of proceedings. He grinned at the families of victims when they testified. He appeared to everyone watching to be a man who was genuinely enjoying himself. The prosecution called survivor after survivor to the stand.

 Maria Hernandez described lying on the ground outside her condominium pretending to be dead while he stepped over her body. Lillian Doi described being bound and assaulted in her own bedroom while her husband bled out in the next room. Somkid Khovanant described her 12-year-old son locked in the closet while she was forced to her knees and made to invoke the name of Satan.

Ines Erickson described the moment he told her his name and what he was going to do and that there was nothing she could do to stop it. Each woman sat in that witness box and looked across the courtroom at the man who had done those things to them. Each time Ramirez looked back without expression, without acknowledgement, without anything.

 And then, in the middle of the trial, one of the jurors was found shot to death in her home. Her name was Phyllis Singletary. She was discovered by her neighbor with a gunshot wound. The courthouse went cold. Every remaining juror understood what it could mean to sit in judgment of this man. The terror that settled into that jury box in the days that followed was real and it was total. Security was increased.

Jurors were escorted to and from the building. People who had agreed to serve justice now had to confront the possibility that serving justice could cost them their lives. The murder was eventually investigated and attributed to Phyllis Singletary’s boyfriend. It had nothing to do with Ramirez. But for several days, nobody knew that.

For several days, 11 remaining jurors sat in the courtroom and wondered whether the Night Stalker’s reach had already extended beyond the bars of the cage in which he sat every morning flashing pentagrams and grinning. Deliberations lasted 22 days. On September 20th, 1989, the jury returned to the courtroom and delivered guilty verdicts on all 43 counts, 13 murders, five attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, 14 burglaries.

 When the last count was read, Ramirez turned to face the jury and said, “You make me sick. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within all of us.” On November 7th, 1989, Judge Michael Tynan sentenced Richard Ramirez to death, 19 death sentences. He told the courtroom that Ramirez’s crimes had demonstrated cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.

Ramirez walked out of the sentencing and told reporters, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.” He was 29 years old. The most expensive murder trial in the history of California at 1.1.8 million dollars, and it ended with a man smirking at cameras on his way to a prison van.

The record stood until the O.J. Simpson trial. San Quentin State Prison sits on a narrow peninsula in San Francisco Bay. Its walls rising from the water like something built to hold not just men, but the idea of men, the worst possible version of what a person can become. Ramirez arrived in 1989 and settled into death row with the ease of a man who had found his natural environment.

 He received more fan mail than any other inmate in the facility, more than any convicted murderer in the state. Women wrote to him from across the country. They sent photographs. They visited. They lined up outside the gates on visiting days and waited for a chance to sit across a table from the Nightstalker and tell him they believed in him.

One of them had been watching television on August 30th, 1985, the night his mug shot interrupted her program. When she looked at his face on the screen and felt something she could not name. Her name was Doreen Lioy. She was 41 years old, a freelance magazine editor who had worked for Tiger Beat. She started writing letters, then more letters.

Nearly 75 of them over the years that followed. She visited him in prison, then again, then four times a week bringing breath mints so she could kiss him with confidence, which is a sentence that exists in the actual record of this case. In 1988, Ramirez proposed to her from death row. She accepted.

 On October 3rd, 1996, they were married in the main visiting room of San Quentin State Prison. Doreen wore a white calf-length dress with long lace sleeves. Ramirez refused to wear a gold wedding band because, he explained, Satanists do not wear gold, and so his ring was platinum. The ceremony lasted 15 minutes. There were no flowers.

 Photographs were taken on a Polaroid camera and sold to the couple for $2 each. Nobody from Doreen’s family attended. Her family had already disowned her for the relationship. Ramirez’s brother, sister, and niece were there. Approximately 60 other inmates watched from across the visiting room. There was no wedding night.

 California does not permit conjugal visits on death row. Doreen told the press outside the prison gates that day that she was ecstatically happy and very, very proud to be his wife. She had publicly stated on more than one occasion that if the state of California ever executed Richard Ramirez, she would take her own life. She visited him four times a week for years.

 She packed breath mints every single time. She wrote a biography defending him. She gave interviews. She lobbied reporters. She told anyone who would listen that they did not know him the way she did. That he was kind, funny, tender. In 2009, DNA evidence conclusively linked Richard Ramirez to the rape and murder of 9-year-old May Lon in San Francisco in April of 1984, the little girl whose body had been found hanging from a pipe in a basement more than 25 years earlier.

The case that had gone cold while Los Angeles was still learning his name. The case that almost certainly came before Jenny Vincow, before Maria Hernandez, before Dale Okazaki, before all of it. Doreen Lioi reportedly severed ties with Ramirez shortly after the DNA confirmation. There is no official record of divorce.

 She was not there when he died. She did not come to claim his body. The last mention of her in any public record is in her father’s 2019 obituary, where she is listed under her married name, Doreen Ramirez. In 2010, Ramirez was banned from receiving any visitors at all and refused to see anyone for the remainder of his life.

By 2013, his body was failing. B-cell lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, had been advancing for years. His liver was giving out. Reports from inside the prison described his skin turning jaundiced, his body visibly deteriorating. The man who had terrorized California for 16 months now barely recognizable from the grinning figure who had once flashed devil horns at courtroom cameras.

 He had bragged to a prison officer at some point during his years on death row that he had killed more than 20 people. He said it the same way he said everything, without remorse, without weight, as though the number were a score. On the morning of June 7th, 2013, Richard Ramirez was transported by ambulance from San Quentin to Marin General Hospital, just north of the prison.

He was pronounced dead at 9:10 a.m. The cause of death was complications from B-cell lymphoma. He was 53 years old. He had spent 23 of those years on death row waiting for an execution that California’s backlogged appeals process would never have reached in time. By most estimates, he would have been in his 70s before the state could have scheduled an execution date.

 He died in a hospital bed. No chamber, no witnesses, no final statement because nobody asked for one. No last meal because the state does not offer that courtesy to a man dying of cancer. Nobody claimed his body. He was cremated. Bill Carns, the man Ramirez had shot three times in the head in Mission Viejo, who had survived partially paralyzed and spent the rest of his life carrying those three bullets as a permanent reminder of a single August night, heard the news and said three words, “It’s about time.

” Sakina Abuath, whose husband Elias Elias had been shot dead while she was bound and assaulted in the next room with her two sons somewhere in the house, said she had been waiting for the news for the longest time. She said she wished they had hanged him or given him the electric chair so he could feel even a fraction of the pain he had inflicted.

 She said, “I never forget. It has been exactly 28 years and I never forget.” Neither of them got to watch him die. Neither of them got a last statement. Neither got the formal moment of reckoning that 19 death sentences had promised them for 23 years. The state of California spent $1.8 million to convict him. Then spent two decades more housing him and litigating appeal after appeal while his surviving victims grew older and some of them died without ever seeing the sentence carried out.

And in the end, the system delivered nothing it had promised. No execution, no last words, no moment where the condemned man had to sit in a room and face what was coming and know that it was coming because of what he had done. He had said he was beyond good and evil. He had said death always went with the territory.

He had said, “See you in Disneyland.” And then he had simply rotted in a bed in a hospital in northern California with nobody watching and nobody there. And the whole thing ending not with justice but with the slow ordinary failure of a human body that had used itself up. And here’s the question this case leaves behind.

19 death sentences, 23 years, more than two decades of appeals and legal proceedings and taxpayer money spent maintaining a man who had told the court and the cameras and the world that he felt nothing and would do it again. California could not execute him. The system could not deliver what it promised. And the people who survived him, who rebuilt their lives around the hole his crimes left in them, who lay awake in 1985 listening for footsteps and are still lying awake 40 years later, got a news alert one morning in June

2013 telling them it was over. Is that justice? When the state promises execution and a cancer cell delivers it instead, when the condemned dies on his own timeline in a hospital bed while his victims are still waiting, did the system work? Or did Richard Ramirez beat the gas chamber the same way he beat everything else? On his own terms, without anyone having a say in how it ended? Drop your answer in the comments because the people who survived him are still waiting for an answer they never got.