Richard Ramirez

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Richard Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, to Mexican immigrants Mercedes Muñoz and Julián Tapia Ramirez, the youngest of their five children. His father, a railway laborer, was a violent alcoholic who often physically abused the household. Ramirez began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at age 10. Psychiatrist Michael Stone described Ramirez as a 'made' psychopath, stating that he was knocked unconscious and almost died multiple times before age six, later developing temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality. At age 12, his older cousin Miguel Valles, a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD, shared Polaroid photos of Vietnamese women he had raped, murdered, and dismembered, and taught Ramirez military skills including stealth and kill tactics. Ramirez began sleeping in a local cemetery to escape his father's violent temper. At 15, he was present when Valles fatally shot his wife Jesse in the face; Ramirez later remarked that witnessing the murder was a subject of fascination, not trauma. He dropped out of Jefferson High School in the ninth grade in 1977 and moved to California at age 22, where he began using cocaine and committed burglaries to support his addiction.

Reader's Guide

Ramirez's murder spree terrorized residents of Greater Los Angeles and later the San Francisco Bay Area over fourteen months. His first known murder was on April 10, 1984, when he killed nine-year-old Mei Leung in the basement of her apartment building in San Francisco's Tenderloin district—beating, strangling, raping, and stabbing her before hanging her partially nude body from a pipe. This crime was not linked to Ramirez until 2009 via DNA. His second-known murder, on June 28, 1984, was 79-year-old Jennie Vincow in Glassell Park, Los Angeles, stabbed repeatedly and nearly decapitated; Ramirez's fingerprint was found on a screen he removed to enter. He used a wide variety of weapons: handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, a claw hammer; he also punched, pistol-whipped, strangled, stomped a victim to death in her sleep, and tortured another with a live electrical cord. In 1989, he was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited 'cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.' Ramirez never expressed any remorse. He died in June 2013 of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison.

Did You Know?

• Ramirez was born on February 29, 1960, making his birthday a leap day.
• His first known murder, of nine-year-old Mei Leung in 1984, was not linked to him until 2009 through DNA evidence.
• Ramirez's older cousin Miguel Valles, a Vietnam War veteran, killed his wife in front of Ramirez when Ramirez was 15.
• He used a wide variety of weapons including a machete, tire iron, claw hammer, and live electrical cord.
• Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison in 2013.