by Ian Brady
Ramirez’ modus operandi was first to crack his way into the chosen house, then stealthily check the occupants of each bedroom. If there was an adult male in residence, Ramirez would immediately neutralise him with a shot through the head. He then had the house to himself, all other occupants being completely under his control, and would rape the females and sodomise the male members of the family.
He apparently derived sadistic, exhibitionist satisfaction from carrying out these humiliating sexual assaults in front of the other members of the family, ensuring profound traumatic effects on the family unit as a whole. This was probably an integral part of the revenge-fantasy he was pursuing. The other part we will come to presently.
The police already knew from surviving witnesses that ‘The Night Stalker’ was a tall, young, lean Hispanic. According to FBI profilers, serial killers usually select victims of their own race, but Ramirez did not conform to this pattern. He was choosing mainly Caucasians (also, curiously, a few Asians) and this probably reflected the general element of deep-seated racial hatred or revenge behind more than a score of his attacks and homicides.
Witnesses stated that the teeth of ‘The Night Stalker’ were badly decayed; again, whether the police thought to question all L.A. dentists, particularly in the Hispanic districts of the city, is not recorded, but it seems likely that they would have done so. Again, if so, it produced no results. At any rate, the attacks in Los Angeles suddenly stopped.
Had ‘The Night Stalker’ forsaken his vendetta, or had he become bored by unsatisfying repetition? Perhaps he was just lying low until the high state of readiness among those in the white residential areas of the city relaxed?
For whatever motive, Ramirez had moved his operations to San Francisco. Los Angeles police were alerted when, thanks to a new computerised filing network, a murder bearing all the hallmarks of ‘The Night Stalker’ was reported in San Francisco. Los Angeles detectives moved in swiftly to assist the San Francisco police department. Some good, routine detective work yielded results. Checking the cheap hotels for an occupant fitting the description of Ramirez, they discovered that just such a person had been using a particular hotel spasmodically over a period of several months, and that his last date of departure from the hotel had been the day prior to the attack in San Francisco.
The police obtained a very detailed description of Ramirez from the owner of the hotel, but were not able to lift any fingerprints from the vacated room, as it had been used by many people after Ramirez’ departure.
The location of the next attack bearing the modus operandi of the Night Stalker indicated that he was moving back towards his familiar hunting grounds in Los Angeles. This is an error many serial killers make, as previously stated, feeling safer and more confident in the territory of their past initial successes. The Los Angeles police were put on full alert. As deduced and projected, Ramirez staged his next attack in an outlying district of Los Angeles, shooting the husband through the head and raping the wife repeatedly before leaving her. Alive.
That act of clemency was his fatal mistake. She managed to see the car’s licence plate as he drove away. Detectives speedily discovered that the car had been stolen in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles. Now every policeman in the city was looking for the car. Several days later it was found hidden away in the corner of a car park in Los Angeles.
This time the police were in luck — they managed to lift some fingerprints from the interior of the car. Feeding the prints into the newly installed digitized computer, they soon knew the identity of ‘The Night Stalker’: Ricardo Ramirez. He had a criminal record for small-time burglary. The photograph was immediately given to the mass media for widespread circulation.
The general public takes true crime all too seriously. By that I mean they seem oblivious to the fact that, even in the commission of the gravest and — that word all judges love to use — most ‘heinous’ crimes, an element of total absurdity or slapstick comedy can impishly intrude. The following example will serve to illustrate my point.
Apparently the only person in Los Angeles who did not know that the rest of the city was searching for him was Ramirez himself.
Without a care, he strolled leisurely through the sunny, thronged streets of early morning Los Angeles and entered a shop to buy some provisions. As he stood at the counter waiting to be served, he failed to notice that all the other customers were eyeing him intensely. It was only when he let his gaze drop to the newspapers on display that he saw his own visage staring back up at him from the front pages.
Too late, he fled from the shop and raced along the streets with the alerted, shouting and gesticulating customers in full pursuit. Adrenaline pumped super-energy into his thin legs, keeping him ahead of the howling pack.
By ironic serendipity, he found that his panicked flight had taken him into the Hispanic district of the city. Not that he gained advantage from it.
Trying to pull a Hispanic woman out of her car to commandeer the vehicle, he attracted the attention of yet another mob of pursuers, this time of his own ethnicity. The hectic gaggle of hunters continued to careen along the busy streets at a madcap pace.
Next, Ramirez jumped through the open door of a parked car, not knowing that the owner of the vehicle was lying under it doing some repairs. When Ramirez started the engine, the portly owner rolled out hastily from underneath the car in fear and indignation. Ramirez glared with some genuine surprise at the sudden, dishevelled apparition and began to drive away regardless.
But by this time the owner had managed to grab hold of him and was running frantically alongside the moving car, legs a thrashing blur. Ramirez, trying to shake himself loose from the tenacious citizen, put the car into fast reverse and crashed through the owner’s garage wall. Still the increasingly unfortunate man clung on to Ramirez. A prolonged struggle took place amid the general wreckage of the garage until Ramirez at last succeeded in tearing himself free.
He next high-jumped over a garden wall, rampaging his way through foliage and flowers. In order to regain the road and faster speed, Ramirez raced without ceremony through the open back door of a house, crashed through the rooms and out of the front door, with the outraged occupants running after him.
Again he tried to bundle a woman driver from her car and, during the tussle, the woman’s husband came out of the house and began to pummel Ramirez around the head with a length of wood.
Ramirez, understandably by now in a dazed state, took to his heels again, but this time was caught and dragged to earth by the crowd, who held him down until the police arrived.
After a series of lengthy trials, Ramirez was found guilty of multiple murder and sentenced to death. Since then his legal arguments have kept him alive on Death Row to this day.
He did make one interesting statement in court: ‘I don’t believe in the hypocritical, moralistic dogma of this so-called civilized society. I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, the haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards — truly the nematodes of the earth, each one in his own legal profession. You maggots make me sick — hypocrites one and all. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil [presumably he had read Nietzsche at some period in his life], legions of the night, night breed, repeat not the errors of the Night Stalker and show no mercy. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all. That’s it.’
One friend who knew Ramirez in his childhood days said that Ramirez had once been profoundly religious and that Bible classes had turned him to Satanism! There, in my opinion, lies the crucial psychological key to Ricardo Ramirez: childhood or youthful disenchantment rooted in the yawning gap between Christian theory and practice in the secular world.
Like Captain Ahab, Ramirez had found his Moby Dick, his white phantom, in the form of the WASPs, whose religious/ethical corruption he saw as having been designed to cripple and weaken him at an early age, robbing him of hope.
Had Ahab managed to destroy Moby Dick, the dumb creature who had grown to embo
dy his blind, malignant fate and mock his pursuit, he would have experienced the same hollow sense of achievement that Ramirez must have felt after raping and murdering his victims. That the killing had solved nothing, and that he continued to breathe without hope or faith in a world for which he still had only contempt.
With each successive killing Ramirez was really sacrificing himself and gaining no human advantage. Even if he killed all those he hated there would still be a craving to discover something that made sense of life, transforming it to an experience worth enduring.
Naught’s had, all’s spent, where our desire is got without content: ’Tis safer to be that which we destroy than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
— Macbeth, Shakespeare
The manner in which Ramirez, without hesitation, cursorily shot through the head the adult male of all the households he raided, shows not the least degree of concern for human life. So why did he not also kill the remaining women and children after he raped them, especially as they were witnesses to murder and could provide the police with a detailed description of him?
In shooting the adult male of each household, was he ritually killing a symbolic father figure? There was nothing in Ramirez’ family history to indicate he had been mistreated by his father or that he harboured hatred for him. Killing the adult male of the household would therefore appear to have been simply a pragmatic act of caution. Leaving the other members of the family alive could have ministered to some selfish purpose, some fantasy fulfilment. Or perhaps it was due to a weakness, a subconscious residue of sentiment from the far past.
We have, in a previous chapter, already touched upon another possible motive as being the common sadistic wish to leave the other members of the family alive to suffer their degradation for the remainder of their lives. Was attainment of that relatively modest object sufficiently important to justify allowing such dangerous witnesses to live?
No, in my opinion.
This distinctly limited theory of revenge neither fits in with Ramirez’ pathological cunning nor, more significantly, his anti-Christ, grandiose conception of himself in the scheme of things. And most acts of revenge are based on the necessity of surviving the victim to savour the triumph. Therefore, I believe Ramirez must have been grasping for something more ambitious, more enduring, something unique — perhaps a form of immortality other than that which public recognition of his crimes would earn him. Some motivating goal that sufficiently merited apparent acts of dangerous mercy.
What if his hidden agenda were not only to inflict traumatic damage on his immediate victims but also, by chain reaction, on their future children, and their children’s children, ad infinitum?
To envisage and cherish in the mind the reality of his malignant, vengeful influence spreading, imperceptibly and implacably, from generation to generation beyond estimate, could indeed be viewed as having achieved, as near as any human can hope to expect, god-like powers. Immortality.
Conscious deliberation and calculation would distinguish his acts of destructive creation from the imponderables and coincidences of mere chance, making him a Shakespeare of homicide in terms of hereditary or psychological effect. Here was an ambition befitting his metaphysical stature, something that he might consider worth the risk of allowing his victims to survive. For, even in the event of capture, nothing could stop the grand vision from evolving and becoming reality.
A divination he could dream upon, draw vitality from, even behind bars.
I am convinced that variations of such lines of thought — or a strong sense of personal destiny — are shared by most serial killers, but are seldom voiced.
Serial killers are, in that particular respect, very much like writers, pursuing the quest for a measure of immortality in similar solitary fashion, using a knife rather than a pen, skin rather than paper. In metaphysical terms, they would regard anything less a medium than human material as too insubstantial, lacking in existential satisfaction and durability, no substitute for the actual experience of writing on living and breathing pages.
In which case, retroactive metaphysical pondering of the long-term consequences of the act would be paramount to the act itself. Especially as experience soon teaches that nothing is quite what one expected or imagined and that, paradoxically, as previously evidenced, perpetration of the act itself invariably distracts and detracts, lessening immediate existential appreciation. The novelty dulled by concomitant confusion of the senses. This is resented.
It seems to them that nothing less than challenging God or the indifferent universe will satisfy. A form of reversed hope, as it were: ‘Show me your power, your existence, by stopping me.’
Naturally no response is elicited. So their acts, their crimes, become increasingly outrageous and nihilistic to prove to themselves that they themselves exist! That their acts have some meaning. By their rationale, if they do nothing, they might as well be dead. They demand acknowledgement, at any price.
To be ignored is to be deprived of human dignity and meaning.
Deep within the child part of Ramirez, as in us all, there would still have existed a small but sinewy remnant of faith or idealistic longing he could not completely destroy even if he tried. Patiently waiting there like the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The vehemence inherent in the killer’s actions betrays the weakness which he most wishes to conceal. Not even serial killers are entirely what you expect. Sometimes they can actually be the rope across the spiritual abyss, between man and his failed aspirations.
From the standpoint of Ramirez, this poor member of a minority group, possessor of an undisciplined intellect and an indisputably strong will, the doctrines of organised religion had eventually been perceived as a scornful deception, a Conscience devised ‘to keep the strong in awe’ (Shakespeare, Richard the Third).
To his eyes such altruistic doctrines had become a system of counterfeit, absolute and obsolete morality, preaching abnegation of, and contempt for, the real world of the senses, by urging a death wish on the basis of a better life to come. A despicable rejection of perhaps the only worthwhile values of life — aesthetic.
Existence as an exquisite art, rather than a grotesque moral penance.
This deeply vengeful schism appears to have almost certainly generated psychosis within Ramirez and given birth to schizo-paranoid delusions of grandeur/persecution. Which, in turn, had probably led to an over-compensatory appraisal of his superiority, particularly over those he saw as having deliberately deceived him with false teachings.
This would have fomented a burgeoning, perhaps delusive awareness of his intellectual and amoral virtuosity, at having seen through the evil deception of a society exploiting mythical ethics to keep him meek and deprived.
It is common that very often people with an inferiority complex adopt this line of reasoning and related action. They overdevelop a skill, trait or degree of contemptuous reaction to compensate for their actual or imaginary deficiencies in other fields.
In extreme cases of upward-spiraling psychotic paranoia, if this blinkered approach flounders and eventually proves to be unsuccessful, the individual will perceive himself as a victim and cast about for scapegoats of his own.
The transference of hatred or revenge is usually concentrated upon individuals or established authorities which most symbolise the source of obstruction/frustration initially experienced. In some cases not only the object of hatred can be symbolised or connoted, but also the original target. In other words, instead of persevering in the attempt to achieve what he really desired, an attempt which he subconsciously believed would lead to failure and loss of self-esteem, he perversely sets out to degrade or destroy the object of desire. But the subconscious truth goads him to escalating excesses, by which he vainly hopes to convince himself both superior and impervious to the previous attraction.
It is doubtful whether Ramirez had any profound knowledge of existential philosophy, with the exception of my previous deduction that he had read Nietzsche. But
I believe he must have experienced a Thomastic leap of faithlessness, an atavistic grasp of hedonistic reality. His sudden, dramatic conversion to the world of the senses — in modern parlance, sex, drugs and rock and roll — appears to augment this hypothesis. On his revelational journey along a personal road to Sodom and Gomorrah, Ramirez’ baleful eye would have searched eagerly for those responsible for his past misery, deprivation of his vitality and, perhaps above all, for simply wasting his precious time!
That darkly analytical glance, zealous with jealousy and vengeance, would then have sought those who merited death or punishment for that mistake. Those who had gained most from the enfeebling fable indoctrinated and now had most to lose — the aforementioned WASPs.
He would teach them the meaning of misery, of existential accounting. The enemy identified, the attack began, and the result is criminal history. So, when Ramirez sneered, ‘I am beyond your experience,’ he was to some extent perfectly right. We are all beyond one another’s experience. But not so far beyond as the law-abiding would piously prefer to pretend. One fine day the dispossessed become the possessed. Beware the wrath of the disillusioned idealist; it knows no bounds. To seriously paraphrase Groucho Marx, such people end up declaiming they would never join any club that would accept them as a member.
In the modern inferno of crumbling inner cities, such militant outsiders now grow in number by the hour. With a little help and instruction from their friends.
Be in not the least doubt that they are coming to confront some of you. Read tomorrow’s newspapers — if mercy or accident has left you alive after encountering one of this number — for you may be featured in them. Ponder, like Scrooge, that it is never too late to change direction. Or buy a gun. For all the prisons in the world shall not increase your vain hopes of safety one jot, only lessen them.
