World Famous Cults and Fanatics (18 page)

The aim of Helter Skelter was to make whites believe that blacks were about to start a massacre, and to massacre them in turn.
It seemed logical to Manson that if this was to be achieved, the
murders had to be followed up as soon as possible.
That evening, seven family members, all high on “acid”, set out for a well-to-do area of Los Angeles, Los Feliz, and chose a house at
random.
But when Manson saw pictures of children through the window, he ordered them to move on to a house with an expensive car and a boat trailer outside.
It was the home of a middle-aged couple,
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

The LaBiancas had gone to bed when Charles Manson walked into their bedroom with a gun and ordered them to get up.
He tied them up, then went back to the car and ordered Watson, Patricia
Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten to go into the house and kill them.
He, meanwhile, would go off with the others and kill someone else.

Watson and his helpers found the LaBiancas lying quietly.
Mrs LaBianca was led to a bedroom and tied with electric flex; then her husband was stabbed in the throat.
When Rosemary LaBianca
screamed “What are you doing to my husband?”, Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed her in the back, severing her spine.
Watson slashed the word “War” on LaBianca’s chest while
Patricia Krenwinkel stabbed both bodies with a carving fork After it was clear the victims were dead, they scrawled “Death to pigs” and “Rise” – and a mis-spelled
version of “Helter Skelter” – on the wall, then took a shower, and fed the dogs (who had watched the murders without barking, and even licked their hands).
They then hitch-hiked
back to the Spahn ranch where Manson was waiting.
The murders he had intended to commit had been abandoned; in fact, he had left the girls in an apartment block with orders to kill a film actor,
but they had deliberately knocked on the wrong door and went away again.

The slaughter created the sensation Manson had hoped for – suddenly the sale of handguns and burglar alarms soared in Los Angeles.
Six days later, the stolen car used in both crimes was
seized by the police – but not in connection with the murders; they had decided to swoop on the hippie commune in search of drugs, guns and stolen vehicles.
Unfortunately, the man who had
chased the Sharon Tate killers off his lawn failed to report the incident to the police, otherwise the case would probably have been solved immediately.
Manson and twenty-four other people were
arrested, but released three days later for lack of evidence.

On 26 August, less than two weeks after the murders, a Spahn ranch hand named Shorty O’Shea vanished; his body was never found, but it is believed that he was tortured and killed by the
family because he had married a negro woman, and because he knew too much.

In 12 September 1969, the family moved back to Death Valley.
There they courted the attention of the police by wantonly burning a bulldozer belonging to the local rangers.
Tyre tracks led them
to a stolen car, and a miner told them about the family (who had made an unsuccessful attempt to kill him).
On 9 October police surrounded the Barker ranch, then arrested everyone on it –
mostly girls, who tried to disconcert them by removing their clothes and urinating.
Manson returned to the ranch three days later, to be told about the arrests by a few girls who had escaped the
raid.
While he was eating, the police descended again.
Manson almost escaped by hiding in a tiny cupboard under the kitchen sink, but was detected.

It was Susan Atkins, in prison in Los Angeles on suspicion of knowing something about the Gary Hinman murder, who betrayed the family.
She began to drop hints to fellow prisoners ahout the
Sharon Tate killings, and finally described them to her cellmate in detail.
The cellmate reported this to another prisoner, who reported it to the police.
Under questioning, Susan Atkins was soon
confessing the whole story.

The trial was one of the most expensive in Los Angeles history (although in this respect it was surpassed by the trial of the Hillside Stranglers, Buono and Bianchi, ten years later).
It had a
slightly surrealistic air, since Manson seemed to have no regard for normal logic, and insisted that they were innocent because society was guilty.
Asked if she thought the killing of eight people
unimportant, Susan Atkins asked if the killing of thousands of people with napalm was important.
Manson became a hero of the hippies, who saw him as a figure of social protest; there can be no
doubt that if he had been released, he would soon have had as huge a following as any messiah in history.

Even after the arrests, the murders went on.
Defence attorney Ronald Hughes disappeared eight days into the trial; his badly decomposed body was found in the desert at about the time of the
sentencing; he had strongly disagreed with the decision of Manson’s co-defendants to insist that he was not guilty.
In his book
Helter Skelter
, prosecution attorney Vincent Bugliosi
lists a dozen other murders connected with the family, including those of two family members believed to have killed Hughes.

On 30 March 1970, Charles Manson, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel were sentenced to death; in 1971 Watson received the same sentence.
In effect, this meant life
imprisonment.

In September 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford, but her gun misfired; she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In April 1992, Manson – now housed in a maximum security prison in the San Joaquin Valley – made his eighth appeal for parole, but was turned down by the board.

Richard Ramirez

Throughout 1985 handgun sales in Los Angeles soared.
Many suburbanites slept with a loaded pistol by their beds.
A series of violent attacks upon citizens in their own homes
had shattered the comfortable normality of middle-class life.
Formerly safe neighbourhoods seemed to be the killer’s favourite targets.
The whole city was terrified.

The attacks were unprecedented in many ways.
Neither murder nor robbery seemed to be the obvious motive, although both frequently took place.
The killer would break into a house, creep into the
main bedroom and shoot the male partner through the head with a .22.
He would then rape and beat the wife or girlfriend, suppressing resistance with threats of violence to her or her children.
Male
children were sometimes sodomized, the rape victims sometimes shot.
On occasion, he would ransack the house looking for valuables while at other times he would leave empty-handed without searching.
During the attacks he would force victims to declare their love for Satan.
Survivors described a tall, slim Hispanic male with black, greasy hair and severely decayed teeth.
The pattern of crimes
seemed to be based less upon a need to murder or rape but a desire to terrify and render helpless.
More than most serial killers the motive seemed to be exercising power.

The killer also had unusual methods of victim selection.
He seemed to be murdering outside his own racial group, preferring Caucasians and specifically Asians.
He also seemed to prefer to break
into yellow houses.

In the spring and summer of 1985 there were more than twenty attacks, most of which involved both rape and murder.
By the end of March the press had picked up the pattern and splashed stories
connecting the series of crimes.
After several abortive nicknames, such as “The Walk-In Killer” or “The Valley Invader”, the
Herald Examiner
came up with “The
Night Stalker”, a name sensational enough to stick.

Thus all through the hot summer of 1985 Californians slept with their windows closed.
One policeman commented to a reporter: “People are armed and staying up late.
Burglars want this guy
caught like everyone else.
He’s making it bad for their business.”
The police themselves circulated sketches and stopped anyone who looked remotely like The Night Stalker.
One innocent
man was stopped five times.

Despite these efforts and thorough forensic analysis of crime scenes there was little progress in the search for the killer’s identity.

Things were obviously getting difficult for The Night Stalker as well.
The next murder that fitted the pattern occurred in San Francisco, showing perhaps that public awareness in Los Angeles had
made it too taxing a location.
This shift also gave police a chance to search San Francisco hotels for records of a man of The Night Stalker’s description.
Sure enough, while checking the
downmarket Tenderloin district, police learned that a thin Hispanic with bad teeth had been staying at a cheap hotel there periodically over the past year.
On the last occasion he had checked out
the night of the San Francisco attack.
The manager commented that his room “smelled like a skunk” each time he vacated it and it took three days for the smell to clear.

Though this evidence merely confirmed the police’s earlier description, The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to prove more revealing.
A young couple in Mission Viejo were
attacked in their home.
The Night Stalker shot the man through the head while he slept, then raped his partner on the bed next to the body.
He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for
money and jewellery.
Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head.
Unfortunately for the killer, however, his victim caught a glimpse
of him escaping in a battered orange Toyota and memorized the licence plate.
She immediately alerted the police.
LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in Los Angeles’s Chinatown
district while the owner was eating in a restaurant.
An all-points bulletin was put out for the vehicle, and officers were instructed not to try and arrest the driver, merely to observe him.
However, the car was not found.
In fact, The Night Stalker had dumped the car soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in Los Angeles’s Rampart district.
After
plain-clothes officers had kept the car under surveillance for twenty-four hours, the police moved in and took the car away for forensic testing.
A set of fingerprints was successfully lifted.

Searching police fingerprint files for a match manually can take many days and even then it is possible to miss correlations.
However, the Los Angeles police had recently installed a fingerprint
database computer system, designed by the FBI, and it was through this that they checked the set of fingerprints from the orange Toyota.
The system works by storing information about the relative
distance between different features of a print, and comparing them with a digitized image of the suspect’s fingerprint.
The search provided a positive match and a photograph.
The Night
Stalker was a petty thief and burglar.
His name was Ricardo Leyva Ramirez.

The positive identification was described by the forensic division as “a near miracle”.
The computer system had only just been installed, this was one of its first trials.
Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after 1 January 1960.
Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.

The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news.
At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo.
On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph all over their front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.

He arrived safely and went into the bus station toilet to finish off the cocaine he had bought.
No one seemed to be overly interested in him as he left the station and walked through Los
Angeles.
Ramirez was a Satanist, and had developed a belief that Satan himself watched over him, preventing his capture.

At 8.15 a.m.
Ramirez entered Tito’s Liquor Store at 819 Towne Avenue.
He selected some Pepsi and a pack of sugared doughnuts; he had a sweet tooth that, coupled with a lack of personal
hygiene, had left his mouth with only a few blackened teeth.
At the counter other customers looked at him strangely as he produced three dollar bills and awaited his change.
Suddenly he noticed the
papers’ front pages, and his faith in Satan’s power must have been shaken.
He dodged out of the shop and ran, accompanied by shouts of, “It is him!
Call the cops!”
He
pounded off down the street at a surprising speed for one so ostensibly unhealthy.
Within twelve minutes he had covered two miles.
He had headed east.
He was in the Hispanic district of Los
Angeles.

Ever since the police had confirmed that The Night Stalker was Hispanic there had been a great deal of anger among the Hispanic community of Los Angeles.
They felt that racial stereotypes were
already against them enough without their being associated with psychopaths.
Thus more than most groups, Hispanics wanted The Night Stalker out of action.