Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker - Case Study Example

Introduction: Most sensational crimes are committed either by serial killers or mass murderers. What makes those crimes sensational however is seen not only on the basis of frequency in the case of serial killers, or the number of people they have killed in the case of mass murderers, but also on the way they have carried out the killing. “How could someone do such an atrocious act,” is a question that plays in the mind of the viewing public when a similar case hits the news; a question which brings to light the need to understand criminal behavior so that students of Criminology can have a better grasp of what law enforcement is really all about. The following case analysis is a move towards such end. Case Background: Richard Ramirez made it to the headline when he spread terror in the communities of Los Angeles in 1985. In just a span of one year, the notorious serial killer had committed fourteen murders and thirty-one other felonies related to murder, rape, and robbery aside from the other rape-murder case he carried out in San Francisco. The gruesome acts involved bloody carnage of his victims; mutilating their bodies, and spreading their blood at the scene of the crime. And as though such markings were not horrible enough, he sketched pentagrams on the bodies of his victims to signify his preoccupation with Satanism. Ramirez’ modus operandi was to shoot the man first (usually a husband, or a boyfriend) who he considered an obstacle to his intentions, rape the woman, and ransack the house of valuables. His victims included people between sixty to eighty years old and very young children. The following table enumerates incidents of Richard Ramirez’ killing and rape spree: _________________________________________________________________________ DATE INCIDENTS _________________________________________________________________________ June 28 - Patty Higgins, age 32, was beaten and her throat slit. July 2 - Mary Cannon, age 75, was beaten and her throat slit. July 5 - Deidre Palmer, age 16, survived being beaten with a tire iron. July 7 - Joyce Lucille Nelson, 61 was bludgeoned to death. July 7 - Linda Fortuna, 63, was attacked and Ramirez tried to rape her, but failed. July 20 - Maxson Kneiling, 66, and his wife Lela, also 66, were shot and their corpses mutilated. July 20 - Chitat Assawahem, 31, was shot and his wife Sakima, 29, was beaten then forced to perform oral sex. Ramirez then collected $30,000 in valuables, but before leaving, he sodomized the couple’s eight year-old son. August 6 - Ramirez shout both Christopher Petersen, 38, and his wife, Virginia, 27, in the head. Both somehow survived. August 8 - Ramirez shot Ahmed Zia, 35 and raped and sodomized his wife, Suu Kyi, 28, and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Source: About.com Biographical Sketch Just who is Richard Ramirez? Where did he come from? What kind of a man is he who had become a seemingly ravenous animal? Ricardo Leyva, a.k.a Richard Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas in 1960, the youngest of five children. According to his father, Richard was a good boy, and was observed by neighbors to be a softspoken lonely child. Later probe revealed that he was actually afraid of his father who had a bad temper and who sometimes beat his kids. This fear of his father would force him to leave home and to hang out in a nearby cemetery, sometimes even spending the night there. Richard was also reported to have suffered from epilepsy. As a student, Richard did not do so well. His interest in football was doused by his frequent episodes of epileptic seizure and because of his famish look, had become an object of ridicule among his schoolmates. As a way to get over his frustrations, Richard had learned to isolate himself from the rest of the students. On the ninth grade, he dropped out completely from school and started smoking marijuana. He had become obsessed with rock music; with ACDC band in particular, whose satanic lyrics were believed to have influenced his curiosity with Satanism. If there was one big influence in Richard’s gruesome criminal behavior, it was no other than his cousin Mike who had just returned from the War in Vietnam as a Green Beret. Obviously suffering from a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Mike boasted of his horrible combat experience by telling Richard stories regarding the atrocities they had committed in Vietnam. He recounted how he had tortured and mutilated the enemy, and had shown polaroids to prove it. At night, Mike and Richard would go out in the woods to hunt animals, kill them, and dismember their body parts. The turning point occurred when Mike, in the presence of Richard, shot his wife on the face after the latter nagged him of his laziness instead of going out to look for work. This murderous act and the overall exposure of Richard with his cousin Mike had made a lasting impression on him and had been instrumental in shaping his criminal mind. Criminological Theory: Holmes and Deburger (1988) identify four major types of serial murderers: (1) visionary; (2) mission-oriented; (3) hedonistic; and (4) power/control oriented. The visionary type experiences bouts of delusion; that is, he hears voices that command him to kill certain groups of people such as corrupt politicians, the rich and the powerful. He feels as if God himself is giving him instructions to cleanse the world of sinners. The mission-oriented type, on the other hand, believes that some kind of people has to be annihilated although he doesn’t demonstrate any delusive or psychotic behavior. The power/control group, from the word itself, derives satisfaction when others are made to feel powerless. He believes himself as a dominant figure every time he inflicts pain on others and determines a life-death control over his victims. In contrast, the hedonistic kills out of sheer pleasure and is thrilled by the act of murdering or making others suffer. Ramirez is the hedonistic type. His motives for killing were not done out of vendetta as he had no known enemy back then. Neither was his crime done merely to gain material possessions; robbing his victims of their valuables was a different matter entirely. The truth is that Ramirez was acting out his sexual fantasies that involved mutilation and bloodshed. His long exposure with his cousin Mike who have shown him pictures of dismembered body parts and massacre were made at a time when he was still at the stage of puberty. It could be that such exposure had caused faulty association between his sexuality and what Cousin Mike had been orienting him with. Ramirez was, obviously, sexually sadistic (Lunde, 1976) on all counts. He was vicious in his act; the more blood, the more excited he became; and he almost always consummated those nights with rape and mutilation; with old, and young alike. There were instances when he would strike twice on a single night only because he did not feel satisfied with his first victim. Part of this sexual sadism is the need for dominance so as to be able to degrade his victims and violently inflict harm. Truly so, Ramirez did sodomize and forced his victims to perform oral sex on him. He is thrilled by the way his victims plead for their life, and to spare them of further pain. But the more they beg him to stop the more he makes them suffer. At one time he even threatened to kill a woman for just looking at him straight in the eye. He told her instead to swear to the devil and say “I love Satan” repeatedly while he was raping her. Another important point regarding sexual sadists is the one pointed out by Brittain (1970), their unusual “fascination with occult, black magic, werewolves, vampires, and portrayals of horror in both print and electronic media.” Ramirez preoccupation with Satanism is ever consistent with this finding. He was a self-styled Satanists and not a member of any cult. He had used Satanism to justify his antisocial behavior, and claiming the devil for himself had given him a sense of identity and therefore a safe cover; a security blanket. One characteristic feature of serial murderers is their obvious lack of remorse or sympathy for their victims. It is, as if their antisocial behavior is the rule rather than the exception. They can walk away from the crime scene and immediately resume their normal life without being bothered, at all by what they did. Conversely, these people feel no shame for their evil deeds. Media coverage of Ramirez’ apprehension showed a relaxed individual; smiling at the camera, making faces, and giving the devil sign. Typical of people who suffer from antisocial personality disorder (Nevid, Rathus, Greene) is the absence of anxiety in stressful situations. At the height of Ramirez murderous frenzy, he was said to be capable of hopping from one crime scene to another, to just barge in and start killing and raping people. These were done in a place where there were neighbors around who could have heard the commotion inside the house. But Ramirez was also a seasoned murderer and too smart for his “trade” to make such mistake. In court, he was reported to have kept on ridiculing and disrupting the entire proceeding. And finally, when he was officially sentenced to death nineteen times, Ramirez quipped, “Big deal… I’ll see you in Disneyland.” ORIGIN OF CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR Information regarding Ramirez’ family background was limited. What has been made obvious though was Ramirez’ aloofness with his father who he considered as punitive. From this we can say that Ramirez did not have a significant role model of good behavior. What had been imprinted in his mind, rather was a seemingly consistent barrage of cruelty and coldness. This I say, because no child would run away from home to stay overnight in the cemetery. As this fact could speak volume, one can’t help but ask: How were family members treated at home? Was dad so abusive as to beat his wife? Did Ramirez learn cruelty against women out of witnessing dad’s mistreatment of his wife? Was Richard’s mom an ideal mother? Or was she also as self-centered as her husband was? Curt Bartol’s (1995) explanation of Edwin Sutherland’s differential association theory specifies that: Criminal or deviant behavior is learned the same way that all behavior is learned. The crucial factors are who a person associates with, for how long, how frequently, how personally meaningful the associations, and how early they occur in the person’s development. As a lonely boy yearning for a companion, Ramirez’ cousin, Mike, became for him an important role model. He adored and idolized this hero from Vietnam who taught him how to use guns with real ammo, hunting animals at night just like in the movies. Coupled with the absence of positive values at home, the situation had become conducive for Ramirez to imbibe a wrong set of moral principles. As young as Richard was, he was incapable of filtering information he received from Mike. And no one, responsible enough was there to advise him otherwise; or to at least help neutralize the effects of such information. As an improvement to Sutherland’s theory, Ronald Akers (1977) developed what he called, differential association-reinforcement theory that gave emphasis on the role of social and non-social reinforcement. According to Akers: Most of the learning relevant to deviant behavior is the result of social interactions or exchanges in which the words, responses, presence, and behavior of other persons make reinforcers available, and provide the setting for reinforcement. Unfortunately for Ramirez all such reinforcement turned out to be positive from the direction of his cousin Mike. He was Ramirez’ mentor, whose treatment of him solidified the formation of criminal values. Society for its part, which includes Ramirez’ family and school did not do well in injecting conforming values. Ramirez hated his father and maybe his mother too. In contrast, however the school rejected him. All such elements had seemingly become a concerted effort and so overwhelming, that for Ramirez who witnessed Mike killed his wife, the world is a hateful place to live which offers nothing good but frustration and anxiety. Yet still, other questions need to be answered: How come Ramirez’ brothers and sisters did not turn out to be as cruel? Was his exposure with Mike enough reason to become the kind of person that he turned out to be? Were there other factors that need further scrutiny? Was his epelipsy a contributing factor? Or any biological factors for that matter? And finally, by some wild speculation, was Ramirez destined to be a serial murderer? Was it by some cosmic design that he had become the Night Stalker? CONCLUSION As in normal human behavior, there is no single theory that can fully explain the nature of Criminal behavior. Unlike animal behavior, we can only surmise on the basis of biological elements. Not with us. We are too complicated to be to be confined to a single paradigm. We can, however build upon layers and layers of theoretical assumptions in order to establish a more or less acceptable etiological framework, as we tried to do on the foregoing analysis. Yet, as has been pointed out there are blanks that need to be filled up. The same thing is true with crime prevention. There would have been less “Richard Ramirez” if more individuals were trained to control their emotional outbursts; if there were more families oriented towards correct family values; schools that focused more into forming the psychospiritual and emotional well being of their students as well as their IQ’s. And lastly, there would have been no Mike to go and get traumatized in Vietnam just to return and continue the war back home, had our society been peaceful and compromising. Crime prevention is not an exclusive province for law enforcement agencies. It is the combined efforts of individuals, families, schools, religious organizations, and the state to determine its success. There is no single approach. It is multi-level; it is multi-disciplined. References and suggested readings: Bartol, C. Criminal Behavior (4th ed.). Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995. Bruno, A. The Night Stalker: Serial Killer Richard Ramirez, Crime Library. from http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/notorious/ramirez/terror_1.html Montaldo, C. The Night Stalker. from http://crime.about.com/od/serial/p/nightstaker.htm Corey, G. Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy (2nd ed.). Monterey, Calif: Brooks Cole, 1982. Nevid J., Rathus S., Greene B. Abnormal Psychology in a Changing World (3rd ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997. Read More