Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez also known as Richard Ramirez was an American serial killer, rapist and burglar, born February 29, 1960 and died June 7, 2013. He was known in the media as the “Night Stalker”, he terrorized the residents of the Los Angeles area and later in San Francisco area from June 1984 until August 1985. He murdered 14 people total and tortured dozens more before being captured. He used a variety of weapons including handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron and even a hammer at one point. Ramirez actually claimed to be a satanist, and never expressed any remorse for his crimes. Which I’m not going to lie, is pretty scary. He eventually died of complications from B-cell lymphoma, which is “blood cancers” attacking the lymph nodes.

Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas on February 29, 1960, the youngest of Julian and Mercedes Ramirez’s five children. His father Julian, a Mexican national and former policeman who later became a laborer on the Santa Fe railroad was prone to fits of anger that often resulted in physical abuse. 

As a 12-year-old, Richard – or “Richie”, as he was known to his family – was strongly influenced by his older cousin, Miguel  Ramirez, also known as Mike who was a decorated U.S Army Green Beret combat veteran who often bragged of his gruesome exploits during the Vietnam War. He shared polaroid photos of his victims, including Vietnamese women he had raped and in some of the photos, Mike posed with the severed head of a woman he had abused. Ramirez, who had begun smoking marijuana at the age of 10, bonded with Mike over joints and gory war stories. Mike taught his young cousin some of his military skills, such as killing with stealth. Around this time, Ramirez began to seek escape from his father’s violent temper by sleeping in a local cemetery.

Ramirez was present on May 4, 1973 when his cousin Mike fatally shot his wife, Jessie, in the face during a domestic argument and after the shooting, Ramirez became withdrawn from his family and peers. Later that year, he moved in with his older sister, Ruth, and her husband, Roberto, an obsessive “peeping Tom” who took Richie along on his nighttime outings peeping into women’s homes. Ramirez also began using LSD and started to take an interest in Satanism. Mike was found not guilty of Jessie’s murder by reason of insanity and was released in 1977, after four years of incarceration at the Texas State Mental Hospital. His influence over Ramirez continued. 

Adolescent Ramirez began to mend his burgeoning sexual fantasies with violence, including forced bondage and rape. While still in school, he took a job at a local Holiday Inn where he used his master key to rob sleeping guests. His employment ended abruptly after a hotel guest returned to his room to find Ramirez attempting to rape his wife.Although the husband beat Ramirez senseless at the scene, criminal charges were dropped when the couple, who lived out of state, declined to return to testify against him. Ramirez dropped out of Jefferson in the ninth grade. At the age of 22, he moved to California where he settled permanently.

Before getting into the neurological side of Ramirez something I thought was interesting was he actually had a woman send him nearly 75 letters during his incarceration. Her name was Doreen Lioy, and they actually got married in California’s San Quentin State Prison. Lioy also said that she was going to commit suicide once Ramirez’s execution went through, but eventually she left him because it was rumored she had found a direct link of his connection to a murder and rape of a 9 year-old girl (which happened to be his first murder). Fact: there is a name for the condition that women have when they’re attracted to convicted murderers or rapists — hybristophilia.

With every serial killer I’ve presented thus far in this blog, there seems to be a pattern present. They either got abused (whether it be physically, emotionally or sexually), faced a childhood trauma, suffered some sort of brain injury or a combination of all the above. In Ramirez’s case it was a combination of all the above, but he suffered multiple brain injuries. At age 2, a dresser fell on his head causing him to get 30 stitches, almost killing him. At age 6, he was hit by a swing, knocked unconscious and this caused deep gashes. And finally at age 11, he was diagnosed with epilepsy, which is a neurological disorder marked by sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions, associated with abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Epilepsy can be caused by brain conditions that cause damage to the brain. There are many arguments that those brain injuries sustained plus the abuse he suffered as a child played into why he became a killer. But to play devil’s advocate here, there are people who suffer brain injuries and traumatic childhoods and don’t end up killers. If things had gone differently for Ramirez could his life have had a different ending? Could the head trauma he suffered as a child have done lasting damage? While it is very true that we ultimately have a choice as to which direction we take in our life, it’s hard to ignore that our past experiences can have influence over us.

Is there a chance that all these experiences at a young age led Richard Ramirez to become The Night Stalker? Or is there a possibility he was born with this monster and no matter what the circumstances of his childhood were, this monster would come out?

Let me know what you think. Thank you for reading!

John Wayne Gacy was born was an American serial killer born on March 17, 1942, raped, tortured and murdered at least 33 young teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois. All of Gacy’s known murders were committed in his Norwood Park ranch house. His victims were usually brought to his address by force or deception, and all expect one of his victims were murdered by strangulation with a makeshift wire/cord, but his first victim was stabbed. He buried 26 of them in the crawl space of his home. Three other victims were buried in other places on his property, while the bodies of his last four victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River. Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980 for 12 of the murders. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. An interesting, but creepy fact about Gacy is that he become known as “Killer Clown” because of his charitable services at fund-raising events, parades, and children’s parties where he would dress up as “Pogo the Clown” or “Patches the Clown”, characters that he had created (and this is creepy to me because clowns absolutely terrify me!) 

Going into Gacy’s earlier life, he was born in Chicago, Illinois, the second of three children born to John and Marion Gacy. As a child he was overweight and not athletic whatsoever and because of this he was bullied a lot. He constantly sought out his father’s approval, but he was never able to get it. Gacy’s father was an alcoholic who was physically and emotionally abusive to him, his siblings, and his mother. The earliest memory Gacy recalled was when he touched some of his father’s stuff and his father got mad and beat him with a leather belt, then proceeded to hit him on the head with a broomstick rendering him unconscious. This abuse continued for all of his childhood, and while his mother tried to shield him from this abuse, it never worked, and it alway ended with his father calling him a “momma’s boy” or “that he would probably end up queer”. Gacy was molested by a family friend, and never told his father because he was afraid his father would blame him. Even after his arrest and him recounting all the abuse he experienced, Gacy denied having any hate or resentment towards his father. During the fourth grade, Gacy began to experience blackouts. He was occasionally hospitalized because of these seizures, he actually estimated that he spent almost a year in the hospital which attributed to the decline of his grades. His father accused him of having this episodes as a way to gain attention and sympathy, even as he laid in the hospital bed, it was never officially concluded what medical condition Gacy had. In 1966, Gacy accepted an offer from his father-in-law to manage three KFCs in Waterloo, Iowa, which actually earn him a good amount of money. So he relocated with his wife, started the job and had 2 children. Seeing as how he was so successful, his father actually apologized to him, saying “I was wrong about you son.” Gacy said this was the most seemingly “perfect” part of his life, but behind the scenes he involved in activities like wife swapping, drug use and cheating on his wife multiple times. It just went down from there.

Although there are no actual brain scans of Gacy’s brain, there’s something better! A psychiatrist by the name of Helen Morrison was granted permission by Gacy to have his brain and he said he wanted her to study it. Studies of the brain came up entirely normal, she said. “They basically told us that there’s actually nothing abnormal, so no tumor, no growth, no sign of any injury,” she said. “The ventricles are fine; no sign of hydrocephalus.” Usually with analysis of brains of serial killers you rarely see any insight as to why they behave the way that they do. Morrison is going to keep the brain, and hopefully in the future how to analyze brain tissue in a different way that can give some insight as to why Gacy acted as he did. Seeing as so he committed so many murders (33 victims!), serial killers usually take this time to argue some sort of insanity defense, arguing that they were not in their right state of mind so that is why they murdered those people. But Gacy did not. He said that “he was not insane and that he did murder those people, he isn’t insane and that he takes full responsibility. It is a rarity to see criminals, especially serial killers who have killed many people, act like this. Morrison argued that he was unable to psychologically dissociate himself from his mother, disabling him from developing his own identity. Therefore, him killing the parts of himself he didn’t like, like the fact he was homosexual (because he many different experiences with men, which he enjoyed), but he couldn’t come out because of his father. Who would’ve thought the thought that childhood abuse and the inability to be yourself who have caused the deaths of so many innocent people?

Last time we talked about I feel like one of the most well known serial killers, here’s another. The next serial killer we are talking about today is Jeffrey Dahmer, also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or Milwaukee Monster. Dahmer was a serial killer and sex offender who raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991. For one of the reasons that made me pick Dahmer was the fact that while investigating his later murders the police found evidence of necrophilia, which is sexual intercourse or attraction towards corpses, and cannibalism, which is the act of practice of consuming another human’s organs. SO gross! But in a kind of fascinating way!

In order to know him entirely you need to know a little bit about he grew up. Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 21, 1960 born to Lionel and Joyce Dahmer. He was described as an energetic and happy child until the age of 4 where he had to have a surgery in order to correct a double hernia, and he was described as not being the same afterwards.  Noticeably different, he became increasingly withdrawn following the birth of his younger brother and the family’s frequent moves. By his early teens, he was disengaged, tense and largely friendless. Dahmer claims that his compulsions toward necrophilia and murder began around the age of 14, but it appears that the breakdown of his parents’ marriage and their divorce a few years later may have been the catalyst for turning these thoughts into actions. By the time of his first killing, Dahmer’s alcohol consumption had spun out of control. He dropped out of Ohio State University after one quarter term, and his recently remarried father insisted that he join the Army. Dahmer enlisted in late December 1978, and was posted to Germany shortly thereafter. His drinking problem continued, and in early 1981, the Army discharged him. Although German authorities would later investigate possible connections between Dahmer and murders that took place in the area during that time, it is not believed that he took any more victims while serving in the Armed Forces. Following his discharge, Dahmer returned home to Ohio. An arrest later that year for disorderly conduct prompted his father to send Dahmer to live with his grandmother in Wisconsin, but his alcohol problem continued and he was arrested the following summer for indecent exposure. He was arrested once again in 1986, when two boys accused him of masturbating in front of them. He received a one-year probationary sentence. And everything went downhill from there.

Now onto the next reason I find Jeffrey Dahmer’s situation so interesting. Dahmer was actually diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and a psychotic disorder, but was found to be find legally sane at trial. Borderline personality disorder is a mental health disorder that impacts the way you think and feel about yourself and others, causing problems functioning in everyday life, it includes self-image issues, difficulty managing emotions and behavior, and a pattern of unstable relationships. Schizotypal personality disorder or schizotypal disorder is a mental disorder characterized by severe social anxiety, thought disorder, paranoid ideation, derealization, transient (or not longing) psychosis, and often unconventional beliefs. People with this disorder feel extreme discomfort with maintaining close relationships with people and avoid forming them, mainly because the subject thinks their peers harbor negative thoughts towards them. Lastly, psychotic disorders are severe mental disorders that cause abnormal thinking and perceptions. Also throughout his trials it was thought that he had anti personality disorder as presented throughout his childhood and through his killings. They thought he did not know right from wrong. Dahmer attempted to make his victims like zombies, that would be unconscious and unresponsiveness but still breathing, which was unsuccessful and ultimately led to his victims deaths. The more he failed the more, the more he attempted it. He had many of the red flag signs in his early childhood which was later accompanied by a young teen drinking problem. People who analyzed Dahmer more ultimately concluded or theorized that due to his childhood, drinking problems, coming out as homosexual when it wasn’t accepted and possibly due to the surgery he had when he was younger he shouldn’t have been held entirely responsible for his actions, but he was. And people also felt like it could have been prevented as well. Maybe if he was accepted when he came out or if he made friends in school and wasn’t bullied he wouldn’t have ended murdering 17 people (and those are the ones that are known about).

Do you think like me? I have had this question in my brain for most of life, and although I have lived 18 years on this earth, I still quite haven’t figured out the answer. As humans yes we are all similar in some ways, but in many ways different. Quite different. Whether it is the way we solve problems or how we process emotions. Also how we act and react to certain things. As decided by my previous post, this passion blog called Beautiful Minds, and it will be on the beautiful minds of humans and how quickly beautiful, can turn murderous.

In the image above we have Ted Bundy, one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Bundy kidnapped, raped and killed 30 to 40 women during the 1970’s and possibly earlier, committed across seven different states. But eventually he was caught and put to death by electric chair in 1989. Although Bundy was a horrible person and a murderer, that is not the reason he got this much attention. He was known as being wildly charming and attractive to many women. Even when he was convicted and charged, he had fans saying that he seemed too “nice and charming to commit such horrible crimes like those”. To a person reading this, this may seem ridiculous that these women who make these statements or the ones who wrote him love letters in jail (yes there were multiple women who wrote him love letters during his time in jail) can be swayed solely on appearance and a charming personality. But in actuality it’s quite common in everyday situations. For example, think back to a moment where you met someone who you would consider charming. They charmed you in the way they smiled, maybe their body language or the words they said to you. When you meet someone incredibly charming, their words may be convincing enough to have you believe whatever they want you to. In this instance he had these women convinced he was innocent. His ability to be charming and clever also assisted in how he captured his victims. He would pretend to have a cast, crutches and pretend to have a disability (also posing as authority figures, like police officers at times) in order to lure his victims to his car, where he would then strike them and put them in his car. Although Bundy was found guilty and eventually put to death, some people claim he was mentally ill and that he shouldn’t have been held entirely accountable for his actions.

Pictured above you see a comparison of two brain scans, the one on the left is a normal brain and the brain on the right presents a brain with a psychopathic pattern. If you look at the differences in the brain scans you see in the normal brain there are lots of patches of red and yellow, in comparison to the one with the psychopathic pattern there is no red and barely any yellow. The orbital cortex puts a break on another of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there’s an imbalance — the orbital cortex isn’t doing it’s job — perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was just born that way. What takes over in it is place? The area that drives your id-type behaviors, which is rage, violence, eating, sex, drinking. In my personal opinion I don’t believe that he was born like that or that his brain sustained an injury. I was conducting more research on Bundy and other serial killers as a comparison, in order to see what makes them become violent. Here is what I found: If early in life a person is lonely and doesn’t fit in and is empty, they begin to look for some way to undo that, to satisfy their loneliness. And they turn to fantasy to comfort themselves. This is what happened with Bundy. He started out lonely and shy as a child. He believed all of the attention was paid to the younger kids, who were really (his stepfather) Johnnie Bundy’s children from a previous marriage. He started fantasizing about women he saw while window peeping or elsewhere and mimicking the accents of some politicians he listened to on the radio. In essence, he was fantasizing about being someone else, someone important. But just because someone is lonely, may come from an emotional dysfunctional family, or have similar things like Bundy does not mean that they will turn out to be a serial killer.These things did not cause him to kill—they built up the desire within him to experience more real sexual activity with a girl. He was not interested in killing. The real thing was to get as close to controlling a woman as possible and perhaps rape her, because it was the next step in what was getting to be exciting for him. The fact that he had an attachment disorder from his mother passing herself off as his sister, and then developed an obsession of knives, along with many other things eventually leading him to become a serial killer. How fascinating how a person can be born so normal, and the environment and people around them change them dramatically and eventually lead them to become murderers.