If you want to talk about serial killers, then Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez is definitely a representative figure that cannot be avoided.
As one of the world's top ten ring killers, Richard is almost well known in the United States in the last century, and Netflix even launched a limited documentary in 2021 to restore the killing nightmare.
Richard's titles are many, his family calls him Richie, the local people in Los Angeles call him "Satan's disciple", and in the mouths of the American media, he has transformed into a "night devil" who is terrifying in the dark.
Official records show that from April 1984 to August 1985, Richard killed at least 19 people in just over a year, and in the spring and summer of 1985 alone, he murdered 14 people in a row.
There are no fixed groups and characteristics of the victims, they are men and women and children, the age distribution ranges from 6 years old to 82 years old, regardless of skin color or industry, logically disorderly, just live.
In this case, male victims are beaten and shot, while women and children are sexually assaulted, slit and dismembered, and in the same way, every horrific murder scene leaves an inverted five-pointed star totem.
In an age of rumors, this Satanic cult killing sign also put everyone in Los Angeles at risk.
It is worth mentioning that after Richard was arrested and arrested, this sensational national demon killer attracted a lot of fanatical girls who were obsessed with and adored him because of their appearance like comic book characters, and they would receive courtship letters from all over every day, and even in 1996, there was really a fan who "chased the stars" successfully and married Richard in prison.
Richard was born in February 1960 to a working-class family in Texas, the youngest of six children, and his father did not pamper him much.
As an immigrant family, Richard's father immigrated to the United States from Mexico with his family, and then changed from a policeman to a porter, and the huge psychological gap also made his father very irritable, often abusing Richard and his brothers and sisters.
It is said that Richard was tied to the cross for a whole day as punishment after each beating.
At the age of 12, Richard met his cousin Miguel, who had returned from the Vietnamese stand, and if the original family was Richard's petri dish for becoming a cold-blooded killer, then this man was a fierce catalyst.
Miguel, who returned from the army, did not go out to find a job like a comrade-in-arms, but instead pulled Richard and these children every day to brag about his "merits" in Vietnam.
His cousin Miguel not only taught Richard to smoke marijuana, but also showed him photographs of himself killing, torturing, and sexually assaulting Vietnamese women.
Logically, anyone with this number of relatives will hide far away, but in Richard's view, the appearance of his cousin is tantamount to a "beam of light" of his own dim vitality.
Sometimes, the cousin would also teach Richard military knowledge, teach him how to hide in the grass and other shadows to peek at the girls without being found, in addition, his sexual assault, massacre, and corpse splitting atrocities in Vietnam fascinated Richard.
At the age of 13, the tragic accident changed the trajectory of Richard's life, and his cousin shot his wife in front of Richard. It was also the first time Richard had faced death.
After the shooting, his cousin naturally went to prison, and without his company, Richard gradually became sullen and even estranged from his family.
By 1982, Richard simply dropped out of school and moved to California. There, he became addicted to drugs, and in order to solve the cost of drug expenses, he began to commit burglary and go around committing crimes.
On April 10, 1984, When Liang Meishan, a 9-year-old Chinese girl, was squatting on the ground with her brother looking for a lost dollar, Richard walked over.
Under the coaxing of rhetoric, Liang Meishan followed him into the basement, and as soon as he arrived, Richard revealed his true face.
He strangled the little girl by the neck with a rope and began to inflict heinous beatings and sexual assaults on her, and after the atrocity, he took out a spring knife and stabbed the little girl's body, and hung the half-naked body on a tube on the wall.
It wasn't until 2009 that police identified Richard as the killer through DNA, by which time he had been arrested for 25 years. It also became the earliest known murder committed by Richard.
In June of the same year, Richard set his sights on Jennie Vincow, a 78-year-old elderly man living alone.
At first, he only planned to sneak into the house late at night to steal something, but after half a day of hard work and finding that there was nothing of value in the house, he spread his anger on Jennie inside the house.
He slashed dozens of knives at the sleeping old man, and then slashed at the neck, and his head was almost cut off... To vent his anger, Richard also sexually assaulted Jennie's body after beheading.
After the incident, the police extracted a fingerprint left by Richard at the scene, but unfortunately, the fingerprint comparison technology of that era still relied on the manual naked eye to carefully compare, so this clue did not play a key role in solving the case.
Perhaps only know that this torture is too fierce, after the crime, Richard disappeared nine months before committing the crime again, and it was from this time that a killing frenzy officially arrived, making the whole of Los Angeles tremble with fear.
On March 17, 1985, Richard re-entered the house and shot and killed 37-year-old Darley and another roommate.
On the same day, just after the murder, he met 30-year-old Chinese Yu Cailian on the road, dragged her out of the car, and shot her.
Ten days later, on March 27, Richard went into another burglary in the middle of the night and shot a man named Vincent, and just as he was about to ask Vincent where his wife's belongings were, she suddenly broke free and took a shotgun from under the bed and pointed it at Richard. However, there were no bullets in this gun...
This act also directly angered Richard, who fired three shots at the woman in a row, then took a carving knife from the kitchen and slashed at the dying corpse, then dug out her eyeballs and put them in a jewelry box to take away as a souvenir, until she was found after her arrest.
When the police arrived at the scene, in addition to a large amount of blood on the ground, there was also the woman's dismembered body.
This successful escape also made Richard's bolder and bolder, and he became even more crazy:
On May 14, Richard robbed and murdered in Montreal Park, shooting 66-year-old Bill and sexually assaulting his disabled wife;
On May 29, he drove a stolen car and sexually assaulted an 83-year-old man and her 81-year-old sister. Two days later, two elderly people were found, one of whom was too seriously injured and unfortunately died;
On 30 May, Richard sneaked into Carol's house in the same car and handcuffed Carol's 11-year-old son, forcing him to watch his mother being repeatedly assaulted;
On July 2, Richard again enters the home of a 75-year-old man living alone, loots his belongings, and then kills and escapes;
On 5 July, he broke into a home and repeatedly beat a 16-year-old girl with an iron, and although the victim eventually survived, the entire scalp was stitched 478 times;
On 7 July, he went into another burglary and robbed a 60-year-old man, kicking her in the face repeatedly with his foot until he died;
On July 20, he committed a burglary and hacked to death an old couple who were sleeping;
……
What is even more frightening is that Richard's crime frequency is much higher than expected, and these are only the evil records of death.
According to the official report, there are records of attempts to attack others on the remaining dates, but they did not find the opportunity to be ruthless, so that some victims were lucky enough to escape.
Since these murders mostly happened at night, he soon became the protagonist of all the newspapers and television in California, and the media also gave him the title of "Night Devil".
With such a brutal and intensive attack, coupled with the fact that the police repeatedly dropped the chain to let Richard escape under his nose, the people of Los Angeles, eroded by the atmosphere of terror, could only act spontaneously to protect themselves.
Some called relatives and friends to move in together, some picked up guns and were fully armed, and even derived security services, asking professional security personnel to protect themselves and their families at night...
On August 28, the always passive Los Angeles police finally had key evidence when they found Richard's stolen vehicle in Koreatown, Los Angeles, with fingerprints in the rearview mirror matching the comparisons they had initially taken at the crime scene.
After visiting the staff of the nearby store, the police finally determined Richard's appearance based on the descriptions of the masses, as early as a few years ago, he was arrested for illegal drug trading, and the police also found Richard's headshot from the case.
The funny thing is that even if he knew the true appearance of the night devil, he was not caught by the police in the end. Instead, after the official release of the wanted photo, Richard, who was planning to steal the car again, was caught by the crowd.
The people, who had been highly nervous for a long time, finally found a release, and everyone gathered around to scold and besiege Richard, until the police arrived at the scene and "rescued" the killer from the hands of the masses.
On September 20, 1989, the jury unanimously convicted Richard of 13 counts of murder, 5 counts of attempted murder, 11 counts of sexual assault, and 14 counts of burglary, and was sentenced to death.
In court, Richard did not act very panicked after learning of this result, but said with a flirtatious face: "Scared me to death, sooner or later it is a death, see you at Disneyland!" ”
However, this justice is not only late, but even useless.
According to local law, the number of death penalties is displayed every year, and if it is not rotated this year, it will naturally be postponed to the next year, and the time in line alone will be enough to give Richard the opportunity to appeal and disrupt the procedure.
From the time he was sentenced to death in 1989 to Richard's natural death in prison in 2013, neither the victims nor the families of the victims waited for the news of his execution.
Not only that, Richard's more than twenty years in prison can be said to be colorful.
The overwhelming media coverage has made some people aware of his existence, bloody, violent, serial killings, turning the police around... And so on labels have also made him suck a lot of female fans who worship super criminals.
In their eyes, there's nothing cooler than falling in love with a killer. This even included a jury member.
Cindy Harden fell hopelessly in love with Richard when she first met him in court, and on Valentine's Day, she went to jail to give Richard a cupcake she had made herself, which read "I love you."
Although Cindy was later removed from his post, he was so infatuated with Richard that he even went on a TV talk show to defend him, calling him a "caring man."
Cindy alone with her boyfriend's filter received several sacks of courtship letters every year during richard's more than 20 years in prison, and some women who adored him would photograph their private parts and send them to Richard to show their admiration.
"He's good looking and I like his hands."
"It's dangerous to go to a state prison, but if you can meet the world's most fearsome killer, it's worth making your dreams come true."
"Mom said you can love someone, but you don't have to like him."
It is hard to believe that such remarks were actually spoken by some flesh-and-blood people.
This phenomenon is also called Hybridia, also known as "bad boy control", and this psychological academic word has the most intuitive representative case.
In the end, a magazine editor, Doreen Lioy, successfully took down the "niche lover", and the two were married in prison in 1996.
Doreen said that if Richard was executed, she would kill herself immediately.
In their vigorous courtship, Richard received even more care than the victim's family, and he lived peacefully in prison for 28 years, but the process was an indescribable ordeal for the victims.
Anastasia Hronas, one of the surviving victims, was 6 years old when she was abducted and assaulted by Richard, and as the years have passed, she can only tell herself over and over again, "Don't be like a murderer." ”
Even after years of death, some people still have nightmares of being gunned over and over again.
Their lives were originally more possible, but now they can only repeat their names in prayer, seeking a moment of peace.