Quotes from Philip Carlo

Back at his office, knowing he could now never be Richard's lawyer, Adashek phoned Gallegos and asked him to visit Richard at the jail. To keep Richard from calling the press, Adashek phoned Judge Soper and asked her if she'd bar Richard from having access to the phone and telling reporters that he was guilty. Such a story would virtually destroy Richard's chances at trial if his new counsel decided to litigate the case. Judge Soper took his request under advisement.

But then, who's to say what is evil? "A man's beliefs are his own business. Neither the Church nor anybody else has any right to tell you how to think and how to act; that's what real freedom is about: to be able to be who you really are, not what you are expected or supposed to be," he later said.

The weekend of September 28, Manny Barraza came up to Los Angeles with an agreement by which Richard would assign all the rights of his story to his sister Ruth. The district attorney's office repeatedly said it would not allow Ramirez to use funds from any sales of his story; such money, they said, would go to the victims. Nevertheless, Richard signed the agreement.

The juror selection was a slow, tedious process. It bored Richard, and he soon began falling asleep. He'd stay up late at night reading and would be tired for court. Judge Tynan didn't like his sleeping and warned him to stay awake. Richard took to wearing large black Porsche-type sunglasses, also bought by Doreen, so he could close his eyes behind them.

Richard told Gallegos he was intent upon pleading guilty to all of the crimes except the abduction-molestation charges. He knew, he said, he'd probably get the death sentence, but that didn't matter. He didn't want to go through with any long, drawn-out trial that he'd lose in the end because of all the negative publicity against him. He didn't want his father to suffer the disgrace of all the details that would surely come out during a protracted trial.

Toward the end of July, Richard reportedly told a sheriffs deputy that he was going to have one of his girls sneak a gun into the courtroom and he was going to shoot Halpin to death, then people in the audience, then himself. Security was already tight, but the bailiffs took Ramirez's alleged threat seriously, set up metal detectors, and searched everyone coming into the courtroom.

If, he said, Richard wanted to plead guilty, so be it. However, he pointed out to Richard that an insanity plea might be the way to go. Richard didn't like that idea and shot it right down; he was not, he said, insane. He was different, and he followed the dictates of his own mind and desires, rather than a hypocritically dogmatic society's, he said.

Richard said he'd already assigned the rights of his story to Ruth, but he would sign them over to Gallegos in payment. That was agreeable to the lawyer; he knew the huge media attention would inevitably spark book and movie interest, and he agreed to accept the yet-to-be-made deals as payment.

Daniel Hernandez told Judge Tynan that Richard didn't want to attend the jury selection; Tynan said that he had to, whether he wanted to or not.

Gallegos told Richard he'd been arrested in 1975 for shooting a hooker over a blow job payment, and the press might bring it up. Richard said that didn't matter, that it was bullshit.

Jury selection took six months, longer than most had anticipated. On January 10, 1989, a jury and twelve alternates were sworn in, comprised of six Hispanics and six blacks, seven females and five males. The Hernandezes felt it was a victory for the defense.

Midway through the jury selection, juror expert Jo 'Ellan Dimitrius was brought in to help the defense. She had a long, thin face, intense dark eyes, and bouffant platinum hair. Richard often conferred with her.

Back in San Francisco, the Stalker task force made a very clever decisive move: they published pictures and descriptions of the jewelry stolen from the Pan residence. They figured someone somewhere was buying it, and with the high rewards being offered for the killer's identification, this might be the way to nail the Stalker.

Richard became obsessed with the rush and the feeling of power cocaine gave him. When he was on it, he felt strong, cunning, and invincible. Richard had seen Ruben using a needle since he was twelve, and it was an easy transformation from snorting cocaine to injecting it intravenously.

It didn't take long for the press to learn about Gallegos's prior problem with the law. Both the Times and the News did detailed front-page pieces on his arrest and trial for assault with intent to commit murder and the subsequent reduction in charges by the judge which led to the guilty verdict being put aside.

To support his cocaine habit, Richard committed scores of burglaries. Without difficulty, he was earning the money he needed for the cocaine—which was now between $1,200 and $1,500 a week. The fences at the bus terminal gladly bought whatever he had of worth, though they preferred televisions, stereos, jewelry, stamp collections, watches, any kind of gold, and diamonds.

Richard was taken to San Quentin ten days after he'd been sentenced. The authorities viewed him as a security risk: they knew he had many female admirers, and they knew about the Satanists who had regularly visited the trial, and there were always rumors that someone was going to try and break him out. For security reasons it was decided it would be better if he was flown to Quentin rather than driven.

Death, as such, held no fear for Richard. More than ever he believed in his heart that he would go to Hell and sit at the right hand of Satan. He believed all the hardest criminals throughout history would be there and he'd get to know them. Jack the Ripper, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, and all the others sent to Hell for their deeds. Heaven and Hell were as real to Richard as the helicopter now taking him to San Quentin.

To Richard, in a sense, Mike was a god. He listened to his older cousin's war stories of rape and killing wide-eyed, fascinated beyond normal curiosity. The photos had a profound effect on Richard. They aroused him sexually in a way far more intense than the girlie magazines his brothers had.

In some of the pictures Mike was holding the decapitated head of a woman. It was the same woman who had been forced to fellate him in another photograph. Richard didn't know why these pictures excited him so much; he knew it was wrong for him to be aroused by such brutality, but he would often masturbate thinking about those pictures.

Satan, he began to vehemently believe, would have approved of the thoughts and feelings he was having, and he started to think maybe Satan would be a more appropriate god, a power, for him to follow and worship.

Richard had been smoking pot steadily from the time he was ten. His siblings were always lighting up joints in the house, and Richard was quick to pick up the habit. It made him feel grown up. Pot was cheap in El Paso and easy to come by.

On the morning of Friday, August 30, 1985, Richard Ramirez stepped onto a Greyhound bus to Tucson, Arizona. He wanted to visit his brother, Robert, who was now living in Tucson with his wife Samantha and their daughter, two-year-old Betty. Richard knew nothing of his being linked to the Night Stalker crimes.

It's like nothing else; you can't explain its intensity in words. To have that power over life—nothing is more sexually exciting; it's the ultimate, something very few people experience.