Grisly new series on the Night Stalker tells us little about the killer himself
True crime has paid big dividends for Netflix. From “Making a Murderer” to “The Keepers,” “The Staircase” and “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness,” the streaming service has been a steady provider of whiteknuckle programming for viewers who can’t get enough of grisly crime scene photos, dogged detective work and reallife cliffhangers that seem tailor made for TV binge-watching.
Murder has been very, very good for Netflix. But its latest bloody offering, “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer,” is problematic TV. The story of Richard Ramirez and the sadistic killing spree that kept Californians in a state of terror throughout much of 1985 is so horrific, it seems like it should be off limits, somehow. If any real-life crime did not need to be packaged and delivered to our Netflix queues, surely the Night Stalker case is it.
But filmmaker Tiller Russell (“The
Last Narc” and “The Seven Five,” about a very dirty cop in 1980s Brooklyn) has decided to go there, and the resulting four-part series is occasionally absorbing and frequently maddening. Absorbing because the longer it takes the authorities to catch Ramirez, the higher the body count is going to be. It’s hard not be become invested in the chase. It is maddening because once Ramirez is caught, after killing at least a dozen people and sexually assaulting multiple women and children, the documentary doesn’t know what to do with him.
Really, the title says it all. The focus of “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is on Los Angeles County sheriff ’s homicide detectives Frank Salerno and Gil Carrillo and their monthslong pursuit of Ramirez. The two detectives are Russell’s main interview subjects, and even as the series makes some room for the victims and their families, the bulk of the four episodes is devoted to the hours and hours of methodical investigating by the cool, collected pro (Salerno) and the passionate, intuitive newbie (Carrillo).
The authorities don’t find out Ramirez’s name until the end of the third episode. He isn’t caught by a mob of angry East L.A. citizens until halfway through the final episode. Which means viewers spend a lot of time with Salerno, Carrillo and the members of the Los Angeles media who covered them. We get details galore — shoe prints, shell casings, shadowy re-enactments with gruesome sound effects, and piles of graphic crime scene photos that will haunt you for days — but there is almost nothing in the way of big-picture perspective.
And as the series points out for a fleeing few minutes during its first episode, the picture was big.
In the 1980s, Los Angeles was home to blockbuster Hollywood movies, a booming recording industry and celebrities galore. The Queen of England came in 1983 during a California swing that included a visit to San Diego. The Summer Olympics were held there the following year. But Los Angeles had a history of being home to serial killers, most notably Charles Manson, who terrorized Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, and “Hillside Stranglers” Angelo Buono Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi, two cousins who tortured and killed 10 young women (Bianchi murdered two other women on his own) between 1977 and 1978.
Russell gets to Los Angeles’ glitter-and-gore contrast right away, and then he promptly drops it. This was the backdrop to the Night Stalker summer, and we never see it again.
Instead, Carrillo, Salerno and other members of law enforcement walk us through each crime, as Ramirez breaks into homes all over Los Angeles (and, later, San Francisco) to commit random, violent murders and vicious assaults while also making time to kidnap children, assault them, and then set them free. Unlike killers before him, Ramirez doesn’t seem to have a pattern. His victims are old and young, male and female. Sometimes he uses a gun, sometimes he uses a knife or a hammer. Sometimes he kills his victims, sometimes he doesn’t.
One of those survivors was Anastasia Hronas, who was kidnapped and assaulted by Ramirez when she was 6 years old. Her calm recounting of her unimaginable experience and her determination to survive it — “I’m OK,” she says in the last episode. “I grew up. I went to school. I have a family. I’m not letting that turn me into what he was.” — brings some real humanity to the project.
Russell also deserves credit for his interviews with some of the victims’ families, who share details about their loved ones that show you a few of the people behind the numbing parade of corpses.
Eventually, a random phone tip and an informant’s confession about a piece of jewelry lead investigators to Ramirez. Without much time to spare, “Night Stalker” sprints through Ramirez’s trial, which ended on Nov. 7, 1989, when he was sentenced to death. Carrillo and Salerno chat with him briefly after the trial, but the episode doesn’t spend much time on that, either. In 1994, he agrees to be interviewed by crime writer Philip Carlo, but we hear just a snippet of the interview, and that’s that. Ramirez died in 2013 due to complications of B-cell lymphoma.
By the end of the series, Russell has given us a thorough, often lurid accounting of the who, the what and the how of Richard Ramirez and his many crimes. But we do not get much in the way of why. In the introduction to the final episode, a few unnamed people weigh in briefly on his terrible childhood in El Paso, Texas, and that’s it. Russell may not have wanted to glorify Ramirez, but if he has time for Ramirez’s courtroom groupies, various turf wars between the Sheriff ’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, not to mention all those grisly photos, he could have told us a little something about the monstrous man we have been following for nearly four hours.
Without even the sketchiest examination of the killer or his motives, a bigpicture look at the awful toll that summer took on terrified Californians, or commentary from people outside the media and law enforcement, “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is a supersized network procedural at best and crime porn at worst. It will probably pay off for Netflix, but it will leave you with nothing but your nightmares.