Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
HOW THEY STALKED THE STALKER
A gripping new true crime series reveals how a rookie cop and a grizzled veteran teamed up to catch a serial killer terrorising LA
The grizzled detective and his rookie partner who somehow form a dynamic crime-fighting duo has become a Hollywood cliché. But sometimes it’s true.
Gil Carrillo was the youngest cop in the LA murder department when he had a hunch that a set of seemingly random killings and abductions were all the work of one man. His colleagues thought he was crazy, and it was only when he teamed up with Frank Salerno, a legendary detective who’d already caught two serial killers, that they were able to finally collar Richard Ramirez, known as the Night Stalker.
It was 1985 and there was a record-breaking heatwave, but everyone kept their windows and doors closed. That was because a psychopath who crept into homes through windows and garages was on the loose. He would shoot, stab or strangle his victims, who included nine-year-old Mei Leung, and he never left a fingerprint.
The chilling story is now told in forensic detail in Netflix’s new true-crime series Night Stalker: The Hunt For A Serial Killer. ‘It was important we didn’t glorify the killer,’ says director Tiller Russell. ‘But this was a unique crime story. Everyone knew he was going to kill again at any moment, but this set of killings were different because they were totally random. It unleashed this wave of terror because anyone could be next.’
The story focuses on the detectives at the heart of the hunt. ‘The relationship between these two men captivated me from the beginning,’ says Tiller. ‘Just making it onto the homicide team was a childhood dream for Gil. To suddenly find himself involved in the case of a lifetime took him on an incredible hero’s journey, alongside Frank, this legendary cop.’
The LA homicide department was already seeing 1,000 murders a year when Gil investigated several he thought might be linked, including those of Vincent Zazzara, 64, and his wife Maxine, who were shot in their home. Crucially, the killer left footprints from a pair of size 11½ Avia trainers in the Zazzaras’ flowerbeds.
At the same time there were a spate of child abductions in which youngsters were taken from their bedrooms and molested before being abandoned. There was little to link the two sets of crimes, except for very similar witness descriptions: the man was tall and thin, with a light-skinned Latino appearance, dishevelled hair, brown teeth and a pungent odour. Gil was convinced all these crimes were the work of one man. ‘In my opinion we had a serial killer who was also responsible for kidnapping girls and boys,’ he recalls. ‘We’d never seen anyone like that in criminal history.’
Gil was mocked by his colleagues, even though a footprint at one of the abductions appeared to match the footprint from the Zazzara murders. But then he was partnered with Salerno, who’d caught serial-killing cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr, known as the Hillside Stranglers. When another matching footprint was found at the scene of an attempted murder, Salerno backed his partner’s hunch. The series features in-depth interviews with both policemen, as well as journalists and victims. ‘When I sat down with Gil, he blew my mind with all these things I’d never heard before,’ says producer Tim Walsh. ‘Now I was seeing this from other perspectives – the cops, the journalists, the victims and the city itself as a character.’
As the net closed in, the team got lucky. On 24 August Ramirez, driving a stolen Toyota, was disturbed while trying to break into the house of James Romero, who noted the details of the car. The police found a footprint that matched the others at the scene, and when they traced the stolen car a single fingerprint was found on the rear-view mirror.
Ramirez, then 25 and with a history of drug arrests, could now be identified and his mugshot was published in the papers. On 30 August he was recognised at a convenience store and when he tried to flee, bystanders held him down until police arrived.
He was found guilty of 13 charges of murder and sentenced to death in September 1989, with the judge remarking that his deeds exhibited ‘cruelty, callousness and viciousness beyond any human understanding’. He spent the rest of his life on death row, dying on 7 June 2013, from complications related to lymphoma.
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