From April to August , Ramirez murdered at least fourteen people during various break-ins, with his crimes usually taking place in the afternoon, leading to him being dubbed the Night Stalker , the Walk-In Killer , and the Valley Intruder.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in and died while awaiting execution in Ramirez's crimes were heavily influenced by a troubled childhood. Frequently abused by his father, he developed brain damage and started abusing drugs at the age of He began developing macabre interests in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin, a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD , who extensively bragged about the war crimes he had committed , and who killed his wife in front of him when he was Ramirez learned military skills from him that he would later employ during his killing spree.
He also cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. By the time he had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, Ramirez began to frequently use cocaine. He would often commit burglaries to support his drug addiction, many of which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders , rapes , attempted rapes, and battery. The murder spree terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles and later the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of fourteen months.
However, his first known murder occurred as early as April ; this crime was not connected to Ramirez, nor was it known to be his doing, until Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns , various types of knives, a machete , a tire iron and a claw hammer. He punched, pistol whipped , and strangled many of his victims, both with his hands and in one instance a ligature ; stomped at least one victim to death in her sleep; and tortured another by shocking her with a live electrical cord.
Ramirez also frequently enjoyed degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill. In , Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults , and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding. He died on June 7, , of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on Californian death row.
