"I grew up in a yellow house by a freeway, a common target for the killer who terrorized Southern California in my youth," starts Dennis Romero's piece on Richard Ramirez in the current Tu Ciudad, aka Your City, informally:
To this day, on hot summer nights, he slips into my mind's window -- this shadowy intruder -- and stands at the foot of my bed. I try to yell out and fend him off, but I am frozen, my words escaping only as muffled, terrified moans, their volume increasing until they jolt me awake in a cold sweat.
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With a cast of Latinos, including the suspect, investigators, and captors, the case put the international spotlight on Mexican-American L.A. -- good and evil -- like never before.
Ramirez, the "Night Stalker," dominates an imagined L.A. of fear and darkness like no one else, and continues to fascinate people to this day. His creepy drawings from Death Row probably have lots to do it. Romero's piece details the amazing mob capture of Ramirez on a street in East L.A. on August 31, 1985: "After sunset, a block party broke out on Hubbard Street. All of Southern California, it seemed, was celebrating Ramirez's capture. [...] We shared and then shed some collective guilt. One of our own had lost all boundaries of humanity -- and some of our own had brought him down."
But in the end, whenever the end happens, Ramirez might consider himself ultimately triumphant. His famous words before his sentencing for 13 brutal killings: "You don't understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. [...] I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells within us all. That's it."
* Original drawing of Ramirez courtesy of artist Kathryn Garcia.