On August 31, 1985, after returning from his vacation, Deputy Andy Ramirez was assigned to the morning shift. Andy and the other patrol deputies at the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s Station received a briefing on the Night Stalker suspect’s name and physical description. It did not surprise Andy when a few of his colleagues ribbed him about sharing the wanted killer’s surname. Later, just to be sure, he checked his family tree and found no link to the infamous killer.
Before he began his day at 8 a.m., Andy stopped for a cup of coffee at a convenience store a few blocks outside of his patrol area. As he sat in his car sipping his coffee, he heard a call go out for Unit 22 to respond to a disturbance. The unit did not answer. That was not unusual. In 1985, deputies did not have hand-held radios and could only hear a call if he was in or near his patrol car.
As Unit 22 was unreachable, the dispatcher assigned the call to Andy’s car, Unit 24. They updated the call from a disturbance to persons fighting in the 3700 block of Hubbard Street. Andy rolled. He was about midway down the block before he spied a small group of people standing on the south side of the street. They hovered over a seated man who was leaning against a chain-link fence. A man holding a metal bar stood over the cowering, black-clad figure.
As he got out of his patrol car, by-standers came up to Andy and said, “Deputy, Deputy, he’s the guy! It’s Richard Ramirez. He tried to steal a car. We chased him and hit him and he’s down.”
Andy asked the man wielding the metal bar to relinquish it, which he did. The man was the husband of a woman who stood in a yard screaming. He gestured to the man on the curb and said, “This guy tried to steal my wife’s car.”
Clad in black from head to toe, not the best choice for a 93-degree August day, the suspect dripped sweat. Andy noticed blood running down the back and side of his face. As he approached the suspect, Andy directed him to stand, and then he cuffed him. He patted the man down but found no weapons or identification, so he asked him for his name. The man said “Ricardo” in a soft voice, and then he went silent. Andy put him in the back of his patrol car.
Andy left the suspect seated on the curb and returned to his car to summon paramedics. While he waited for medical aid to arrive, he talked to the residents. They were excited. One of them waved a copy of La Opinion, the local Spanish language newspaper, which had a photo of the Night Stalker on the front page. A few minutes later, the crowd swelled from a handful of bystanders to over fifty people. People from outside the block poured in on foot, on bicycles and in cars. It didn’t take long before at least one hundred people milled around the site of the arrest. At first, the attitude of the crowd was one of jubilation—even without official identification, they knew they had captured the Night Stalker. But then the atmosphere changed. Andy sensed a rapid shift from happiness to hostility. People wanted a piece of the man who had terrified them for months and then had the audacity to bring his evil to their neighborhood.
The crowd tried to open the doors to Andy’s patrol car. He needed backup to prevent the situation from getting out of hand.
Other deputies rolled up to the scene before the crowd became a mob. Andy gave the new arrivals a thumbnail briefing, and then they pushed the crowd back. Moments later, a couple of LAPD patrol cars arrived. They told Andy they had pursued the suspect all morning from downtown. They watched in amazement as he sprinted across the freeway, avoiding vehicles as they whizzed by. The cops said they tracked him following the trail of unsuccessful car-jackings he attempted as he fled.
Following a brief conversation, Andy and the LAPD officers concluded the only way to ensure the safety of the suspect was to get him out of harm’s way. Andy requested the officers transport the tall, skinny man in the sopping wet Jack Daniels t-shirt to the East Los Angeles Sheriff’s station. He watched as the LAPD car drove away with the suspect. He did not notice they had turned left out of Hubbard instead of right.
Andy called the Sheriff’s station to tell them that the Night Stalker was being transported by LAPD and would arrive soon. Later Andy discovered they took the suspect to LAPD’s Hollenbeck Station instead. Did the LAPD officers deliberately transport Richard Ramirez to Hollenbeck, or did they make the left turn out of habit? It is impossible to know for sure. The two agencies have a relationship that is like the cross-town rivalry between UCLA and USC. Each aims to protect the public, but their territories are a patchwork of adjacent jurisdictions which can complicate the pursuit of a fleeing felon.
In the end, it didn’t matter that Richard Ramirez went to LAPD’s Hollenbeck Station. Much later the day of the arrest, Andy stopped by Hollenbeck to retrieve his handcuffs. At first, the LAPD officers claimed not to know what he was talking about. Then he told them he could identify the handcuffs as his because he had scratched his name into the metal. No doubt about it. Andy arrested the Night Stalker.
The moment Andy realized the handcuffs were a significant artifact in one of L.A.’s most notorious criminal cases, he retired them. He held on to the cuffs for almost three decades until he donated them to the Sheriff’s Museum.
NEXT TIME: Epilogue