“How a 13-year old boy brought down the Night Stalker!”
This story is one of many articles that claim something or someone directly led to Richard Ramirez’s capture. As with everything the media has told you about the Night Stalker, the reality is a little different. Bill Carns and his girlfriend Inez Erickson (sometimes named as Carole Smith) survived a Night Stalker attack in Mission Viejo, Orange County, California. James Romero, a 13-year-old neighbour was rewarded a small motorbike and some money after spotting a man prowling around his house, before escaping in an orange Toyota station wagon. Eagle-eyed James memorised the licence plate and the police found the car, helping them catch Richard Ramirez.
It is a nice end to a horrible story, a young lad giving police that missing puzzle piece in the manhunt, but James Romero actually lived 1.5 miles away from the Carns home. He was not a neighbour. Bill Carns lived on Chrisanta Drive and the Romero family lived on Via Zaragosa at the furthest point possible from the Carns house.
A child seeing the back of a man in a baseball cap, on his front lawn, in the dark, a mile from an attempted murder does not prove that man was the attacker.
James reported the prowler to the police (nothing to do with hearing about a local murder, but because someone was sneaking about on their property). He described the orange station wagon with a cargo rack and gave a partial licence plate of 782 I.
Later, in Los Angeles, 50 miles away from Mission Viejo, a 1976 orange Toyota station wagon was stolen from Bill Gregory in Chinatown. A man reported it to the police after seeing the news story about the car seen in Mission Viejo. This car was later found four miles away in a parking lot on South Alexandria Avenue in Koreatown (locked and neatly parked).
Its licence plate read 482 RTS.
The Netflix documentary shows us archive news footage, comparing the stolen car’s plate to the one given by James Romero.
Only 8 and 2 are matches. And even if it was the same vehicle, James did not see this car anywhere near Bill Carns’ house. Later news reports claimed the boy’s identification was much more accurate, and that he only missed the R and the S off.
You might also notice that the composite shows the 3-door variant of the car, whereas the LA car is a 5-door.
Break it all down and we end up with very little evidence at all.
- A boy sees a prowler driving an orange car in Mission Viejo.
- A man and a woman were attacked elsewhere in Mission Viejo.
- A car theft 50 miles away in LA.
- Numberplates that do not match.
It is said that Ramirez’s latent fingerprint (invisible to the naked eye, and unable to be found through dusting) was found on the interior mirror, which seems suspiciously convenient. Suspicious because the way they identified Ramirez’s fingerprints through a special new computer program seems to be a myth. They were actually examined manually, which is unreliable and subjective. The evidence listed above is circumstantial and unconnected, so of course, they had to connect it with an invisible fingerprint, just like they used the Avia shoe at the ‘Uncharged Incident’ when they were unable to use the child cases.
Because Carns’ girlfriend did not want to testify a second time (she had testified at the preliminary hearing and admitted she never saw the gunman’s face). The Carns attack never went to trial so we will never know if the fingerprint evidence could be refuted. Although we do know that if Ramirez had been represented by Ray Clark or the Hernandez clowns, they definitely would have forgotten to bring their own expert…
Did Richard Ramirez really drive such a car?
If you read the testimony of Ramirez’s burglar associate Sandra Hotchkiss, she claims that she and Ramirez were driving an orange Toyota station wagon that was involved in an accident, on an unspecified date in 1985. If the car James Romero saw was Ramirez’s car, why was it not dented? If the vehicle dumped in the car park was his, why was it not also dented?
Because it was not the same car.
Then there are the child molestations of which Ramirez was falsely accused. One boy, aged 9, said he had been kidnapped from Montebello in an orange station wagon, but that was not Ramirez unless he was 5’9”, medium build and blonde…
Therefore, that was also not the same car. Not only that, shortly after the theft, its owner received scary silent phone calls to the church he worked at (his work phone number had been left on paperwork inside the car). Richard Ramirez is not associated with crank calls (that’s more the Golden State Killer’s thing), so this points to an unrelated crime.
It was because of James Romero’s description that a hat was added to the composite sketch and detectives then tried to link it with the hat found at Okazaki (and by extension, Carrillo’s extraordinary serial killer hypothesis) as if Richard Ramirez was the only man in California to wear baseball caps.
Everything about Richard Ramirez is ‘unique’. The only man with an AC/DC hat, the rarest shoes in Southern California, the unique orange station wagon, the only man who used red primer bullets, the only satanist, the only person with bad teeth, and so on.
From the little evidence we have access to, nothing connects Ramirez to the attacks in Mission Viejo. It is all smoke and mirrors. But James Romero was hailed as a hero, flown to Los Angeles for a press conference, awarded money, game tickets and a quadbike for “bringing down the Night Stalker.”
-VenningB-
Expendable For A Cause. 
Leave a comment