Expendable For A Cause.

Some people have watched the Netflix documentary and were left with the question: how did all those varied composite drawings lead to Richard Ramirez? He looked nothing like most of them, yet Ramirez had many distinguishing features, like scars and unusual eyebrows.

Here is a quick rundown of some the composites involved in the Ramirez case. There were others but they were not released to the public, or have been lost in the mists of time.

Feb-March 1985: The San Gabriel Child Abductor. Three children and one adult said he was “dirty blonde” or light brown, 5’9” and of medium build. Below is a composite sketch of the suspect, from a 14th March 1985 Los Angeles Times article, again describing his hair as “dirty blondish” to light brown.

A 29th March Los Angeles Times article gives the same description but a different drawing, this time a sketch rather than a composite. It was created by police sketch artist Fernando Ponce.

March 1985: After Dayle Okazaki’s murder, victim Maria Hernandez helped create a drawing of a moustachioed hitman.

Detective Carrillo found an AC/DC hat inside their garage, so Moustachioed Hitman gained a hat in April – the logo was not included for some reason, which is unhelpful.

The Doi sketch – previously thought to be from a child abduction. Lillie Doi told neighbours that she did not think Ramirez was her husband’s murderer.

Released on 25^th June 1985: Carol Kyle was raped by a Latino with a side parting and fringe, whose hair curled slightly at the ends. (She was attacked on 30^th May so there was a delay between the attack and her meeting with police artist Fernando Ponce) Again he has none of Richard’s distinctive features: arched eyebrows, messy hair, full lips – and, at the time – broken teeth. More on his teeth later…

On 7^th July Sophie Dickman was raped. The sketch below ended up looking the same as the composite in two unrelated crimes and the nose is similar to those. Some newspapers state that this was the suspect in the Joyce Nelson crime, based on the paper girl describing a curly haired man lurking in the street days earlier, although this is never made clear.

Composites are made almost like a flat, two-dimensional Mr Potato Head where you are given a base head shape and select see-through slides of features and overlay them onto that face. It has Richard Ramirez’s hairstyle, but curly hair is not uncommon.

Because of this method, many composite sketches look the same across the United States. This is silly – composite sketches are not always drawn by artists, so this same face, aside from a few differences has been used in the 1978 suspected Golden State Killer attack (below, centre) and also for the ‘Brayman Road Attacker’ in Connecticut from 1988. Frankly, it should be thrown in the bin.

Now we come to the most famous composite, again by Fernando Ponce, for the Khovananth Incident which occurred on 20^th July 1985.

The reason the police decided that this composite was the man they were looking for, was because they had previously pulled over a man named Richard Mena for a traffic violation in a car found to be stolen. That man was Richard Ramirez using an alias. Richard drew a pentagram on the car, which was suspicious – a pentagram had been drawn on a recent murder victim.

Richard left his dental appointment card behind and they discovered he had decayed teeth – the damage and decay to his upper front teeth created a gap. For the record, Somkid Khovananth was the only victim who described someone with ‘stained, gapped teeth’ – no one else. The police (mostly Carrillo) and the media lied. He does not really resemble Richard. All his features are wrong; the distinct attributes are absent. Furthermore, Khovananth described him as having a brown face, before changing it.

Not that the nose is very similar to the third child abductor drawing. Detective Carrillo insists that every victim description was identical. However, it is important to note that the abductor was fair-haired and averaged sized, not tall, skinny and dark like Mrs Khovananth’s description. It is common mistake for artists to draw the same face over and over, which might explain the similarities.

Apparently, Sakina Abowath helped to create a composite, but it has not been made available but in any case, she had originally seen a very tall, dirty blonde to light brown-haired man. It seems likely that Abowath had been led by the police and was shown the Khovananth composite. After being asked whether his teeth were stained, she changed her description from “wide front teeth” to “crooked and stained”. Reminder: Ramirez’s semen was not on her vaginal swab.

A child named James Romero spotted a ‘prowler’ in his yard. The prowler wore a baseball cap. Because an attempted murder occurred 1.5 miles away, the police somehow decided – without evidence – that the prowler was the killer. So, the Khovananth composite gained a hat.

By now, the police had Ramirez in their sights, and thanks to the police focus on the ‘stained, gapped teeth’ man, were beginning to receive tip-offs from his associates. All the previous descriptions were swept away. However, on 30^th August, Carol Kyle made a second composite. Kyle insisted her rapist had ‘clean, straight teeth, with excessive gums’. We know Ramirez did not have his front teeth fixed until early 1986.

The artist, Deputy Sheriff Mahlon Coleman, denied knowing what Richard Ramirez looked like despite the fact informers had given the police his name, and his face was released on the news that very night.

The Netflix documentary shows this weird August 1985 morph of multiple composites. You can see where the hat from the Khovananth/Romero composite has been laid over the blondish paedophile sketch – the forehead is dark and the teeth drawing is just visible.

Just as a footnote. This is probably fake.

Here’s why. Compare it to the real one and look at the dates.

July 21^st was the original creation date of the image on the right. It was crossed out and replaced with August 26^th and given a hat as per James Romero’s description (see the dual image above).

It would be nice if people would refrain from fabricating evidence and muddying the waters of a case already shrouded in mystery and outright deception.

-VenningB-

09/01/2023