Expendable For A Cause.

The Khovananth Incident, on 20^th July 1985, was developed into the most important Night Stalker case of all. This is because the perpetrator’s appearance seemingly matched the description the police had been giving since June, of a tall, thin Latino male with dark curly hair and dental problems, including a gap between his top front teeth.

Richard Ramirez had been pulled over by traffic police for running a stop sign, and before he escaped, had drawn a pentagram on the car. The most recent ‘Valley Intruder/Night Stalker’ incident at that time was Bell/Lang, at which pentagrams were found, and Ramirez inadvertently became a person of interest. The car turned out to be stolen and was impounded. Inside the vehicle, a dental appointment card was discovered, made out for Ramirez’s alias, ‘Richard Mena’, which led police to his dentist, who confirmed his physical attributes. This appearance was noted. Attempts to apprehend ‘Mena’ at his next appointment failed due to police incompetence.

What Did the Night Stalker Look Like?

Judging by police statements that come with the Habeas Corpus (in Document 20-3), up to this point, victims and witnesses had given a variety of descriptions of their attacker. Maria Hernandez had seen a 5’10”-6’1” light-skinned man with facial hair. Witnesses to Tsai-Lian Yu’s murder believed the suspect was between 5’6”-5’8” and East Asian. Lillian Doi claimed her husband’s killer was white with mid-brown hair and was between 5’10”-6’0”. Launie Dempster had seen a dark-skinned Mexican lurking in cars. Carol Kyle saw a shiny-haired 5’10”-6’0” Latino with a side-swept wavy fringe and nice teeth, Sophie Dickman had seen a 5’8” white man with brown curls. The child abduction victims saw a blonde man of medium build. Therefore, it is factually incorrect that everybody described ‘Richard Mena’ – yet certain detectives keep telling the ‘True Crime Community’ that this is the case.

If we were not in possession of these police statements – and the court testimonies via the Habeas Corpus – these descriptions would have been buried forever. But back in the summer of 1985, this was the pivotal moment in the Night Stalker case. At this juncture, all the other witness descriptions were thrown down the memory hole. The man who raped Somkid Khovananth – immortalised in a police sketch – had a vague resemblance to ‘Richard Mena,’ and thereby became the benchmark by which all suspects would be compared. Two later victims would describe their own different Night Stalkers, but their unreleased composite sketches would never supersede the ‘Khovananth Composite.’

WANTED

On 28^th August 1985, the LAPD Chief of Police, Daryl Gates, released the following ‘wanted poster’, stating that the Khovananth attacker was responsible for all the attacks – including later attacks in which a blondish man was described.

At the time of the Khovananth Incident, no other attacks like it had taken place. It was similar to the Doi Incident insofar as the husband had been shot in bed, but different in that Lillian Doi was not dragged around the house and repeatedly raped – the Doi rape charge was dropped, and the Petition only mentions her facial beatings and restraints. The only reason Khovananth had been added to the Night Stalker tally was because Avia shoeprints were conveniently discovered on the front porch and back step of the house. There was no other reason to tie this to any other attack.

It seems like confirmation bias: the detectives had decided – based on a pentagram on a car – that Richard ‘Mena’ was the prime suspect, and it only took one survivor to describe a man with curls and bad teeth, for them to decide he was definitely the Night Stalker.

Now their task was to find out his real name. Thousands of people contacted the police to report friends, shifty acquaintances, or suspicious neighbours just because they vaguely resembled the Khovananth Composite. It was only a matter of time before friends of Ramirez did the same – especially after the mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco offered financial rewards to would-be informants. Ramirez was unlucky – he was a burglar and two sets of criminal associates in different parts of the state reported him to the police and so, three different law enforcement agencies (LAPD, LASD and SFPD) simultaneously began to close in.

In conclusion, the Night Stalker character was engineered to look like Richard ‘Mena’ Ramirez, which caused a snowball effect leading to his capture. Being expendable to the criminal community he mingled with – and unable to defend himself due to brain damage – Richard Ramirez became the perfect prime suspect.

-VenningB-

See this post that debunks the idea the Night Stalker exclusively wore black.