This is a long, double post by VenningB and Jay – split into two sections: the history of the incident (Venning) and the DNA aspect (Jay).
This blog is primarily focused on the Los Angeles trial. Because the alleged Night Stalker crimes in San Francisco (the Pan Incident) and Orange County (the Carns/Erickson Incident) never went to trial, it has proved impossible to examine them in depth.
As discussed in this post, Richard Ramirez has had various other San Francisco murders informally connected with his name: Edward Wildgans (shot) Mary and Christina Caldwell (stabbed) Masataka Kobayashi (bludgeoned, his neck broken, possibly with the butt of a gun). Ramirez is not the prime suspect for Kobayashi.
One particular San Francisco case that was not tied to Ramirez at the time was the murder of nine-year-old Mei “Linda” Leung. Mei was found raped, stabbed and strangled with her blouse in the basement of a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district on 10th April 1984.
Habeas Corpus – Convenient Timing
Richard Ramirez’s lawyers had worked hard on his Federal Writ of Habeas Corpus, which was submitted to be read by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008. It was formally accepted into the long queue in March 2009. As demonstrated throughout this blog, it was very thorough and was not just focused on constitutional violations as most Habeas Corpus appeals are – it presented extensive evidence of “Actual Innocence” and sought to overturn all thirteen murder convictions in Los Angeles. As such, it seems most convenient that suddenly, just seven months after the Habeas Corpus was accepted, DNA evidence purported to tie Ramirez to the murder of Leung. Should the Ninth Circuit have overturned the L.A. convictions, the San Francisco District Attorney (then Kamala Harris) would have moved to charge Ramirez with Leung, thus keeping him locked up for good.
Murder: Fact or Fiction?
The story of the violent death of Mei Leung seems to have been embellished with time, in the same way that all the other Night Stalker suspects had been changed to fit him. The most recent newspaper stories of Leung’s murder tell a story of Mei returning from a friend’s with her younger brother Michael, eight. As they ascended the stairs to their apartment, Mei dropped a dollar bill down the stairwell into the basement. Michael carried on. Mei went down to retrieve it and never reached home. Michael was sent to find his sister – but he discovered her body, hanging from a spigot. This article from the New York Post interviews Inspectors Ron Schneider and Mike Mullane, the two detectives who were called to the scene. Schneider describes Leung’s hanging position as “like Christ on the cross” – her head was drooped down and her feet just inches from the ground. An anonymous expert in the occult was also interviewed, explaining Mei’s position was that of a “ritual killing” of a Satanist in the “symbolizing of a desecration.” With Ramirez’s reputation, this is easy to believe – only it is not what was said in the papers at the time.
765 O’Farrell Street
First, we must discuss the layout of the building, a “residential hotel”. The basement is not a basement as we know it. It was not subterranean. It was street level with access via two garages, one door, and another main entrance up some external steps that led to the lobby. This lobby also gave access to the ‘basement’ and there was also access via the maze of backyards and alleyways at the rear of the building. The ‘basement’ was essentially a corridor that led from front to back and contained large bins for the many residents overcrowded into 33 tiny dwellings in the building above.
Two families actually lived on the basement level, and it was one of them who found Mei Leung’s body, not her little brother. It is likely that Mei and Michael began their ascent from this level. It was on the first floor that the manager, Alice Kwan, said she heard two children arguing over whether to take the elevator or the stairs to the fourth floor (the very top). Michael went up and left his sister to ascend on foot. Back in 1984, there was no mention of a dollar bill fluttering into the basement way below. After half an hour (it was between 7 and 7:50pm), Mei’s mother Yuk Yin asked Michael to find Mei, who she presumed was playing in the building. When Michael reached the first floor, he was greeted by the police who told him to go straight back up – the ‘basement’ was now a crime scene.
The Position of the Body
In the San Francisco Chronicle, a 50-year-old man who lived on the ‘basement’ level with his two pre-school age daughters claims his children found Mei Leung’s body a few feet from their door. The area in which she was found is referred to as a basement garage.
On 5th May 1984, the San Francisco Examiner stated that she was “wedged” in some overhead pipes.
Later that year, the same paper repeated that she had been wedged in “a maze of overhead pipes” in an attempt to hide her body. Seeing as she had been stabbed, it is likely that blood dripping from above gave her location away, and although this is never stated something must have made the unlucky finders look upwards.
Nothing is mentioned about Mei Leung being found hanging like Jesus from a spigot by her blouse, although the blouse was tied around her neck. The coroner does not state the exact cause of death but she had also been stabbed multiple times in the back. There was nothing to suggest this horrific crime was connected with the occult and given that America was in the midst of the ‘Satanic Panic‘, even the slightest whiff of Satanism would have sent the press into overdrive. Yet there was nothing. It seems to be a 2009 invention to support the DNA ‘hit’ for Richard Ramirez.
The rest of Mei Leung’s clothes had been dumped in the back yard. These must have been taken for serological testing.
Alice Kwan is again quoted, saying that the residents no longer want to throw garbage away – this means the ‘basement’ and its bins were in frequent use by all the families. The killer must have been very quick and therefore very familiar with the building and how to escape. Nobody reported a child screaming, so she must have been silenced somehow, or lured by someone she trusted.
The Suspect
In April, straight after the murder, Inspectors Mullane and Schneider stated that there were no suspects. However, by May 1984, a description was given in the San Francisco Examiner: a white male, about 5’10”, medium build, clean-shaven, brown hair, side-parted and slightly over his ears, who – according to an article in a 2009 edition of Central City Extra magazine – was seen in the elevator. It is not stated who reported this.
This building was exclusively inhabited by Chinese and Vietnamese families, so a white man would have stood out, but the suspect given in the above articles sounds so ordinary, with no distinguishing features and most importantly, nothing like tall, dark, curly-haired Latino, Richard Ramirez.
Below is the composite sketch of the suspect from Central City Extra.
In 2009, when the DNA story broke, detectives claimed that Ramirez had lived in a residential hotel on the street behind O’Farrell Street: Ellis Street. Their evidence was supposedly a medical record giving that address, as well as Mason Street which runs perpendicular to O’Farrell and Ellis. This of course means nothing – the Tenderloin is a densely populated area with a high crime rate. Even if they could prove he once resided there, it is not enough to prove murder and it seems this is just like the other cases: a nebulous suspect and a story that has been sensationalised and embellished with time.
One must also ask, if the cold case detectives were so sure Ramirez was at the scene because of a DNA match – and they knew he stayed in the area – why were they appealing for informants to provide information about his whereabouts in 1984? Was that necessary? This brings us to the second part of the post: DNA evidence.
Part 2: DNA
DNA typing, or profiling, has become the most powerful tool in the arsenal of forensic science. It can convict the guilty, exonerate the innocent, and identify suspects and victims. It is considered (by the public) to be infallible, with most juries expecting the presentation of DNA evidence in court.
Juries comprise a cross-section of the public, laymen, most without scientific knowledge. They rely on prosecutors and defenders to give them the correct information to enable them to reach a verdict, hopefully, the correct one.
Programmes such as CSI and Law and Order tend to quickly solve a case using forensics, but the reality is somewhat different. Contrary to these shows and public perception, DNA analysis is open to misinterpretation, a fact that investigators don’t always emphasise to a jury.
DNA Testing – Then
In 1986, the first criminal case using DNA to get a conviction occurred in the UK. One wonders why the same did not happen in the Night Stalker case, considering the serology testing they did seemingly excluded Ramirez, as shown in the Abowath incident, where the PGM marker obtained from a semen sample collected from the victim was not a match to him. None of the LA rape victims were proven to have any serology that matched the accused. In the incidents where unidentified blood (Bennett and Cannon) was present and that unknown blood came from neither the victim nor Richard, a DNA test, even in its infancy, would have been valuable
In the 80s, DNA testing and the results were a much more simplistic affair; it either matched or it didn’t. Even a non-expert can readily understand what that means.
Things have changed.
A Brave New World?
With the advancement of technology, DNA testing has become extremely sensitive. Great! Yes and no. We constantly shed DNA when touching anything, coughing, sneezing, talking, or biting an apple. These traces and mixtures have always been present at crime scenes; however, with the lower sensitivity of previous years, they were unlikely to have been detected. That is no longer the case. Today, they can generate a profile from just a few skin cells, enabling forensic science to solve a more extensive array of crimes. It can also cause complications when analysing ever more complex mixtures, especially where contamination from improperly collected and stored evidence is concerned. Or when a result yields more than one profile.
Cold Case – 2009
With impeccable timing and convenience (Ramirez’s habeas appeal having been filed just months before), San Francisco’s cold case unit, consisting of just two officers, Holly Pera and Joseph Toomey, announced the preliminary findings that would link Ramirez to the murder of Mei Leung.
The cold case unit, formed two years previously in 2007, had looked at cases that could be added to Ramirez’s rap sheet. Her determination to solve this crime was her main goal when the cold case unit came into being.
Homicide Inspector Pera had been a new police officer at the time of Mei’s death, serving the neighbourhood where the crime occurred; the horror of which had never left her.
Although the cold case unit had been formed in 2007, one DNA expert with the San Francisco crime lab, Matthew Gabriel, said in a San Francisco Examiner news report on 22nd October 2009 that he had been working on the case for five years and with great difficulty managed to generate a profile from an undisclosed piece of evidence collected in 1984. That evidence was later explained as a cloth or a handkerchief, reportedly discovered in the basement of 765 O’Farrell Street, either by the rubbish bins or near the stairs.
“We’ve been working on this case for approximately five years now,” said Gabriel, in the news report.
Why they were working on the case in 2004, and yet Pera says they didn’t start until 2007, isn’t explained. 2004 is the date of one of Ramirez’s appeals; it is also the date that the Californian Proposition 69 was voted into legislation, whereby all convicted felons had to supply a DNA sample to be loaded into a database. A notorious criminal, such as Richard Ramirez, would most certainly been made to provide a sample at that time.
In 1984, DNA typing was yet to be the standard practice we see today, and the items collected from the crime scene were unlikely to have followed what is now routine protocol. How the items were collected – and stored – is paramount. We have not been told how or where these 25-year-old items were stored, under what conditions, and whether or not they were in a controlled temperature. The probability of all the evidence being stored in boxes piled on shelves with many others consigned to “unsolved” is a likely scenario. As we learn more about the science of DNA, we also discover the most vulnerable part of any evidence collection begins at the crime scene, where contamination is its weakest link, especially in a situation where a discarded cloth was discovered in the vicinity of many people’s garbage.
No photographs of the evidence and no details of the storage conditions have been released.
A “cold hit” from the CODIS database matched Ramirez; Holly Pera duly served a warrant on him to collect a buccal swab. Richard was compliant, and neither he nor his lawyer, Michael Burt, commented.
SFPD asked anyone who may have seen Ramirez in the area of O’Farrell Street in 1984 to get in touch. DNA was insufficient; they apparently needed eyewitnesses, even though the eyewitnesses in 1984 had described someone other than Ramirez.
What they were hoping for in 2009 is anyone’s guess.
A Second Suspect – 2012 to 2016
In 2012, SFPD got a second hit from the database, from what turned out to be a mixed sample on the handkerchief. It went unreported, unsurprisingly, as the last thing anyone wanted was their science to be challenged. They had got a hit on the one man they wanted; nothing else mattered, and the 2012 hit remained hidden for four more years. Richard died in 2013, so it is safe to assume that no one disclosed this information to him or his lawyers. The incompetent Hernandez duo no longer represented Richard; his new lawyers would have known precisely what to do with the latest news.
“On Monday, The Post exclusively reported that a “second suspect” had been tied to the case around 2012 after police got a DNA match from a handkerchief left at the crime scene, according to SFPD Homicide Inspector John Miller.”
New York Post 16th March 2016
SFPD disclosed that the second suspect was known to them; he was a convicted felon (hence his DNA profile in the database), but they refused to name him, saying he had been a juvenile at the time of the murder of Mei Leung. Juvenile suggests a young person, perhaps under 18, a youth; it does not suggest a child. Had the second suspect been a child in 1984, that is the word they would have used.
In sudden haste to explain this new revelation, and in doing so undermined its original scientific findings, SFPD declared the second sample flawed and that it should never have been uploaded to the CODIS system. How convenient.
Because of the new suspect, Mei’s case had remained open, although it had been pinned on Ramirez, without him being charged or tried. The word DNA is usually enough to satisfy the public. However, more was needed to satisfy DNA expert Rockne Harmon, former prosecutor and consultant on Mei’s case.
He dismissed SFPD’s explanation as “gibberish”.
From the New York Post:
“Multiple sources told The Post that authorities now know the man’s identity because — while a juvenile at the time of Mei’s murder — he went on to commit other felony crimes. That enabled California lab tech Cherisse Boland to get a “cold hit” on him after repeatedly running the evidence through CODIS, the FBI-maintained forensic DNA database.”
New York Post 16th March 2016
Rockne Harmon, who also worked on the OJ Simpson case, had this to say in the same news report:
“The handkerchief had stains in several places that were tested,” said former prosecutor and DNA expert Rockne Harmon, who reviewed the Leung case while doing consulting work for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office in 2009.
New York Post 16th March 2016
“The stain that produced the hit was a mixture of three people, two different semen sources. One of the sources matched Ramirez, and the other source linked the second male to the handkerchief by the stairs,” Harmon told The Post.
“It’s significant because it connects the two sources to the body,” added Harmon.”
He went on to say, in an excerpt taken from the New York Post:
New York Post 16th March 2016
“The “co-existence” of the other man’s DNA on the cloth “suggests a connection between Ramirez, the second male and the victim associated with her death,” Harmon said, urging authorities to come forward with any new information they have.
“Only a thorough, intense investigation to ascertain the truth about the presence of his [DNA] in such a sinister context will satisfy public safety interests. Anything less will not do so.”
The San Francisco Police Department said nothing and still has not released the second suspect’s name. He is protected for reasons unknown.
The Problem With Mixed Samples
The information in this section has been taken from DNA Mixtures: A Forensic Science Explainer | NIST
Even the most experienced DNA analysts can have difficulty separating the profiles within mixed samples. For these reasons
- How many people contributed DNA to the mixture? More contributors make a mixture more complex and more challenging to interpret.
- How much DNA did each person contribute? Even if a mixture contains plenty of DNA, one or several people might have contributed only a tiny amount. The lower those amounts, the more complex the mixture.
- How degraded is the DNA? DNA degrades over time and with exposure to the elements. This can also increase the complexity.
Currently, there are no established protocols for determining how to analyse mixes; different labs follow different rules when confronted with mixed samples. It helps to understand how DNA typing is done by looking at how interpretations are determined. Forensic scientists only analyse part of the genetic sequence when generating a DNA profile. Instead, they look at roughly 40 short segments of DNA that vary from person to person. Those variations are called alleles; the key to knowing a person’s DNA profile is knowing which alleles they have.
To discover this, scientists make millions of copies of the alleles to amplify their genetic material. Then it’s processed and sorted, ending up as peaks on a chart, and those peaks tell the analyst which alleles are present, and that is how they determine someone’s DNA profile.
A mixed sample would look something like this.
A profile of a low-level DNA mixture from a crime scene (top) and the DNA profile taken from a suspect. When the peaks in the evidence profile are small, they can introduce uncertainty. Did a false peak “drop in” at position A? Did a peak “drop out” at position B? Those factors should be assured before examining the reference profile. A single profile would have two peaks at one location; looking at the top image, we can see multiple peaks at each locus, whereby it’s safe to assume more than one person contributed to the mix.
These images are a reference point; they are NOT profiles taken from the crime scene or Ramirez and the second suspect.
In an analysis of a mixed sample, alleles from each contributor appear on the chart; picking them apart is problematic because they have made MILLIONS of copies of each allele. Now, they are all together in a test tube.
In teasing them apart, they cannot, with certainty, be sure which allele belongs to whom. It is like contemplating a colossal bowl of letters from a million Scrabble games and trying to form a coherent sentence, or maybe the word “suspect”, with your eyes closed. One mistake could cost someone their freedom, or indeed their life.
To combat that, scientists developed software to help, and a system where they calculate probabilities is used. It is a highly complex and complicated matter. For more information, please read the link highlighted above.
Uncharged – Again.
Richard Ramirez was never formally charged or taken to trial over the murder of Mei Leung; the then DA, Kamala Harris, declined to arrest and charge him, stating that as he was already on death row, she did not want to prolong his life by another trial and the ensuing appeals. It was far easier to say it was him and let the science go unchallenged by his new, competent defence lawyers.
Without a doubt, had the petition rendered his LA convictions unsound, which we have demonstrated throughout this blog, it would have been a different story; they would have charged him.
From Crime Scene to Courtroom
The principles of evidence collection at any incident are many, with priority given to:
- Contamination
- Degredation
- Chain of custody
Today, crime scene investigators know how vital these fundamental principles are; they learn to work in a sterile environment, keep unwarranted people away from the scene, and properly dry samples and evidence before bagging them. In 1984, as the DNA expert Mathew Gabriel said, they did not have the knowledge they do now. They must also ensure correct preservation, enabling the defence lawyers to conduct independent testing.
Chain of custody is vital, and each and every person who ever came into contact with any evidence must be logged and its journey every step of the way from the incident scene to the lab, thus avoiding the risk of contamination or (God forbid) tampering. A piece of cloth from a filthy basement floor, deposited near some garbage bins would already be contaminated enough.
That leaves the question what happened to her clothes? As Venning has mentioned in the section above, they were piled up in the yard. Mei was found partially clothed, surely they had stored these evidence exhibits in the same way the cloth had been? Did they not test those too? If not, why not?
Any improperly kept and maintained samples may be degraded after twenty-five years of being stored in boxes in a “cold case room”, as we might assume. Information has yet to be released to the public to suggest otherwise, and they went to some lengths to conceal the appearance of another DNA profile for some years. Had it not been “leaked,” it is doubtful anyone would have known.
San Francisco Police Department, to this day, still have not released the name of the second suspect; one imagines they never will. Their reasons for refusing to accept a second profile are doubtful. They claim the additional profile was “flawed”, which adds a reasonable doubt to the validity of either sample. If they question the results of one person’s forensics, they should surely question the validity of both suspects’ profiles. Or if the science was as infallible as they claimed, where Richard’s DNA was concerned it should have been independently tested.
DNA never was and never will be 100% conclusive; it is a powerful tool, but a tool that judges prefer to have backed up by further evidence. Evidence they did not have.
Mei
One cannot fail to be moved on viewing the face of Mei Leung staring out from the news reports. Did she receive the justice she deserved? When her family were informed of the link to Ramirez, they were reported to have said they were “grateful” by SFPD.
But was this honest and actual justice? Or was her tragic death used as an insurance policy? An insurance policy against the eventuality that the Supreme Court may have granted the order for relief. Without full transparency detailing the name of the second suspect and the details questioning the science attributed to his DNA profile, are we really seeing light shed on the case?
This brings us back to 1985 when, after his arrest, SFPD scratched around to tie him to as many.”unsolveds” as possible, but they did not peg him for the murder of Mei Leung.
It feels like yet another curtain has been drawn across, a veil not to be lifted.
For further reading on the uses and abuses of DNA within the criminal justice system, I highly recommend the book “Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA” by Erin E Murphy.
~ Jay ~ & -VenningB-
Expendable For A Cause. 
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