Expendable For A Cause.

As explained in Part One, Detectives were hoping to link the ‘Burglar Rick’ reported by Alejandro Espinoza to the ‘Burglar Rick’ reported by the Gregg family. The same time all this was going on, another informant called the police: Jesse Perez.

Jesse Perez had met Ramirez through his older brother Julián, who was his neighbour. Perez was a convicted felon, for both manslaughter (he stabbed someone in a bar fight in Texas) and burglary. He also illegally taxied Mexicans across the border. Perez also knew Felipe Solano and that Ramirez sometimes sold stolen goods to him. While Solano is only tangential to this part of the story, it always comes back to him.

Perez claimed that he knew a burglar called “Rick Moreno.” He was tall with curly hair and bad teeth, just like police had described the Night Stalker. Perez said Ramirez had sold him a Jennings pistol: a .22 calibre long rifle semi-automatic. This was later supposedly tied to the murder weapon in the Doi Incident, so this was very exciting news for the Night Stalker Task Force.

However, there was no such person called Rick Moreno that fit the description, so detectives hit a wall. Returning to Perez, they asked for more details. Perez revealed that Rick had told him he was from El Paso, and that he had been arrested and imprisoned for joyriding in a stolen vehicle in December 1984. “If you find that arrest record, then you will find the Night Stalker.”

They found a Ricardo Muñoz Moreno in the records, complete with a fingerprint and mugshot. Again, they returned to Jesse Perez and asked him to confirm whether this was his Rick. It was. So, detectives had their man, but not his real name.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Donna Myers, her son Floyd Dvorak and the Greggs were asked to identify the mugshot and they too confirmed it was their ‘sweet’ friend Rick, who often gave them stolen jewellery.

Fingerprints

At this time, an orange Toyota station wagon had been found abandoned in downtown Los Angeles. This was thought to be linked to an attempted murder in Orange County. As discussed in this post, the orange car was merely weak circumstantial evidence, but to detectives, this was one of their main leads. The car apparently contained a partial fingerprint on the interior mirror. Finally, Frank Falzon punched Ramirez’s name out of Armando Rodriguez, and they had his identity.

The official narrative is that the car print matched Ramirez’s on the CAL-ID system and was matched within seconds. But the truth is that they inputted Ramirez’s name, up popped eight Richard Ramirezes and obviously, only one of them was him – only one fitted the description of the man police had decided was the Night Stalker. The prints themselves were actually only examined manually, not through a computer. This post examines the issue in more detail.

To police, they thought this was solved: Three people had named Rick, there was a murder weapon and – so they told the public – a fingerprint that supposedly tied Ramirez to a suspicious car. This is when they – with Falzon’s urging – decided to go public with the mugshot.

As mentioned in this post, the evidence around the Jennings pistol was a complete farce. Witnesses who supposedly saw it described a completely different gun, the gun shown on the Netflix documentary was the wrong type, and it was lost during the trial! Best of all, Jesse Perez admitted he had bought it off Ramirez six to nine months before the Doi murder took place, claiming senility as the reason he forgot he had said this, which brings the total of recovered murder weapons down to zero.

So, the police were now very close to catching Ramirez on what would ultimately turn out to be a non-murder weapon, unverified fingerprints in a random stolen car. But most people are completely unaware of this – in the well-known story of the Night Stalker, the build up to the capture is gripping and amazing, but once deconstructed, there are gaping chasms in its narrative.

-VenningB-

Part 3 is here.

2/11/2023