Expendable For A Cause.

By Venning

I’ve made some edits to The Appeal of the Night Stalker. It’s not enough to qualify as a true second edition – those require at least 10% of the content to be substantially changed – but there are a few important corrections worth noting.

Recently, we watched Beware the Night Stalker (Fox Nation, 2019), which, like most Ramirez documentaries, was overly dramatic and riddled with inaccuracies. But ironically, it helped expose a major error – one that originated with the 2021 Netflix series.

In Episode 1 of the Netflix show, two police sketches are shown side by side: one of the child abductor (left) and the other from the Hernandez-Okazaki case (right). The implication is that the sketches look similar.

We disagree – but that’s not the real problem. What matters is that Netflix showed the wrong sketch altogether.

While researching for the book, I uncovered old Los Angeles Times articles that featured a completely different composite sketch of the child abductor, pictured below:

Later on the Netflix documentary, they showed another child abductor sketch that also appeared in the Los Angeles Times:

While watching the Fox documentary, I spotted that same sketch – this time in better quality. This time you can see the suspect was obviously blonde (I already updated this in the book in April).

I had always wondered why the first Netflix sketch was never shown in the abduction newspaper articles. Watching the Fox documentary, I soon found out why: it showed that it came from surviving victim Lillie Doi.

At first, I thought this might be simple misinformation – Netflix previously showed the wrong pistol for the Doi incident, after all. But then I noticed something important: a case number at the bottom of the sketch image:
85-3601. This code and the writing that says “for Monterey Park” and “light brown short hair” had been cropped out on Netflix.

I did some detective work and checked the affidavit (document 7.4) and discovered that 85-3601 was the crime number for the Doi attack. It’s not very clear but you can see it below.

This is significant because we had believed the Doi sketch was lost. We’d written about Ramirez’s lawyers showing the sketch in court and arguing that it didn’t resemble him, but until now, we’d never seen the image ourselves. This new discovery not only confirms what the defence claimed but also serves as another reminder not to take documentaries at face value.

Jay will update the Doi article with the correct sketch, and this correction is hopefully already reflected in the book update – sometimes it takes a while for new editions to process. I don’t expect everyone to buy a new copy – most of the book remains unchanged – but I do want to be transparent.

Newer copies only have the main title on the spine, not the entire subtitle. So you know you have a newer one if it looks like this.

The Yu Case

Fox also presented new information relating to the Tsai-Lian Yu case that I’d never heard before. It came from the retired Monterey Park chief of police, Jon Elder, so it should be a legitimate source. Elder said that upon entry to Yu’s apartment, there was a Chinese spy acting “excited” and “agitated.” See the clip below.

Elder also stated that when they learned the bullets from the Yu case matched those from the Okazaki shooting, the case was handed over to LASD. We know the original firearms examiner wasn’t certain the bullets came from the same weapon, which makes it feel like the Yu case was absorbed into the Night Stalker narrative before it was fully understood.

In conclusion, I can’t stand sharing false information – even when it’s not my fault. I am angry that Netflix misled viewers with the wrong police sketch. I hope this revised edition helps set things straight. Thanks everyone for the continued support of our website and thanks to our commenter Vivi for recording the entire documentary series for me.

Our friend has also made a video about the new composite sketch on the Sataysandmash YouTube channel.