Richard Ramirez Early Life

Richard Ramirez

In the town of El Paso, Texas on February twenty-eighth, 1960 a man named Richard Ramirez was born. Only about a quarter of a century later would he become one of America's most feared criminals by starting a gruesome killing spree. Over a two-year rampage, Richard Ramirez had managed to rape and torture more than twenty-five victims. Unfortunately, out of those victims, Ramirez murdered more than a dozen of them, most of them in the privacy of their own homes. Aptly named the "Night Stalker" by the media, Ramirez had been turned on to Satanic worship at a very early age by a family member of his. Ramirez's cousin Mike had been a soldier who had recently returned from the war over in Vietnam, and shared many horrific memories with the young Ramirez. Eventually, following a four-year trial of Ramirez, which took place in 1989, he was convicted of 13 killings. The sentence he would receive called for the death penalty and he was then sent to San Quentin Prison in California where he would eventually die on June 7, 2013, at age 53 of natural causes

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Early Life:

Richard Ramirez was born Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez on February 28, 1960, in El Paso, Texas. Richard was the youngest of seven children who had been born to Mercedes and Julian Ramírez, who was a Mexican-American railroad laborer. Known by friends and family as Richard or Richie, Ramirez had quite a traumatic childhood. He became heavily influenced by an older cousin, who had been a Green Beret, by the name Mike. His cousin had seen combat and had just recently returned from fighting overseas in the Vietnam War. Mike recounted stories to Ramirez, that he ended up finding incredibly fascinating, that depicted images of the torture and gruesome mutilation he had inflicted on several victims who were mainly Vietnamese women. To top it off, Mike had taken plenty of Polaroid pictures to go hand in hand with his horrific narratives.

The tandem of Mike and Richard also began to discuss Satanic worship and frequently smoked marijuana together. The smoking was a habit that Ramirez had began to develop as early as around the age of ten. So, by the time Ramirez's teenage and adolescent years had started, a rebellion began which led to various petty crimes in hopes to further fuel his mounting drug habits. This also helped in further alienating him from his Catholic parents and isolating him from family and most other people in general. As a result, he returned to where he had first been exposed to the possible causes or factors which must have put him on a path towards psychopathy; his cousin's. He began spending much of his time with his cousin Mike, most of which was spent indulging in the use of marijuana and sharing violent and gory stories. At one point when Ramirez was with Mike, he witnessed his cousin murder his own wife Jessie in cold blood with a .38 caliber revolver during a domestic skirmish on May 4th of 1973. This must have been an eye opening moment for Ramirez and been quite a rush, giving him a sensation he had yet to experience which may have given him a confused outlook on whether to embrace the feeling or not.