A Year Can’t Ease Anxieties of Attack by Night Stalker

Like most Southern Californians on Aug. 24, 1985, the family was riveted to evening news reports that the Night Stalker serial killer, just blamed for a new murder and assault in San Francisco, was believed headed back to the Southland.

“It’d be incredible if he came here to Mission Viejo,” Grace Yoo, then 18, remarked nervously to the rest of the family.

She recalled later that her father did something unusual that night: He shut and locked all the windows and doors of their single-story home on Chrisanta Drive despite the sweltering heat.

At 5 the next morning, neighbor John Cox was leaving to play golf when he stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of swarming Sheriff’s Department patrol cars and police barricade tape roping off three houses directly across the street.

Neighbors ‘Just Knew’ It

It would not be confirmed for another 9 1/2 hours. But retired personnel manager Jean Dickson and many others living on the quiet, tree-lined drive say they “just knew” it was the Night Stalker.

Now, as the first anniversary of the vicious attack on their neighbor, William R. Carns Jr., approaches, the people of Chrisanta Drive no longer sleep with loaded guns beside their beds or sweat in terror behind bolted windows during a blistering heat wave.

But for many in this quintessential suburban neighborhood, where the serial killer shot the sleeping computer engineer and sexually assaulted his fiancee last Aug. 25, the feeling of vulnerability and violation of their once-safe haven persists.

Twelve-year-old Jon (Bubba) Cox had barricaded his bedroom door and slept at the foot of his bed every night until a few weeks ago.

Roger and Sandra Bradshaw, who live across the street from the Carns house, have installed a sophisticated alarm system. A lawn sign advertising that fact also bears the warning: “armed response.”

For James Romero III, the teen-ager hailed as a hero for spotting a car and part of a license plate number that led to the arrest of Richard Ramirez, suspect in the string of at least 14 murders and 21 assaults throughout California, the bad dreams have stopped. But James, who doesn’t admit to fear, still awakens at night at the slightest sound.

Anxiety Hurt Schoolwork

His mother, Emily, believes the anxiety her now-14-year-old son has suffered may be the reason he will repeat his last semester of junior high school.

“This Night Stalker business has left terror in the lives of so many people,” said Dickson, 65, who installed bolts in her sliding glass doors, locks on an outside gate and extra floodlights around her home.

The siege had its beginnings at least six months earlier in quiet residential neighborhoods of suburban Los Angeles County.

The assailant, once called the Valley Intruder because most of the attacks occurred in the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, would break into dark, unlocked homes. Some victims were shot, others fatally stabbed, strangled, slashed or bludgeoned. In several attacks on couples, the sleeping man was shot while the woman was left beaten and raped, but alive. In others, both were killed.

On the weekend of the attack on Carns, San Francisco police announced a murder attributed to the serial killer had taken place in their city. And in a widely televised news conference, they speculated that the killer was on his way back to Southern California.

On Aug. 25, about 2:30 a.m., an intruder entered Carns’ house on Chrisanta Drive through a living room window and shot him three times in the head. His fiancee was beaten, raped and bound. She managed to free herself and telephone for help.

Earlier Report Linked

Homicide detectives later would link a report taken 90 minutes earlier at the Romero home 10 blocks away. James Romero III had been inside his family garage, working on his bikes. He reported a suspicious car and gave part of a license plate number to sheriff’s deputies called to his home.

Neighbors would say later--although law enforcement officials would not confirm it--that the serial killer was frightened away as he tried to break into the Romero house. That was why, they said, the youth darted out of the garage to see the fleeing car.

Five days after the attack on Carns, three law-enforcement agencies announced an all-points bulletin for Richard Ramirez, then 25, after fingerprints matching his were lifted from the stolen orange Toyota spotted driving from the Romero home.

The next morning, Ramirez was captured by angry residents of an East Los Angeles neighborhood who foiled an attempted car theft.

Now 26, the rangy, gap-toothed drifter from El Paso, Tex., has been ordered to stand trial in Los Angeles County later this year on 14 murder charges and 31 other felony counts stemming from the seven-month spree of kidnaping, rape and murder.

In Orange County, Ramirez was charged with attempted murder, rape, burglary and robbery in connection with the attack on Carns and his girlfriend. A preliminary hearing has been set for June, 1987, after Ramirez’s anticipated lengthy trial in Los Angeles.

Carns, now 30, is recuperating at a Long Beach residential care facility for people with severe head injuries. Most weekends, he returns to the Mission Viejo home his girlfriend, also 30, shares with a roommate.

At least one bullet remains lodged in his head, and he suffers from short-term memory loss and partial paralysis of his left arm and leg. A family friend said he will require surgery to cover a missing skull fragment.

This week, lawsuits were filed against Ramirez on behalf of Carns and his parents, seeking reimbursement of medical costs, which so far have exceeded $300,000, recovery of lost earnings and punitive damages of $125 million. There is little likelihood that Ramirez will ever have that much money. But attorneys say if he is ever paid for movie or book rights to his life story, Carns must have a claim filed to recover damages.

May Never Fully Recover

William Carns Sr. and his wife, Anne, have been told their only son may never fully recover from either the brain damage or the paralysis. But the Williston, N.D., couple say he has shown much improvement so far. “And of course, you know, we’re in a beautiful age of medicine,” said Anne Carns.

“He’s made tremendous progress,” agreed Roger Bradshaw, one of the neighbors who had become friendly with Carns in the year before the attack and sees him on occasional visits home.

After the attack on Carns, the last attributed to the Night Stalker, there was a run on guns and weapons of all kinds, as well as on locks and security systems.

Yet for some in the Mission Viejo neighborhood, the incident has had little impact.

“It hasn’t really changed my life at all,” said Gene Griffith, a 61-year-old retired businessman who lives with his wife, Helen, 65, in a secluded house across from the Carns home.

He always has slept with his pump shotgun, loaded with buckshot, beside his bed, Griffith insisted.

“I believe you have to take care of yourself,” he said. “You can’t ask the police to do it. Let’s be honest.”

But Griffith’s next-door neighbor, Diane Cox, shivers at the memories: her husband with a loaded .357 magnum beside the bed, windows locked and everyone too afraid to sleep. “My son is still afraid,” she said. “He will not stay by himself if we go out.”

“I get scared at night, so I barricaded my door because I just feel safer,” said Bubba Cox. “My sister used to bury herself under a pile of blankets, when it was really hot. . . . She said if somebody stabs her . . . it would be less painful.”

Emily Romero said her 14-year-old son had nightmares for months after the incident and may have fallen behind in school as a result.

“He wasn’t great to begin with in his grades, but this didn’t help,” she said. “I think if we could afford it, I would move out. Staying here just reminds me. None of us have gotten over the noises. We’re very jumpy, especially James.”

Spent Most of Reward

The slightly built teen-ager, who has spent all but “a few hundred dollars” of the $3,500 cash reward he received from Rams football team owner Georgia Frontiere and the Orange County Sheriff’s Advisory Council for his part in the capture of Ramirez, insists he is not afraid.

“But like, when I hear a lot of noises at night, well, every night I’m always looking out the window,” he said. “Before, if I would hear a noise, I would just shine it on.”

Dickson said the unprovoked attack on a neighbor “shatters your sense of security, and I don’t think you ever regain it, not completely.”

“You can be as rational as you want and say lightning won’t strike twice in the same place. But this isn’t a rational thing. . . . It has left a residue of fear even now, where before there wasn’t any.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Gordon Globus said such lingering anxiety is not uncommon, even years later.

“There is a tremendous feeling of helplessness when someone creeps into one’s home and attacks, and the horror of that helplessness is very difficult to cope with,” said Globus, a professor of psychiatry at UC Irvine.

“We know if we walk down a dark alley at night, we could be putting ourselves in danger,” he said. “But we feel safe in our own homes, and when we retreat from the violence of the world to our homes and find it follows us there, it’s very traumatic.”

Children may have the toughest time coping because attacks like the Night Stalker’s reinforce their sense of vulnerability, especially when parents dwell on their own fears and anxiety, he said.

Dr. Louis A. Gottschalk, founding chair of the department of psychiatry at UC Irvine said: “The bottom line is, people have long memories. . . . We know there are others out there. And so it keeps reinforcing in everyone’s mind the potential danger.”

Even friends who only visit Chrisanta Drive residents have been affected.

Still Closes Windows

Dickson said a woman friend living alone in nearby Laguna Niguel was so frightened after the attack that she stopped leaving her windows open at night. “To this day, she doesn’t sleep with her windows open.”

Many residents declined to discuss the Night Stalker attack in Mission Viejo, saying they didn’t want to “relive the nightmare.” But it was evident that they were already doing so.

Globus attributed it to what is known in psychiatric circles as the “anniversary phenomenon.”

“Often, when an anniversary is coming up, there will be heightened anxiety, a renewal of the grief reaction,” he said. “The first anniversary is usually the worst. It tends to fall off after that.”

But even the most fearful neighbors point to one positive outcome of the Night Stalker’s attack.

“It has pulled people together more in the neighborhood,” said Cox. “The neighbors really watch out for each other now.”