‘Night Stalker’ Guilty : Jurors Convict Ramirez on First Verdict in 13 Serial Murders : Verdict Reached After 22-Day Deliberation

After deliberating 22 days, a Superior Court jury today determined that Richard Ramirez, a drifter from El Paso, Tex., is the Night Stalker accused in a string of nighttime attacks that terrified Los Angeles in the summer of 1985.

Ramirez, 29, was in an adjacent holding cell as he was pronounced guilty in the first of 13 murders for which he was charged. The courtroom was packed as the verdicts were read on the individual counts. Ramirez, chained and dressed in blue jail fatigues, left before the jury entered the courtroom, having voluntarily waived his right to be present during the proceedings.

Ramirez could face a death sentence following the penalty phase of his trial.

Most of the Night Stalker crimes were committed during pre-dawn residential burglaries throughout Los Angeles County and were marked by cold-blooded murders, savage beatings, mutilations and sexual assaults.

The crimes were especially chilling because they seemed so indiscriminate. His victims were not prostitutes or vagrants or hitchhikers.

Rather, they were middle-class men and women who lived peacefully in neatly-tended homes and condominiums and had simply gone to bed with a window or door unsecured on a warm, benign California night.

Among his victims were a traffic supervisor, an accountant, a lawyer, a student, a pizzeria owner, a parking lot attendant, an auto mechanic. Some were grandparents. One was a church deacon.

The random and brutal slayings generated widespread fear throughout Southern California once police disclosed the existence of a wanton killer on Aug. 8, 1985.

Overnight, sales of guns, ammunition, locks and window bars rose sharply all over the county. Between Aug. 8 and Aug. 31, the day Ramirez was caught by citizens in East Los Angeles, employees of gun shops and home-security stores often arrived for work in the morning to find customers waiting at the door.

Various government agencies eventually offered about $80,000 in reward money for information leading to the killer’s arrest and conviction. Nearly 20 claims already have been filed.

All but one attack occurred between mid-March and early August of 1985. Several of them took place within hours and blocks of one another.

Even as the killings continued, however, investigators gradually began to recognize the Night Stalker’s various “signatures”--distinctive and gaping stab and slash wounds to the throat or body; the familiar language that Ramirez used in demanding loot; his use of ligatures and restraints, including handcuffs and thumbcuffs; and rare Avia shoeprints at many of the crime scenes, including a bloody print on a murder victim’s face.

During the trial, prosecutors presented the 43 felony charges to jurors as 15 separate “incidents,” mostly in chronological order, buttressed by charts and maps as well as gruesome color photographs of the crime scenes and victims.

Ramirez still faces separate felony charges, including murder and attempted murder, in Orange County and in San Francisco.

His identity became known after authorities lifted a partial fingerprint in a stolen car that was linked to Ramirez’s final attack, in Mission Viejo on Aug. 25, 1985.

Working manually--and not with a laser and a state-of-the-art computer, as previously reported--fingerprint experts matched that print with those taken of Ramirez after he had been arrested several years earlier on a misdemeanor traffic violation in Los Angeles.

Police issued an all-points-bulletin for his arrest, accompanied by a mugshot. The next morning, Aug. 31, 1985, he was captured in East Los Angeles shortly after he returned to Los Angeles from Arizona, where he was visiting a brother.