The Culture

Last week, Josie and I watched a Netflix miniseries called Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Actually, I saw it twice because Josie fell asleep once and had to leave my place once. I finished it because I was transfixed.

Now I remember this case. I was 17 years old at the time and lived in Los Angeles. Josie was only 6 years old and lived in San Diego. I wasn’t into news at the time but I followed this one. I remember that we would lock all our door and windows. I remember that there were hourly reports on the case. I remember that the news, only daily at the time, spent 15 to 20 minutes out of an hour on the murders. And there were a lot of murders. One every few days.

The documentary, which I recommend if you are into true crime stories, was excellent. There were a lot of things that were skipped probably because of censorship reasons. Richard Ramirez, who ended up being the Night Stalker, was a seriously twisted…human being? No, he was an animal. Filth. But, outside of that, the story was pretty accurate.

But the Left wing news outlet, Vox, had a problem with it. one could tell by there title, Night Stalker Review: Netflix misguided Night Stalker series treats cops like gods by Aja Romano. The bad grammar on the title is theirs.

It said:

The climactic moment of Netflix’s true crime docuseries Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer, is probably supposed to feel cathartic. In the final minutes of the four-part series’ third installment, San Francisco detective Frank Falzon recalls how he tracked down a friend of the California serial killer whose string of attacks throughout 1984 and 1985 made him a household name among true crime followers.

Falzon describes this moment with relish almost four decades later. In his recounting, the friend — who’d originally contacted police himself with a tip about the Night Stalker’s identity — balked when Falzon asked him to reveal the Night Stalker’s full name. So Falzon forcibly dragged the friend-turned-informant into his police car, threatened him, and punched him in the face. This is a lie. That’s not what happened and that’s not what the movie said had happened.

• A woman calls saying her father, who was homeless, might be hanging out with Ramirez in Skid Row.
• Police find the man and he admits that Ramirez confessed the murders.
• He said that Ramirez gives him a gun and sold it to someone in Tajuana.
• Police fly to TJ and get the gun. They also find a radio which has a matching serial number to one that was stolen during one of the murders. At this point, they know Ramirez is the murder but only know him as “Rick”.
• An informant gives a bracelet to police.
• Police question the woman who owned the bracelet and said it was a gift from her boyfriend.
• The boyfriend was, then, confronted by police and that’s when he got smacked down for not turning over a serial killer.

Worse, he knew what Richard Ramirez was doing.

“It wasn’t my best punch, but it definitely wasn’t my worst,” Falzon says. After further threats, Falzon says, he lunged toward the informant, who cringed away from him, “threw his hands up in a cross,” and stammered out: “Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez. Richard Ramirez.”

As Falzon repeated the name, the music swelled and grew more ominous. The episode cut to the docuseries’ cliffhanger end credits. And all I could think was how terrified this person must have been of the police.

Um, he should have been terrified of the police. He was hiding the name of a serial killer, rapist and child rapist. A man who had victimized over 20 people that the police knew of.

On the one hand, the production must have felt it would be satisfying to deprive Ramirez of some of that notoriety. To some extent, it is satisfying. In particular, it’s inspiring to hear from Ramirez’s survivors, including one couple who narrowly escaped their brush with Ramirez, and one victim who was assaulted by Ramirez when she was a child. Seeing her declare with certainty that she’s fine feels like the ultimate victory over Ramirez.

But Ramirez’s life arguably fits into a conversation about the cyclical nature of abuse and the cyclical horror of war — each a form of trauma. Likewise, a more thorough examination of Ramirez’s actions in the context of Satanic Panic could have made for a fascinating discussion within the series, had it been handled well. To what extent was Ramirez responding to the Satanic Panic of the era, and to what extent was he acting independent of it, but still becoming a part of the larger societal hysteria? These are all themes I’d have loved to see explored.

So, what this is saying, is that the film unjustly made the police into heroes for capturing a serial killer who left few clues and was completely random in his crimes. Instead, the documentary should have showed how a rapist, serial killer who kidnapped children and raped them was a victim. Nice.

The absence of Ramirez from his own story wasn’t that confusing to me because I could see what Night Stalker was trying to do. But it was confusing to other viewers I’ve spoken with, many of whom were totally unfamiliar with Ramirez’s story and naturally expected to learn about the titular serial killer.

There’s an obvious argument to be made that “understanding the mind of a serial killer” is too often used to justify overblown, glorified serial killer narratives. Sure. But we also need to understand the minds of serial killers, as well as the societal and personal circumstances that can lead to criminal behavior, if we’re ever going to fully understand criminality and attempt to rehabilitate potential offenders before it’s too late.

The only thing that would have confused me is why the writers didn’t say all that Richard Ramirez did. A lot of that was cut out because of the shear brutality of his crimes. There was more than enough as far as the timeline goes and pictures and videos of the crime scenes. In fact, other critics said that the documentary was too violent.

Perhaps it was. Carrillo and Salerno seemed to do good police work, even if the clue that led to the killer came from a Northern California citizen who apparently got punched in the face for his good deed. We need dedicated police officers who have positive relationships with their communities. Whenever cops do good work — work that truly serves the public — that moment feels like a victory. It comes with deep relief and pride in the justice system for functioning as it should.

But herein lies the difficulty of being a true crime fan: We have to recognize that police officers as a group perpetuate an inherently flawed and racist system of justice that fails people of color and marginalized communities far more often than it serves them. We can never lose sight of the reality that for every moment when the cops and the community are in harmony, there are countless others when the police force is the oppressor. And cases like Ramirez’s are often used as excuses for police to crack down and enact violence on people who aren’t serial killers.

Night Stalker doesn’t acknowledge this paradox at all. Instead, it treats Carrillo and Salerno like demigods. It approvingly lets a cop talk about punching an informant in the face and edits it like a pivotal, satisfying moment of triumph rather than a horrifying example of police brutality. And that strange omission — I mean, it’s dealing with the LAPD in the ’80s, perhaps the most notoriously racist police force to exist outside of the LAPD in the ’90s! — undermines Night Stalker’s effort to excise the bad seed at the heart of its story. Especially given the racial tensions between the police and their communities that erupted across the nation in 2020, I’m wondering if the production team ever stopped to think about how their approach to the police might be perceived.

Do you know how the police could reach out an support the community? By capturing a serial killer who was raping and sodomizing women, girls and boys. Arresting a man who was killing people every couple of days with no discernable pattern and would not leave any clues. Guess what? The community thought that too. Ask the 50 people who beat the crap out of Richard Ramirez when the caught him.

These detectives were not demigods. They made mistakes. They problems in their family lives. They were drinking too much. They made mistakes during the investigations. All this was in the show including that the police officer lost his temper and smacked down that guy who wouldn’t tell them who Richard Ramirez was.

And about that guy. This author is making the guy who got punched into a “citizen”. This is crap. He knew what Richard Ramirez was doing. He was fencing the stuff Ramirez was stealing during his crimes. How do you think the cops found him. He was also be belligerent and was picking a fight. This is something the writer of the article kind of leaves out. That guy was not an individual that the community of color would have embraced.

But, the writer has to say this because it validates the narrative that cops are bad and they abuse innocent civilians. And any story or documentary that show how the police did their jobs and how they felt cannot be celebrated. Here’s the thing: this case may never have been solved simply because the assaults and murders were so random and there were no clues left.

Night Stalker is a reminder that building a true crime story around the non-criminals isn’t enough. You need balance — and more crucially, context — for every narrative beat, especially because these are real crimes, still sending ramifications and echoes throughout society decades later.

Those echoes are clear, just from the fact that so many people who witnessed and lived through the Ramirez story are still around to talk about it nearly four decades later. History is living and walking — and very occasionally still stalking — among us. In the case of Night Stalker, that history deserved more careful attention.

The story was about how Richard Ramirez was caught. So it makes sense that the writers would talk to the cops who were involved in the investigation. This was not about the mental capacity of Richard Ramirez, his life that may have made him, or what the community thought of the police. This is a true story.

The last line where “history is living and walking” is a lie. History is history. It does not change. This podcast is history and it’s not going to be change. It’s people who change history. The revisionist history. That doesn’t mean the history actually changed. We are seeing this in our history books today. We are seeing this in our children who cannot tell us who the first President was and can’t pass the civics exam to become an American citizen

Overall I thought the movie was very good. It brought back a lot of memories and showed aspects of the case that were not known back then. I did not know how much of an unimaginable bastard Richard Ramirez was until this documentary and how much effort the police had to make to catch him. It’s worth a watch if, for nothing more, because Vox says you shouldn’t see it.

https://www.vox.com/culture/22240673/netflix-night-stalker-docuseries-frank-salerno-gil-carrillo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ramirez