Night Stalker, Serial Killer Who Terrorized Mission Viejo, Dies on Death Row

Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker" whose string of sexual assaults and murders up and down the California coast included a Mission Viejo couple, died in prison of natural causes at 9:10 a.m. Friday, according to various news sources.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 killings and sentenced to death in 1989 for his 14-month murder spree that terrorized California. On August 24, 1984, Ramirez slipped into an open window and shot Mission Viejo computer engineer Bill Carns thee times in the head, then repeatedly raped his girlfriend in their Chrisanta home.

Carns hasn't forgiven the killer, according to a 2012 interview.

"I would like to torture him with a chain saw or a belt sander," Carns, who now lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, recently told the Orange County Register.

After raping her twice and forcing her to perform oral sex, Ramirez forced Carns' girlfriend to "swear her love for Satan."

Carns was left brain damaged.

Two hours earlier, a 13-year-old on Via Zaragosa had a brush with Ramirez, who had been prowling around his home. Ramirez ran, but young James Romero helped police identify the orange Toyota station wagon he drove off in.

From that tip, police later located the car and pulled a fingerprint of Ramirez that would lead to the killer's capture.

The focus of an intense manhunt, Ramirez had been identified as the suspected Night Stalker when he was recognized on an East Los Angeles street by a group of angry residents and badly beaten before police arrived to arrest him.

Along with the murders, he was convicted of 30 other counts – including attempted murder, rape and first-degree burglary -- for the nighttime killings between June 1984 and August 1985 that made the self-proclaimed devil worshipper one of California's most notorious criminals.

About a year after his arrest, the former drifter from El Paso, Texas, called a guard over to his jail cell and showed photographs of two of the murder victims.

At his sentencing hearing, Ramirez rocked back and forth and turned to grin at the audience, vowing that he would be "avenged."

"You maggots made me sick, hypocrites one and all. We are all expendable for a cause, and no one knows that better than those who kill for policy, clandestinely or openly, as do the governments of the world which kill in the name of God and country and for whatever else they deem appropriate,'' Ramirez said.

"You don't understand me," he said just before being sentenced to death. "You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil."

In 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld his death sentence and rejected the defense's contention that numerous errors were made in his trial in Los Angeles Superior Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused the following year to review the case against him.

Ramirez died at age 53 in Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae, according to California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He was still awaiting execution.