Satan, Shadows and Serial Murder: Ramirez and Shawcross
“Serial killers can be your sons. We can be your husbands. We are everywhere.” Ted Bundy
The 1980s didn’t just give rise to more serial killers, it made them famous. Newspapers printed their faces. Talk shows debated their motives. Courtrooms became their stages and mugshots turned into collectible images. It was no longer enough to kill. In the age of fear and fascination, serial murder became spectacle.
No one embodied that better than Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, whose reign of terror across California turned him into a dark celebrity. He was the killer with Satanic symbols, rotten teeth and dead eyes. He was a walking nightmare in a black leather jacket. His crimes were random, ritualistic and filled with hatred. When the media made him a monster, Ramirez gladly accepted the role.
But not all the killers of that era courted the cameras. In the shadows of upstate New York, Arthur Shawcross hunted quietly. There were no pentagrams or screaming headlines, just bodies piling up near rivers and bridges. The bodies were of prostitutes that he discarded like trash, victims who would not be missed. But what made Shawcross so terrifying wasn’t just his murders. It’s that he had already done it before. He murdered two children, served fifteen years and was released. Only to kill again.
Two killers. One decade. One thrived in the spotlight and the other hid in plain sight.
Richard Ramirez – Hell In The Headlines
The Devil In The Doorway
She woke to the sound of someone breathing. It was past 2 am and the Los Angeles heat made the air heavy, thick with sweat and silence. Maria Hernandez opened her eyes and stared into the dark, convinced she was dreaming. But then she heard it again, slow, deep, raspy breathing.
She sat up and that’s when she saw him, a figure dressed all in black, standing in the doorway of her bedroom. Thin. Pale. Eyes hollow sockets. His mouth twisted into a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. In his hand he held a pistol. He raised a finger to his lips. “Don’t scream.” The bullet hit her before she could.
He moved quickly, silently, stepping over her body and heading for the next bedroom. Another woman. Another life. Another sacrifice. By the time the police arrived, he was long gone but the message had been clear.
A pentagram drawn on the living room carpet with lipstick. A footprint in blood. A neighborhood left shaking behind closed doors.
The Night Stalker had arrived.
The Making Of The Night Stalker
Before he became the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez was just a boy growing up in El Paso, Texas. He was the youngest of five from a severely troubled family. Born in 1960 to Mexican-American parents, he spent his years in a home filled with violence, fear and instability. His father, drunk most days, was a strict disciplinarian with a volcanic temper. Richard learned early to be silent, to avoid the belt and to disappear.
At the age of five, a falling dresser struck him in the head, knocking him unconscious and requiring stitches. Not long after he was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. This condition can cause blackouts, hallucinations, mood swings and dissociation, all of which are reflected in his future behaviors. He began suffering blackouts and seizures. Despite his diagnosis, likely exacerbated by repeated head trauma, there is no record that Ramirez ever received proper treatment. The seizures came and went, the damage stayed.
But it wasn’t just illness and injury that defined him. It was family and war. When Richard was 12, he grew close to his cousin Miguel “Mike” Ramirez, a decorated green beret who had returned from Vietnam with more than just medals. Mike showed the young Richard Polaroid pictures of women that he had raped and murdered in the jungle. Some were tied to trees, others decapitated. In some of the photos, Mike was standing beside them smiling. Some photos showed Mike embracing women who had clearly been murdered.
Richard didn’t flinch. He watched. He listened. He absorbed.
Then, one day in 1973, he watched as Mike shot his wife in the face in the middle of a heated argument. Blood splattered the kitchen and Richard. He stood frozen taking it all in. Mike was arrested and deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, and institutionalized. But it was too late, the damage to Richard had been done.
By his mid teens, Ramirez had dropped out of school and was using LSD regularly. He slept in cemeteries and wandered the streets at night. He became obsessed with Satanism, violence and breaking into homes. It was a thrill that gave him power, control and a place to exist when the world ignored him. His fantasies sharpened and the boy who watched death in Polaroids was about to make a mark on the American psyche.
A Killer Without A Pattern
When the murders began in 1984, no one realized a serial killer was stalking the streets of Los Angeles. That was part of his horror, Richard Ramirez didn’t follow any pattern. He didn’t hunt a specific type of victim or use the same method to kill. He murdered the elderly and the young, men, women and children, sometimes he would kill entire households. The only consistent element was randomness.
Ramirez moved like a shadow, breaking into homes through unlocked windows or picking locks. Some victims were shot in their beds while they slept. Others were raped and tortured, sometimes for hours. He used a gun, a knife, a hammer, a tire iron, whatever was within reach. He beat a man to death with an iron rod and then raped his wife. He then carved a pentagram into her thigh before killing her. He forced his victims to profess their love for Satan. In one house, he smeared Satanic symbols with the victim’s blood on the wall above the bed.
He attacked without warning and left with nothing. Sometimes he’d steal a car. Sometimes he would raid the fridge but most of the time he just disappeared. Law enforcement had no consistent evidence to go on. Ramirez left behind little physical trace: the occasional footprint, mismatched fingerprint, rumor of a man with rotten teeth and wild eyes. It was a vague sense that evil itself was living among them.
The Los Angeles press dubbed him, “The Night Stalker” and the city began to unravel under the weight of fear. Hardware stores sold out of locks and bars for windows. Families slept with lights on and baseball bats by their beds. People stopped trusting the night.
He wasn’t hunting a type, he was hunting opportunity.
The Fall Of The Night Stalker
By the summer of 1985, Los Angeles was gripped by fear that bordered on hysteria. The Night Stalker had murdered over a dozen people, possibly more and there was still no arrest, no clear suspect, no safe neighborhood. Gun sales spiked. Entire streets organized volunteer night patrols. The city was holding its breath, waiting for the next scream in the dark.
But Ramirez was getting sloppy. Too bold. Too high on drugs, adrenaline and Satan.
In August, after yet another brutal assault in Mission Viejo, he left behind a partial fingerprint on a car window. Detectives matched it to a petty criminal already in the system: Richard Ramirez, 25, with a rap sheet for burglary, drug possession and car theft. When they pulled his mugshot and released it to the public, it ignited a firestorm. The monster now had a face.
A few days later, on August 31, Ramirez, unaware that his picture had been front page news, walked into a liquor store in East L.A. to buy a soda. He noticed people staring. Whispers. One woman pointed and screamed in horror. “El matador!” The killer.
Realizing he had been recognized, Ramirez fled the store and tried to steal a car. Then another. But he was chased through the neighborhood by a group of civilians. They caught him, beat him and held him down until police arrived. The Night Stalker had been taken down by the very people he terrorized.
Ramirez was charged with 13 counts of murder, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults along with other crimes. But the horrors didn’t stop there, the trial became a media circus. It dragged on for four years, costing California more than $1.8 million, making it the most expensive case in California history at that time.
Ramirez appeared in court with a pentagram drawn on his palm, flashing it for the cameras saying, “Hail Satan!” He smiled at the victims’ families. He laughed at testimony. Despite overwhelming evidence, he showed no remorse even when survivors testified against him.
The press obsessed over his black clothes, his decaying teeth and the groupies who sent him love letters. He became a twisted celebrity, soaking in the attention like it validated the evil inside of him.
On September 29, 1989, Richard Ramirez was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death by gas chamber. When the sentence was read, he smiled at the courtroom and told the courtroom, “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”
He died in prison in 2013 from complications from lymphoma. A quiet, anticlimactic end for a man who once thought he was invincible.
Arthur Shawcross – The Monster Who Was Released
If Richard Ramirez was the devil in the spotlight, Arthur Shawcross was the complete opposite. He was a silent storm, hidden in the cracks of the system, forgotten until it was too late. There were no pentagrams. No groupies. No courtroom cameras when his victims started turning up. Just bodies dumped near rivers and bridges, lives snuffed out in silence. Their names quickly fading from memory.
Yet what made Shawcross so terrifying wasn’t just how he killed. It was the fact that he had been caught before…and set free.
Born in 1945 in Kittery, Maine, Shawcross claimed to have suffered brutal abuse at the hands of his mother, later claiming to have violent sexual fantasies by adolescence. He was described by classmates as odd, strange, slow and prone to sudden outbursts. By his twenties, he was bouncing between jobs and arrests for burglary and arson. Eventually he was drafted and sent to Vietnam, though his claims of combat experience are widely disputed.
The truth is, Shawcross didn’t need a war to become a killer. In 1972, he raped and murdered 10-year-old Jack Owen Blake in Waterton, New York. The boy had been fishing near a bank when Shawcross lured him away, sexually assaulted and strangled him. A short time later, he killed 8-year-old Karen Hill, mutilating her body and dumping her under a bridge. He confessed to both murders and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Here’s the scary part, he was released after serving only 15 years.
In 1987, Arthur Shawcross was released early for good behavior, deemed no longer a threat. Despite the warnings from prison psychiatrists, despite two dead children, the state set him free. He relocated to Rochester, New York and the bodies began to pile up. Only this time the victims were women. Prostitutes. Disposable in the eyes of society.
The Genesee River Murders
Shortly after his 1987 release, Shawcross settled into an anonymous life in Rochester, New York. He lived with a woman named Clara Neal, took on low wage jobs and kept quiet. The system, it seemed, had done its job reintegrating a felon. At least, on the surface.
But by 1988, the killings had started again. The first body was found near the Genesee River, decomposed and partially frozen. Her name was Dorothy Blackburn, a local sex worker. Police didn’t think much of it at first. Blackburn was known to walk the streets and her death was chalked up to exposure or drugs. Then another woman went missing. Then another and another and another.
It wasn’t long before a pattern emerged – women vanishing from the same part of town. Many of them were last seen alive near Lake Avenue. Over the course of two years, 11 women would be found, most of them dumped near the river, creeks or in the surrounding wooded areas. Most were sexually assaulted, strangled and mutilated post mortem. Some were found fully clothed, others naked from the waist down. Several had been revisited after death. During these visits he would reignite the fantasy, relive the thrill of full control and delve into his most twisted sexual desires.
The press began calling him “The Genesee River Killer.”
What made the case even harder to solve was that the bodies were being discovered in different counties along the river. Which split the investigation into two different jurisdictions. The victims were poor. Marginalized. Often forgotten. But the bodies kept surfacing and the violence in the attacks was escalating.
Then, in January 1990, investigators caught a break.
A surveillance team, watching known red-light district and trucking routes, noticed a brown vehicle parked near the Salmon Creek area, a known dump site. When they approached the car, Shawcross was inside, eating lunch, watching the water. He claimed he was just taking a break.
Moments later, the nude body of Elizabeth Gibson was discovered nearby. Fresh. Still warm.
The timing was too precise. The location too familiar. Police brought Shawcross in and soon the truth came pouring out.
He did not want a lawyer, he just wanted to talk. He confessed in chilling, matter of fact detail. He described how he picked up the women. Usually small talk and the promises of money, then drove them out to remote wooded areas. Once alone, he would snap. Some he strangled with his bare hands, others he used cords, ropes or a belt. Some he had sex with before killing them. Other times he raped their corpses, claiming they were “warm enough.” He told police that one woman, “talked too much,” so he beat her face in with a hammer. Another, he said, reminded him of his abusive mother, so he butchered her.
But what unsettled the detectives the most was the way he described revisiting the bodies. Shawcross admitted to returning days later to watch the decay, sometimes he would even violate the corpses. When asked why, he shrugged and said, “They are mine. I had a right to go back.” The police were suspicious that he had left out details and that there were more victims. But he never divulged if there were more or why he did it.
Conviction and Final Cell
Arthur Shawcross was charged with 11 counts of murder. In 1991, after pleading guilty to all charges he was sentenced to 250 years to life behind bars. There would be no trial. No press spectacle. Just cold facts and a confession that never seemed to end.
He was sent to Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York. There, he spent the rest of his life mostly in isolation, occasionally granting interviews. Where he blamed an alternate personality named “Bessie” or the trauma he endured in Vietnam, despite evidence that he never was in combat.
He died of cardiac arrest in 2008, taking with him the final pieces of a puzzle nobody wanted to finish.
Conclusion: The Golden Age Turns Rotten
As the 1990s began, America’s obsession with serial killers hit fever pitch. The Night Stalker was dead in the eyes of the law. The Genesee River Killer was locked away. But the streets were far from quiet.
The next chapter of horror would bring the public face to face with Aileen Wuornos, a woman who claimed to kill out of survival rather than lust. With her, the question is whether a female serial killer could ever be viewed the same way that a man is.
But she wasn’t the only one roaming the streets and killing in silence. Alongside Wuornos, we’ll explore the twisted world of Robert Hansen, the Alaskan hunter who flew his victims into the wilderness then hunted them like animals.
Two killers. Different coasts. One born from abuse, the other hidden in the ice.