Night Stalker: Netflix Richard Ramirez Docuseries review

I was nine in the summer of 1985, and it was very hot in San Diego – the kind of oppressive dry heat where you don’t sweat because it evaporates instantly. I sat very, very still with my parents in the stifling heat around the dining table at our neighbor’s. All the doors and windows were open – air conditioning was a rarity in San Diego then – and my parents kept interrupting the meal to look out the window or stand on the doorstep. My father was standing up, looking out, my mother turning her head around him to take a quick glance into the night.

My dad didn’t try to calm down. It was because the former college basketball player – who is over six and a half feet and over 250 pounds – was worried about the Night Stalker. All the lights were on in our house and the blinds and curtains were open for line of sight. He continued to look across the yard to make sure no one was inside the house, waiting to ambush us when we got home.

Between March and August 1985, Richard Ramirez killed 12 people in California, mainly in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, a campaign of slaughter and torture that also included numerous sexual assaults and child abductions. . It goes beyond the real crime; this is the real horror. Netflix’s “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is a four-part documentary series that follows the work of two detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as they hunt down Ramirez. The cataloging of police work by Det. Sgt. Frank Salerno and Det. Lieutenant Gil Carrillo is a cathartic tale, a compelling examination of the intuition, the dogged search for evidence, luck, and experience that always risk being thwarted by interagency policing policy.

Where the series goes horribly, offensively badly, is in the dismal wrapping of very solid interviews with police, reporters, surviving victims and families. Real photos of crime scenes are used throughout the series, a deeply upsetting but necessary choice to illustrate animal horror. (As wild as your imagination is, that wouldn’t be enough.)

What isn’t needed at all are director Tiller Russell’s reenactments of the crimes backed by cheesy B-movie quality visuals. We don’t need to see a single drop of blood in slow motion as it falls to the ground. We don’t need to see a hammer covered in blood fall beside it. (This shot repeats several times.) We don’t need to see scenes of threatening animals looming in the dark – it’s not symbolism, it’s a creepy, spooky filler. We don’t need Ramirez’s recorded words on the hot pink stage at nighttime traffic scenes in Los Angeles. This is not an exhibition by Patrick Nagel.

In the last episode, when Ramirez is finally identified as a suspect, his name and photo are splashed all over the media. Returning from Arizona on a Greyhound bus, Ramirez soon realizes he is at real risk of being apprehended and sets off on a frantic chase through east Los Angeles, including through all lanes – back and forth – off highway 5. The story of this last desperate attempt at freedom is interspersed, God help me, with a scene of Pac-Man chasing and about to eat a ghost. (It’s the 80s, got it?)

It’s deeply, in a jarring voice, and it’s an issue throughout the series. When you use the actual photo of a bloodied bedspread of a 16 year old girl who was beaten almost to death with an iron, you don’t get cute.

Netflix

My dad was watching the news on August 30, 1985 – the day after his birthday – and told me on entering the room that they had caught the Night Stalker. “How did the police catch him?” I asked.

“A bunch of people in a neighborhood recognized him, and…” he started, and I remember my dad taking a long time to figure out how to phrase exactly what happened to Ramirez to me, 9 years old, “… Made sure he wasn’t going to run away.”

As the docu-series reveals, once Ramirez was recognized on his way through eastern Los Angeles, an impromptu group from the neighborhood beat him into submission. A patrol car arrived by sheer luck and the officer made Ramirez sit in the back seat before the mob killed him. Ramirez eventually received 19 death sentences for his crimes and was sent to San Quentin; he died in prison in 2013 from lymphoma.

The Night Stalker’s case still resonates with me and others who lived through that time, but now the places he terrorized in the San Gabriel Valley have seemingly returned to their normal. Sierra Madre is where the good ice cream shop is. We got our Christmas tree from a location in Monrovia. A Glassell Park bakery offers the best pastries in Los Angeles. We buy our camping gear for our son’s annual school trip to Joshua Tree in Arcadia.

There’s a story to be told about life in the Los Angeles suburbs, where the Night Stalker has proven that the veneer of bucolic normality is so thin, so tenuous. It can be a sunny spot for shady people to fly the Somerset Maugham line.

But it’s a story that requires subtlety, a willingness to delve into the inhuman and the inhuman amid the seemingly mundane, and how the everyday can be curdled by the unfathomable. Maybe one day this story will be told. It’s not that.

Quality: C-

“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is now streaming via Netflix.

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