Homicide Det. Gil Carrillo: “I don’t believe that anybody has a choice. Your number is there, one day we’re all going to die. We just don’t know when. You start dying the day you’re born. I was born and raised in the Catholic church. I believe in God, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe there’s a devil, I believe there’s an evil force. I believe there’s a devil. I believe there’s an evil force. I just say prayers, hopefully to help give me the knowledge to bring this case to a solution.”
The Bulldogs never let go. That’s what people said about Detective Carrillo and Detective Frank Salerno (who had worked on the Hillside Strangler case). “You’re investigating the ultimate crime. There’s nothing more serious than one human being taking the life of another.”
A heatwave hits Los Angeles in 1985. St Patrick’s day brings the first case of what will be many. A baseball cape with an AC/DC logo lays on the floor of a garage. In the kitchen is the body of a woman, shot in the forehead. A male suspect welcomes the second woman, her roommate, home. He makes a noise to draw her attention. Then raises a gun to her face. The keys she raises in her hands deflects the bullet and it knocks her down. Carrillo and his partner, Hernandez, are called in. Carrillo knows the first victims mother. The case has officially hit close to home. There is another murder that night. And Carrillo’s partner notes that the mock up of the suspect matches that of a kidnapping not far away. A suspect that liked to look his victims in the eye to see their terror when he brings the gun up to shot them.
“I was in alliance with the evil that is inherent in human nature. And that was who I was. Walking death.”
We watch over the shoulders of the detectives and through the eyes of surviving victims over four hour long episodes as the case unfolds. The victims had nothing that seemed to tie them together beyond the dark eyed man. So much so that murders and kidnappings were covered by different units. The suspect drawings matched but the men investigating, having never encountered anything like it before, faced resistance. One young detectives theory of a serial killer faced derision from the men in the unit who thought they’d seen it all. That would cost time. Would cost lives.
Watching and listen through first-person interviews, grainy footage and police photography as Richard Ramirez stalks Los Angeles with two detectives at his heels, we clench our jaws. We shake our heads. We sit rapt.
“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer,” directed by Tiller Russell has a grim beauty to it. Rather than glorifying the killer, the cops are the heroes. Time is ticking. The clues are adding up but not there are not enough of them. The dark eyed stranger is out there and he isn’t going to stop.
