Serial Killers

"Night Stalker" Richard
                    Ramirez: From the Bowels of
                                          Hell

                                    by Joseph Geringer

                                  Crescendo of Terror

                    Late in the 20th Century, Hell glutted on humanity. Its first
                    bloodletting of that season of the Devil occurred on the warm
                    evening of June 28, 1984, when an earth-bound Lucifer found his
                    way into the small Glassel Park apartment of 79-year-old Jennie
                    Vincow. Throughout the Los Angeles area a damp humidity had
                    oppressed the air that day, and when the evening came and the
                    temperature slightly cooled, Jennie left her window open to invite
                    what little breeze there might be into her flat. Like a fallen leaf,
                    decayed and tossed from its source, a fallen angel, dark, angry and
                    also decaying, blew across the sill of that open window. When the
                    demon departed through that same window, he left behind Jennie
                    Vincow, raped, beaten and nearly decapitated.

                    "Her body was found by her son, who lived above her ground-floor
                    apartment, just south of...Forest Lawn Park," reports the Los
                    Angeles Times. "Her throat had been slashed and she had been
                    stabbed repeatedly."

                    The police were baffled. But, in the months to come, they were to
                    encounter a madman whose lust for killing and depravity equaled, if
                    not surpassed, that of Jack the Ripper or, more contemporary, the
                    Hillside Strangler. Soon to be named the "Night Stalker" by the
                    press, this madman bore, according to true crime author Richard L.... [continues]

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