The Case of the Night Stalker Reveals an Unseen Essence of Los Angeles
This article contains spoilers for Netflix’s true crime docuseries Night Stalker. So only read if you have watched it or don’t care about finding out who did it…
The latest true crime documentary to appear on Netflix’s platform is not for the faint of heart. Night Stalker premiered on the 13th of January and has attracted some criticism for its graphic use of crime scene photos across its four episodes. However, at the time of writing, Tiller Russell’s inquiry into the Night Stalker boogeyman who “gripped the city” of Los Angeles across five months in 1985, sits at number two in the U.K top 10. The series looks into the horrific acts of Richard Ramirez who murdered at least 13 people in L.A and San Francisco, and violently assaulted countless others — ranging from 6 year olds to those in their 80s. The story arc is from the perspective of both the detectives — Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno — trying to ensnare this elusive figure and those whose lives were turned upside down by either surviving an encounter with Ramirez or being close to those who did not. The viewer doesn’t know who the killer is until the end of episode three of four. The case was tragic in incomparable ways, but saying that, it didn’t exist in a vacuum. In fact, I’d wager that Los Angeles as a city shaped the manner and manifestation of these crimes, to such an extent that these particular crimes are distinctive of a number of Los Angeles’ characteristics.
It is a manner of sheer coincidence that in the days preceding my viewing of this documentary that I began reading Mike Davis’ sublime City of Quartz. This in depth, nuanced and eminently readable account of Los Angeles from the perspective of an urban theorist, reveals how the city’s history has shaped and formed the metropolis we know today. From the get go, it is apparent that L.A is a city wracked with polarising contrasts and wicked inequalities, for the location of Hollywood is held in perpetual tension concerning the interpretation of the ‘city myth’. This myth was initially propagated in the late 1800’s by the likes of General Harrison Gray Otis — then owner of the L.A Times — who steered the local economy towards the development of L.A’s primary industry: real estate. Otis entered into direct competition with, at the time, the most unionised city in the world — San Francisco — by making all L.A businesses open shop, in the pursuit of ideal conditions for real estate speculation. It worked, in 1880, Los Angeles was the 137th largest city in the U.S.A, by the time Otis passed away it had a population approaching one million. In Davis’ own words, the promise of the curative powers of Southern Californian sunshine, union free workplaces and well connected railroad links attracted “retired farmers, small-town dentists, wealthy spinsters, tubercular school teachers, petty stock speculators and Iowa lawyers’’ to name a few. [1]
The development of the real estate industry as the driving force behind the Angelino economy massively influenced its geographic reality. L.A is a city characterized by vast sprawl, stretching to Santa Clarita in the north, down to San Clemente in the south (roughly 85 miles apart) and as far inward as San Bernardino, which is roughly 66 mile in land — the same distance that separates Cambridge and Oxford in the U.K. The sprawl is a direct result of, in the words of Carey McWilliams, Los Angeles “[reflecting] a spectacle of a large metropolitan city without a industrial base”. [1] This is a fascinating point. Think about Chicago, home to the meat packing industry, Pittsburgh, the steel industry or Detroit with its faded motor industry. The geographical reality of these cities has been inexorably shaped by the dominating industry which was the root of their modernisation. In the U.K for instance, the engine rooms of the industrial revolution were the cities of Sheffield and Manchester. The traditional dwelling in these cities is the terraced house — numerous houses packed in tightly along long streets to house those who worked in the textile and steel mills and their families. Whereas L.A’s main economic driver — real estate — did not require vast factories, this coupled with the desert surrounds of the city, sprawling neighbourhoods became the order of the day. This history lesson is necessary to provide some context to why I argue that the Night Stalker case and subsequent docuseries could have only become manifest in the way that they did in Los Angeles.
Richard Ramirez attacked alone, at night. His victims were all murdered or assaulted in their own homes, breaking in through the rear door or a window. He traversed L.A, and later San Francisco, in stolen cars and attacked across the city by seemingly selecting victims at random. By crossing the threshold from public to private space and attacking there, Ramirez struck deep into the collective psyche of many Angelinos. Private home ownership was a tool used to bargain with the working classes in Los Angeles in order to produce a ‘content’ workforce in the face of the aforementioned open shop policy [1] and has, therefore, been a component of L.A’s identity for around a century. However, the promise of a house in the suburbs is another element of the ‘city myth’ — L.A is also home to skid row which as of 2019 has a population of 3872 permanent homeless residents.
The majority of the homes Ramirez infiltrated were suburban and detached. Rupa Huq, the author of Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture argues that suburban neighbourhoods and houses are antithetical to built-up urban settings, stating that
suburbia has always evoked the idea of safety and security whereas the inner city has been equated with risk and danger. Suburbs are predominantly residential districts associated with population sprawl to accommodate the burgeoning workforce of a city. The expression ‘bright lights, big city’ conjure up a pulsating, throbbing buzzy space, ideally suited to the young free and single whereas suburbia is associated with quiet sleepiness and middle aged familial suffocation [2]
By targeting these homes, rather than abducting people off the street or in public settings such as a bar, Ramirez’s heinous actions not only struck deep into the psyche of Los Angeles, but the suburban nature of his targeted locations meant he could operate relatively free of scrutiny. A shocking element of the Night Stalker case was the length of time that the killer was loose and his identity was only revealed two days before his eventual capture — no one categorically knew what he looked like, with the composite image produced by the police looking little like the perpetrator.
A substantial difference between the urban and the sub-urban is the relative lack of observable public life in and amongst the latter’s streets. Suburbia is defined by its private spaces and is contingent on private car ownership, whereas in a dense urban setting the sidewalks and streets are often used by people walking or cycling. The legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs argued that a contingent element of a safe and healthy neighbourhood is having so-called ‘eyes upon the streets’ with “the buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers must be orientated to the street”. [3] Whilst it may not be likely that someone will be walking around in the dead of night and see the killer or his vehicle, but in a densely populated setting, neighbours are more likely to see or hear untoward occurrences. This phenomenon was even picked up by Jacobs in her seminal text The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she argues, as a result of L.A’s high crime rate in the mid-1960s, that “we can be sure: thinning out a city does not ensure safety from crime and fear of crime”. [3]
Another element of the Night Stalker story is the role of print and television media in creating the myth surrounding this elusive monster. Like most publicly known nicknames or pseudonyms, the media bestowed the Night Stalker moniker upon Ramirez, and it was by this he would be known before and after his capture. L.A, as referred to above, is a mythologised city, to such an extent that the writer Michael Sorkin described it as “nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers”. [1] Therefore, storytelling takes precedent in the formation of the city’s own narrative. The myth, like any fantasy, is profoundly untrue and L.A has produced several writers — and of course films — pointing this absurdity out. Noir a mix of German Expressionism and gritty American Realism is distinctly L.A, so much so that the aesthetic of film Noir was used in the docuseries. The ‘hunt’ for the Night Stalker became a ‘spectacle’ and in a sense an expose of the L.A myth as if it was penned by Raymond Chandler. It has long been posited that the suburbs are ‘dominated’ — in the words of the author J.G Ballard — by television, and it was through this medium that the spectacle of the Night Stalker case entered into the dwellings of a seemingly besieged Los Angeles.
Guy Debord, the author of The Society of the Spectacle argues that
when the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings-figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle’s job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special preeminence once occupied by touch […] But the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes people’s activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue.
This paragraph perfectly encapsulates the effect of the mono-directional news coverage on the populace. The television is for many people — certainly in pre-internet L.A — the only connection to broader occurrences outside the home. The T.V is the link for many to the outside world. Therefore, if this link sensationalises the threat and importantly, the randomness, of Ramirez’s violence, it places the danger inside the home, and thus the protective safe space of the viewer. This coupled with the general lack of community cohesion prevalent in the suburbs contributes towards further myth making; a phenomenon by which Los Angeles is defined. In short, the objective reality of the Night Stalker case was replaced by a mediated, sensationalised reality composed of half truths in search of increased viewership figures.
Mike Davis includes a great quote from Louis Adamic in City of Quartz, where he broods that “from Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a sea of changing colours. Actually, and in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it’s a bad place.” [1] It is this juxtaposition which in many ways defines L.A. At the start of episode one of Night Stalker, numerous talking heads look fondly back to the early 80s, marked by a booming economy and the Olympic Games. However, to quote Robert Hughes, ‘as theatre replaces life, so nostalgia replaces history’. L.A is a city of sharp contrasts, like the black and white tones synonymous with its own film Noir. Obviously, a depraved individual like Richard Ramirez could commit these atrocities anywhere, but L.A proved to be the right environment for a spree such as his to take place. The home invasions cut deep into the psyche of a city premised upon the valorisation of private space and suburban sprawl, which by its very nature provided him with a level of cover to commit his crimes in relative obscurity. The randomness of his attacks placed fear into the city’s residents, rendering the safe haven — i.e. one’s home — a liability. The media, both print and visual, turbo charged this narrative into the homes of millions and created a spectacle which besieged an entire city for several months.
In conclusion, I argue that it is this combination of suburban living, which is the perfect realm for the consumption of media infused spectacle, coupled with the mythologised existence of Los Angeles, that made the Night Stalker murders a distinctly L.A phenomenon.
References
[1] Davis, M, 1990, City of Quartz, Verso, London
[2] Huq, R, 2013, Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture, Bloomsbury, London
[3] Jacobs, J, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Pelican, London
By Will Brown
Doctoral Researcher
Loughborough University
