Richard Ramirez, so-called ‘Night Stalker’ serial killer, dies in California prison

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 Richard Ramirez, the demonic serial killer known as the Night Stalker who left satanic signs at murder scenes and mutilated victims’ bodies during a reign of terror in the 1980s, died early Friday in a hospital, a prison official said.

Ramirez, 53, had been taken from San Quentin’s death row to a hospital where authorities said he died of liver failure. Prison officials said they could not release further details on the cause of death, citing federal patient privacy laws.

Ramirez had been housed on death row for decades and was awaiting execution, even though it has been years since anyone has been put to death in California.

At his first court appearance, Ramirez raised a hand with a pentagram drawn on it and yelled, “Hail, Satan.”

His marathon trial, which ended in 1989, was a horror show in which jurors heard about one dead victim’s eyes being gouged out and another’s head being nearly severed. Courtroom observers wept when survivors of some of the attacks testified.

Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders that terrorized Southern California in 1984 and 1985 as well as charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

The killing spree reached its peak in the hot summer of 1985, as the nocturnal killer entered homes through unlocked windows and doors and killed men and women with gunshot blasts to the head or knives to the throat, sexually assaulted female victims, and burglarized the residences.

He was dubbed the “Night Stalker” by the press while residents were warned to lock their doors and windows at night.

Some of the crimes were grisly beyond imagining: A man was murdered in his bed and his wife was raped beside the dead body. The killer beat a small child and attempted to sodomize him.

There were also signs of devil worship — a pentagram drawn on the wall at one murder scene and survivors’ accounts of being ordered to “swear to Satan ” by the killer.

Ramirez was finally chased down and beaten in 1985 by residents of a blue-collar East Los Angeles neighborhood as he attempted a carjacking. They recognized him after his picture appeared that day in the news media.

The trial of Ramirez took a year, but the entire case — bogged down in pretrial motions and appeals —  lasted four years, making it one of the longest criminal cases in U.S. history.

Because of the notoriety, more than 1600 prospective jurors were called.

The trial was almost aborted in its final stages when a woman juror was murdered during deliberations. Jurors were 13 days into talks when the juror failed to appear one morning. She was found beaten and shot to death at the home she shared with her boyfriend. The next day, the man committed suicide and left a note saying he killed her in an argument.

Jurors wept when they learned of the tragedy, and Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan was faced with one of his most trying legal challenges. Lawyers said there were no legal precedents for the situation.

Defense attorneys argued the jurors were too distraught to resume their talks and noted the murder was similar to the gruesome attacks attributed to the “Night Stalker.”

Tynan decided to move forward. “We must get on with the task life has given us,” he told jurors, ordering them to begin deliberations with an alternate juror.

Jurors later said the death of the juror did not influence their decision.

After his conviction, Ramirez flashed a two-fingered “devil sign” to photographers and muttered a single word: “Evil.”

On his way to a jail bus, he sneered in reaction to the verdict, muttering: “Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”

The black-clad killer, unrepentant to the end, made his comment in an underground garage after the jury recommended the death penalty for his gruesome crimes.

Inexplicably, Ramirez, a native of El Paso, Texas, had a following of young women admirers who came to the courtroom regularly and sent him love notes.

Some visited him in prison, and in 1996 Ramirez was married to 41-year-old freelance magazine editor Doreen Lioy in a visiting room at San Quentin prison.

Relatives called Lioy a recluse who lived in a fantasy world.

In 2006, the California Supreme Court upheld Ramirez’s convictions and death sentence. The U.S. Supreme Court refused in 2007 to review the convictions and sentence. Ramirez still had appeals pending when he died.

His lawyers claimed the case should have been moved out of Los Angeles and said Ramirez was incompetent to stand trial.

Two years after his arrest, San Francisco police said DNA linked Ramirez to the April 10, 1984, killing of 9-year-old Mei Leung. She was killed in the basement of a residential hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood where she lived with her family.

Ramirez had been staying at nearby hotels.

Ramirez previously was tied to killings in Northern California. He was charged in the shooting deaths of Peter Pan, 66, and his wife, Barbara, in 1985 just before his arrest in Los Angeles, but he was never tried in that case.

Missing Men Mystery in US Boomtown Oil Fields

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The murder of a North Dakota man has authorities investigating whether other recent missing persons cases are connected or the work of separate criminals who’ve descended on the area known as the Bakken Formation, where new discoveries of oil and natural gas have drawn thousands of transient newcomers and strained the resources of police.

Police on Tuesday found the body of 58-year-old Jack Sjol in a shallow grave about six miles southeast of his ranch in Williston. Sjol was shot “multiple times,” and authorities arrested and charged 33-year-old Ryan Stensaker with his murder, Williams County Sheriff Scott Busching told FoxNews.com. Stensaker, who has a history of drug-related convictions, is being held on $1 million bail.

“He would give the shirt off his back for someone,” Sjol’s niece, Aubrey Millar, said in an interview. “When you think of the stereotypical North Dakota cowboy, that’s him.”

“He was always there to help. He never wanted anything in return,” Millar said of her uncle, a 30-year Williston resident, who was last seen on April 24.

“We have over 90,000 man camp beds permitted in Williams County alone, and countless RV’s, RV parks, sanctioned or not.”

– Williams County (N.D.) Sheriff Scott Busching

Sjol’s case is one of several missing persons cases to hit the area since an influx of people moved to the region in pursuit of high-paying jobs in the oil and gas industry.

Kristopher “KC” Clarke, 29, was last seen more than a year ago in the Williston area. Clarke, originally from Washington state, disappeared under suspicious circumstances, according to his mother, Jill Williams.

Authorities are also searching for 30-year-old Eric Haider, who lived in Bismarck and worked in Dickinson, about 132 miles away from Williston. Haider was last seen on May 24, 2012, at his job site.

Investigators are considering whether the men’s disappearances are connected or whether they are separate crimes committed by convicts who find it easy to go undetected in an area that’s experienced a recent population boom because of discoveries in the 200,000-square-mile Bakken Formation, which stretches through swaths of North Dakota and Montana. So many men have moved in recent years to North Dakota, where unemployment is the lowest in the nation, that they must live in camps and RVs because new home construction can’t keep up with demand. 

“They’re separate cases right now but the possibility that they may be connected is being looked into,” Busching told FoxNews.com.”We have a tremendous transient population. We have very few addresses,” Busching said. “We have over 90,000 man camp beds permitted in Williams County alone, and countless RV’s, RV parks, sanctioned or not.”

We have people living in tents and under bridges,” he said. “They come and go.”While authorities describe an overwhelming task at hand, the victims’ family members, like Jill Willliams, are outraged over what they say is a lack of publicity given to the missing men.

“They cannot keep track of anybody,” Williams said of the local police. “It is absolutely like the Wild West. They’re ill-equipped to do anything. They’re overwhelmed and overworked.”

“It is the perfect hiding place for rapists, pedophiles and serial killers,” she said. “This isn’t just about my son. It’s about everyone missing out there.”

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Kristopher “KC” Clarke is being urged to call the Williston Police Department at 701-577-1212. For tips or information related to the disappearance of Eric Haider, the public is urged to contact the Dickinson Police Department at 701-456-7762.

Search for John Wayne Gacy victims solves decades-old missing person case

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A DNA test used by investigators to identify victims of serial killer John Wayne Gacy has helped solve a 41-year-old New Jersey missing persons case, officials announced Tuesday.

Sixteen-year-old Steven Soden went missing on April 3, 1972, but his remains were not identified until 2012, when authorities matched them with a DNA sample from his sister.

Soden’s relatives contacted the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in 2011 after hearing about Sheriff Thomas Dart’s efforts to identify several of Gacy’s victims. They believed Soden may be one of them, officials said.

“We always had hopes that we’d somehow find him alive,” Steven’s brother, Ron Soden, 73, told NBC 4 New York Tuesday from his home in Tacoma, Wash. “In this day and age, it’s so much easier to find someone over the Internet.”

The teen, who lived at an orphanage, was last seen alive on April 3, 1972, running away with 12-year-old Donald Caldwell, from the Bass River Camp Grounds in Burlington County, N.J., during a group camping trip, officials said. Neither boy was ever seen again.

Soden may have headed to Chicago, where his biological father lived, his relatives suggested — and there he may have come into contact with Gacy.

Gacy killed 33 teenage boys and young men in Chicago from 1972 to 1978. He was executed for his crimes in 1994. Seven of his victims remain unidentified.

At Dart’s request, a DNA sample was taken from Soden’s sister, but there was no match between her and any of the unidentified Gacy victims.

In December 2012, however, her profile matched that of unidentified human skeletal remains found 13 years earlier in New Jersey.

Over the next few months, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and New Jersey State Police conducted further investigation and obtained additional DNA samples from Soden’s half siblings, including a paternal half sibling, to make an accurate identification.

Genetic testing was performed at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

The remains were discovered in the woods in Burlington County in April 2000 — not far from where Soden was last seen.

New Jersey State Police say they’re still searching for Caldwell as well as additional evidence in Soden’s death, according to Philadelphia NBC affiliate WCAU. His exact cause of death is still unknown.

“You always hope for the best,” Ron Soden told NBC 4 New York. “But when you finally get an answer, a partial answer…” He trailed off.

“It’s sad,” he continued. “The sense of him being so young, and the way it happened, and where it was. He probably ran away because he thought nobody cared about him. It’s just not a good story.”