Ts first minutes of Night Stalker: the Hunt for a Serial Killer, a new Netflix true crime miniseries, focuses not on the titular killer, real name Richard Ramirez, but on the city he terrorized in the 1980s: Los Angeles, kissed , but marked by a long period of crime noir, both real (the Black Dahlia, Manson’s murders) and fictional (the works of Raymond Chandler, an entire genre of films). From the source of the title to the dark and ominous covers of synth hits, Night Stalker evokes the mid-1980s – a time of rapid growth for LA’s national profile, especially after the 1984 Olympics and, in 1985, a summer of stultifying heat and a wave of fear after a wave of brutal home invasions.
Night Stalker incorporates many basic elements of the true crime genre – extended slow motion montages, the click-through of crime scene photos, decadent bar aesthetics – into the story of a serial killer with unusual indiscretion. From June 1984 until his arrest in August 1985, Ramirez, then 25 years old and represented in anxious press coverage by a disturbing police sketch of a skinny, tanned man with a block of dark curls and large, disturbingly intense eyes, killed at least 13 people in a wave of violence whose scope would cover at least three separate episodes of Law & Order. The victims – some brutally murdered, others left for help – were aged between six and 82 years. There was no consistent goal for sex, age, race or class; the weapons of crime ranged from attempted strangulation with a telephone cord to point-blank shooting. Sometimes the killer left satanic messages or symbols, other times he stopped to eat a piece of fruit from the refrigerator.
The only thing in common seemed to be an unlocked door or window, and as the attacks intensified – some on the same night or two days apart – Los Angeles residents closed their homes in 100F heat, bought window bars or adopted large dogs. The fear of the “unknown, nameless, faceless, haunted nature” of the bogeyman Night Stalker “dominated the city,” Tiller Russell, the series’ director, told the Guardian.
Russell, a veteran of the real crime series interested in the Law & Order chase since his days as a local police reporter, entered the history of the Night Stalker 30 years later through the memories of Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, the two police detectives from Los Angeles who tracked the crimes over five harrowing months in 1985 and who largely serve as double narrators for the series. Russell met Carrillo through a colleague at a “traditional LA” steakhouse and was “absolutely fascinated by the precision and specificity of his memories,” he recalled. Carrillo, about 30 years old at the time of the murders, remembered exact dates and times, what the victim was wearing, the address of the crime scene.
The clinical tenacity of Carrillo’s memory of the case led Russell to ask himself, he said, about “the human history of this – what is the impact on the people who experienced it?” To police officers, surviving victims and family members, he asked, “What is the price of the human soul on them?”
Night Stalker is, therefore, four episodes of true crime in which the violent aggressor happily retreats to the offended. The series unfolds chronologically, assault by assault, granular track by track, rather than psychologically, according to the terrifying memories of Los Angeles residents or any interest in what motivated Ramirez, who remains an almost anonymous figure until the final episode. The timeline stops along the way to verify the toll on the relentless pursuit of the case in Carrillo and Salerno, which fueled minimal sleep and a justified fear that Ramirez, after the investigation’s press coverage, would target his families . Russell also accumulates humanizing memories of family members of some victims who have been minimized for a long time, in the press coverage, in the most terrible details of their deaths. (Ramirez, sentenced to death for 13 murders, among other crimes, died of cancer in the San Quentin state prison in 2013, aged 53).
The focus away from Ramirez was a deliberate attempt, Russell said, to avoid the “very strange and surreal afterlife” in the Night Stalker story, in which Ramirez became, for a small group, something like a satanic sex symbol. Witness statements at the time converged on two anonymous but striking facts about the Night Stalker: its strong and disgusting body odor and its mouth full of missing or rotten teeth (a failed sting operation to catch Ramirez involved a dentist’s office). But in the photos, Ramirez is tall and thin, with prominent cheekbones and black hair falling apart; he was known for wearing an exclusive jacket for members and hats of rock bands. In other words, as evidenced by the strange phenomenon of men on death row receiving a plethora of marriage proposals: a mature figure for an exploratory makeover by some as a hot and lost icon of darkness.
“It was very important for me not to fall into what I felt was false mythology,” said Tiller of the phenomenon. “This guy is not the Jim Morrison of the serial killers. There is nothing cool about it. ”In Night Stalker, Russell combined the detectives’ memories with testimonies from family members to” deliberately not fall into the exploratory or sensational nature of Ramirez’s myth, immersing you in the stories of those people whose lives were massive, dramatic and irrevocably impacted by Ramirez. “
Still, the corrective focus on law enforcement, which serves in Night Stalker, as in most crimes shows real and fictional, like the protagonists of the story, has its own limitations. That is, the persistent centralization of the police in American crime stories and the assumption, on TV, that the police are always the main characters – a trope that, inadvertently or not, works to sanitize police work and normalize the police as good guys standard, even when America’s terrible racist policing record and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this summer indicate otherwise.
Asked about any discomfort with the police narration centered on the Night Stalker – aside from the tenacity and indisputable achievements of Carrillo and Salerno – Russell agreed that, in general, “we are dealing not only with a crisis in policing, but with a kind of categorical failure in policing, and a moment of cultural reckoning when it’s like, that should change now, today and forever. “
“Telling a story based on law enforcement becomes an interesting issue,” he said. “At the same time, we tell the story of something that is 35 years old and is very specific for that. So I think it’s important to understand the lens through which to see history.
“The way we have approached these things doesn’t work anymore. It’s time for something new, ”he added later, pointing specifically to the death of black men at the hands of the police. “But at the same time, there are courageous people doing an incredibly challenging and impossible job, and you need law, order and the police. So, these are the issues of our time that we are all struggling with. “
Whether retracing the police investigation, repeating extensive interviews with the man on the streets of local TV, or reliving the feverish summer in courts for relatives and small players in Ramirez’s eventual arrest, Night Stalker seeks a picture of Los Angeles, 1985, instead of a serial killer mystery. The story “became this Los Angeles tapestry and a portrait of place and time,” said Russell, the series, therefore, about “the carnival of people … whose lives were affected by it.”