This could have been a respectful examination of the impact of unfathomable horror. Instead, he opts for tacky and deaf.
I was nine in the summer of 1985 and it was scorching hot in San Diego – the kind of oppressive dry heat that you don’t sweat because it evaporates instantly. I sat very, very quiet with my parents in the sweltering heat around the dinner table at our neighbor’s house. All doors and windows were open – air conditioning was a rarity in San Diego – and my parents kept interrupting the meal to look out the window or to stay in the door. My father appeared, looking out, my mother tilting her head around him to take a quick look at the night as well.
My father did not want to calm down. It was because the former college basketball player – who is over six feet tall and over 200 pounds – was concerned about the Night Stalker. All the lights were on in our house, and the blinds and curtains were open for a clear view. He continued to look out onto the patio to make sure no one was inside the house, waiting to ambush us when we arrived.
Between March and August 1985, Richard Ramirez killed 12 people in California, mainly in the San Gabriel valley, east of Los Angeles, in a massacre and torture campaign that also included numerous sexual assaults and kidnappings of children. It goes beyond the real crime; it’s the real horror. Netflix’s “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is a four-part documentation that follows the work of two detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as they track down Ramirez. The cataloging of police work carried out by Det. Sgt. Frank Salerno and Det. Lieutenant Gil Carrillo is a cathartic tale, a convincing examination of intuition, obstinate evidence tracking, luck and experience that is always in danger of being thwarted by interagency police policies.
Where the series goes horribly, offensively wrong is in the sinister packaging of very solid interviews with the police, journalists, surviving victims and families. Real crime scene photos are used throughout the series, a choice that is deeply disturbing, but necessary to illustrate animalistic horror. (As wild as your imagination is, it wouldn’t be enough.)
What is not necessary at all is director Tiller Russell’s reenactments of crimes supported by class B tacky visuals. We don’t need to see a single drop of blood in slow motion as it falls to the floor. We don’t need to see a bloody hammer fall beside it. (This scene repeats itself over and over again.) We don’t need to see scenes of sinister animals appearing in the dark – it’s not symbolism, it’s gaudy, filled with scary tactics. We don’t need Ramirez’s recorded words scattered around the scene in hot pink over the scenes of Los Angeles night traffic. This is not an exhibition by Patrick Nagel.
In the last episode, when Ramirez is finally identified as a suspect, his name and photo are released throughout the media. Returning from Arizona on a Greyhound bus, Ramirez soon realizes that he is at real risk of being arrested and begins a frantic chase through eastern Los Angeles, including crossing all lanes – in both directions – of Highway 5. The story of this attempt desperate and final freedom is interspersed with, God help me, a scene of Pac-Man chasing and about to eat a ghost. (It’s the 80s, got it?)
It is deeply deaf to the tones, and it is a problem throughout the series. When you use the real photo of a bloody bedspread from a 16-year-old girl who was beaten almost to death with a wheel wrench, you don’t look good.
Det. Lieutenant Gil Carrillo in “Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer”
Netflix
My dad was watching the news on August 30, 1985 – the day after his birthday – and he told me when I walked into the room that they got the Night Stalker. “How did the police catch you?” I asked.
“A lot of people in the neighborhood recognized him and …” he started, and I remember it took a long time for my father to figure out how to formulate exactly what happened to Ramirez for me when I was 9, “… made sure that he would not run away. “
As the docuseries reveals, as soon as Ramirez was recognized for his run through eastern Los Angeles, an improvised gang from the neighborhood beat him to the finish. A patrol car came by accident and the policeman put Ramirez in the back seat before the crowd killed him. Ramirez ended up receiving 19 death sentences for his crimes and was sent to San Quentin; he died in prison in 2013 of lymphoma.
The Night Stalker case still resonates with me and the others who lived at that time, but now the places he terrorized in the San Gabriel Valley are apparently back to normal. Sierra Madre is where the good ice cream shop is located. We took our Christmas tree from a place in Monrovia. A bakery in Glassell Park has the best sweets in Los Angeles. We bought our camping gear for our son’s annual school trip to Joshua Tree in Arcádia.
There is a story to be told about life in the Los Angeles suburb, where the Night Stalker proved that the varnish of bucolic normality is so fine, so tenuous. It can be a sunny place for somber people, to steal the line from Somerset Maugham.
But this is a tale that requires subtlety, a desire to dive into the inhuman and inhuman in the midst of the seemingly mundane, and how everyday life can be fragmented by the unfathomable. Perhaps one day this story will be told. Is not it.
Note: C-
“Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer” is now being broadcast via Netflix.
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