Night Stalker: What REALLY Prompted Richard Ramirez to Kill
Night Stalker glamorizes serial killer Richard Ramirez and glosses over his true motivations. Here’s what really prompted his murder spree.
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Night Stalker glamorizes serial killer Richard Ramirez and glosses over his true motivations. In a time when there’s so much psychological nuance in true crime-themed docuseries, Tiller Russell’s Netflix project merely covers the bare essentials about the subject and offers little insight about the larger picture. As a result, viewers are left with a puzzle that’s missing several key pieces.
Set in 1985, Night Stalker chronicles 13 murders that were committed by Richard Ramirez over a five-month period. The documentary includes extensive and enlightening interviews with Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, who were the lead detectives during the initial investigation. Night Stalker frames the focal killer as an “evil” individual, with the first three episodes focusing primarily on the crime scene evidence and the events that led to Ramirez being identified and captured in August 1985.
Night Stalker inexplicably fails to address what prompted Ramirez to kill. Incidentally, viewers are left wondering about Ramirez’s motivations for murder, and the director seems content to pose hypothetical questions instead of analyzing the evidence and facts. For example, the Night Stalker series finale on Netflix begins with the revelation that Ramirez was tied to a graveyard cross by his father during childhood, and it’s also revealed that Ramirez witnessed a murder as a young boy. According to psychiatric analysis presented in the 2020 HBO documentary Crazy, Not Insane, a serial killer like Ramirez was prompted to kill because of cerebral trauma.
Overall, Night Stalker is a strong piece of filmmaking that will undoubtedly entertain Netflix audiences. But it would’ve been beneficial to establish a clear connection between the subject’s childhood experiences and his crimes as an adult. Night Stalker effectively documents Ramirez’s modus operandi, as the killer would often target families during his 1985 spree. First, he would murder the man of the household, and then sexually assault a female. Ramirez also molested young children. So, a basic psych evaluation suggests that the Night Stalker killed males who were symbolic of his father, and that he targeted females who reminded him of painful childhood memories. The attacks on kids also imply that Ramirez resented the fact that he didn’t have a normal upbringing, at least according to what Dorothy Otnow Lewis discussed in Crazy, Not Insane.
Night Stalker acknowledges all of Ramirez’s victims and wisely doesn’t spend its entire runtime highlighting the subject’s pop culture persona. But given that there’s now a barrage of serial killer docuseries available to stream, it’s important to note that the Netflix doc makes little effort to psychoanalyze the subject, and mostly relies on the testimonies of detectives. In 2021 and beyond, serial killer documentaries need to do more than just cover the basics, and then ask the audience “How did this happen?” in the closing moments.
Netflix frames Ramirez as a wild-eyed outsider, a supposedly evil man who killed just to kill. In reality, though, the Night Stalker subject presumably hurt people because of emotional trauma and social circumstances that he wasn’t equipped to deal with. For entertainment purposes, though, Night Stalker ignores a psychological deep-dive and instead provides nostalgia-loving Netflix viewers with ’80s-style synthwave music and neon graphics, rather than trying to further explain what truly motivated Ramirez to kill.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/night-stalker-richard-ramirez-killer-motivation-true-story/