Tthe first minutes of Night Stalker: the Hunt for a Serial Killer, a new Netflix mini-series for true crime, focus not on the title killer, real name Richard Ramirez, but on the city he terrorized in the 1980s: Los Angeles, sun-kissed and yet long characterized by a grim streak of noir crime, both genuine (the Black Dahlia, the Manson murders) and fictional (the works of Raymond Chandler, a whole genre of films). Night Stalker evokes the mid-80s from the title font to the dark and predictable covers of synth hits – a time of rapid growth for the national profile of LA, especially following the 1984 Olympics, and in 1985 a summer of astonishing heat and a wave of fear following a rash of brutal house raids.
Night Stalker contains many staples of the true crime genre – extensive slo-mo montages, the click-click fluttering through crime scene photos, a bad bar aesthetic – for the story of a serial killer with unusual indiscretion. From June 1984 until his arrest in August 1985, Ramirez, then 25, was represented in anxious press coverage by a disturbing police sketch of a light, tanned man with a block of dark curls and large, disturbingly intense eyes, and at least 13 people killed. a rush of violence that will span the scope of at least three separate episodes of Law & Order. The victims – some brutally murdered, others called for help – were between six and 82 years old. There was no consistent target of gender, age, race or class; the murder weapons ranged from attempted strangulation with a telephone cord to a sniper. Sometimes the killer left Satanic messages or symbols behind, other times he stopped to eat a piece of fruit from the fridge.
The only commonality appears to be an open door or window, and as the hits increased – some the same night or within two days in a row – LA residents equipped their homes in 100F heat, bought window bars or adopted large dogs. Fear of the “unknown, nameless, faceless, kind of ghostly nature” of the Night Stalker boogeyman “gripped the city,” Tiller Russell, the series’ director, told the Guardian.
Russell, a veteran of true crime series who has been interested in the Law & Order style since his days as a local crime reporter, entered the Night Stalker story thirty years later through the memories of Gil Carrillo and Frank Salerno, the two police detectives in Los Angeles. who tracked down the crimes in 1985 during five disturbing months and who serve primarily as the double narrators of the series. Russell first met Carrillo through a colleague at an “old-school steakhouse” and was “just absolutely hooked on the precision and specificity of his memories,” he recalled. Carrillo, in his mid-30s at the time of the murder, remembered exact times and dates, which a victim wore, the address of the crime scene.
The clinical stubbornness of Carrillo’s recollection of the case prompted Russell to wonder, according to him, ‘the human story of this – what is the impact on the people who lived it?’ To the police, victims and surviving relatives, he asked, “What is man’s soul attached to it?”
Night Stalker is thus four episodes of true crime in which the violent retreats gratefully to the avenged. The series plays chronologically, assault by assault, granular clue for clue, rather than psychological, according to either the terrible memories of Los Angeles residents, or any interest in what motivated Ramirez, which until the last installment remains an almost anonymous figure. The timeline takes pit stops en route to take the toll of the relentless pursuit of Carrillo and Salerno, which has penetrated minimal sleep and a justified fear that Ramirez, after press coverage of the investigation, would target their families. Russell also collects human memories of the relatives of some victims who have long been kept to a minimum in press coverage, down to the grim details of their deaths. (Ramirez, sentenced to death for 13 murders, including crimes, died in 2013 in San Quentin Jail at 53).
Focusing away from Ramirez was a deliberate attempt, Russell said, to avoid the ‘very strange and surreal afterlife’ of the Night Stalker story in which Ramirez became a satanic sex symbol for a small group. Witness testimony at the time coincided with two anonymous but moving facts about the Night Stalker: his strong, repulsive body odor and his mouth full of missing or rotten teeth (one failed sting operation to catch Ramirez was a dentist’s office). But in photos, Ramirez is tall and thin, with prominent cheekbones and a rockstar flop of black hair; he was known for wearing a Members Only jacket and rock band hats. In other words, as evidenced by the strange phenomenon that men on the realm of the dead receive an abundance of marriage proposals: a figure ripe for an exploitative reconstitution by some as a hot, lost icon of darkness.
“It was very important to me not to fall prey to false mythology,” Tiller said of the phenomenon. “This man is not the Jim Morrison of serial killers. There is nothing cool about this. In Night Stalker, Russell combined the detectives ‘memories with testimonies from family members to’ deliberately not fall prey to the exploitative or sensational nature of the Ramirez myth, by immersing yourself in the stories of these people whose lives are massive. and was dramatically and irrevocably influenced by Ramirez. ”
The affirmative focus on law enforcement, which serves in Night Stalker, as in most crime, shows both real and fictional, as well as the leading protagonists of the story, has its own limitations. The persistent centering of the police in American crime stories, and the assumption on TV that police are always the main characters – a herd that accidentally works to disinfect police work and normalize the police as the standard good guys, even when America’s grim record of racist policing, and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor this summer, otherwise indicate.
Asked about any discomfort with Night Stalker’s cop-centric narrative – Carrillo and Salerno’s undeniable stubbornness and achievements aside – Russell agrees that, in general, “we are not just dealing with a crisis in policing, but with a kind of categorical failure in policing, and a moment of cultural reckoning, it must change now, today and forever. ”
“Telling a story based on law enforcement becomes an interesting question,” he said. ‘At the same time, we are telling a story of something that is 35 years old and that is very specific to it. So I think it’s important to understand the lens through which you can see the story.
“The way we approach these things no longer works. It’s time for something new, ”he later added, pointing specifically to the deaths of black men among police. ‘But at the same time, there are brave people doing an incredibly challenging, impossible job, and you need law and order and policing. So these are the questions of our time that we are all struggling with. ”
Whether by investigating the police, replaying the bountiful local TV interviews on the street or reliving the feverish summer in family members and contributing players in Ramirez’s final arrest, Night Stalker aims for a Los Angeles chart Angeles, 1985, rather than a serial killer mystery. The story “became this Los Angeles tapestry and a portrait of place and time,” Russell said.