Richard Chase, the vampire of Sacramento, killed six people during one month of terror in Sacramento, California during the winter of 1977-78. His nickname resulted from his acts of cannibalism on his victims. Chase was born in the California state capital on May 23, 1950. His parents were strict disciplinarians and he was often beaten for disobeying them. He exhibited sociopathic behavior from an early age including animal abuse, bed-wetting, and starting fires. Chase's parents often argued with each other and his mother sought psychiatric help at least once; they divorced in 1971.
Chase dated a couple different girls in high school but these relationships usually ended when he was unable to get an erection. He began abusing alcohol and drugs and at age 18 consulted a psychiatrist who suggested he had repressed anger, but didn't make any suggestion that he should be committed to mental health care. Although Chase performed poorly in school and was arrested in the 10th grade for drug possession, he did graduate on time in 1968.
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Chase moved out of his parents' home and lived with several roommates all of whom were turned off by his bizarre behavior and drug abuse. Once he checked into a hospital emergency room claiming someone stole his pulmonary artery. He also insisted his bones were coming out the back of his head, his stomach was backwards, and his heart stopped beating. One psychiatrist diagnosed Chase as being a paranoid schizophrenic but believed his drug use was causing him to lose his mind. He was put under observation for 72 hours but he was eventually released. Chase's life and personal habits continued to go downhill.
He drove to Utah in the fall of 1972 and was arrested there for a hit and run accident. The following April he was kicked out of a friend's party for groping a girl. Chase came back a short while later and they called the cops. While being escorted out of the apartment, a .22 revolver fell out of his pants pocket. Chase was arrested and his father bailed him out of jail. He went to live with his grandmother in Los Angeles in May 1973 but she soon tired of his bizarre behavior and sent him back to Sacramento.
what the actual frick was wrong with boomers? seriously.
He bought pet rabbits which he killed and ate raw, sometimes consuming the animals' blood which he claimed was to prevent his heart from shrinking and disappearing. Once he injected himself with rabbit blood and became violently ill; Chase claimed the rabbit had consumed battery acid which seeped into his stomach. Finally he was committed as a schizophrenic suffering from delusions. Giving Chase anti-psychotic meds didn't have much effect and suggested that his drug abuse was at least partially responsible for his problems. Chase escaped the mental hospital in 1976, went to his mother's house, but was soon returned to the hospital. There he became known as "Dracula" for his weird blood obsession. Once Chase was found with blood around his mouth and two dead birds lay outside his window.
Eventually he was released and deemed no longer a danger to anyone. His parents were granted a conservatorship, renewed annually, and his mother paid his rent and shopped for his groceries. Chase moved into an apartment and began catching and killing animals to drink their blood. Sometimes he abducted neighborhood pets and he once even called a family whose dog was missing to tell them what he had done to the animal. He bought guns and started to practice with them. Chase's mother decided he didn't need his psych meds and started taking him off of them. The court-ordered conservatorship expired in 1977 and his parents did not bother renewing it. Once Chase's mother saw him holding a dead cat, which he dismembered and smeared its blood all over his face and neck. She did not report the incident to anyone.
this is a new level of disgusting i never even imagined possible
That August 3, police found Chase's '74 Ranchero stuck in some sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Two rifles lay on the seat next to a pile of men's clothing. There was blood inside the car and in a plastic bucket which contained a liver. The cops surveyed Chase from a distance with binoculars and saw him nude and smeared with blood. He realized he was being watched and ran, but the cops caught up to him. Chase insisted it was his own blood and it leaked out of his body. The liver in the bucket turned out to be a beef liver. No charges were filed against Chase and he was released.
The Hillside Strangler was active during this time and Chase avidly kept up with the news about the killings. On December 29, Ambrose Griffin, 51 and a member of the Sacramento Bureau of Land Management, was standing in the driveway of his Sacramento home removing a bag of groceries from his car trunk. Griffin's wife walked up to the front door of the house, turned, and noticed him laying on the ground, collapsed of an apparent heart attack. Only later did she realize that he'd been shot twice in a seemingly random drive-by shooting. One of their sons reported seeing a man with a rifle walking around the neighborhood. Police were called but it wasn't the gunman and his weapon was a different type than the one used to shoot Griffin.
On the afternoon of December 30, a 12 year old boy reported that a man aged about 25 with brown hair had fired at him from a brown Pontiac Firebird as he rode his bicycle. The boy reported the car's license number but it failed to turn up any results. Also on the 27th, a woman said a shot was fired into her home, a few blocks from the Griffins. A .22 slug was found in her kitchen which matched the bullet removed from Ambrose Griffin.
Dawn Larson was a neighbor of Richard Chase and had been since the summer of 1977. During that time she'd seen him carry three animals into the apartment, which was against the rules, and she never saw them again. On January 11, 1978, Larson encountered Chase outside and offered him a cigarette. He motioned to her that he wanted the entire carton. She obliged and he walked away. On January 23, Jeanne Layton, who lived on Burnece Street, saw a shaggy-looking young man walking towards her. He tried to open her patio door but it was locked, so he tried the windows, also found them locked and went back to the patio. Layton walked over to ask him what he was doing. He stared at her for a few moments, said absolutely nothing, lit a cigarette, and walked off.
Shortly after that encounter, Bob and Barbara Edwards were taking a grocery bag into their home when they heard something inside. They heard a window slamming followed by a shaggy young man running to the front yard. Edwards tried to stop him but he got away. They called police who found that their home had been thoroughly ransacked in an obvious burglary attempt. The intruder had also urinated and defecated in their infant son's bedroom.
At 2360 Tioga Way, Richard Chase arrived at the home of 22 year old Terry Wallin, who was pregnant with her first child. Chase placed a .22 round in the mailbox, opened the front door, and encountered Terry as she was taking out the garbage. She dropped the bag as he raised his pistol and shot her twice. One round cut through her right hand and forearm, the other cut through the top of her head. Wallin collapsed and Chase fired into her right temple, killing her. He dragged the body into the bedroom and got a kitchen knife and a yogurt container...
Terry's husband Dave came home that evening and realized the lights were off and there was no sign of his wife anywhere but the stereo was blasting. A garbage bag and dark stains on the carpet disturbed him. With trepidation, Dave opened the bedroom door to walk into absolute horror. Terry lay on the floor, face up. Her clothes were partially removed and her legs splayed open. Her left nipple was amputated, her torso cut open, and her spleen and intestines pulled out. She had stab wounds to the left lung, liver, diaphragm, and left breast. Her kidneys were sliced out and her pancreas cut in two. The kidneys were then placed back inside her body cavity. There was blood everywhere and to top it all off Terry's mouth had a wad of animal feces stuffed in it.
Two days later, a puppy was found dead and mutilated near the Wallins' home. A weird man with long hair driving a Ford Ranchero had purchased two puppies from the family with no apparent concern for if they were male or female, one of whom was the animal found dead.
On January 27, a 38 year old woman named Evelyn Miroth was babysitting her 20 month old nephew in her home about a mile from the Wallins' place. Dan Meredith, 51 and a neighbor of hers, stopped over to check on them. Miroth was going to send her 6 year old son Jason to a friend's house but he didn't show so the friend sent her daughter over to check. The girl saw something moving inside the front window and said no one answered the door. Neighbors became concerned and one finally entered the house...
Dan Meredith was dead, laying in a pool of blood in the hallway. He had been shot in the head. There was blood in the bathroom and bloodied water in the bathtub. Evelyn lay naked on her bed, her legs spread open. She was shot execution-style in the head, her abdomen sliced open, and her intestines pulled out. Two bloody carving knives lay nearby. It seemed that she'd been in the bathtub when her killer surprised her and dragged her to the bed. She was anally sodomized, leaving a quantity of semen in the rectum, and then stabbed in the anus several times. Her neck had several slash marks and it looked like the killer had tried to cut out one of her eyes. It also looked as if he'd tried to collect some of her blood in a container. Several of Evelyn's organs were stabbed.
Nearby lay 6 year old Jason, dead from two close range gunshots to the head. There were bloody shoe prints which resembled the ones found in the Wallens' home and a neighbor girl reported seeing a man in his 20s near the house. He fit the description of a man often seen walking around the neighborhood asking people for magazines. Dan Meredith's red station wagon was also missing. Karen Ferreira, the mother of Evelyn's nephew, was left wondering what happened to the infant. He was not in his crib but a bullet hole and a lot of blood were discovered there.
Meredith's car was found near the murder scene, the keys still in the ignition and David Ferreira was presumed dead. Sacramento police contacted the FBI for help and profilers Bob Ressler and Russell Vorpagel developed a profile of the killer. He acted on impulse and was most likely psychotic as he had left mountains of evidence behind including fingerprints and shoe prints with no attempt at concealing his crimes. They believed he lived in the neighborhood and would strike again if they didn't act quickly. Attempts at asking people in the neighborhood if they'd seen anyone suspicious around failed to produce any leads until one young woman provided a useful clue.
Nancy Holden, 27, had been out shopping on January 23 when a weird, disheveled man started walking towards her in the parking lot of the Town and Country Village Shopping Center. She tried to avoid him but he called out to her "Were you on the motorcycle when Kurt was killed?" Nancy was surprised. Back in high school, she'd had a boyfriend named Kurt who was killed in a motorcycle accident. The disheveled man looked strangely familar so Nancy asked him for his name. He replied "Rick Chase.'
Nancy was stunned. Richard Chase was an old high school classmate of hers but the greasy man before her barely resembled the clean, tidy kid she remembered. She heard that he'd gotten into drugs and now knew the rumors must have been true. Nancy was unnerved by Chase and wanted to get away from him; she finally managed to slip outside while he was paying for a purchase. She then noticed Chase was following her into the parking lot apparently trying to get a ride. Nancy quickly got into her car, rolled up the windows, started the engine, and took off before he could catch up to her.
She told police she was sure that the man in the sketches was Rick Chase. In addition to that, they found that a .22 semiautomatic handgun had been sold and registered about a month earlier to a Richard Chase. On January 10, he'd bought ammunition. Police ran a background check on Chase and discovered his history of mental problems and being institutionalized, a concealeed weapons charge, several arrests for drug possession, and the arrest in Nevada. After obtaining his address on Watt Avenue, they decided to check it out.
The apartment manager told the cops that Chase's mother paid his rent and she believed he fried his brain with LSD. He wouldn't let her inside the apartment. They knocked on the door but Chase would not open up. After a while, he went outside carrying a box in his arms and headed for his car. The cops went to arrest him but he didn't go down without a fight. Chase was wearing an orange coat with dark stains and his shoes had dried blood on them. He had a .22 semi-automatic pistol with blood stains on it. In his pants pockets were latex gloves and Dan Meredith's wallet.
The box he'd been carrying had bits of bloodied paper and rags in them. Taken in for questioning, Chase said he'd killed a couple of dogs but denied murdering any humans. While this was going on, detectives searched the apartment. It looked like something out of a horror movie. There was blood everywhere, all over everything and the entire apartment smelled horrible. Several bone fragments were found in the kitchen and dishes containing body parts in the refrigerator. One contained held human brain tissue. An electric blender was badly stained and smelled like rotting flesh. Photographic overlays on human organs from a science book lay on a table along with newspapers where ads selling dogs were marked. A calendar showed the inscription "Today" on the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders, and even more horrifyingly, the same word was written on 44 more dates yet to come during that year.
A blood sample had to be taken from Chase but he would not give it up willingly and panicked so he had to be restrained. His mother continued to maintain his innocence and said there was no proof that he did anything. At one point, Chase admitted to another inmate that he drank the blood of his victims because he had blood poisoning. He needed blood and he had grown tired of hunting and killing animals.
The missing David Ferreira was finally found on March 24 when a church janitor discovered a box containing the remains of a dead male infant. He had been beheaded and his head placed under the torso. A hole in the center of the head showed that he'd been shot in addition to being stabbed and several ribs broken.
Due to the notoriety surrounding the case, the trial, which opened January 2, 1979, was moved to Santa Clara County and Chase was charged with six counts of first degree murder. The prosecution dismissed the idea that Chase was mentally ill and argued that he'd planned and premeditated all of the attacks. He took the stand in his own defense. Chase said he'd been in a haze during the Wallin murder and could barely remember it, and that he'd been maltreated most of his life. He admitted to having consumed Wallin's blood. He didn't remember much about the second series of murders but he mutilated David Ferreira's body in the bathroom, cut open the head, and spilled pieces of brain in the tub. He fled the house with the baby's body, later severing the head and eating part of his organs. Chase remarked that Ferreira was "something else" but didn't elaborate. He was sorry about what he did and blamed it on his relationship problems in high school.
The jury did not buy the defense's insanity plea and on May 8 they found him guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to death.
Chase's spiral into insanity had started with his arrest in Nevada in August 1977. After that, he killed his mother's cat and purchased two dogs to kill. He also bullied a neighbor family about their missing dog, collected newspaper clippings about the Hillside Stranger, and then bought a gun. He also collected a newspaper clipping about the Griffin shooting and burned a neighbor's garage because their playing loud music annoyed him. He claimed the first murder happened when his mother wouldn't let him visit during the holiday season.
Chase told detectives that he had killed to preserve his own life and he was developing an appeal based on that. He mentioned soap dish poisoning. One detectived asked him what that was and he explained that everyone has a soap dish. If you lift the soap and find that underneath it is dry, you're all right. If it's gooey, you have the poisoning, which turns your blood to powder. The powder then depletes your energy and eats away at your body.
He then claimed that Nazis were persecuting him because he was israeli, although he wasn't a israelite, and that he had a Star of David on his forehead, which he didn't. He said the Nazis were connected to UFOs that telepathically told him to kill to replenish his blood. The UFOs followed him around and the FBI could track them by putting a radar on him. Chase was not popular with other inmates in prison; most would have nothing to do with him and some mockingly told him to commit suicide.
Chase ultimately did take the advice. On December 26, 1980, a correctional officer in San Quentin saw Chase laying on the bunk in his cell, apparently normal and with nothing amiss. The guard walked off and came back about an hour later to notice him partially slumping off the bunk. He did not respond when called to. The guard entered the cell to find that Chase was unresponsive. Inside the cell was a weird suicide note mentioning pills. Chase had been taking Sinequan for depression and hallucinations, which he received in packets of three capsules a day. Apparently he horded the pills until he had enough to overdose on them. An autopsy of Chase found that he was a normal, healthy 30 year old man with no underlying pathologies and that the cause of death was toxic overdose of his psych meds.
idk man i think this guy was clearly insane and should have been in the nuthouse rather than jail
Yeah he could have been in a high security psych hospital and the public would be safe
Late 70s USA was an insane murderscape where you could go around shooting strangers in the street and keep strangled hookers in your apartment for weeks and the police couldn't do shit
>Late 70s USA was an insane murderscape where you could go around shooting strangers in the street and keep strangled hookers in your apartment for weeks and the police couldn't do shit
more like the justice/mental health care system was completely and utterly moronic
>this guy who's openly psychotic, kills birds, and drinks their blood and earlier tried to inject himself with rabbit blood? nah he's no threat to anyone, it's ok to release him.
i hate boomers, i really do