On September 3, 1985, less than a week after his arrest, Richard Ramirez went to see a prison dentist.
Over a period of nine months, Dr. Alfred Otero repaired nine badly rotten teeth, filling them with a compound substance.
Ramirez’s dental hygiene was an issue starting at a young age. The killer would begin his day by drinking Coca-Cola and eating sugar-covered cereal.
“He’d never brush his teeth. I used to tell him to close his mouth or brush his teeth,” Ramirez’s childhood friend and classmate Ray Garcia told the press.
The lack of hygiene and his sweet tooth, combined with the damaging oral effects of drugs, caused his teeth to decay heavily.
Ramirez’s teeth left a significant impression on his victims, with one victim reportedly describing the “Night Stalker” as having “stained and crooked teeth.”
Lillian Doi, a 56-year-old woman who was attacked and raped by Ramirez in May 1985, told the police that her attacker had bad teeth.
Another survivor, Somkid Khovananth, who was also raped and beaten by Ramirez, noted the same thing.
“Our biggest clues were his teeth and feet,” Frank Salerno, the lead detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department recalled. “That’s where we focused our energy.”
Little did Ramirez expect, his lack of hygiene would become a significant piece of evidence in his trials and eventually contribute to his conviction.
One of the witnesses, Ester Petschar, who had seen Ramirez buying an AC/DC hat he later left at one of the crime scenes, said the “Night Stalker” had “hardly any teeth” and the smile of a “killer clown.”
During his testimony, Ramirez’s father, Julian, claimed that the killer had been with family in El Paso during two of the Night Stalker attacks.
However, Dr. Peter Leung, a dentist in Chinatown, had proof that Ramirez had a dental appointment in Los Angeles during that period, adding three victims to his sentence.
In 1989, 29-year-old Richard Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries.
The judge who sentenced Ramirez remarked that his deeds exhibited “cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding.”
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