F I R S TP R E V811NEXTLAST

Night Falls over San Francisco
Today a really creepy story; Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker committed a number of his early murders in San Francisco. In August of 1985 he attacked an elderly Chinese couple in San Francisco, killing the man and leaving the woman paralyzed. Five months later he stabbed to death two elderly sisters in their Telegraph Hill. Two months after that Ramirez shot and killed a man in his Cow Hollow apartment, near this photos location. A description given by the manager of the Bristol Hotel in San Francisco where Ramirez had stayed eventually helped lead to his arrest in L.A. where he was convicted for 13 murders and given 19 death sentences in 1989.

Here is where the story gets a little creepier. In 1996 Ramirez married a woman who first contacted Ramirez after his arrest and who had written him 75 letters while he was in jail. After Ramirez was moved to San Quentin Prison, just north of San Francisco, the woman relocated here and got a job as a manager of party goods store at a shopping mall in Marin County that just happens to have a view of San Quentin across the water.

One day while shopping at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in that same small mall I noticed a paperback book in the crime section. Unlike the other pristine books on the shelf this one appear quite worn and thumbed-through. When I pulled the book down from the shelf its broken spine flipped wide open to a photo spread with a number of pictures of Richard Ramirez. Yikes, I guess I know how someone spends her coffee breaks.
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