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Historic Sickos that Could Have their Own Terrifying Netflix Series

Khalid Elhassan September 30, 2022 37 min

The Juror Who Loved the Criminal Defendant

The Night Stalker was finally undone by a fingerprint that he left on the windshield of a stolen car used in his murder spree. Richard Ramirez’s mug shots from earlier unrelated arrests were widely publicized in California, and he was spotted by Los Angeles citizens on August 31^st, 1985. After a wild chase that involved multiple failed carjacking attempts, he was captured by members of the public, and beaten half to death before the police arrived. He was eventually charged with thirteen murders, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries.

Despite all the gory details that came out in the trial, one of the jurors, Cindy Haden, fell madly in love with the Night Stalker. On Valentine’s Day, 1989, she gave him a cupcake with “I Love You” iced on the top. She still voted him guilty on all counts, but her passion for him did not wane. After the trial – for which Ramirez was sentenced to nineteen death sentences – Haden got a private detective license just so she could visit the Night Stalker in prison in the company of his lawyers.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.