Most Notorious Los Angeles Serial Killers
Richard Ramirez
Ramirez’s childhood is considered an influence on his crimes. Frequently abused by his father, Ramirez began developing gruesome and macabre interests in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin who also taught him some of the military skills that he would go on to use during his year-long killing spree. Ramirez also cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. By the time he had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, he had begun frequently using cocaine. Ramirez would often commit burglaries to support his drug addiction, many of which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders, rapes, attempted rapes, and assaults
Ramirez’s highly publicized home invasion and murder spree terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles and later the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of fourteen months. However, his first known murder occurred as early as April 1984; this crime was not connected to Ramirez, nor was it known to be his doing, until 2009. Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons and different murder methods, including handguns, various types of knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a claw hammer. He punched, pistol whipped, and strangled many of his victims, both with his hands and in one instance a ligature, stomped at least one victim to death in her sleep, and tortured another victim by shocking her with a live electrical cord. Ramirez also frequently enjoyed degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill, by forcing them to profess that they loved Satan, or telling them to "swear on Satan" that there were no more valuables left in their homes he had broken into and burglarized.
In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld Ramirez’s nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding".[3] Ramirez never expressed any remorse for his crimes. He died on June 7, 2013, of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on California’s death row.
Hillside Strangler
It was initially believed that only one person was responsible for the killings. The police, however, determined from the positions of the bodies that two criminals were working together, but withheld that information from the press. The perpetrators were eventually discovered to be cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono Jr., who were later convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing and murdering 10 women and girls ranging in age from 12 to 28.
The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of two prostitutes who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles in October and early November 1977. It was not until the deaths of five young women who were not prostitutes, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent “Hillside Strangler” moniker came to prominence.
There were two more deaths in December and February before the murders abruptly stopped. An extensive investigation proved fruitless until the arrest of Bianchi in January 1979 for the murder of two more young women in Washington and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case.
The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of those crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Patrick Kearney
In the 1970s, Kearney would troll California highways and gay bars in search of men to pick up and then rape and murder. He dismembered his victims, stuffed their body parts into heavy-duty garbage bags and dumped them on the side of the road. His murder method earned his duel nicknames: “the Freeway Killer” and “the Trash Bag Killer.” In exchange for taking the death penalty off the table, Kearney pleaded guilty to 21 murders, according to CBS News. In 1978, he received 21 life sentences. Kearney, 83, is currently incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California per prison records Take a deeper dive into the true-crime history of the City of Angels when The Real Murders of Los Angeles premieres this fall. He was sentenced to life imprisonment
Lonnie David Franklin Jr.
Franklin’s brutal L.A. killing rampage with a 25-caliber handgun began in 1985 and went on for more than two decades. Franklin was convicted in 2016 of killing nine women and a teenage girl, Reuters reported. He was given the infamous nickname Grim Sleeper because he took a 14-year break from homicides – from 1988 to 2002. During the penalty phase of his trial, prosecutors connected him to several additional slayings. Detectives believe he may have killed at least 25 women, according to the Los Angeles Times. Franklin, 67, died on death row in 2020 at age 67.
William Bonin
Known as the Highway Killer, Bonin used the intricate network of Southern California highways and roads as a hunting and dumping ground. After luring victims – hitchhikers, schoolboys, and male prostitutes – into his vehicle, he would overpower and bind them before bludgeoning and torturing them. At times, he had an accomplice. Bonin was convicted of killing, sexually assaulting and torturing 14 boys and young men between May 1979 and June 1980, per California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records. In 1982, Bonin received the death penalty for 10 L.A. murders, and in 1983 was hit with a second death penalty for four slayings in Orange County. On February 23, 1996 at San Quentin State Prison, Bonin, 49, became the first California convict to die by injection, the Associated Press reported.