Killer Summer — A True Crime Memoir Podcast

"The summer of 1985. I was nine years old. And the world, as far as I could tell, was exactly the right size."

There's a newspaper on the driveway.

It's early morning. The kind of August morning in the San Fernando Valley where it's already hot before eight o'clock — no relief from the heat, not even this early, not even before the sun's really up.

The newspaper is folded in thirds. Face down.

I'm ten years old, standing at the end of my neighbor's driveway on Bobbyboyer Avenue. A couple of other kids from the cul-de-sac are standing next to me. Nobody's touching it. That's the game. You flip it over, and you see his face. You dare each other to do it.

None of us want to be the one.

This is a story about that summer. About what it did to us. And what it left behind.

By the mid-1980s, the San Fernando Valley had figured itself out.

Two hundred and sixty square miles of it, stretching west from the Verdugo Mountains all the way to the Simi Hills. Affordable housing. Good schools. Low crime. Strip malls, yes — maybe a few too many — but also cul-de-sacs and backyard pools and the kind of quiet that people moved to Los Angeles to find, only to discover they had to leave Los Angeles to get there.

My parents put down roots in Canoga Park — what would become West Hills a few years later, when the neighborhood decided it wanted a rebrand. They bought a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath stucco home on what had been a working orange grove not long before. Now it was a cul-de-sac. About twenty homes. Well-appointed. The kind of street where you knew your neighbors' names.

By the time I had any real sense of my surroundings, I was an undersized nine-year-old Jewish kid with glasses, attending fourth grade at Pomelo Drive Elementary. And as far as I could tell, life was good.

The year was 1985. L.A. was still riding the high of the 1984 Olympics. Mayor Tom Bradley had just been reelected. He was the kind of public servant who ends up with an international airport terminal named after him, which is exactly what happened.

At the movies, we watched The Goonies, Back to the Future, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Rocky IV, and The Breakfast Club. On the radio, Rick Dees ran the weekly Top 40. A-ha's Take On Me was everywhere. Tears for Fears. We Are the World.

Some kids had Transformers. Some of us got our first Cabbage Patch Kid. We ate Ghostbusters cereal — the Ralston brand, the one that came with a piece of Bazooka gum in every box.

We collected Topps baseball cards. We watched Family Ties and laughed at Alex P. Keaton. We watched Magic and Kareem and the Showtime Lakers beat the Celtics in six and felt like we owned the world.

Nobody could have imagined what was coming around the corner.

Most avid readers of the Los Angeles Times would have noticed, by June of 1985, a string of seemingly unrelated headlines. Random home invasion murders. Rosemead. Monterey Park. Whittier. Monrovia.

In each case, the victims appeared to be chosen at random. Attacked in or near their own homes, late at night. No apparent pattern — except one.

Survivors of two separate attacks described the same man. Hispanic. Gangly. Bad teeth.

By June, detectives from multiple jurisdictions had started comparing notes. Matching footprints at multiple crime scenes. And when they traced those footprints, they discovered that only six pairs of a specific Avia shoe — size eleven and a half — had ever been distributed in the greater Los Angeles area.

Six pairs. One set of footprints. The dots were connecting.

I knew nothing of any of this. I was doing what a soon-to-be fifth grader did on a hot Valley summer day: swimming in backyard pools, riding my bike up Woodlake to the drugstore on Cohasset, getting lost in Choose Your Own Adventure books, listening to Vin Scully call the Dodger game on the radio.

Then came a Saturday night in July.

My parents went out with friends most Saturday nights. They'd leave my sisters and me home with our babysitter — a teenager, with what I can only describe as a near-obsession with Duran Duran.

I'm sitting on the couch. Eyes on the TV. She walks out of the room to put my younger sister to sleep.

I'm alone with the television.

A news report. A police composite sketch. A man's face — expressionless, curly hair, dark hollow eyes, something menacing in the set of the jaw.

The newscaster's voice. Describing someone he called the Valley Intruder.

A man responsible for a number of random, horribly violent murders in and around the Los Angeles area.

[Long beat.]

I couldn't believe what I was seeing or hearing.

Did he just say, Valley Intruder?

I was in the Valley, too.

She came back in not long after and told me it was time for bed. I don't remember arguing. I remember lying there in the dark, and the face wouldn't leave. The curly hair. The hollow eyes. I kept seeing it on the inside of my own eyelids.

That image stayed with me the rest of that summer.

But the nightmare was only just beginning.

The next morning, I didn't say anything to my parents. I just went about my business, the way a ten-year-old does — like if you don't talk about a thing, it maybe didn't happen.

But I wasn't the only kid who'd seen that broadcast.

A few days later, the kid across the street — a couple years older than me, which at that age might as well have been a college degree in worldliness — gave me the rest of the story. Or his version of it.

He told me the killer had carved a woman's eyes out of her face. Taken them with him from the scene.

He told me the guy worshipped the devil.

He told me he went after yellow houses. Near the freeway.

I remember doing the math in my head. Our house wasn't yellow. We weren't near the freeway.

That gave me some relief.

Not much. But some.

I didn't know yet how much of it was true. The eyes — true. The devil worship — true. The yellow houses near the freeway, I'd later learn, wasn't some schoolyard myth — it was a real theory investigators were chasing, one that just hadn't made it past the chain-link fence around our cul-de-sac and into the mouth of a fourth-grader.

At ten, I didn't know the difference between a rumor and a fact. I just knew what I'd been told, and I held onto the part that helped me. The part about the yellow house. The part where I got to feel, for a minute, like the math worked out in my favor.

But the part I couldn't reconcile was the name. The Valley Intruder. Or the Walk-In Killer, as some outlets were already calling him.

I didn't realize at the time that they meant the San Gabriel Valley, not the San Fernando Valley. Different valley. Close enough, geographically, that the distinction meant nothing to a ten-year-old.

I still lived in a valley. And who was to say he wouldn't just walk into my house one night, and do to me what he'd done to that woman? To any of the others?

I'd soon find out I wasn't the only one playing this out in my head.

Soon, the entire city of Los Angeles would enter something like a panic. A state of dread and unease that spread as fast as the heat that summer — record temperatures, windows locked anyway, doors bolted anyway, millions of people waiting to see who'd be next, as the wave of terror, and the image of that same face I couldn't shake, moved across the region like a tsunami.

"He had a name now. And a name made him real."

There's a thing that happens when a kid's brain runs into something it has no shelf to put it on.

You've seen violence in movies. You know, abstractly, that bad things exist in the world. You've watched a kid get punched at school. You understand, conceptually, that harm is possible.

But there's a line. And on one side of that line, the bad things are theoretical. They happen somewhere. To someone. Not here. Not to us.

What I saw on that television screen in July of 1985 was the moment that line disappeared. And what Brad told me on the sidewalk a few days later was the moment it got a face.

I tried to process what I'd seen with a fragile nine-year-old mind.

These kinds of things didn't happen in our community, I told myself. Sure, they made movies about it. I'd caught my dad watching A Nightmare on Elm Street the year before. But that was made up. This was real life. Even at nine, I knew the difference.

When my parents got home that night, I asked them. And they — like so many Los Angelenos at that moment — weren't adequately prepared to give me any meaningful answer. How does a parent prepare for that?

So we filled in the blanks ourselves. Brad's blanks. Mine. Albert's. Whatever the kid across the street had heard from his older brother, who'd heard it from somewhere else, who'd probably heard it from the news in the first place, run through three or four different ten-year-old translators by the time it reached us.

Some of it turned out to be true. The eyes. The devil worship. Some of it was just kids doing what kids do with something too big to hold — turning it into a story with rules, so it would stop being a thing with no rules at all.

While two detectives who'd worked the Hillside Strangler case tried to build a real profile out of footprints and shoe sizes, we were building our own profile out of nothing. Out of fear, mostly. And the particular logic that only makes sense if you're nine.

It was Brad's idea, like everything else that summer.

He came across the street one afternoon — I want to say it was maybe a week after he told us about the eyes — and he had that look on his face. The one that meant he had a plan, and the plan was going to involve all of us, whether we'd agreed to it yet or not.

"We need a watch," he said. "A neighborhood watch."

Albert, practical even at ten, asked the obvious question. "How do we do that?"

Brad didn't really know. But not knowing never stopped Brad from being in charge of something.

What we ended up with wasn't anything close to organized. It was four or five kids on a cul-de-sac, deciding, with total seriousness, that we were going to help catch the most wanted man in Los Angeles County.

Rajesh — whose dad owned the liquor store up the street, which gave him a certain credibility with the rest of us, like he had inside information just by proximity — got assigned the job of keeping track of things. He had a notebook. Maybe a map, at some point, though I might be giving us more credit than we deserve. Lisa took notes because she had the best handwriting. Albert's older brother, who was deep into Ratt and Billy Idol that summer and treated most things with the practiced disdain of someone two years older than everyone else, hovered at the edge of all of it — not really in, not really out, the way older siblings do when their little brother's friends are doing something he's decided is beneath him but can't quite stop watching.

And I — I don't really remember what my job was. I think that was the job. Just being there.

We talked about what we knew. Which by now was the same mix of fact and rumor we'd had since the start — bad teeth, curly hair, a man who came through windows people left open because of the heat. We didn't have a plan beyond that. We had concern, and boredom, and the specific energy that only exists when a group of kids convinces itself it's doing something important.

The watch had exactly one real night of operation, as far as I remember.

Albert and I were on it. We sat on the edge of my porch with flashlights, the cul-de-sac quiet and dark in front of us, the kind of summer-night quiet that's usually comforting and that summer wasn't.

We talked about everything except the thing we were supposedly watching for. That's what kids do — circle the real subject for hours without ever landing on it. At some point, deep into a conversation I don't fully remember, headlights turned onto the street.

We didn't say anything. We just went still.

The car came down slow. Too slow, probably, for what it actually was, but at the time it felt like the slowest car that had ever existed. It reached the end of the cul-de-sac, turned around, and started back toward us.

Albert and I were behind the side of the house before either of us decided to move there.

We watched through the gap by the fence as it came to a stop almost directly in front of my house. The engine idled. Neither of us breathed, or at least it felt that way.

Then the dome light came on inside the car.

It was an elderly woman. Glasses, gray hair, the kind of face that had never once been mistaken for a Hispanic man in his twenties with bad teeth. She looked at a piece of paper in her hand — lost, probably, or checking an address — turned the light back off, and drove away.

Albert and I came out from behind the house and didn't say anything for a second. Then we both started laughing, the specific kind of laughing that's really just relief with nowhere else to go.

That was the whole watch. One scare. One elderly woman looking for somebody's house. We never organized another night after that — not because we decided to stop, just because summer kept happening, and there were pools to swim in, and bikes to ride, and eventually nobody brought it up again.

I think about that now and it's almost funny. Almost. A handful of nine- and ten-year-olds with flashlights, genuinely convinced we were a line of defense against a man who'd already killed more than a dozen people across two counties.

But I also think it tells you something true about what that summer actually was. We weren't equipped to understand the scale of it. So we built something the size of a porch and called it a plan. It made us feel less helpless, for one night, even if it didn't actually do anything.

That's true of a lot of things adults built that summer, too. They just had bigger porches.

By the end of July, the entire Los Angeles metropolitan area was in what could only be described as a state of emergency.

The police sketch was everywhere. Every time I saw it, the same panic came flooding back.

My bed saw very little action that summer. The carpeted floor of my parents' room became my only real refuge. They let me stay there for a few months — never made a thing of it, never told me I was being ridiculous, just let me drag my pillow down the hall most nights and set up camp. Even there, close to them, I'd lie awake listening for sounds outside. Jumping at the smallest noise. Peering out the window into the backyard, certain the prowler had found his way in.

That's what the Valley had become by August. People were buying guns. Guard dogs. The summer was one of the hottest on record — temperatures past ninety, sometimes past a hundred — and people without air conditioning faced a genuinely terrible choice: leave the windows open and sleep, or close them and lie awake in the heat, knowing the killer gained entry through open windows.

Most people closed their windows.

We didn't have any of that — no gun, no extra locks, nothing official. What we had instead was a porch and two flashlights and a notebook nobody really wrote anything important in.

Then they gave him a new name.

A detective said the case reminded him of a popular 1970s TV series about a serial killer. The press ran with it. And a moniker emerged for a fully realized monster.

The Night Stalker.

Nobody had seen anything quite like this. Ted Bundy had grabbed national headlines, but Bundy's victims fit a specific profile. The Hillside Stranglers stayed within the same narrow targeting. The Night Stalker had no profile. He wasn't selecting. He was hunting whatever was in front of him.

And by August, it had escalated into something even the most twisted Hollywood screenwriter would have struggled to put on the page. He was authenticating each murder now. Pentagrams in blood on the walls. Messages. In one home, he left behind a baseball cap with an AC/DC logo.

A bloodthirsty man with bad teeth, driving the L.A. freeways late at night, listening to heavy metal, hunting at random.

It was something out of my worst nightmares.

Only it was real.

I want to be precise about something.

Statistically, I was an unlikely target. A nine-year-old kid in a cul-de-sac in Canoga Park was not who this man was looking for. The facts, if I'd known them, would have offered some comfort.

But fear doesn't operate on statistics.

Fear operates on imagination. On the composite sketch. On the newspaper in the driveway. On the sound outside the window at two in the morning that turns out to be a cat. On a car turning around at the end of a cul-de-sac and slowing to a stop in front of your house.

That's what the summer of 1985 was for me. Not danger. Dread. Which is its own kind of damage.

The Night Stalker had committed something like thirty assaults across the Los Angeles area. Thirteen murders. Five attempted murders. Sexual assaults. Torture. He was operating in a frenzy, accelerating, making no apparent effort to stop.

And then, on August 24th, 1985, his luck ran out.

[Hard cut to silence.]

Act Three through End

[Four full seconds of silence after "Gracias. Gracias." before anything — music or narration — resumes. Do not rush this.]

Manuel de la Torre didn't want the word hero. He just saw a man hurting his wife, and he picked up a lead pipe.

Faustino Penon got his hands around the neck of the most wanted man in California because he tried to steal his car, and Penon wasn't going to let that happen, gun or no gun.

And Maria Marijo just wanted to know her daughter was safe.

None of them woke up that morning trying to end a seven-month nightmare that had reshaped how an entire region slept, locked their windows, and looked at strangers. They were just protecting the people in front of them. That's all any of it ever was, the whole summer — people doing what they could with what they had, at whatever scale was available to them. A grandmother buying a gun. A sheriff asking the public to call in. A handful of nine-year-olds with two flashlights and a porch.

And, on the last morning that mattered, a man with a lead pipe who didn't want to be called anything at all.

The struggle didn't end clean. Ramirez tried to run. The residents of Hubbard Street didn't let him get far.

By the time police arrived, Ramirez had been beaten, his head bleeding badly enough to need bandages. And when they finally got him into the back of the squad car, surrounded by the people who'd just spent the last several minutes making sure he didn't get away, he looked up at the officers and said it himself.

It's me. It's me, man.

I remember watching that moment on television. The most feared man in the state of California, in the back of a police car, bandaged and beaten, sounding almost relieved. Like some part of him had been waiting to stop running.

[Silence holds through the end of Act Four and into the opening of Act Five.]

I need you to understand what it actually felt like to watch this unfold, because looking back at it now, the closest comparisons I have are things that hadn't even happened yet.

You know that feeling of watching a live pursuit unfold on television — a low-speed chase down a freeway, every channel cutting to it, the whole country stopping to watch the same screen at the same time? That wouldn't have a name for almost another decade. But that's the closest thing I can compare it to. Real-time, can't-look-away, the whole city watching the same broadcast at the same moment, because everyone needed to see how it ended.

Or maybe it's closer to the Olympics. We'd just had those, the year before — the whole region puffed up with civic pride, strangers high-fiving each other over a gold medal. This felt like the dark mirror of that. The same sense of we did this together, except instead of cheering an athlete across a finish line, we were watching a city catch a monster with its bare hands.

When word came that they had him — that it was over, that the streets of East L.A. had done what a task force of fifty detectives and two FBI psychologists hadn't quite managed to do on their own — I remember the feeling in my own house. It wasn't just relief. It was something closer to triumph. Like the Dodgers had won the World Series, except the other team was an actual nightmare, and the whole city had been playing defense for seven months straight.

The fog that had been sitting over Los Angeles all summer — and I mean that as more than a figure of speech, because the heat and the haze and the fear had all blurred together into one long, suffocating season — that fog finally lifted. The virus that had been spreading from the San Gabriel Valley to San Francisco to Orange County, the one we'd all caught some version of, whether we admitted it or not — it had finally been stamped out. The beast that had been loose in the wild all summer, the one we locked our windows against and slept on our parents' floors to avoid, had finally been put back in a cage.

Not everyone in that crowd was feeling generous.

That's the part that's harder to admit, looking back. The celebration wasn't entirely clean. There was something feral underneath it too — the same fear that had kept us all locked indoors all summer, just inverted, pointed now at the man in the back of the squad car instead of the shadow at the window. We weren't just relieved. Some of us wanted blood for blood.

The fanfare around his transport to county jail was captured live on TV, down to the smallest, strangest details.

Even the inmates wanted him caught. That's how completely this man had managed to terrify an entire region, regardless of which side of a cell they were already standing on.

I remember feeling ecstatic. Like our team had won the championship.

Good had triumphed over evil. We got our guy. And the fact that it was regular people — not detectives, not a SWAT team, just a man with a lead pipe and a few terrified neighbors — that mattered to me, even at nine. It meant something that the city had, in some small and unplanned way, caught him itself.

The watch on my porch ended that week, without any of us ever officially deciding to stop. There wasn't a last night. There was just a morning when the news came on and we realized we didn't need it anymore.

Summer wound down after that. By September I was a fifth grader at Pomelo Drive Elementary, worrying about the things fifth graders worry about. Richard Ramirez was awaiting trial. The terror, as far as any of us could tell, was a thing of the past.

Life went back to normal.

Sort of.

[Near-silence holds through the transition into Act Seven.]

A few months later, on the morning of January 28th, 1986, my class gathered around a television to watch the Space Shuttle Challenger lift off.

We watched it explode seventy-three seconds after launch.

Seven astronauts. Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who'd won a trip on the mission, who'd been about to become the first civilian in space.

Gone, live on television, in front of children across the country.

I was ten years old by then. In the span of about six months, I had learned something that no one had explicitly taught me, and that I would spend years trying to put into words.

The world is a place where bad things happen for no apparent reason. Where one person can decide to harm another to fulfill their own sick desires. Where an entire community can be held in the grip of fear by one person hell-bent on chaos. And where, on any given Tuesday morning, something enormous and hopeful can come apart in the sky.

My parents' generation had Vietnam and the Kennedy assassination. My generation had this — the Night Stalker and the Challenger — inside a single school year.

We were not prepared. But the world doesn't ask if you're prepared.

The world just teaches.

[Near-silence holds through the transition into Act Eight.]

I never really let go of that summer.

I'm not sure I'm supposed to.

Over the years I've met other people who are both fascinated by and repelled by what happened in 1985. People who, like me, had a version of that moment — the sketch on TV, the newspaper in the driveway, the feeling that the world had shown them something they couldn't unsee.

Today I'm a sucker for a good true crime book or documentary. Maybe it's because exploring the darker side of human nature triggers something that brings me back to that summer. To the sheer bewilderment of discovering what people are capable of.

Or maybe it's simpler than that.

Maybe I'm still doing what I was doing on Bobbyboyer Avenue all those years ago. Still daring myself to flip over the newspaper. Still trying to look at the thing that scared me. Trying to understand it. Trying to make it smaller.

I think about Brad sometimes. About Albert, and Rajesh, and Lisa. About a porch, two flashlights, and a watch that never caught anything, except maybe each other, on the worst nights of a summer none of us asked for.

And I think about James Romero. Thirteen years old, writing down a partial license plate because something didn't look right. He didn't know what he'd just done. None of us ever really know, in the moment, which small thing we do is going to matter.

Here's what I actually learned that summer, even if it took me years to find the words for it.

Up until that point, the world I'd been handed was a simple one. There were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys lived in movies, the ones my dad watched after I'd gone to bed. I didn't know yet that the world I'd been given was only half the story.

There is light. And there is dark. Most of us spend our whole lives trying to live somewhere comfortable in between — close enough to the light to feel safe, far enough from the dark to forget it's there at all.

That summer took the in-between away from me, just for a while. It showed me the dark directly, with no buffer, no movie screen, no grown-up softening the edges. And once you've seen it without the buffer, you don't really get the buffer back. Not all the way.

That's what that summer really was, underneath the heat and the headlines and the flashlights on my porch. It was the end of my innocence. The end of a lot of people's innocence, all at once, across an entire city that didn't ask for it either.

I call it, now, a killer summer.

[Complete silence.]