‘Night Stalker’ Is Netflix’s Latest Serial Killer Doc

In 1993, then-incarcerated serial killer Richard ‘The Night Stalker’ Ramirez did an interview with tabloid TV show “Inside Edition.” Although he declined to answer any questions about the 13 murders, five attempted murders, and 11 sexual assaults that put him on California’s death row, he did offer an analysis of other killers. “A serial killer comes about by circumstances and, like, a recipe [of] poverty, drugs, child abuse,” he said. “These things contribute to a person… to a person’s frustration and anger. At some point in life, he explodes.”

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Those sentences could’ve been torn from the pages of Ramirez’ own story, although he insisted that he wasn’t interested in talking about himself. And, despite its name, a new four-part Netflix series is less concerned with Ramirez than it is with the survivors of his attacks, the families of his slain victims, and the two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department detectives who stayed on the heels of his worn sneakers during the summer of 1985.

“Night Stalker—The Hunt for a Serial Killer,” is the streaming service’s latest true-crime documentary, and it also might be the most affecting; instead of hypothesizing about Ramirez—or attempting to humanize him—director Tiller Russell focuses on those whose lives were irreparably changed because of their encounters with him. VICE recently spoke with Russell about the series, about telling the survivors’ stories, and about the nature of evil.

VICE: What sparked your interest in the Night Stalker case, and your interest in telling these stories?
Tiller Russell: My professional life has been spent in the world of law enforcement and crime, and it’s really been my beat for a long time. I’m constantly looking for compelling crime stories with nuanced and complex characters and, in a weird way, I feel like I’ve been making the same movie for a long time: The Seven Five, Operation Odessa, Silk Road, and now “Night Stalker.” With this one, I was writing for a TV show at the time, and a writer friend came to me and said he’d met one of the lead homicide investigators who worked the Night Stalker case. He said ‘I think there may be a fascinating documentary in this, do you want to go to dinner with this guy?’ I went and met Los Angeles County homicide detective Gil Carillo, and he told the story of that long, hot, dark summer, what happened, what it was like for him to work the case, and the toll it took on him. I was struck by his vulnerability and the unlikely kind of hero’s journey that he went on. The human story behind the Night Stalker hadn’t been done, and [it felt like] an incredible opportunity to author a piece of that history.

Carillo and his partner, Frank Salerno, both feature heavily in the documentary, as do relatives of Richard Ramirez’ victims, and some who survived being attacked by him. How did you get such a wide range of people to participate, and to revisit what had to be such a dark time? With a story where the trauma is this deep and raw, and lasting and defining, you know this is going to be a precarious undertaking that has to be approached thoughtfully and carefully. We basically reached out to every single person that we could find, every cop, forensics expert, victim, survivor, and family member. We also reached out to all of the other people who may have just had strange crossings with Ramirez, like a librarian at the downtown library in L.A. or Esther, the woman that meets him when he’s buying a ball cap. Everybody who was in L.A. at that time remembers that summer vividly and visceral, and what their experiences were. I thought that this had to be a portrait not just of the iconic cops and killer, but an iconic city, and the way to do that was to have all of these different people contributing their perspective.

The episodes feature recreations of some of the crime scenes, and include photos from the police files. How did you balance between including those details, but also being respectful to the victims and their families? It’s a huge moral and ethical question that we constantly asked ourselves. These are the most profound, traumatic and horrifying experiences imaginable for these people. Sitting in the room with somebody like Anastasia Hronas, who was kidnapped, abused, and miraculously released by Ramirez, we heard the power of that story and the pain of it, but at the same time, we saw her resilience and refusal to be defined by it. That was profoundly affecting. We wanted to make sure the victims’ stories were thoughtfully told, so they’re treated as something more than a statistic in somebody else’s crime spree. Yes, this is a sensationalist story, [based on] the way the media covered it at the time, but there was a massive human toll to this. We were constantly asking ourselves the question, “’How do you stay true to the material, and never cross the line into doing something that’s exploitative or tawdry in any way?”’

I thought that was effectively done at the beginning of the third episode, when each victim’s name flashes on-screen –– and they just kept coming. That was such a stark reminder of how many people were affected. That was a thoughtful contribution on the part of our lead editor, to evoke the depth and vastness of the crimes. And when you see the victims’ names and ages… that’s why this was so terrifying, because everybody in the city felt like ‘I could be next, or my wife could be next, or my grandfather, or my son or daughter.’ Finding different ways to evoke that was one of our central goals.

How did immersing yourself in those stories affect you? The way I think about it is almost like layers of trauma. The people that lived through this or lost loved ones, they experienced trauma in the most direct and primal way. The next layer of that are the homicide cops who work the case and have to walk into those rooms to talk to the surviving family members [and] look at the bodies, they’ve got their layer of trauma. The media at the time covered the cops and the victims, and they’ve got a layer. And even 35 years removed, the filmmaking team is choosing to enter that chain of trauma. From the very beginning, Netflix was wonderful about saying “’Hey, anybody that needs to step out and talk to a therapist, or have a room where you don’t work, just come in here to talk and decompress.”’ It was a necessary part of it, because you are wading in the darkness – and if you’re not careful about it, the darkness will stick to you.

Is that partlially why you’re not telling Richard Ramirez’ story? I mean, the doc is called Night Stalker, but it’s not Ramirez’ story. Perspective and point of view are the most critical decisions that get made in the course of telling any story and [with this] there was a weird afterlife. There was a circus-like trial, and Ramirez became a sex symbol and object of desire, with this unlikely but rabid fanbase. We decided not to perpetuate that, and not to make him into, like, the Jim Morrison of serial killers. We wanted to show the human toll of it, being able to tell it from the perspective of these two partners who have the case of a lifetime, and the only way to solve it is for another person to die. That, paired with the point-of-view of survivors, victims, and family members whose loved ones didn’t survive make us look at the real impact of [Ramirez’ killings] instead of a tabloid top-line version of it. It was a deliberate choice.

After last summer’s protests against police violence and calls for police reform, did you have any concern about centering two officers as the heroes? It’s an important question, because we’re at this moment culturally where we have not just a crisis in policing, but a complete failure in policing. The system has to change immediately and permanently. At this moment in time, that’s undeniably the case, but it’s important to remember that whatever story you’re telling needs to be looked at through the lens in which it was experienced. This is a story from 35 years ago, and Gil and Frank were a force of good in the world—yet here we are. I think it’s important to judge it on the terms and the context within what it was, and at the same time to acknowledge the truth of where we are today.

Detective Carillo says that he believes that Ramirez was “born evil.” I recently interviewed serial killer researcher Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who says that evil is a religious term, not a diagnostic one. She believes that murderers are made through a combination of abuse and brain dysfunction. After making this documentary, which side are you on? I don’t think anyone has the final answer to that one. Certainly someone like Richard Ramirez is a product of the [physical] abuse, drug abuse, violence, and horrors of his childhood. Those religious questions about good and evil, we’ve been asking those and using those terms since the dawn of humankind. I wanted to leave the series with Gil, when he says (in the final episode) that he prays for Richard Ramirez every night. That’s such a complicated ending. I don’t know what to make of it myself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.