Essay About Small Glassel Park Apartment And Forest Lawn Park

Serial Killers
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“Night Stalker” Richard
Ramirez: From the Bowels of
by Joseph Geringer
Crescendo of Terror
Late in the 20th Century, Hell glutted on humanity. Its first
bloodletting of that season of the Devil occurred on the warm
evening of June 28, 1984, when an earth-bound Lucifer found his
way into the small Glassel Park apartment of 79-year-old Jennie
Vincow. Throughout the Los Angeles area a damp humidity had
oppressed the air that day, and when the evening came and the
temperature slightly cooled, Jennie left her window open to invite
what little breeze there might be into her flat. Like a fallen leaf,
decayed and tossed from its source, a fallen angel, dark, angry and
also decaying, blew across the sill of that open window. When the
demon departed through that same window, he left behind Jennie
Vincow, raped, beaten and nearly decapitated.
“Her body was found by her son, who lived above her ground-floor
apartment, just south ofForest Lawn Park,” reports the Los
Angeles Times. “Her throat had been slashed and she had been
stabbed repeatedly.”
The police were baffled. But, in the months to come, they were to
encounter a madman whose lust for killing and depravity equaled, if
not surpassed, that of Jack the Ripper or, more contemporary, the
Hillside Strangler. Soon to be named the “Night Stalker” by the
press, this madman bore, according to true crime author Richard L.
Linedecker, “the horror in his soul of a Stephen King or a Clive
Barker fright novel Ð- and more.” A Freddy Kruger. For real.
Less than a year later, the monster reappeared. This time, he waited
in the shadows of an upscale condominium outside LA. The date
was March 17, 1985, time 11:30 p.m., when pretty-faced Maria
Hernandez pulled her auto into the security garage, unaware the
monster was watching her from behind a pillar. When she alighted
from her car, the killer stepped from the darkness, gun upraised and,
despite her pleadings, he pressed the trigger. She stumbled. And the
killer, thinking she was dead, stepped over her to enter the side door
of the condo. But, Maria had been lucky Ð- very lucky Ð- for the bullet
had deflected off the car keys she held in her hand, causing a hand
wound, but nothing more.
Inside the building, Marias roommate was less fortunate. For, when
Maria finally made her way to the safety of her place, breathless, she
discovered that her friend, Dayle Okazaki, had also encountered the
killer. And this time, his bullet had found its mark.
Thirty-three-year-old Okazaki lay in a pool of her own blood, her
skull smashed by a missile fired at extremely close range.
The demon vanished just as quickly as he had appeared. The police
were stumped.
All they knew of him was what Hernandez was able to tell them: He
was tall, gaunt, dark, maybe Hispanic.
This time, the killer didnt wait nearly a year to murder again. He
struck within the hour. His next victim that same evening was petite
Taiwanese-born Tsai-Lian Yu, who, driving her yellow Chevrolet
down North Alhambra Avenue in nearby Monterey Park, withered
when someone with the eyes of a madman forced his way into her
car and shot her. He had thrown his own car into idle, simply entered
hers, pushed her onto the pavement, called her bitch, then blew her
into eternity at point-blank range.
Fast. Neat. Clean.
Then dematerialized into the darkness from whence he came.