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Terror, Pentagrams, and a Shoe That Was Never Found
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Richard Ramirez murdered fourteen people across Los Angeles and San Francisco in the summer of 1985 — and a pair of shoes that never existed helped send him to death row. This is the case the city couldn't forget, and the forensic story it never fully told.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A pair of shoes was never found. No witness ever saw Richard Ramirez wearing them.
Between the spring and late summer of nineteen eighty-five, a series of violent attacks swept through Los Angeles and San Francisco. Fourteen people were murdered.
In August of nineteen eighty-five, Ramirez was spotted in East Los Angeles. He had been attempting to steal a car.
Now let's talk about the shoe. At eight of the crime scenes, investigators found partial footprints.
The shoes themselves were never recovered. Think about what that means in terms of the evidentiary chain.
In two thousand and eight, a federal habeas corpus petition raised the shoe evidence directly. The petition argued that the print testimony was scientifically unsound, that Burke's lack of qualification made his expert status improper, and that the failure of defense counsel to challenge the evidence amounted to a violation of Ramirez's constitutional right to adequate representation.
Richard Ramirez spent twenty-four years at San Quentin. He married a true crime enthusiast named Doreen Lioy in nineteen ninety-six.
The Avia four-four-five-b was never recovered. No one placed it on Ramirez's feet at any crime scene.
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