#horror – #podcasts – #DarkAsiawithMegan –
A screen pulled from a window. An unlocked door. A family asleep inside. For more than a year, people across California had no way of knowing whether their home would be the next one he chose.
On June 28, 1984, 79-year-old Jennie Vincow was found dead inside her Los Angeles apartment. Months later, a series of attacks began spreading across Southern California, as people of different ages, backgrounds and neighborhoods were targeted and terrorized inside their own homes.
No conventional victim profile seemed to exist. Yet Asian victims appeared with striking frequency throughout Richard Ramirez’s known crimes, particularly in and around the San Gabriel Valley. A detective on the case, Gil Carrillo, would later say Ramirez had a particular interest in Asian women, adding another disturbing layer to a pattern that could not be explained by geography alone.
Then, in 2009, DNA connected Ramirez to the 1984 case of a nine-year-old Chinese-American girl, Mei Leung, in San Francisco — linking him to what is now considered his earliest known case. Authorities also examined whether Ramirez could be connected to other unsolved cases in the San Francisco area from that period, raising an unsettling question about how many others may never have been linked to him.
Join Megan as she investigates the Night Stalker case, the hunt for Richard Ramirez, the Asian victims who make up a significant and often overlooked part of his known crimes, the forensic breakthrough that finally gave investigators a name, and the disturbing case that would only be connected to him decades later.
Was Mei Leung truly Richard Ramirez’s first victim — or simply the earliest one investigators have been able to identify?
Podcast: Dark Asia with Megan