Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Taking Down The NIGHT STALKER | Gil Carrillo

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Taking Down The NIGHT STALKER | Gil Carrillo

Nowhere documented in criminal history has there been anybody doing what Richard was doing. He was not only with little girls, but with little boys. He was using weapons. Serial killers normally kill in the same fashion, they stick to the same air. He used knives, guns, different caliber gun, blunt force trauma, manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, different times a day. They ranged in age. He used a machete, a shod foot, you know, you name it, type of high.

how he killed, and he did it. It was all different, different type of everything. Richard could hear out of the speaker on the motorcycle, tension in all cars, temp kidnapping just occurred, suspect described as driving A, and it was Richard. Richard could hear it. Richard drew the pentagram with his fingers. He says a pentagram used to give him power. So he drew the pentagram on it, and then he took off running and got away.

Hey, this is Matt Cox, and I'm going to be doing an interview with Gil Carrillo. He is one of the two homicide detectives on the night stalker case in Los Angeles. He was a homicide detective, and we're going to go ahead and interview him. I really appreciate you guys watching, so check out the interview. I saw the, I'm sure there have been many, many documentaries on Ramirez. I've seen a lot of them, but the ones that were done a few decades ago. But the one, I had just finished watching the one on Netflix that they just redid. And it's funny because I had watched that maybe a month or so ago with my wife.

And then I found that, then I, my booking agent said that, you were, you could be interviewed. So, which I thought was great because I was like, oh my gosh, I just watched him. I just watched that case. So, you know, so it's funny because I know a lot of, I guess I know probably a lot of these answers, but I was wondering. So where were you, where were you born? Okay. Right. Well, let me, let me do a little beginning than I normally do when I go on.

I be public speaking. Okay. I grew up, I was born in the city of Maywood, which is part of Los Angeles County, grew up in the city of Pecoravira. And life was just coming along. I was one of seven children, six sisters, no brothers, and I was headed for no good. At age 17, a cop took me home and told my parents, signed for me to get off the streets, or I'll end up dead of prison. And so at age 17, my parents signed for me, and it's the best thing you never happen.

That cop saved my life. I turned 18, November 29th, and on February 1st, I was in a place called Vietnam. Now, one year of combat, two years of, three years of military service, I came back with a new appreciation on life. And that was, I had goals in life. I had matured. I wanted to go to college. I was naive enough to think that only rich white people went to college at that time.

And fortunately, the community college was mandated to put me in because I was a Vietnam veteran. I got in. I wanted to become a cop because I wanted to give back and save somebody's life left that cop and saved mine. I wanted to get back to the community. Number three, isn't so nice.

I wanted to start dating my ex-girlfriend that had written me a dear John and get her eating out of the palm of my hands so that I could witness breaking it off on her and watch her suffer like I had suffered when I was in Vietnam. Well, I got out in June of 70 in December 26th, the day after Christmas, we got married. And so...

It didn't work out the way you thought. It didn't work out. We just celebrated our 52nd wedding anniversary. I tried a reminder that I'm working. I've got two out of three, and I'm working on number three still. It hasn't come to... It's not too late. No.

So we did that. I joined the Sheriff's Department, went to college, when I first started going to college and I was anal, I wanted A's. That's all I wanted. I was a different person. And a local politician said a letter home to my family saying congratulations. And they said, congratulations, your son is on the honor roll.

And the first thing my mom said was, me or are you cheating? You know, because this was not like me. You know, I obviously, I have matured when I looked at my transcript from high school, I thought D stood for damn good. and F was fabulous. But life went on. I got on the Sheriff's Department.

The natural progression was me to start, after doing my mandatory jail time, I ended up going to East L.A. Patrol, where I started working gangs and had the first planned closed gang unit there. The progression from gangs led me to Homicide Bureau. I saw the way Homicide Bureau worked, the men, the women, they were professionals. They were, they were. Uh, just when I grow up, that's what I want to do. And normally in the Sheriff's Department, we have one homicide bureau.

It's a centralized homicide bureau. And it takes an average of 15 years to get there. And I was the youngest guy to get to the bureau for the first seven years of my assignment. I was there nine and a half years. Uh, we transferred up there because of my gang expertise. Then I just started working regular murders. And once working regular murders, the job, I just, it was made for me.

I learned very quickly. It's not a job. It's a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle to immerse yourself and the death of someone and then try to get out and solve it. And that's what I did. Did that for 21 years. An investigator was sent out on loan to work for the sheriff of Los Angeles County at that

time. I spent four years with him and then I went back as a team lieutenant for the last five years in my career I spent as a homicide lieutenant leading 14, 14 homicide investigators. Then I retired. All was good. I was enjoying retirement. I did a short stint as the interim chief of police for a small city out here in Los Angeles County, the city of San Fernando. they got a permanent chief. I then went back to doing absolutely nothing, but I started doing, I was still doing consulting. And then all of a sudden, this documentary by Mr. Tiller Russell,

I was approached. The premise was that if you look at television today, There's not a lot of Hispanic heroes out there. Most Hispanic characters are robbers, murder, muggers, thugs, gangsters, dopers. And they said, we're looking for a story that has Hispanic. It turns out to be the hero. And we like your story. We like you.

They talk to me. I told them I really didn't care about television that much, but I just wanted to leave a legacy for my grandkids. we come to an agreement, shook hands, and that was it. I told Mr. Tiller, I didn't want to know. He told me how he wanted the story. He said, I don't want to know about the story. Story is yours.

I'm just the talking headpiece. He says, well, we'll show you some of the edits how it's coming along. I said, I don't want to see any of it. When it comes out and drops from the public, that's when I'll see it. He called me up the night that it was going to drop. He said, okay, Gil, it's coming. out tonight, and all I can tell you is enjoy the ride. I had no idea when he was talking about it.

What do you mean? He said, just enjoy the ride. I watched it with my wife. I cried through part of it, part of what I laughed. It went way better, more accurate than I ever thought, more than I ever expected. And the theme of part of it was, you know, my wife knew it. my friends of it, all I ever want to do with my career was make my dad proud of me. And unfortunately, he was not around when I got the case.

He was already deceased. And this was my shining moment, and he was there. So I watched the documentary, and subliminally, I could see that he had put into her. And I knew my dad was proud of me now. and I called him up, and I said, you did it. I now know my dad is proud of me. And that picture that you put it there, and he said, stop. Let me tell you something.

When we were going through the edits, he says, I showed that part of you and your dad. And then I stopped everything, turn on the lights, and everybody in the room was crying. I knew we had a winner. And so since that time, I've spoken all over the U.S., I've been, I've done Australian television, Canadian TV, Dr. Ross, some, there's a female, I apologize her. I never can't remember her name. She's a very big talk show on the day, during the day. She's an African-American lady, and I just never. remember her name because I never watched the show. We did a show for her. Is that Oprah?

No, not Oprah. I remember. If my wife were in here, she'll know who it is. But I did that and do podcasts for people that are interested and people want to hear about things and hear about the case, ask questions. The biggest one I did, something's called CrimeCon, It goes on once a year. Yeah.

And I was invited to that in Austin two years ago. It was the last minute invitation because somebody dropped out. And I said, sure, I'll do it. So I went down there and I did it. And then they called me back the following year and they said, are you going to come back? Will you do it again? And I said, well, what do you want me to talk about this time? Last time, you know, just there last year.

And you said, they said, same thing you did last year. Last year, we had 1,500 attendees because of COVID. This year, we've already sold all 5,000 tickets. Wow. So same thing. And I said, okay, I'll do it, 45 minutes. It's put on professionally. A&E sponsors it.

It's a great, it's a great show. I came, I got off the phone. The wife says, well, are you going to do it? I said, yeah, he said, what are you going to talk about? I said, same thing I did last year. She said, what did you talk about last year? I said, I don't know. I don't remember.

because I really don't prepare that much for a speech. When it's the truth, and it comes from the heart, it's easy to speak. And so I went out there, night before the night before I was talking, I was having dinner, drinking some wine, and I was there with some of the attendees, and they're saying, what are you going to talk about tomorrow? Same thing I did last year. And they said, well, what was that? I said, I don't remember.

Find out tomorrow more when I get up there. And I got up there. and when I was done, I got a standing ovation. So they filmed that I came back home and she doesn't go with me to any of these events because I need to socialize with people and, you know, what do they call it, networking? So if I do one, I'll get invited to another one. And so, and she's an introvert. She's so shy, I shouldn't want to do anything.

So I came home and I said, hey, look, you send me a video. You want to see it? And she said, sure, so we watched the 45-minute video, and with which there was a standing ovation in the end. And all she could say was, do you have to make so much fun of me? Because I even seen where's a point to get my point across sometimes, and she's brother of my humor. And I said, dear, it's all just to get the point across, but that was that was about it. She's happy staying home, and I'm happy going on the road. I just got back, uh, I was just in Delaware last, last, last, last,

month and I was in Fresno last week and I'll be in Oklahoma here in a month or two. So yeah, CrimeCon, I think it is in Orlando this year. Yes, sir, it is. In a month or two? A couple months? October. It's in October.

I'm supposed to go just but just to attend and to interview people. Yeah, it's well worth your time. Although I love CrimeCon, it's not worth it for me to pay money to fly out there to get in a hotel and stay there, just to say hello.

If they want me to work, I'd be more than happy to go back to them, but if not, I can consult. All right, Kim, let's go back to the Ramirez case if, I mean, if you don't mind. So when

did you, you were partnered up with a detective that had been, that was kind of, you were partnered up with a, like, a homicide detective that was when you, is it when you first got to homicide that he was kind of a legend? He'd been. Oh, he was a legend. He was a legend before I got there. Right. It was Frank Schlerno. He was, uh, I, you know, I call him the Italian stallion. He's the big gumba. He was a big man on campus. And to this day, he's the most consummate investigator I've ever worked with. But we were paired up when I first went up there.

Okay. The first three years, I worked straight gang murders, which is kind of like taking sand to the beach. You get to the prime scene and it's paramedic debris, blood spots, casings, and no witnesses that want to be cooperative. Then I started working regular murders. And December of 84, he asked me, we were at Christmas party, asked me if I would mind being his partner. And I said, no, not at all. and that would be kind of cool.

So I walked back and I told my wife, I was very excited. I said, Frank Salerno just asked me to be his partner. She says, so who's Frank Salerno? I said, that Frank Slurdo? Don't shit, no, you know, I was beside myself. So Frank could have had anybody wanted and the bureau was a partner. And he chose me. And in January, he called me up on the phone.

He says, were you busy? I said, no, not at all. He said, why don't you meet me in a station? So we met, and he said, the night that I talked to you about being my partner, I was in my cups, you know, I was pretty well down the road. And I figured, okay, now he's letting me down easy. He was too drunk, really didn't mean it. Right.

So I said, sure, I was in my cups also. And he said, well, I'm not in my cups now. He said, I want to know if he'll still be my partner. And I said, certainly. He said, good, because I've already talked to the captain, and it's going to happen. And so that was in January. Bent is the story of John J. Boziak's phenomenal life of crime. Inked from head to toe, with an addiction to strippers and fast Cadillacs, Boziac was not your typical computer geek.

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Bent, how a homeless team became one of the cybercrime industry's most prolific counterfeiters. Available now on Amazon and Audible. We actually didn't hook up his partners till July because his partner got sick. The guy that was going to take his place couldn't. You know, he was a tough old guy. and they, if you, if you put him and Johnny Paii together, his last, this guy's name was Jim Mercer, Jim Mercer's last partner died of a heart attack. And so Frank's partner at that time, Johnny Pyee was a good guy.

And they said, if we split Pai and Frank up right now and we put Mercer with him, he'll kill he'll kill Paii. So I said, kill, you work with him. So I worked with Mercer for a while. And it was Mercer and I got the first one, oh, March 7th. 18, 1985, Dale O'Gazaki and the wounding of Maria Randas. And so I got the first one with him. I continued working with him.

And it wasn't until June the 28th that Frank and I got our first case again. That was Patty Elaine Higgins in the city of Arcadia. And then we started to work. And Frank was not a, he was my boss. He was the acting lieutenant for most of that time. and he actually wasn't a big proponent of one man's serial killer. He didn't think one man was doing it, as most people didn't. And myself, I understand why they didn't because you understand what the criminal

profilers are, what they do. Yeah. Well, everything the criminal profilers do is based on criminal history. Nowhere documented in criminal history has there been anybody doing what Richard was doing or what I was alleging at that time. Which was, he was a pedophile, not only with little girls, but with little boys. He was using weapons, serial killers normally kill in the same fashion, they stick to the same air. He used knives, guns, different caliber gun, blunt force trauma, manual strangulation, ligature strangulation, different times a day.

They ranged in age. He used a machete, a shod foot, you know. You name a type of how he killed, and he did it. It was all different, different types of victims, different type of everything. And so it was hard convincing people that one man was doing it, and it wasn't until we had enough physical evidence to show that one man was doing, and that didn't come about until July. What was that connection? Well, we had, from early on, we had a shoe print, a VIA shoe print, which was a Model 440, and I can tell you without equivocation today, that 1,356 pair of Model 440 V has arrived in New York

from Taiwan for distribution throughout the U.S. of which six pair ended up, state of California, one pair ended up in L.A. That's a piece of evidence. now when you have we had that shoe print there was a lady that didn't didn't die as a result of Richard but her house was a victim of a burglary I want to say her name was Clara Adsel and he had gone into her house via a kitchen window he did not wear a glove that day and he put his hand on the kitchen sink and he put his foot on the kitchen sink when he stepped in so we had a handprint and a footprint

Why didn't he wear a glove? I mean, was he just getting, was it just arrogance or becoming brazen, more brazen? No, this was way early on. Okay. And if you have nothing at that time during the early 80s, only felony convictions

have been computerized, everything else was manual. So there was nothing on file. We named DNA then. You know, this was just, something so it was just there to show that they were together and so we we had that eventually we were able to put together the fact that some of the guns used were the same guns used on various victims we were able to initially we couldn't do that because the bullets were too distorted but once we found the guns and we found more evidence we were able to say

this bullet was used to kill that victim and this victim as well uh we had surviving victims that gave physical descriptions, and the physical descriptions were relatively the same. Tall, thin, light-skinned Hispanic or Caucasian, dark, disheveled hair, brown-stained-gapped teeth, very pungent odor to him. So it was easy, you know, it kept going. And then when you go on, on the morning of July, on July the 5th, the house of Whitney Bennett, on a bloody, we found a bloody comforter with a via footprint. on it. And we knew, okay, now, you know, that shoe print had showed up, but this is our

showed up all the places. Start an issue. Kind of overlapping. July the 5th, that was July the 5th, July the 7th, we're running on no sleep. July 7th, there was a nice pretty footprint on the front porch of Joyce Nelson's house. And so, not only was there a footprint on the porch, but there was a footprint on the side of her head. He stomped her head and gave her a basal fracture. So now you've got people working together. Once you got, it's kind of like you're going to put a party on it.

If you got five people in the groups said, okay, this is we're going to put together. This retirement party. This guy's a great guy. You have five different directions people want to go in. And until you get everybody thinking on the same page, then you move forward. Well, that's the way.

the case went. I understood why people did not believe me. It didn't bother me at all. I just had to keep working. The only thing did bother me, there were some people out there that were name calling me. And as long as they didn't call it to me in my face, you know, I'd hear about it,

but they weren't calling me names to my face. It was all right. Just frustrating. So what about, at some point he went and he adopted, it a child. Yes. Brought her home, molested her, and then dropped her back off.

And was it like in the middle of nowhere, he dropped her off? Yeah. Well, it was in, yes, sir, Larry, he let her go in it, told her to walk cross street and a gas station, told her, tell the people the gas station, call the cops, call her family. And they did. Why would, why? A young lady was six years old. That's the lady that was in the documentary on his last.

him. Right. Why do you think he spared her? Were you ever able to? I don't, I don't think, you know, I get asked questions. Why do you think did he do this? Why do you think he did that? Richard asked me, why do you think I am the way I am? My simple answer is, if I knew the answer that, I'd be a doctor making a lot more money than I am, more money than I am as a cop. I have no idea why he did the things that he did. My job was to find the facts, and I owe so much of this case, not because I was that good. There was a professor at Cal State, LA, Dr. Robert Mordeaux, retired FBI agent, taught two semesters of advanced criminal investigation pertaining to sex crimes. And he taught me something that I'll never forget, and I'll get on

a pulpit, talk about it. That's understanding. If you can understand, If my people do what they do, then it's easier to talk to them. You don't condone their actions. You just have to understand them. So if I understand that he's doing this to little kids because he's a pedophile and that's sex to him, that turns him on, that's exciting. Okay, well, I just have to understand that. I'm not condoning it. I just understand it.

When somebody kills his wife, I don't condone it. I just understand it. uh at it's okay so at at some point he was he was driving was it a stolen car he was driving he was using mostly stolen cars he was one car there was his own just one everything else was stolen okay i was going to say what wasn't it there was the one car where he'd almost been i guess he took off and he had touched the the roof of the car he touched the inside you guys wanted it printed and that it just sat in the and you I remember you were you guys were you called down there several times you were just super frustrated because it was frustrating it was a stolen

car it had been stopped by a motor officer from Los Angeles Police Department and motor officers are great cops they have a job to do he was more interested in writing a greenie and write a ticket for running a red light. So he walked back to his motorcycle, left Richard with his hands on the hood of the car he had been driving. As Richard is there, Richard could hear out of the speaker on the motorcycle, tension all cars,

attempt kidnapping just occurred, suspect described as driving A, and it was Richard. Richard could hear it. Richard drew the pentagram with his fingers. He says, a pentagram, he used to give him power. So he drew the pentagram on the, and then he took off running and got away.

Did you, and did the officer connect that to him? Did he think, hey, I just had that guy? No? No. Matter of fact, when he found out we were looking for him, we called in an extra day sick. So, but you guys figured it out. You wanted the car printed. Yes.

Yes, we did. he had left behind inside the car a little cheap plastic business card holder. And it had an appointment card in there for a dentist in Chinatown there in downtown L.A. And he stopped the car and it was stolen. He did that. But it was such a hot, hot day. He was hot during that summer that by the time we got to the car four days later, the print had burned right off. So it was, that was senseless to us.

The card that he left in there, we went to the dentist, we figured it was him because the dentist described the patient's name. He put his name down as Richard Mena, but he described them and it sounded just like the guy that we were looking for. So we put two guys inside the dental office, good dental office. It was working seven days a week, 12 hours a day. He was making money. so we sent two of our Asian officers in there to make a bunch of money and Richard wasn't coming back. An executive from my department

made the decision that we were wasting too much money and that having those guys sitting in there, Richard wasn't going to come back. And we knew he was going to come back because I got a copy of the x-rays, took him to a personal friend of mine that was a dentist, and he said he's got an abscess. He's going to be in a lot of pain.

He's got to come back. So didn't come back. our executive told us call LAPD tell them to put a silent alarm in there. So you put a silent alarm. As soon as they hit it, it would go off downtown in L.A. They'd be on there within a couple of minutes.

And so 10 o'clock that night, I'm getting phone calls from the dentist, excited. Why didn't we respond? How come nobody went down there? Richard had been down there. The alarm was not working. Function. not working properly.

So he went, our guys were gone, he went in there, got his tooth fixed, and of course the executive said, well, put the guys back in there tomorrow. So,

not good. We had, up in northern California, we had an informant out here that told us his name was Richard, Ricardo, or they called him El Despernado,

which means the uncombed one in Spanish. and we knew he had friends up in San Francisco in the San Francisco area because he had given some jewelry up there and they had pawned it. Long-bendy Twizzlers candy keeps the fun going. Keep the fun going.

And so we knew we had a friend named Armando, who was from El Paso, Texas, as well. So San Francisco got old of Armando, they had a talk with him. He gave up the name Ramirez. They gave us the name Ramirez. We called Department of Justice. We said, okay, manually search every Richard Ramirez you have. And they broke it down to eight. our informant told us that our Richard Ramirez had been arrested for stolen car the year before

right there in L.A. And as it turns out, they found that arrest, they found that print, and they were able to match it. And not only that, we had one of the stolen cars we recovered from the Orange County case had a live print on it. They were able to match that as well. So now we had a photograph, we had a positive identification, who we were looking for, and we put it out Friday, August 30th, and the next morning he was in custody. Right.

There was, you guys were waiting for him at the bus station, right? And he, he came in on an arriving bus. Yes. He thought he was leaving, but he was. Well, we knew he used to hang. We knew he used to hang out at that Greyhound Bus Depot. He had a locker there. And we had no idea he'd be leaving, but that's where he kept this kill kit.

he kept duffel bag with guns and clothes and everything inside there and we figured we had an operation going where we had cops all around it all around except for where the buses came in and what we didn't know was he had been on a motorcycle on Wednesday night got stopped by LAPD but this was before we knew who he was before we knew who he was and he went ahead and got sighted on that motorcycle for driving without a proper license. He drove to Phoenix to go find his brother. The motorcycle broke down on the way to Phoenix. He got a truck driver to give him a ride to Phoenix and trade for the motorcycle.

He went down to Phoenix, couldn't find his brother, turned around, got on a Greyhound Bus Depot, came back to L.A. That's what he was doing, coming back into the depot. Right. Right. And then he got, he ended up getting recognized. I'll always remember the first time I ever saw a documentary on him that the, like the neighborhood, that group of, I want to say, you know, vigilantes, boy, they were, they were ready to lynch him when they knew who he was. You know, it plays good on television, but the realities are he got out of, what he did was when he got on,

as soon as he got out of that bus, he realized, hey, there's so many people here in a bus station. This doesn't look right. So he went out the way the bus came in. And he walked down the street, walked by a liquor store, saw his picture on the front page of the morning paper. He got on the local bus, which was then the RTD, Rapid Transit District. All he had to do was get eight miles.

He had a brother that lived eight miles from downtown L.A. He was on the bus, and while he's on the bus, one of the passengers just happened to look at the morning paper, then glanced over, said, holy shit, that's him. They were at a stop, he got off. He saw the guy on 911 from a public fall right next to the bus. Richard went down, about another quarter mile, got off the bus.

By this time, the guy that saw him originally had flagged down a gentleman that used to work for the gas company and said, follow that bus, the bad guy's on the bus. He started running around. He ran over five lanes, would be ten lanes of, the five freeway over sound barriers, over fences. He ran about two miles when he tried carjacking one car, didn't get that one, tried carjacking another one. And that was a lady.

She started screaming. Her husband grabbed a piece of pipe from inside the house and hit him on the head. By this time, he was tired. He was tired. So they just, the neighbor saw him, their neighbor screaming. They saw her husband in a fight with a guy. Then they saw the guy starting to take off. Well, he was so tired.

He only got about four hours down before they just surrounded him. They didn't beat him up. They didn't even, they just surrounded me. He gave up. He was exhausted. Oh, okay. But they didn't realize who he was. It was just because they were the fight.

Had they knew he was, they'd have killed him. I mean, when you guys grabbed him, he never, did he ever deny any of this? Or was it just the evidence was overwhelming or he just, he said, you got me and this is. Well, when we first started talking to him, first he was advantaged of his constitutional rights and he invoked he didn't want to talk without an attorney being

president so he said okay all bets off we'll see it but he wanted to ask questions he wanted to ask more so he said well go ahead you're asking a question what do you want to know so we sat there and we talked with him for a while and he enjoyed talking to me he was not that he enjoyed it it was more comfortable talking to me because of my culture

culture matched. So he did. He talked to me, did whatever he had to do, and he talked in the third person. The Nightstocker would have done this, the Nightstocker would have done that. He never admitted to being the Nightstocker. Later on, second visit,

he said he'd cop out to everything if we dropped the kitty charges. And they said, well, that's not up to us. That's up in the District Attorney's office. and then he made up his mind. He said, well, how do I get the death penalty? He says, because I'll cop out in soon as I find out a way to explain this to my mom. And I said, you can't cop out to the death penalty. No attorney, the only way they give you the death penalty if you cop out

is if it's with a concurrence of your attorney and no attorney in his right mind and go ahead and say yes, it's the right thing to do, plead guilty. So you'll have to fight it. And he said, do you think I'll win? I said, no, we're going to win. Guys and white ads always win. So, okay, I'm, maybe I'm, he wanted the death penalty? Yeah, no, he did.

We said, okay. Whether that was bravado, he also said he was tired running. You knew he was going to get caught. He was tired. So what was the, you know, ultimate resolution? I mean, there wasn't, there wasn't a trial. Well, no, there was a trial. Was there a trial?

around. He found guilty on every count that we alleged he found guilty. So I have a question. Why would he go to trial? Why not? Because there's a chance that we may have made a legal mistake. As in the beginning, I told you, he invoked his rights. Yet we talked to him. One of the judges said, and that judge is totally wrong. At the preliminary hearing said it was the worst violation of Miranda he had ever seen after a suspect invoked us constitutional rights, we continued talking to him. Well, what he didn't realize and he spoke out of term was we could not use anything Richard told us in the case in chief, nor did we. Because everything he told us

initially, we already knew. But we couldn't use it anyway, unless if Richard took the stand in his own defense, then we could use it in rebuttal. Right. That's the only way we could use it. Well, this judge said there was a worst case in violation, Miranda. Worst case of judge he never seen. He was in violation. He's out of order. So, I mean, I just, I can't imagine going to trial thinking after, you know, all the various crimes.

He's like, no one technicality is going to destroy that case with such, you know. Well, what you have is. because in the very beginning in criminal law there's a doctrine that they teach in law school is called fruits of the poison tree. Right. So any fruit that comes off that tree, if it's poison,

everything after that is no good. So if they had to shut down that beginning, you know, they could have said a lot of things. Who knows? Didn't happen. Right. I was glad it happened. I was glad it came out the way it did.

and I know I got home that night my wife had never seen me cry before I said nothing I got in bed crawled under the blankets and I cried like a baby and she just put her arm around me and said it's okay your dad was with you she knew why I was crying so it was all over with

well ultimately what was his sentence. He was given, I don't know how many counts of death he was given. I think he was given about, geez, 14, 15 counts of death plus about 300 years. You know, but he's dead now. He died September 13th, June 7th, 2013. Was he executed or he died of natural?

Didn't he? No, he had cancer and hepatitis. Um, I can't, were there, are there any other, uh, cases that you worked on that I mean, I'm, I'm sure this is obviously, this is the most, you know, I don't know, uh, I don't know if, do you say notorious or celebrated or? Yeah, this is the highest profile. Highest pro. Thank you. But, uh, yeah, worked on hundreds of murders over there with all the years that I spent there. But the realities are it's different. between us, when I say us, homicide investigators and you, the press or civilians out there

that aren't in law enforcement, a murder is just another murder dress, none is more important than the other. It could be a transient, it could be rich old lady, and it doesn't matter. Nobody has a right to take anybody else's death. You put every ounce of work that you can in every case you get to try and solve. they're all important to us right and and now you're you retire when did you retire i retired i retired officially november 30th 2009 okay and what are you doing now yeah i'm doing a lot of public speaking and just trying to stay ahead of the health game you know

the older you get you run into these speed bumps i've hit a few speed bumps that they get it well then get back up and start going again. So it's just getting old. It ain't for cissies, I'll tell you. I know. My mom used to say that all the time. Trying kids now. I, uh, I mean, I'm, I'm, listen, I'm, I'm 53.

I start the day off with three ibuprofen. Yeah. And if I don't take them, I can tell throughout the day. I'm like, oh, you know, and I'm in fairly good shape. But, you know, there's always some I twist sideways or something. then something's always aching or hurting. I'm the bionic man. I've had both knees replaced.

They took out my kidney. I had cancer in my kidney about 12 years ago. They took my kidney out. I got something, so I don't have to take blood thinners on the lip. What do they call on the, I even forget what they call it. They advertise them on TV. Well, something you put an appendage in your heart. Make sure you don't get blood.

blood clots. Like a stint. A watchman. Oh, watch. Yeah, I got a watchman in there. And now they're talking about putting something in my wrist. I go see some electrophysicist physician that wants to put something in my wrist. It'll go up my arm that'll monitor my heart.

I have a fib. I have a leaky valve on the left side of my heart. You know, I'm a walking. I just appreciate every day I have. well I mean you've I mean you have to you have to look back and say you know you've had a hell of a career you know you know things have gone pretty pretty well I'm assuming I mean for someone who's going to go into that line of work I mean there's going to be a lot of disappointment you've got a you know there's no you can't solve every case you see a lot of horrible horrendous things I'm sure so but for what for for for for for for for the for the career path you chose you know you found a pretty good one i'm a happy camper i can't i can't complain i was i was brought the tears the other day i was in a funeral and i met a man that brought tears to my eyes there's a movie starring meld gibson we were soldiers and it's a very

very touching movie um i flew over there uh and a buddy of my mine who was a technical advisor who called me and said you got to take somebody you love to go see this movie and so I took my wife my wife begged me for forgiveness for having broken up the movie over there my kids watched the movie on their own and they came home and they were crying they couldn't believe it well I met the man on the other day is still alive looks great he was the radio operator for Colonel El Morrow in the movie. He was Mel Gibson's radio operator, but only in real life. He had to live through all that, see all that.

And I just could not believe I was, I was awestruck. I was so honored just to see what combat's like, but to see what he went through and to see what they went through and everything is very, very touching for me. I still have a heart. Well, listen, I don't. I don't want to keep you any longer. I really appreciate you doing this interview. You know, I was fascinated by the story and I enjoyed, you know, you talking to me.

Well, it was my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. Hey, this is Matt Cox. I really appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. If you like the video, hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Leave me a comment and share the video.

And thanks a lot. I really do appreciate it. See you guys.