RedHanded - FROM THE VAULT - Richard Chase: The Vampire of Sacramento - Parts 1&2

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

As part of our virtual road trip around North America inspired by the 2026 World Cup, we're revisiting some of our most classic cases. This week we stop off in  Sacramento, to revisit on of the single most disturbing individuals we have ever covered Richard Chase - The Vampire of Sacramento. Clinical vampirism, terrifying delusions and paranoid schizophrenia. This week the girls enter the bloody world of their very first truly psychotic spree killer, Richard Trenton Chase. Join them as they follow his evolution from cat-murdering child, to drug-addicted teen, to blood-smeared twenty-something; unpicking the unbelievably shocking story of one of America’s bloodiest killers.

All right, guys, we're halfway through our virtual road trip through the whole of North America. We've been looking at cases through Canada, the US and Mexico, tracing a gruesome journey across the continent. I'm also taking a look back at some of our classic cases and reminiscing about our big American memories from our last US tour back in 2023. And today, we are looking all the way back to Saruti Barler's boyfriend, Richard Chase. Oh my God, this was such an early episode. I don't know. I feel like sometimes I feel like sad when we've done a really big case really early on because I'm like, oh, I wish we could do that again.

Yeah. Not that I think our research or our storytelling was bad at all in those early cases. But sometimes the sound quality. Yeah. A little bit scratchy. And also just because we've done it, so I don't get to do it again. And obviously, as we all know, Richard Chase is my boyfriend. No.

All I said, if you listen to this episode, you'll realize that. I just like, for the vampire of Sacramento, how he ends up. up looking at the end versus how he looks at the start. It is just, it's mind blowing. It's honestly mind blowing. He is just one of the most insane. And I mean that in the truest sense. Yes, absolutely.

He is rabbits in the blender. Legally insane. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did we go to Sacramento? I don't think we did because we did LA. We did the 101. And then I think we got rid of the car in San Francisco.

and then flew down to LA. Oh, yeah. So I think we missed that. That area. Well, let me check my map. So yes, we probably did miss Sacramento, but, you know, this is a great case in the most horrible sense of everything. Yeah. And it wasn't his fault.

Yeah. Fucked. Fucked. In a big way. That's it, guys. Enjoy. See in the next one. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to Red Hat. where today it's time because we've held off for long enough and today we are covering the case of the vampire of sacramento mr richard trenton chase firstly that is a banker's name how much does he just he sound richard trenton chase banker extraordinary but no richard wasn't wasn't a banker in fact he was a psychotic spree killer and he's the first truly psychotic killer we've covered. That's, yeah, I think that's right. I think the only one who could possibly contend would be Robert Maudsley, but I think that Maudsley had a bit more of like a,

a trigger than seeing red type situation, whereas Richard Chase is just living in a completely different universe. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And he was so brutal, so brutal in fact that he needs two episodes. So, guys, it's going to be a two-parter. And for you. And, fair warning, these are not going to be easy listening episodes. Definitely no eating. He killed totally indiscriminately and for the short few months he was active, he took six lives and absolutely terrified America. It spreden last long as is usual with this type of killer because he made very little effort to cover up his crimes and when we say very little effort he would just wander out of crime scenes covered in the victim's blood like that was no problem.

He genuinely didn't try and hide what he was doing at all. And we can definitely call him a spree killer rather than a serial killer because he had very little, if any, calling off period between his kills. But build up to chase his murders, yes, they took years, but once he got started, fucking hell, he blitzed through his victims. And psychopathic serial killers, as opposed to psychotic. spree killers, tend to kill, wait, relive the kill, cool off and then ramp themselves up again for the next kill. And a question that comes up with psychotic killers in the same way that we've discussed the past of psychopaths, the question is, was Richard Chase born to be a psychotic killer, or was he made? And to answer this, and the many other questions this case throws up, we need

to start right at the beginning. Richard Trenton Chase was born on May 23rd, 1950 in Sacramento, California. Pretty classic. Yeah, and when we were doing research for this, I really just immediately wanted to be like, fucking out of California. Like, do you want to just stop murdering everyone that lives there? But I was actually surprised to find out

that California is not the state with the highest murder rate, serial murder rate. Where do you think it is? Um, what number in the rankings is? Oh, it's fourth. California comes fourth. Okay. Can I have a clue? It's fucking cold.

Is it where Bob the Butcher Baker's from? It is indeed. So like... It's Alaska. It's Alaska. So like low headcount of people, I'm guessing, that there's probably quite a low population in Alaska. But higher serial murder rate. Because the US absolutely outpaces every other country in terms of reported serial killers.

But Alaska is the top of the top within there. Interesting. And also, though, this was really interesting, regardless of state, the decade in which the murders was the worst in all of them, categorically, was the 80s. So the 80s in the US was not where you wanted to be hanging out. That is really interesting. The thing is with Chase, by all accounts, and certainly for a serial killer,

in serial killer terms, he had a bloody normal childhood. And it was a childhood that was kind of typically dysfunctional in a sort of feel. 50s kind of way in the sort of my dad never speaks to me and smacks me occasionally. My mum's probably drunk all the time. But like typical 50s home stuff, I don't think that's anything particularly out of the ordinary. So the childhood he had with the physical punishment they'd have and the domestic abuse he would have witnessed, they just, they were totally normal at the time. Just because Richard's parents' behaviour was pretty normal for the time doesn't mean his was.

Because if there was one thing he loved, it was murdering cats. He just loved torturing and killing cats. It was just his favourite thing to do. And many children, at a very young age, can be rough with animals, can even hurt them. Even the child with, like, the magnifying glass over the ant hill, they lack for a while the understanding of what they are really doing. But eventually they develop a conscience and start to see other animals and people as sentient beings. And that will, too, or ability even to hurt animals or other people goes away.

But for Richard it never did, the normal development of a conscience just didn't happen. I think there is a bit of a difference between the kid with the magnifying burning ants and murdering cats. Richard exhibited the classic MacDonald triad. He was constantly bedwetting by age eight and he was starting fires and killing animals by age 10. So this year begs the question, what was Richard the cat murdering Richard like at school? You'd think he'd be a horror, but he was surprisingly normal. He fitted him well at the start, and he was not really missed a personality, but he wasn't totally freaking people out either.

And actually, pretty good-looking. He looks like a banker. He does. And actually, I really wanted to make sure you saw that picture before you yelled at me about putting in the fact that he was actually quite good-looking when he was younger. Because the pictures of Richard Chase that you will see when he's in his late 20s after his spree is over. Not so hot, probably a left swipe, but teenage Richard, probably a right swipe, I'm going to say.

I mean, not now, I'm old, that's weird, but I'm on date a teenager, I'm just saying. But Richard, with all his underlying issues, was about to experience a huge accelerator on his road to becoming the vampire of Sacramento. Because he was at school in the mid-60s. and you know what that means. It means LSD. It means loads and loads of LSD. And again, it's the question of, can drugs push you into psychosis? We talked about the possibility of drug-induced psychosis in our Suzanne Caput episode.

But that was really different. That's a situation where you're perfectly normal, and it's only when the drugs are in your system, that you see psychosis as a symptom. Here, however, the issue was that Richard had underlying issues, a vulnerability that made him susceptible to psychosis. The drugs, especially taken in the quantities he was taking, especially during adolescence when everything in your brain is changing,

it led to a breakdown. The drugs aggravated or activated or triggered, whatever you want to call it, his genetic potential. And it's impossible to say what the exact impact of the drugs was on Richard's later crimes, but we know that he was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. taking psychotropic drugs when you have underlying schizophrenia, not the best idea.

And before people go mental, drugs don't cause schizophrenia, but drugs certainly wouldn't have helped. And I think the proof of that is like everyone was taking LSD back then. And if it was just the drugs, all of them would be killers. We'd have way more killers on our hands if LSD caused people to become serial killers. So at school, Richard was habitually using weed, LSD and speed. Coupled this with his psychological problems, he was spiraling.

Then, bam, the third strike. Richard developed a physical issue. Richard found himself very attracted to girls, but the problem was he was impotent. He didn't even have a problem getting dates. He was attractive, he was reasonably like normal facade at school, but he was completely impotent. And this is when we start to see more of Richard's psychological. He started thinking he didn't have enough blood in his body. He started to obsess about getting blood. He became obsessed with the idea that he needed blood to survive. And also he became convinced

that the lack of blood in his body was why he was impotent. Because he'd learned in biology at school that the penis fills with blood during a man's erection and that if his wasn't getting hard, it must have been because he didn't have enough blood. It doesn't need to make sense to us. It made perfect sense to the untreated schizophrenic mind of Richard Chase. Moving into his 20s, Richard's behaviour and beliefs became more and more erratic. He started to believe that he had bones growing out of the back of his head, that people were poisoning him, that his stomach was upside down, and that his pulmonary artery had been stolen. By who, I don't know, the pulmonary artery fairies, that seems like a very bizarre thing.

Richard was in a huge amount of physical pain and he was really unable to cope he did believe that there would be a cure for his problem so Richard went to see a doctor but he went thinking the doctor would be able to fix these problems so he thought the doctor was going to be able to give him some more blood turn his stomach back the right way around fix the bones growing out of his head and get his pulmonary artery back

he thought they were going to help him but obviously when he tells the doctor these things none of his complaints make any sense and the doctors are like this kid is clearly severely mentally ill but they let him go they genuinely thought that he was going to grow out of it and even now we understand so little about mental illness

and there's still so much stigma surrounding it and so little support but you know this was the late 60s it was even worse then and they just sent him away Richard he'd gone he'd tried to see a doctor they hadn't been able to help him and he was still in excruciating pain You know, how much of this is sort of like psychosomatic, how much of this pain is like actually due to physical problems? Because really all that we find out later is that he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

But he can feel physical pain. And now he's even more desperate because the doctors hadn't been able to cure him as he'd hoped. So he decides to take Madison to his own hands and starts to think that he needs to get blood from some external source to stop the pain. He started killing animals for their blood. Now, as we know, he'd been killing animals from child. but now it was with a real purpose. He was obsessed as well with anatomy books. He's convinced that there are so many physical things wrong with him

that just no one understands and he needs to fix it himself. And blood becomes the answer. But question. So if he's reading a lot of anatomy books, surely then he should understand that ingesting something is not, if you're eating blood, it's not going to give you more blood in your vein. Yes, absolutely. That is true.

That is from the logical mind of you being able to know that that is not the case. Just because Richard is devouring anatomy books, he will look at it through the lens of his schizophrenic mind. He'll take something in, but the way he will translate it, the way his mind will relay that, the way his brain will make sense of it, will be completely different how you or I would. And also, he's lost faith in people. He's paranoid schizophrenic. He thinks these doctors won't help me, these anatomy books, while he's obsessed with the body,

with the blood, with the circulatory system, he is not convinced that they know what's wrong with him. He thinks he knows better. There's just no knowing what he could have latched onto. There were also other books in his room. He could have been reading about medieval times, all the bloodletting that are panning. He could have read about that, the leaching.

There's so much of history where we thought blood was the answer to fix all the problems that was wrong with a human. So it's not that. It is crazy, but it's not that crazy that he came to these conclusions, given what was wrong with him. During this time, so in his early 20s, he was just in and out of hospitals. And not psychiatric hospitals, regular hospitals.

And his parents' house and his grandmother's house. And he was just a nightmare, to be honest. No one knew how to help him. There was a severe lack of support for somebody with his condition. He was completely undiagnosed at this point. I know we're talking about him being schizophrenic, but that is with the knowledge of what he ends up being diagnosed with. At this point, he has no diagnosis.

He's just being palmed off from person to person with, he's just weird, he's just being weird. But Richard was crashing. His schizophrenia, as we said, was still undiagnosed and he was still heavily involved with drugs. Richard eventually thinks that the blood in his body is completely stopped flowing altogether and his behaviour escalates again.

Finally, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. And at this point, when he gets diagnosed, it's still just half the battle because he needs treatment and care. But again, they just release him saying that wasn't a harm to himself or to anyone else. The thing is, they didn't know about all of the animals he'd murdered. Can you murder an animal? Does murder have to be a person? I don't know. It's a very ethical question. But I don't know. It's like if you're...

I'm going to say yes. Yeah. Like... I feel like if someone killed my dog, I'd be like you're a murderer. He was murdering like fucking pet cats and shit and dogs. Like he was murdering them. Yeah. Murder, kill. All the animal slaughter. What's interesting is like his parents knew, but they just, didn't tell the doctors. Oh, interesting. It's stigma, isn't it? Your son is fucking killing neighbourhood cats. The mum, the mum will go on to see it's such a huge part of the problem. And when he gets this diagnosis, he is just in a normal hospital. He's still a year away

from being actually institutionalised. So after the diagnosis, Richard's behaviour doesn't get any better. He has an imaginary friend that he spoke to. He flat out refused to wash. He continue to ramble about his physical problems and he was still killing animals. His parents, they just don't know what to do. So they just got him a flat and moved him out. On his own, Richard spent every day just killing rabbits. And this is the thing. This person has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I know this is the mid-60s, but they're just like, he's not in a hospital, he's not being given care, he's not even with his parents. They've just moved him out on his own. He's completely unsupervised and yet killing rabbits.

Killing rabbits that he'd buy from the nearby farm, bring them back to his flat, kill them and either drink the blood or eat them raw or my personal favourite, blend them up into a nice rabbit smoothie, a nice raw rabbit smoothie, just depending on his mood. And so there's this, the rabbit smoothies and the drugs. that's all he was doing. He was continuing to take a copious amount of drugs. And his parents paid the rent and gave him money, but they just weren't checking up on him.

If there was ever an argument for not paying your child's rent, this is it. And like you said, he was eating them raw. He was smoothing them up raw. But when he was drinking the blood, he was drinking them like straight from the animal. I guess some part of his logic was that the blood needs to be as fresh as possible for it to get into his circulatory system and be effective for whatever. he thought was wrong with him. The psychosis gets worse and he starts to think that his heart was shrinking. Now, he wasn't actually ever diagnosed with this, but this could possibly be Katard's syndrome or

catard delusion or as it's also known, Walking Corpse Syndrome. Again, I first found out about this case watching Hannibal, the TV show. You should watch it. It's terrifying. And Katad syndrome, it's a rare mental illness in which the affected person thinks he or she is already dead, doesn't exist or is rotting away or has lost their blood or internal organs. It does kind of sound like what he is thinking. Yeah, definitely. And then one day, Richard got sick. I mean, I wonder, I wonder why.

I wonder why. What could it possibly be? And he tells his dad that he thinks he has food poisoning, so they go to the hospital. But when they're there, they discover that Richard didn't have food poisoning, but he had blood poisoning. Because, get this, he had been injecting himself with rabbit blood. That'll do it.

That will do it. You will get a blood infection. Because maybe Hannah, you're right. He was starting to question, is just consuming this blood really getting it into my bloodstream? So no, I need to start injecting this blood. And it's just crazy because he ate a rabbit that he thought that he'd eaten something poisonous. So then he thought he had gotten sick because of that.

So to fix it, he needed a fresh, untainted rabbit blood. So we got another rabbit, got the blood, and then started injecting it into himself. Oh, God. And after this, thankfully, Richard was finally sectioned and placed in the psychiatric hospital. Here, even the patients were weirded out by Richard. And unbelievably, two days after being placed in that psychiatric hospital, he escaped. He literally just walked out. He doesn't know his ass from his elbow.

Neither did the people that ran this fucking psychiatric hospital because he literally just walked out of the door. He didn't plan some like Bundy-esque escape and like drop 20 pounds and like crawl out of a crawl space. He just walked out the front door. But it didn't last long. He was caught quickly and put into a different hospital. And this is where he gained the nickname Dracula. Because he was catching birds at his window. How you managed to catch a bird in your hand is beyond me.

I just have this image of him crouching on a window sill and just like jutting his hand out of the window really quickly and it comes back in and there's a bird. I really feel like some of the things he was able to do and able to get away with and like catching these fucking birds at his window. It does kind of lend itself to the sort of like almost paranormal supernatural essence of, like there isn't anything paranormal about this case. But again, it's kind of like Maudsley.

He became almost like legendary while he was even still alive. And once he'd magically caught these birds with his bare fucking hands out of a hospital window, he'd then kill them and he'd drink their blood. And it just gets worse because, you know, You know, he is clearly not well, and he's displaying paranoid schizophrenic tendencies, catards, and also, if we want to just chuck another syndrome into the mix, Renfield's syndrome, which is also known as clinical vampirism. And basically, it's an obsession with drinking blood.

As with the other syndromes or conditions, we can talk about how and why they manifest. But in this case, we just, we can't, like there's no telling what a schizophrenic mind may latch on to. Despite all of this, on September 29, 1976, Richard was released into the care of his mother. It doesn't sound to me like he's making much progress in this hospital, but he's released into the care of his mother. And what's really important to know here is that the staff strongly urged against it. They were like, please do not let this man go. But the mother was like, I can handle it. What, she can handle it by putting him in a flat on his own and letting him eat rabbit smoothies. Yeah, exactly. I think there's just so much stigma.

with this. I think the mother, she just couldn't cope with the fact that her son had been institutionalised. She couldn't cope with having to tell people, oh, oh, Richard, you remember Richard. He's now in a mental hospital because he killed all these cats. I think she was like, okay, great, you've got the diagnosis. I want to take him home now and I'll look after him because it's less shameful to say my son is just at home and doesn't have a job and doesn't go outside because I don't let him rather than he's in a psychiatric. It's like girl interrupted. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that's why she insists on taking him home. And she, you know, she says, I can handle this. That was until he tore a cat

apart in front of her and smeared the blood all over his face. I think that's probably more embarrassing than saying he's in hospital. Yeah, I'm going to say that's the case. So she didn't report this again. And the relationship, like we said, with his mother, just didn't help Richard at all. She just wouldn't accept that he was sick. After his release, she took him home and cut his meds. She took him off his schizophrenic, antipsychotic medication. Why the fuck, lady, what are you doing? Like, seriously, don't do that. And her reason was because apparently the drugs were making him numb

and she didn't like the fact that they turned him into a zombie. So either a zombie or a vampire. Just take him as a zombie, I'm going to say. Seriously? And I know, I mean, 1970s antipsychotic medication, I bet he was pretty fucking out of it. But what was the alternative at the time? I think antipsychotics even now.

are still a bit lights are on, nobody's home. But if the alternative is you being a danger to yourself and others around you... What do you pick? There's no wildcument. And again, we just see the same pattern of behaviour. She got him out of hospital. She took him home. And then when it all became too much, she'd just take him to his apartment and leave him on his own again.

So now it's 1977 and he's off his meds, living alone. And yes, things get wild. The incident at Pyramid Lake in Nevada was quite a pivotal moment in this case. In August 1977, offices from Indian Affairs see a pickup truck on reservation land. They approached the car and looked inside and what they saw, absolutely what the fuck. There was blood everywhere. They also spotted a couple of guns, bloody clothes and shoes, and a bucket. with a liver in it.

And immediately, they think this has to be a homicide. They searched the area and half a mile away perched on a rock, they saw a naked man who immediately ran. When they caught him, they saw that he was filthy, completely naked and covered in blood. And in case you were any doubt, it was Richard, who now 27 was clearly more out of control than ever. When the police caught him and examined him, the blood was smeared all over his body and even poured in his ears. When the police asked him, where had this blood come from? Richard told them that it was his own blood and that it was seeping out of him.

It wasn't, because when they checked, the blood and the liver turned out to be from a cow. I don't know how to feel about this. Again, without checking his background or even his previous record, the police released him. Again, it's like, hey, it's the 70s, everyone's a little weird, everyone's on drugs, and cut dirty and covered in blood, let's just let him go. And they just sent him on his way. It is so bizarre to me that you would find someone's car in that state and them totally naked and be like, they're probably fine, probably just a bad trip. Like that is bananas to me. But just four months later, Richard would take his first shot at killing a person. One day in December

97, Richard grabbed his 22-caliber gun, walked around a neighbourhood and spotted Dorothy Polinsky through her window, and he fired. He tried shooting her through her window and the bullet just missed her. It nicked the bun she had in her hair and lodged in a cupboard door behind her. It was a total drive-by shooting. He just shot and ran off. This kind of long-distance killing or attempted killing is very unusual Killers like this usually tend to be up close and personal, which Richard definitely moved on to, as we'll see next week in part two. But this does feel weird, like completely at random. All I can think is that most serial killers work their way

from victim to victim over months and years. But Richard Spree started and ended very quickly, and I kind of feel like killing a person isn't really his endgame. He doesn't really care that it's a person. He cares about the organs or the blood or whatever that he can get from them. So in a way, he's been killing for years because animals and humans kind of the same situation to him. It's the same thing he gets out of it. So that's his run up.

The graduation from animals to humans probably isn't an enormous jump for him mentally. Yeah, I don't think mentally it was a huge jump for him to go from animals to people. I think he maybe on some level understood that they're obviously more high risk. Like to just go grab a cat off the street and kill it is one thing. But now he has to psych himself up to kill a person. because he clearly in his mind is escalating that to really fix this problem, all the physical problems, all the pain that he's in. Animals aren't cutting it. He's been trying it and it hasn't worked. Now it's got to be a person. But these people, these tricky people, they're all in their houses. They're all tough to get to.

It's like it's a difficult next step. And I think maybe this is why he just tries to shoot. Let's see if I hit her. If not, oh my God, let's just run away. I think he's scared. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. But, you know, either way, Dorothy. survives, but his next victims would not be so lucky. Now, after this, Richard went home, and on the 20th of December, he shot the family cat. I'm sorry, why does your family have a fucking cat when you have a cat murderer for a son? I mean, and she's seen him do it. Stop buying cats. And he shot the cat in front of his mom.

And then again, he smeared the blood all over himself, still in front of his mom. And at this point, his mom is like, nope. He's going to ruin Christmas. I don't want him here. That is such a 50s housewife response. Literally, I know. Your son is murdering cats and smearing their blood all over himself. And I'm sure you know that there's more stuff. He was fucking killing rabbits and injecting himself with their blood. You've got him out of a psychiatric hospital and then abandoned him in his own flat again. And you're like, I don't want him here. He's going to totally ruin

Christmas. And so she tells Richard's dad. And you can just imagine Richard's dad is just like this, a disinterested, unengaged, emotionally unavailable. Just sat in the corner like, pipe smoking. Oh, shut up every time she comes and complains about something to do with Richard. And so his mum goes and tells Richard's dad that he shot the cat, but doesn't tell him about all of the blood smearing bit. And she tells him to tell Richard that he wasn't allowed home for Christmas. I think this really pissed Richard off, but he stays away.

Because they're really like isolating him now. They're really pushing him away and I don't think he knows how to do. with that and I think this really pushed him into his next move because a few days after Christmas Richard Chase would take his first human life starting one of the bloodiest and most brutal killing sprees in history. But before we finish up today, I think it's really important that we talk a little bit about the vital differences between psychopathic and psychotic. Firstly, neither of these traits in isolation make you prone to be dangerous or a killer. Secondly, they are totally different. Psychopathy is

Firstly, not a clinically diagnosable condition. It's an emotional or behavioural problem. Psychosis, however, is a clinical psychiatric condition. And when this comes to killers, this is the difference between mad and bad. Psychotic is what people really mean when colloquially we call someone a psycho. Because it's very unlikely that if you were confronted with a psychopath, that you'd even know anything was wrong for a really long time. Because psychopaths are totally in control. they know exactly what they're doing. Psychotic people are totally out of control and they will usually suffer from delusions and hallucinations.

When you have a killer who is psychopathic, they will do all they can to cover their tracks and protect themselves. They know it's wrong. They'll usually stalk their victims, choose them carefully and prepare thoroughly for their big kill. Psychotic killers, like Richard Chase, will lack any actual preparation and they will make very little, if any, attempt,

to hide their crimes. And this is the huge difference between the mind of an organized and disorganized killer. The other vital difference is mad versus bad. A psychopath or a sociopath knows exactly what they're doing. They just don't care because they lack empathy. Psychotic killers are mad because they don't understand the impact or the reality of their action. And so now we have Richard Chase's backstory down. We're all aware of what's going on with.

with him. I think this is a good place for us to stop this week. And next week, when we come back for Richard Chase Part 2, we can then dive straight into the six murders of the Vampire of Sacramento. Guys, it's going to be real bad. It gets really rough. It takes a lot to make me feel unwell. And you're going to feel sick in part 2, guys. So absolutely no eating. We had to have lots of distractions on in the background when we were typing up the research for Richard Chase Part 2. I made the huge error of having on in the background the amazing world of puppies to, you know, just cheer myself up a little bit. That didn't turn out so well and you'll find out why next week. I'm Hannah. I'm Surruti. And welcome to red-handed Richard

Chase Part 2. Thanks for coming back. It's quite rough last week and it's just going to get worse. It is downhill from here, friends. So let's just pick straight up where we left off. Last week, we left you in December 97. So let's go back. Richard had just taken his first shot at killing a person. He'd failed, but he wasn't deterred, because he moved almost immediately onto his next target. He headed to another suburban neighbourhood, and here he spotted a man unloading

his shopping from his car. It was 51-year-old Ambrose Griffin. Again, this shows just how irrelevant it was to Richard who his victims were. He went from shooting Dorothy to Ambrose. Completely different victim profiles. And we talked about this last week. I'm not convinced that he sees people as that much different to the animals he's been killing for years. So with his 22-caliber gun, Richard shot Ambrose in the chest. And this time, sadly, he died. And this again, is just so weird. Richard, as we see later, is 100% a product killer. He takes no pleasure in the kill.

And I'm not excusing him. I mean, literally, he doesn't get off on the kill. What he wants is the body and the blood and everything else that you'll find out in this episode. So why randomly shoot at people when he can't then get to them? And again, like the case with Dorothy Polinsky, the police had no suspects.

It was such a random killing, a literal drive-by shooting. No one had any reason to kill Ambrose. and with no clues left behind except a 22-caliber shell casing, the police just had nothing to go on. After the killing of Ambrose, though, there were more shots fired into random houses in and around the area. Again, as we said last episode,

this is pretty rare, but at last Richard Chase had killed his first person. It's so funny, isn't it, that he, I would imagine that quite a lot of the people in his neighbourhood are aware of him, because he's wandering around looking so weird all the time, and it takes the police quite a while to connect them. That's not necessarily saying the police won't doing their job properly,

but sort of everyone just kind of ignores him. They don't see him as the threat he would become, and I think that's really interesting. And killing Ambrose was just the start of his crimes. In January, the police encounter even more weird behaviour. Just aside from the shooting people, there's more. He started buying all of these animals. So we're talking dogs, cats, and of course,

his fave rabbits. His neighbours watched him cart animal after animal into his house, and none of them were ever seen again. Literally fucking 10 guesses what he's doing with these animals. During the same time, people started to report a prowler on the loose. And spoiler, again, it's Richard. He'd been walking around neighbourhoods, peering into people's windows, walking through their gardens and generally just being totally unhinged and then he started to break into people's houses. A woman called Jean Layton

remembers a particularly terrifying experience when she came face to face with Richard Chase. On January 23rd, 1978, Jean was at home when Richard came upon her house and started trying all the doors and windows. I mean, fucking hell. Just imagine how. how terrified you'd be. She's in the house. She can see him doing this, but he couldn't see her.

And when he moved to the back door, Jean was there staring out through the window, terrified. Richard, probably filthy and generally wild-eyed, stared back at her. And she said later, he just had no emotion whatsoever on his face. He didn't say anything, but as he couldn't get into the house, he just walked away. And Jean watched him, walked through her garden and out into the neighborhood. And this is really important to note here that this is another really weird vampiric trait that Richard Chase lived by. He only went into houses that he found open, not because it was easier, but because he genuinely thought that if the doors and windows were locked, it meant he wasn't welcome. That is so chilling. But again, I think it just comes back

to the idea of what a schizophrenic mind will latch on to. He's read this somewhere, he's picked this up somewhere or, you know, he's just decided in his mind, if a person leaves their door open, I'm okay to go in. I don't think this has anything to actually do with this. Obviously, I don't think it has anything to do with the supernatural side of things. It just comes back to what he convinces himself of and it's terrifying because it fits with the story of vampires. It's horrible. Do you think he thought he was a vampire? I don't think he thought he was a vampire. I think Richard Chase genuinely thought, because look at his obsession with anatomy books, he went to the doctor, he really thought that he had a physical problem, that his blood was turning to dust, that his blood had stopped

flowing. I think he just thought that this was the way to fix that. And we can't, we can't try and understand Richard Chase's mind through looking at it through logic. No, I completely agree. I think that obviously that is part of vampire law that they can't go into your house unless you invite them. I think it is just a bit of a coincidence. It is. It is. And it's another thing that he does that happens to fit into the vampire category. I don't think he was on purpose trying to act like a vampire. I think it just is a coincidence. Absolutely.

And it may have been that he may have read books about like bloodletting from back in the day, got it into his head that that's what he needed to do. And people from his second stint in that psychiatric hospital were calling him Dracula. All he had to do was go away and read a book about that and then pick up and take on the traits that he was reading in there. You don't know where he picked these things up from. So, a few blocks away from Gene Layton's house, Richard Chase found the home of Robert and Barbara Edwards. They were out shopping, but their doors were unlocked.

So he went in, stole some things, but also, I have a really hard time with this, he defecated on their baby's bed and he urinated in drawers all over the family's stuff. Honestly, like, this is not by no means the worst thing he does, but why? What is he gaining from doing that? I mean, he's clearly not thinking rationally or clearly,

but still, like, I just, it's, I can't get my head around it. Is it control? Is it contempt or power? But I don't think it can be about, nothing he does is about power, I don't think. I mean, I don't know. Again, it comes back to the idea that with a psychotic killer, we just cannot understand or try to make logical

assumptions behind why they do the things that they do. It only has to make sense to him. I can't say why he did these things. It doesn't make any sense, but that is, in essence, exactly what sits the heart of the actions of a psychotic person or a psychotic killer. And whatever his reasons were, you know, we'll never know. But it is undeniably an escalation. Why this case is so interesting, I think, is he is doing, he's stepping up and doing what it takes other killers years to work up to and he's doing it in days. He goes from animals to humans in days. What's terrifying is that the family had come home during this, you know, his activities and found him just stood in the middle of their house, filthy and frantic. I mean, fucking hell,

can you even imagine. But unbelievably luckily for them, considering what would become of Richard Chase's future victims, they managed to scare him out. And I think it's really interesting that he goes after suburban families. At this time, families were moving out of the cities to escape the crime, the drugs, the gangs, this kind of era of the 1970s. This was the key time you see that kind of suburban... It's called White Flight, isn't it? Isn't that what it's called? Yes, exactly. And I think the families that he goes after, they're very ordinary, very middle class, very suburban families who were safe, quote unquote, out in the suburbs. And now here was Richard chase the fucking vampire of Sacramento going almost exclusively after them. And the thing with Richard

is that he fell into his psychotic episodes just as quickly as he fell out of them. It is really, really abrupt the change. 30 minutes after being chased out of the Edwards house, he just casually headed to the mall to buy a drink. There he was in his Orange Parker, what a statement. I've never seen anyone wear an orange parker in my life. He really doesn't care about drawing attention to himself, let alone being grubby as fuck. He's wearing an orange parker. And, you know, probably not looking his best. And it's at the mall that he spot an old high school friend called Nancy Holden. Remember at high school, Richard was pretty normal and pretty good looking compared to what he would become because he's completely unrecognisable now. So when he went over to Nancy,

She didn't immediately recognise who he was. It didn't help that the first thing he said to her was, were you on the motorbike when Kurt was killed? So Nancy's high school boyfriend, Kurt, had been killed when they were at school in a motorbike accident. So what a fucking weird thing to say to someone that you haven't seen for years be like, oh, I'm going to open with your high school trauma. I mean, obviously he's not a normal person, but even for him, him, this seems ridiculous. His appearance aside, she doesn't recognise this guy and he's asking

her this really bizarre question, anyone would freak the fuck out. But she does eventually realise who he is. And at this point, Richard tried to follow Nancy out into the car park and get a lift with her, but she managed to lose him and get away. This is just further proof that he really doesn't think anything he's doing is weird? No, no, absolutely not. I think that is the fundamental thing we have to keep at the front of our minds whenever we're talking about Richard Chase is everything he says, everything he does, everything he doesn't do is so weird to us, but none of it is weird to him. It completely makes sense in the mind of Richard Chase, in the disorganized, deranged mind of Richard Chase. That is the main thing. And we don't really

know what he wanted to do to Nancy, like whether he was going to kill her, what he wanted to do, did he genuinely just want to lift back to the suburbs? We don't know, but she managed to get away. He left them all shortly after and headed back to the suburbs, his favorite hunting grounds. Because, you know, after he'd gone and got his drink, after being chased out at the Edwards house, he decided it's time to give it another crack. At 2360, Tioka Way, he spotted a van in the driveway. And this is interesting because that van had been at the shopping centre. Richard had been in just an hour before.

So I think it's really interesting. Had Richard seen the van and its owner Teresa Wallin at the mall? Or again, was it just another coincidence? I don't know. Because a lot of killers do stalk their victims, but he was so disorganised. It doesn't really fit. But then again, maybe he saw her at the shopping centre when he was there,

latched onto thinking that he needed her blood or something. I feel like chase saw signs everywhere. Everything had particular meaning or symbolism to him. Just trying to crack the code of what each of those signs meant to him is what's difficult for us to do. But I think everything meant something to rich. I think so. I think, especially with this instance, he's thinking, oh, I saw that van an hour ago. That means they're the ones I need to go after next. They're inviting me because I've already seen them. Absolutely. She could have looked at him at the mall and in his mind he could have thought, she's telling me, I'm the one come get me, I've got the blood you need. Whatever, we don't know what is going on in Richard's mind. And whatever it was, he decides this is the house. And this time we know that he's looking for a person. When he broke into the Edwards, his house, he knew it was empty. Now he knows that there's someone in this house because the van is outside.

So he goes in. He goes up to the door with his 22-caliber gun with him. He opened the door and there was Teresa about to head outside to put her bins out. And when she saw him, she dropped the bins and held her hands up in the air. And this is when Richard fired. The first shot hit her in the hand and then grazed her neck. The second shot hit her in the head. Then with a final shot to the head, Richard Chase finished her off. Richard was absolutely 100. 100% a product killer. He wasn't interested in the kill like process killers are. He just wanted the body.

And this is when the fun began for Richard. He dragged Teresa's body into the bedroom and went into the kitchen to get a knife and also picked up a discarded yogurt cup that had rolled out of the bins that Teresa had dropped. This is where it's going to get pretty graphic. Fair warning. So then he pulls up Teresa's sweater

and he cuts off her right nipple. What the fuck is it with why? always with the nipples. That and ears and teeth, for fuck sake. I don't know. He then stabbed her in the chest so hard that he cracked open her sternum. He then sliced her stomach open, reached in and pulled out her organs one by one, before pulling her intestines out too.

And he stabbed her again and again so hard, the stab wounds went straight through to the other side of her body. He then picked up the yoghurt cup and filled it with blood from Teresa's stomach cavity and drank it. He then, classic Richard style, smeared the blood all over his face and chest. And then, what he did next just makes no sense. And I know all of this is beyond horrific. But it fits with Richard's obsession and we've seen iterations of what he's done before. but what comes next is completely off the wall.

I would never have thought this would be a natural progression. But now he goes outside and he got some dog feces from outside and he shoved them in Teresa's mouth. And as if this wasn't horrendous enough, Teresa Wallin had been six weeks pregnant. Dog feces just don't make any sense Because you're right, we see him building to the butchery, the blood drinking, all of that with what he did to the animals. What is that about? I don't understand.

But well done, guys, we got through it. When Richard was done, he just left, just walked out, covered in blood, and walked back to his own flat. Meanwhile, Teresa's husband had come home to find his wife. The police in every interview we watched with them talked about how the fear on Teresa's face when they found her body store. haunts them. From the scene of the murder, it was clear that this was the work of a highly disorganised killer. But because of this, the police just had no leads. This was so motiveless. It signalled huge amounts of rage. I mean, imagine how much someone would have had to hate this woman to do this to her. But it wasn't rage. It was something else altogether,

and the police were lost. And absolutely full credit to the police in this case, it was led by super cop, Ray Bindi, who cracked this case and wrote an incredible book about it called Dracula Killer, which I can absolutely recommend if you can stomach it. The only clues the police had at this crime scene to work with were the bloody footprints, the bullets, the casings, and bloody rings on the floor left near the body. They were bucket rings. And the police, and I, if, you know, my opinion matters, really feel that what he'd done is Chase had taken parts of Teresa with him. Think back to the Pyramid Lake situation. He had that big white bucket with a liver in it. These were bucket rings. He took parts of Teresa with him. And he'd killed a

person before. He killed Ambrose. But this was the first human example of what he'd been doing to animals. And I think to Richard, Teresa Wallen was just an object. He couldn't link who she was with what he'd done. I think he just thought people as like big blood sacks. I need this blood. They're just bigger animals. I need blood. They've got more of it. And we kind of talk a lot about in this case the difference between him being a psychotic killer, not being a psychopathic killer. But I saw a lot of reports and articles and stuff written about him where they call him again and again call him a sociopath because he showed no remorse. I think, yes, I think Richard Chase didn't show any remorse. And we'll see that as we go through his case,

but not because I think, anyway, he was a psychopath or a sociopath. I think it's because he thought he had to do this. And again, I'm not making excuses for Richard. I think he thought to survive, to live, he had to kill Theresa Wallen and take her blood, take her organs. I think he saw this as there's no other option for me. And therefore I think he had no remorse. But it's really, really tricky. This is one of the hardest kind of killers to kind of get your head around, wrap your head around their motivations because it makes so little sense. So now Richard Chase had killed two people. And even though they were such different killings, Ambrose had just been shot outside his house and Theresa Wallen, a home invasion where she'd been butchered, Ray Bandy still managed to link them

because the police canvassed the neighbourhood. And the neighbours reported seeing a white man in his 20s, six-foot, scraggly, thin, emaciated looking in a bright orange parker. Okay, this was the 70s in California and what they were looking for a hippie-looking white guy. It's like now if you were out there looking for like a guy in a plaid shirt with a beard, like, who is he, drinking a fucking craft beer? Like, it's everybody. So I think he was able to start to make these links, especially because of the type of weapon use,

the type of person they had been spotted at the crime scenes. But they couldn't go any further with it at this point. But on January 27, 1978, Richard Chase, took four more lives. It was another home invasion. Richard walked into the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miruth and immediately came across her neighbour, 51-year-old Danny Meredith, who had just come over to check in on Evelyn. He shot Danny in the head. It was quick because Richard had no interest in Danny.

He just wants to eliminate the biggest threat first. He had then found Evelyn and again shot her in the head. And then, just like with Theresa Wallin, he eviscerated Evelyn. He cut open her abdominal cavity, played around with her innards, and clearly was thrilled with his work because he'd sodomized her. So his impotence was cured. It is very interesting that he's only messing around with women. The two guys he's killed, he just shoots them.

But this is it, isn't it? People kill who they're sexually attracted to. When you see this with serial killers, anybody, the kill who you're sexually attracted to. John Wayne Gacy was married, etc. publicly, a heterosexual man, but he was dealing with deep-seated issues around his secret homosexuality, and that's why he killed young boys. Like, Tip Bundy, killed women all look the same. People kill who they want to fuck.

Yeah, and I think it is interesting that erectile dysfunction is actually very common in killers. Some killers can only perform when the victim is dead, and I think it's, and it comes out of that frustration if there's a part of your body that you can't control. Like, I genuinely don't know what that's like. I can't imagine having that feeling. Also, again, it just comes down to the impotence that how important that is to men and obviously not all men who suffer with erectile dysfunction go on to be killers. Again, as we talk about, it's all of these things coming together and clashing that lead to a killer,

but the perfect storm has to be there. Just that level of impotence can fill these killers with so much rage that they go on to act like this. And they have to find that thing that sets them off and gets them what they want. Because in very few cases with them, the erectile dysfunction is a genuinely physical problem. It's usually psychological. This can be indicative of a process versus product killer. For a process killer, they get off on the killing. Like it's the actual act of death that is their thing.

Like they want to watch as the life leaves their victim. product killers like Chase want time with the body, time to play with it, and yes, sometimes engage in necrophilia with the body. It's the dead body itself that they want. How they get it is kind of irrelevant to them. Yeah, absolutely. And we see this clearly with the difference between somebody like, if we done like a BTK who wants to watch the fear in his victim's eyes

versus Chase, who just shot them in the head and then played around with the bodies. That was the aim. But what's really interesting now that we see with the escalation to the Sodom, with Evelyn is that finally Richard Chase gets sexual satisfaction after his entire life being impotent and just think what this means. Firstly, it means he's not going to stop because he's figured it out. He's cracked the root of all his problems. And secondly, this is, imagine how confirming this is to all of his theories. He thought, I didn't have enough blood in my body. That's why I couldn't get hard. That's why I couldn't, you know, sleep with these women that I was incredibly attracted to. He's gone out.

He's killed two women. Well, he's killed more than that, but, you know, he's killed and played with the dead bodies of these two women, drunk their blood. And then he's been able to get hard and perform. He's now, of course, he's convinced in his own thinking. He's completely validated in everything he ever thought. Back to the crime scene. And this is just so horrible. On the other side of the bed from Evelyn's torn apart body was the body of her six-year-old son, Jason.

He too had been shot in the head. And the house, as the police described it afterwards, was just hell. hellish. There was blood everywhere. And in the bathroom, the police even found a bathtub full of bloody water. There were 22 casings everywhere as well. And the police soon also made another horrifying discovery, because the day she was murdered, Evelyn had also been watching her 22-month-old nephew, David, who was now missing. Where was he? And you have to understand that the fear was intense. Whoever was doing this was killing totally indiscriminately. And like we said before, he was going after normal suburban families.

But the police, and honestly, full credit to them with this, they went all in on this case. And soon they linked the crimes. Because a family who lived in the area said that they had sold a puppy to a, you guessed it, scraggly looking white guy in an orange parker. You might just want to try a change of costume every now and again, Richard, because seriously, the scraggly looking white guy in the orange parker, it's going to stick out in people's minds.

And it did. And they said that after they sold him this puppy, a few days later they found the puppy dead in their back garden. It had been shot with a 22 and had been cut open, just like Theresa Wallen and Evelyn Mirrod. So the police put out this description. And bingo, Nancy Richards' old schoolmate that he had freaked out at the mall called the police. She gave the exact description of a man wearing an orange coat. And she even said that she thought there might have been blood on his hands. But most importantly, Nancy was able to give them a name, Richard Trenton Chase.

The police now track Richard and find his flat, but when they arrive, there was no response. There was, however, an empty apartment next door. I mean, shocking that nobody wanted to live next to this guy. The police enter the unused flat and through the wall they could hear noises in Richard's flat. so they stay completely silent and hide. Chase, thinking they'd left, came out, but as soon as he did, they pounced and Richard tried to run. But it was too late, they caught him.

It is interesting that he's not opening the door, and he's actively hiding. But he was so paranoid. He was so paranoid. He would do things like lock himself in cupboards and board them up because he thought everyone was out to get him. So I think he's not running because he'd think, oh my God, they're going to come get me and I'm going to go to jail because I killed that woman.

I think he's like, it could be anything. He thinks what he's doing is right and he's justified in it, but he is so paranoid. Absolutely full credit to the police here because Richard had a gun and they overpowered him and arrested him without firing a single shot. The police then entered the flat hoping to find baby David. There was predictably blood everywhere. And there were all these weird and disgusting things in jars, the fridge, there were organs, but police couldn't tell if they were animal or human.

This is the bit that sticks in my mind about this case more than anything else. There was a blender in the kitchen with so much blood and like matter in it. You know he never cleaned that once. You're going to want to rinse that out between uses. Just little rinse between each smoothie. But no wonder you're getting ill all the time. That'll be it. Your unhygienic practices when it comes to blender care is why you're getting ill all the time, Richard. It's so disgusting. They find all this shit in his house. It's very fucking obvious that he's guilty. But no baby David. So the police finally arrest him though. And after a spree that had just lasted a few weeks on the 28th of January, 1978, the police bring in Richard Chase. Five people were dead, but baby David was still missing. During the police investigation after his, he was, he was, he was. During the police investigation after his, he was, he was. He said, he was he was. He said, he was he was he was. He was. He was he was his arrest, Richard admitted to killing the animals, but not to killing the people. So on some

level, he knows that there is a difference between killing animals and killing people. It's really hard to understand where Richard draws his line of morality. But I think where we're going wrong is we're trying to ascribe some sort of logic to it. Like, it doesn't matter how fucked up that logic is, even being like, yeah, but he sees humans as bigger animals. I don't think you can put any logic to it at all. Like, I think that's, the definition of it. It doesn't make sense, but I just think what I mean by that is that it's interesting that he's willing to admit to something that is already very depraved by all these animals and killing them and drinking their blood. He admits to all that. But he says,

I didn't kill those people, though. I know because he knows that the animals isn't illegal. And this is the thing. This becomes a fundamental part of his trial. Did he know what he was doing was wrong when he killed those people? Is it a sign that he knew what he had done was wrong? because during the interrogation he won't admit to killing these people. We'll analyse it more when we get into the trial and what comes of that. But for the police, what they do is they show him the crime scene photos. And just from his reaction, he was like visibly excited by it. They could just tell.

And anyway, the flat gave it all away. They didn't need a confession from him. It was so obvious what he had done. But at this point, the key thing was that the time was running out. They had to find baby David. So the prosecution attorney joined in the question. But Chase just wouldn't answer anything. Most of his answers indicated just how delusional Richard Chase was,

and the police just couldn't get anything valuable out of him. And it wasn't until March, 1978, so two months after Baby David had gone missing, that his body was finally found in a cardboard box behind a church, and he'd been decapitated. So now six people were dead. It's interesting that he treats men completely differently, he kills them in a different way,

he treats women in a different way, he kills them in a different way. And then when it's a baby, it's a different thing as well. So you can, there is some sort of order. But that's the thing. I think it comes back to kind of what we were talking about with Richard's high school years. One of the key triggers into what he started to do was his impotence. That's when he became convinced that he didn't have enough blood.

And the impotence came from the fact that he knew he was attracted to women, but he couldn't perform. He couldn't get it up. Even though he is not a psychopathic killer who's getting off and getting hard on the kill, he was still ultimately acting with a form of sexual desire in mind. When he was playing with the innards, that's when he got hard. And then that's when he thinks, oh, I've done it. I've now got enough blood in my body.

Sex just comes down to it. The reason for so many killings, regardless of the mindset or regardless of the state of mind of these killers. And that is fascinating. Whether it's psychopathic and totally in control or whether it's psychotic and totally out of control. Sex still sits at the centre of so many of their motivations. But then why didn't he

just shoot the baby? Why did he cut his head off? He drunk the blood. Because it was it's blood, isn't it? It's human blood. Why waste it? But he didn't do that with the men. No. But then the men, he could have perceived them as a threat. Yeah, that's true. And there's probably something about it being young blood, probably.

Oh, for sure. A young, untainted 22-month-old baby. That's like not to sound horrific. I'm not the one who did this. That's probably fucking prime the ultimate blood, isn't it? Yeah. I mean...

Right. Not talking about dead babies anymore. Yeah, that's enough. The trial started in Santa Clara on the 2nd of January 1979. And from his opening statement,

Chase's defense attorney Faris Salami painted a picture of his client as a very troubled young man. Salami bought Chase's entire mental health history. to court telling the jury how Richard had spent most of his life, thinking his blood was turning to powder,

with the voices in his head telling him that the only solution was to consume blood. His case was clear, although Richard had killed six people, he was not in his right mind and didn't realise what he was doing. He asked the jury's sympathy for Richard and put forward a plea based on insanity. But prosecution attorney, Ronald W. Totchman, went after, chase to prove that he knew what he'd done because it wasn't hard to prove that Richard had done it but was he sane this was the key question the prosecution wanted the death penalty and to get this they'd have to prove that Richard knew exactly what he had done and touchardman brought in as his star

witness david wallen teresa wallen's husband who had found his pregnant wife dismembered and disemboweled in their home over 250 pieces of evidence were exhibited during the five-month trial as a part of his defence. Chase even took the stand and there he admitted to drinking blood and decapitating baby David. He described himself as a good person but weak and he said that he had to do it because it was therapeutic. I don't understand how you can admit to decapitating a baby and then the same breath call yourself a good person. We have to again understand the fact that Richard Chase didn't understand or claims to not understand that what he was doing was wrong. He doesn't look at killing this baby as in a barren act like a normal person would. He saw it, I believe, as I had to do this

to survive. And that's what I think he means by therapeutic. I had to do this. I'm a good person, but I'm weak. I gave in to my desires. I gave into my needs. But I'm a good person. We can't think about this as how can he describe himself as that, because that's not how he saw himself. Well, no one sees himself as a bad person, did I? Exactly. We've talked about this before. No one is the monster in their own story. Every killer, whether they're psychopathic, whether they're psychotic, whether they're sociopathic, they all think that what they're doing is right. Even take someone like the butcher baker of Alaska. He was convinced I should kill these prostitutes because they're a scourge. All these killers operate by their own code of morality, one that doesn't fit with what the rest of society thinks. Chase's defense, they are trying to get a verdict of second-degree murder through reason of insanity because there's no way he obviously did it. So the case is about his sanity level, not is he innocent or guilty. Everybody knows he's guilty. We come again to the classic question of mad versus bad, cruel versus crazy. And after hearing all of the evidence, the jury, after deliberating for just an hour, found Richard Chase to be legal.

sane, i.e., he knew what he was doing when he killed all of those people. Question. Yeah. Should juries be the ones making decisions on whether someone is legally sane on that? Oh, so do you mean it should be a mental health professional who makes that call? Yes. Because the prosecution's case is very emotional. It's very easy to be emotional about this case.

They bring in, rightly so, David Wallens, the husband, found his pregnant wife fucking eviscerated to come tell the story. If you are a normal person in the jury, how could you not be affected by that? He decapitated a baby. How could you not be affected by that? But within an hour, 10, 15, 20, how many other people are on a jury during this case? They come to the decision that he's legally sane. Should that decision not be made by somebody who understands what that definition even means properly?

Yeah, I hear you. However, we've seen it in loads of cases where you can find an expert to say anything. Like the defence will have a psychiatrist saying, you know, he's the most unstable young man I've ever come across in my life. And then the prosecution will have another mental health professional saying he's completely fine. I think I agree with you, but it is difficult to, because you can find an expert to say anything. That's very true. That's a very good point. So maybe it's more important. Can an average person, a normal person, understand his actions and say whether he knew what he was doing was right or wrong,

rather than just bringing in two experts that say opposing things, and then you're back to nil? That's a good point. Yeah, it's tough though. I don't know how I feel about that. I'll have to think about that one. Let us know what you think about that. Yeah.

So this jury of his peers found Richard Chase guilty on six counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death by gas chamber. Richard Chase, following the trial, was sent to San Quentin until he was to be executed. While in San Quentin, though, the other inmates quickly found out what he had done and began to taunt Chase. They would try and convince him to kill himself. And after a short stay at a mental hospital, Chase was sent back to San Quentin where he stashed his daily antidepressants. And on Boxing Day, 1980, Chase was found dead in his cell from an overdose. I'm not going to defend what Chase did.

He killed six people. He tore them apart and decapitated a baby. but he was so severely mentally ill. I think we're both in agreement here that we don't think he understood the nature of what he did. Not really. And that's the definition of insanity, isn't it? Come on, he wandered in and out of people's gardens. He walked out of crime scenes covered in blood.

He never cleaned himself up. He made no attempt to cover up any of his crimes. The prosecution did point out the fact that sometimes he had worn gloves. as we've mentioned in the past, that this can be a sign that you're covering up a crime, which points to sanity, like with the case of good old Ricky Ramirez. But I wonder if this was because he genuinely thought he was treating himself medically. He called his actions therapeutic, and he'd spent a lot of his life in hospitals, watching doctors and nurses wearing gloves during treatment.

Was the glove wearing a forensic measure, like the prosecution alleged, and therefore a sign of sanity? Or was it a mimicked behaviour he practiced, so as not to conduct? contaminate his precious blood. Why wear gloves, if it's a forensic countermeasure, then wander outside covered in blood? That's it, isn't it? I think if you were concerned about cleaning up the crime scene and not getting caught, you wouldn't smear the victim's blood on your face and then walk outside. Exactly. Exactly. So I think the gloves are like neither here or there, really.

And Richard Chase was a paranoid schizophrenic. And he was a rare one at that because he was violent and dangerous. but most people with schizophrenia do just live their lives in fear and are much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators of it. I think that's a really important thing to say. And you can actually watch on YouTube schizophrenia simulators. It really is a window into the terrifyingly chaotic mind of someone with schizophrenia. After I watched it, I felt dizzy and I felt sick and I felt scared. Yeah, I think it's key that we're not saying schizophrenia makes you

a dangerous killer. But I will say it's very obvious that Richard Chase needed help long before he started killing people. That is the case of Richard Chase, aka the vampire of Sacramento. Thank you for listening. It's been a tough one to research and probably for you guys to listen to. And thank you very much, guys, for your support. It really is so important. Absolutely. It helps us keep going. Oh, and we, honestly, we appreciate each and every one of you. And, you know, usual thing, if you guys can head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star review, that would be fantastic. Also, all the social media is at Red Handed the Pod.

We'd love to talk to you. And we'll see you next week. Yeah, see you then. How are you mates? Bye.