Remember the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez? He terrorized some pretty good neighborhoods in LA back in 1985 or thereabouts. A poet I know was questioned by the police, because of a poem he had written in the first person, trying to describe the mind of a rapist.
Strangely, the chapbook was published in an edition of something like 3, or maybe 7. Less than ten, anyway. And from that small snitch pool, somebody felt enough concern to drop a dime.
During his incarceration, Richard Ramirez produced an amazing quantity of art, viewable on several websites. Paintings of knives and skulls and Satan, along with some innocuous stuff, but all of it atrocious, and even the atrocious ones are banal. He signs them Richard Ramirez, Night Stalker, and apparently sales are brisk.
Anyway, this is the Night Stalker Jack’o’Lantern, carved by me some years after the serial killer was apprehended. A bigger version of it is available by clicking it.
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