Cannibals (11 page)
Richard Chase was proud to confess to drinking the blood of his victims and gnawing on pieces of their bodies when he felt hungry
Richard Trenton Chase became known as the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’ and for good reason, he loved the taste of blood. He started off by killing animals and then gradually began to kill people to satisfy his bloodlust.
Richard Trenton Case was born on May 23, 1950. His childhood years were not happy as he grew up in a strict and very angry household, where he would frequently receive severe beatings. The darker side of his personality started to emerge even as a young boy, because he seemed to get immense pleasure out of harming, mutilating and killing small animals.
As a teenager Richard developed a liking for alcohol and smoking dope. He had several girlfriends but was unable to form a solid relationship partly due to his impotency. He consulted a psychiatrist about this problem when he was 18, and was informed that it was probably due to the fact that he had repressed anger. Even the doctor considered that he was suffering from a major mental illness it was suggested that he should be institutionalized at that time.
When he moved out of his parents home, his friends and several different roommates noted that his behaviour was becoming more and more weird. He became more dependent on drugs and developed a severe form of hypochondria. He was starting to show even more signs of mental instability which caused him to have an intense fear of disintegrating. In his delusioned state Chase believed that the only way to stop his blood turning into powder was to drink blood. His hypochondria became so bad at one stage that he ran into the emergency room of his local hospital claiming that his pulmonary artery had been stolen, that his bones were protruding out of his neck and that his stomach was backwards. He was put under observation for 72 hours but was allowed to leave whenever he wished.
To satisfy his thirst for blood Chase started to kill and disembowel rabbits. He would put the animals intestines into a blender, liquefy them, and then drink this bloody concoction in an effort to stop his heart from shrinking. On one occasion he was even rushed to hospital due to a severe case of blood poisoning brought on by drinking the blood of one of the rabbits he had killed.
Eventually, in January 1978, Chase was committed to an institution as a schizophrenic who was suffering from somatic delusions. While in the institution, Chase complained that his head kept changing shape, that the Nazis were persecuting him because he was Jewish, and that he was being telepathically contacted by UFOs ordering him to kill to replenish his blood supply. He also earned the nickname ‘Dracula’ as he was often found to have blood around his mouth.
Chase was placed on strong medication and released when the doctors felt he was no longer a danger to himself or anyone else – or so they believed. Chase’s parents were made his official custodians which was to be reviewed on an annual basis. Chase moved into an apartment and it was here that he started to catch and torture domestic animals so that he could drink their blood. Even though he was on medication it appears that at this time we was left completely unsupervised and his mother even helped to wean him off the drugs supplied by the hospital, deciding that he didn’t really need them. Also in 1977 the papers giving his parents custody expired, and his parents did nothing to renew them which left Chase totally on his own.
Chase now decided to buy some guns and he started to experiment with them. He paid his mother a visit one day, and on hearing a loud noise she opened the front door to find her son standing in front of her holding up a dead cat. He threw the cat to the ground, tore it open, and then proceeded to smear the animal’s blood all over his face and neck. Any normal mother would have immediately taken appropriate actions, but not Mrs. Chase she ignored the incident and failed to do anything about it.
Another strange incident which happened on August 3, was when police officers found Chase’s car stuck in some sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. There were two rifles lying on the front seat, along with a pile of men’s clothing. The inside of the car was smeared with blood and a white bucket contained a bloody object that looked something like a liver. The police spotted Chase through their binoculars and noticed that not only was he naked but his body was covered in blood. As they went to approach him, Chase ran away, but they managed to catch up with him and took him back to his car. They asked him to explain what he was doing there and he told them that the blood was his own and that it had just ‘seeped’ out of him, while the liver in the bucket turned out to be that of a cow. Again he was not apprehended and left to roam at his own free will.
Chase started to become obsessed by the stories of the Hillside Strangler in the local press. He started to avidly read about all his killings and from animals he soon progressed to far more serious killings. How a man with guns and a very severe mental illness was left unsupervised for so long is still one of life’s mysteries.
Chase took his first human victim on December 29, 1977. The man’s name was Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer and the father of two sons. Mr. Griffin had been out on a shopping trip with his wife and was on his way back to their car to pick up another bag of groceries, when he just dropped to the ground. At first his wife thought he had died from a heart attack, even though she had heard two strange popping noises just before he fell. However, soon she was to learn the horrifying truth that her husband had been shot in some sort of random, drive-by attack.
Two other shootings were reported, one by a boy on a bike who claimed that a man with brown hair, possibly in his mid-twenties, had shot at him from his car. The second one was a report from a woman who said that a shot had been fired into her home, just a few blocks down from the Griffin’s house. A search of her kitchen produced a bullet that had been fired from the same gun that had killed Ambrose Griffin. But at this stage the police investigations did not lead them anywhere.
Around one month later Chase broke into a house and trashed it whilst looking for money. He urinated in drawers and defecated on the beds, but fled when he was disturbed by the returning owners.
Desperate to satisfy his desire for blood, Chase next broke into the home of Theresa Wallin, who was 22 years old and in the early stages of pregnancy. He found the door unlocked and as he entered the house he saw Theresa with a bag of rubbish in her arms. Chase raised his gun which caused the young woman to drop the bag of rubbish and raise her hands up in defence. One bullet entered her palm and the other through the top part of her skull. As she fell to the ground Chase knelt over her and put another bullet into her head. Not satisfied with just killing Theresa, Chase then dragged her lifeless body into the bedroom. He went into the kitchen and found a knife and retrieved an old yoghurt carton from the rubbish bag that Theresa had dropped.
When David Wallin returned home that evening he screamed out in sheer horror at what he found. His wife’s body was lying just inside the bedroom door with her jumper pulled up around her neck and her trousers and underwear still round her ankles. Her knees had been spread apart as if she had been sexually assaulted and her left nipple had been completely cut off. She had been eviscerated and her blood was smeared all over the bedroom and bathroom. The discarded yogurt pot was next to her body, covered in blood, as if he had used it to drink her blood. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, Chase had stuffed animal faeces into his victim’s mouth. Around the body were strange rings of blood, as if someone had placed a bucket there.
Two days after the attack on Theresa Wallin, a puppy was discovered dead and mutilated not far from the Wallin house. A couple reported that a strange man with rather stringy hair had come to buy a couple of puppies off them, not really caring what sex they were. After he left they discovered that one of the other puppies in the litter was dead.
Chase struck again on January 27. Evelyn Miroth, a 38-year-old woman, was babysitting a neighbour’s boy, accompanied by a friend called Danny Meredith. Evelyn’s own son, Jason, was going over to play at a friend’s house but when he didn’t turn up the friend sent her daughter over to see why he hadn’t arrived. When the little girl arrived at the house she wasn’t able to get any answer, but she told her mother that she had seen movement inside when she looked through the front window. The neighbours were immediately concerned and went round to investigate.
The first thing they saw when they went in the front door was Danny Meredith lying in a pool of blood with a single bullet shot in his head. The six-year-old boy, Jason, had also been shot in the head and was found lying in the bedroom. Evelyn was found lying on her bed, naked, with her legs splayed wide open. She also had a gunshot wound to the head and her abdomen had been cut open and her intestines removed. The bathroom was covered in blood and the bath contained what looked like bloody water, so it would appear that Evelyn had been taking a bath when she was disturbed by her killer. Her attacker had sodomized her, stabbed her through the anus several times, made slashes across her neck and had tried to cut out one of her eyes. Several of her internal organs had also been stabbed, and bloody ring marks around the body again indicated that the killer had used some kind of container to collect his victim’s blood.
Around the house Chase had left bloody footprints which matched those the police had found in the Wallin house. Also near the bodies were two large bloodstained knives which he had used to carve up the body. When they questioned people in the neighbourhood a young girl described a man who had been hanging around the area, a man in his mid-twenties with rather unkempt hair. Neighbours reported that Danny Meredith’s car, which had been parked outside the house, was missing. Then the next twist in the story was when Karen Ferreira arrived to pick up her son who Evelyn had been babysitting. No one had seen him, and indeed were not aware that he was in the house. On closer inspection they noticed a bullet hole in a pillow that was in the crib where her son would have been sleeping, and there was also a lot of blood.
It turned out that Chase had drunk Evelyn’s blood and then mutilated the baby’s body in the bathroom. He opened up the child’s head and let pieces of his brain spill into the bathtub. He was, however, interrupted by a knock on the front door and fled with the boy’s body. Back at his own home, Chase removed some of the baby’s organs and ate them.
Chase was probably feeling invincible but little did he realize how close the police were to closing in on their subject. A woman named Nancy Holden, who had known Chase at school, was followed by a man into a car park who then attempted to assault her. She fortunately managed to escape in her car and on arriving at the police station was able to identify her assailant as the man in the police sketch, who they suspected of being the killer. The police started to run a background check on Chase and discovered that he had a history of mental illness, records of drug abuse and also that he had already been arrested on several occasions, so they decided to pay this man a visit.
Detectives managed to trick Chase into coming out of his apartment after he failed to allow them entry. His jacket was heavily stained and the shoes he was wearing were covered in blood and under his arm he was carrying a box. They confiscated a .22 semiautomatic handgun, which was also covered in blood, and when they searched his body they found Danny Meredith’s wallet in his back pocket. The box he was carrying contained pieces of bloodstained paper and rags and a pair of latex gloves.
He was taken back to the police station and interrogated, where he admitted to killing several dogs but refused to talk about any murders. While they held him in custody the police obtained a warrant and searched his apartment. When they opened the front door the police were knocked back by the putrid smell. Virtually every article in the flat was bloodstained including food and drinking glasses. In the kitchen were several small pieces of bone and the refrigerator contained various body parts. There was also an electric blender which had a nauseating smell and looked as if it had been used to liquefy body organs. There were photographs of various organs and a calendar marked up with the ‘killing days’ and an indication of many more to come.
The body of the missing baby was eventually discovered on March 24 when a church janitor reported that he had found a box containing the remains of a baby in a churchyard.
The trial of Richard Chase opened on January 2, 1979 and he entered a plea of not guilty to all six murders due to insanity. The lead prosecutor was intent on seeking the death penalty, and the trial dragged on for four months. The jury were subjected to many theories on his desire for blood, but finally, on May 8, the jury came back with a guilty verdict on all six murder charges.
Chase was sentenced to death and sent to San Quentin to await his punishment. Since his arrest Chase had been prescribed a daily dose of a drug called Sinequan to treat both depression and hallucinations. But, unbeknown to the guards, Chase had not been taking his tablets and he had been hoarding them for future use. On Boxing Day in 1980 the guard looked into Chase’s cell and noticed that something wasn’t quite right. He was lying on his stomach with both legs hanging off his bunk with his feet just touching the floor. His head was against the mattress and both his arms were extended towards the pillow. The guard called out but Chase failed to respond. When he entered the cell and pulled Chase’s body off the bed it was obvious that he was dead. He had died from taking an overdose of Sinequan.