Retired San Francisco cop Frank Falzon solved some of the bloodiest killing cases of 1970s and 1980s America...this is his story. ***IMPORTANT - STRICT LISTENER DISCRETION ADVISED - DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF MURDER - THIS EDITION IS NOT FOR THE EARS OF CHILDREN***
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes, and this is the Unexplained. | |
| Hoping that as we come towards Christmas and the back end of this year, everything is okay in your world, in your domain. | |
| Thank you very much for all of the emails that keep coming in. | |
| Remember, if you're a new listener, let me know. | |
| If you're a listener who's been listening for years and has never been in touch, please let me know as we come to the end of this year. | |
| And when you get in touch by going to my website, theunexplained.tv and following the email link from there, let me know who you are, whereabouts in the world you are, and how you use this show. | |
| Always useful to know that information. | |
| And like I always say, like a stuck and broken record, it's not because I'm being the FBI and keeping a file on you. | |
| It's just nice to know where people are and, you know, what you are doing as you're using this show. | |
| A lot of people commuting to work, some people using this as an aid to get to sleep, something to take their minds off the cares of the day. | |
| Whatever reasons you listen to this show and whatever circumstances you listen to the show in, I'm always interested in that because I'm always surprised at the breadth, width, depth of the audience that this show now has. | |
| And it's great to be able to do something on absolutely zero resources that reaches and has reached for so many years so many people. | |
| Makes me feel very good. | |
| In a very uncertain and very difficult world, which let's not go into all of that because part of our raison d'être here is that we want to offer a little element of an escape from it all. | |
| Now, on this edition of the show, I don't think I would call it an escape. | |
| It's something that I think is fascinating but chilling in equal measure. | |
| We're going to talk to a homicide cop, retired from San Francisco. | |
| His name is Frank Falzon. | |
| If you live in the United States, you might have seen him interviewed by various outlets, including Fox News in the last couple of months, about a book that he's got out detailing some of the many very disturbing cases that he's helped to solve over the years. | |
| The one that we're going to center on in this conversation is going to be the Night Stalker case, Richard Ramirez. | |
| Now, I have to say, before we take this any further, and please heed these words, if you will. | |
| The conversation is about murder, detecting murder cases, finding the suspects, bringing those people to justice. | |
| And you can't have a conversation like that unless you discuss some of the details of the crimes committed. | |
| Now, what you're hearing, or what you're about to hear, is going to be a discussion that I had on television. | |
| And because of television regulations, I think quite rightly in the UK, you have to constantly remind people and constantly warn them about some of the language that they will be hearing and some of the topics that they will hear discussed. | |
| So you will hear me say those words, which rightly for regulatory reasons and for common sense reasons, we have to say in the United Kingdom. | |
| I think in America, late night shows have different rules and pretty much anything goes, I think, in America, as long as you don't use any of the other seven particularly awful words that you can't use on the radio in the States. | |
| But I think the rules are not as they are here. | |
| So that's the reason that I have to caveat and say those things. | |
| And I think it's important. | |
| So I'm going to say it here up front. | |
| If you are disturbed by discussions of murder cases, and in particular the Night Stalker case, then maybe this is an edition you should skip. | |
| And this is definitely not one for the kids. | |
| So if you have kids who listen to these shows, please skip this edition now. | |
| Frank Fauzon, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained from my television show, I think he's an amazing character. | |
| And as you will hear in this conversation, he's been described as dirty Harry with a heart. | |
| I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood and his portrayal of Harry Callahan. | |
| Fantastic piece of acting, amazing actor, amazing stories. | |
| And of course, they were set in San Francisco. | |
| And Frank Falzon is the real-life version, but different. | |
| The job that he had to do is every bit as unpleasant. | |
| And I think if you've been listening to my show for long enough, you know that my father was a police officer. | |
| And those who are in the police, you have to be dedicated to do it. | |
| You can't be doing it for the money. | |
| You have to have dedication. | |
| And my dad was one of those people, but he had to deal, and he didn't speak about it often. | |
| Even at the end of his life, after he'd retired, he had to deal with a lot of stuff that you and I would rather not think about. | |
| People who've been in terrible accidents. | |
| He has to go to the scene and deal with the aftermath, which you can imagine how traumatic that could be. | |
| Murder cases and terrible domestic crimes, crimes of every kind. | |
| My dad had to deal with them. | |
| Well, Frank Fauzon had to deal with what he calls in this conversation murder on steroids. | |
| So, Frank Fauzon, listener discretion advised in this edition of The Unexplained from my TV show. | |
| I'm going to talk about his San Francisco homicide cases. | |
| Before we do this, let's do the disclaimer. | |
| This hour includes detailed discussion of murder and violent crime. | |
| As always, in these things, listener and viewer discretion advised. | |
| Frank Fauzon, highly decorated, accomplished police inspector, investigated more than 300 murders and other cases during a 26-year career with the San Francisco Police Department, 22 of them in the homicide detail. | |
| He played a key role in breaking the notorious Night Stalker case, which we'll talk about, investigated his childhood friend and former fellow cop for the murders of San Francisco's mayor, George Moscone, and supervisor Harvey Milk. | |
| He participated in the Zodiac, Zebra, and Juan Corona serial murder investigations. | |
| And now he's writing all about it in a book that I've only had for two days, so I haven't finished all of it, and I've had to do a speed read with it, but it's beautifully conversationally written. | |
| Frank Felson, thank you very much for coming on. | |
| Oh, thank you for having me, Howard. | |
| And I'm so sorry that we had some technical problems connecting with you there, Frank, but glad to have got you in the end. | |
| One of the things I like about this book that you've written about your time in the homicide detail is the forward of the book because you got your son, Dave, to write that. | |
| Now, I am a police officer's son, and I can tell you that the perspective of a police officer's son Is unique because Dave describes what I used to, and I'd forgotten about it until I read it two days ago. | |
| Dave describes what it is like to be a little worried about whether dad's going to come home okay. | |
| And I remember that feeling. | |
| I remember if my dad was late from his shift in the police in Liverpool, I would start to think as a kid of 10, 11, whatever, I hope he's all right. | |
| I hope nothing's happened to him, you know, in the line of his duty. | |
| And it was interesting that you got Dave to write his perspective on your life and career. | |
| Why did you do that? | |
| I became a police officer because of my love for the city of San Francisco and the fact that I felt I could help people. | |
| Once I became a policeman, I wanted the best job possible, and that was as a homicide inspector. | |
| And I did everything in my power to eventually achieve that position that I strive for. | |
| I couldn't wait to get to work every day. | |
| The cases were the extreme, the taking of another person's life and trying to solve those things and putting the puzzles together. | |
| It was absolutely fascinating. | |
| And in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s and part of the 90s, when I was working in the city, it was like holy hell broke out. | |
| The city was upside down. | |
| The underbelly of San Francisco was alive. | |
| And to put it bluntly, it was murder on steroids. | |
| We had the Simonese Liberation Army. | |
| We had the Black Liberation Army. | |
| We had the zebra killers. | |
| We had the Zodiac. | |
| We had the Night Stalker. | |
| We had the mayor murdered. | |
| We had the city supervisor murdered. | |
| We had my former best friend as a suspect in those two killings at City Hall. | |
| It was like part of me couldn't wait to get to work to see what next could be happening. | |
| And then other parts of me was like, oh my God, this is so overwhelming. | |
| But the challenge and putting myself out front was always what I wanted. | |
| And I was very happy doing it for the city that I loved. | |
| I know it comes right through that book that you are very motivated and you still are motivated by public service. | |
| That's why you did it. | |
| But you have to be, you know, it takes one thing to be a police officer. | |
| I mean, my dad spent time in his career as what they call a plainclothes officer here. | |
| That's out of uniform, a detective, but mostly he was in uniform. | |
| What you were doing was investigating murder cases for a big chunk of your career. | |
| It takes a special kind of person to do that. | |
| What do you think that you had and that people who want to do that? | |
| Bearing in mind that in the 70s and 80s you had that welter of cases. | |
| What is it that makes somebody want to do that and makes them equipped for it? | |
| Well, as a talk show host, you realize people are fascinated by crime, particularly crimes of murder. | |
| Well, I was equally fascinated, and I was always wondering what would make somebody do such a horrible thing. | |
| And handling these individual cases and listening to police officers and supervisors say, well, this case will never be solved, it just inspired me to prove them wrong. | |
| I would turn over every rock, look under every bush, looking for a suspect, knock on every door. | |
| And in those days, we didn't have cell phones. | |
| We didn't have all the techniques they have today, like a single print fingerprint computer or DNA 100% identification. | |
| We didn't have that. | |
| So it really took somebody who was dedicated to their job. | |
| And I was so proud with the men I worked with. | |
| They were the elite group in the San Francisco Police Department. | |
| And a lot of it certainly shines through the book is teamwork. | |
| You know, we'll get into it if we have time a little later, but there was a case where a son had murdered his father. | |
| And like I say, we'll talk about this a little later. | |
| But it was your colleague, the person working with you, I think your partner, detective, because he worked in teams of two, just like in the movies, you know, with Dirty Harry, you know, Harry Callahan. | |
| But your partner said that the person who'd done this, there would have been a trace of what he'd driven over on the underside of his car, which was something that you hadn't thought of. | |
| He'd thought of that, and they looked at the car, and that helped to identify the killer. | |
| So those sorts of things are vital, aren't they? | |
| You have to work as a well-oiled machine. | |
| Yes, it's not a one-man operation for sure. | |
| You need your crime lab. | |
| You need your photo lab. | |
| You need the patrol officers on the street. | |
| They are your eyes and ears. | |
| You need your informants. | |
| You need everybody working together as a team to solve these type of cases. | |
| It's not like a burglary or a robbery. | |
| Homicide takes time. | |
| It takes tenacious effort. | |
| It takes documentation. | |
| So key. | |
| I always told my peers and my teammates, I thought my most valuable tool was the to-do list. | |
| In other words, everybody comes into the office, everybody's talking, everybody's yakking, and it's very, very confusing. | |
| So if you think of something, write it down, and you can always get back to it in a homicide investigation so that you don't miss anything. | |
| Anything little, anything out of the ordinary, write it down, get back to it, do it, document it, put it in your file until you have enough evidence to make an arrest and hopefully sustain a conviction. | |
| You know, when I think of San Francisco Homicide Police Officer, I think of one of my great heroes, Clayton Eastwood and Harry Callahan. | |
| Did you have people like that working with you? | |
| Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry, ironically that you mentioned that one of our mayors described me for our book, 5 Henry 7, as Dirty Harry with a heart, which I Thought I was. | |
| I was a tough, tenacious cop, but I also felt I always played the game of homicide investigator with a heart. | |
| There were times when I felt if it was justified. | |
| I was with the shooter arguing to the DA's office: if you want that individual arrested, have one of your DA investigators, because I feel it was a justified shooting. | |
| It takes a different kind of person to do what I was doing, but I did it because I felt it was just and it was right. | |
| Dirty Harry with a heart. | |
| Frank Felzon is here. | |
| He's going to tell us some stories of the investigations that he was involved in from his book. | |
| It is a great book, and it's a great story conversationally written. | |
| Just to say that some of the stuff we'll discuss is fairly bloody, so viewer discretion advised. | |
| 300 murder cases, some of the bloodiest in America, as he said. | |
| In San Francisco for a period, it was murder on steroids. | |
| There was so much of it, and so many perpetrators to be found, and not enough time or people to do it many times. | |
| Frank Fauson, thank you for doing this with us. | |
| When you were in the midst of all of that, before we talk about one or two specific cases here, how did it feel with all of these cases erupting around you, the 70s and 80s were a particularly bloody time? | |
| You have to have a particular mindset, a particular degree of mental fortitude to cope with it. | |
| How did you? | |
| Well, when I first entered the San Francisco Police Department, one of the sad things about the police department was the drinking culture. | |
| Cops drank. | |
| And I had a sad experience. | |
| It happened my first day out on the street. | |
| I was put with a drunk police officer, and we went from one bar to another. | |
| And I thought I was going to be fired when I returned to the station house. | |
| That individual, about a month later, I was out drinking again, and a friend of mine, another police officer, brought him home. | |
| He lived with his mother. | |
| They knocked on the door. | |
| The mother never came down, so they left him on the stoop. | |
| The next morning, the dear mom found her son dead. | |
| He choked on his own vomit from drinking too much. | |
| I learned a real valuable lesson right out of the box. | |
| I loved the game of baseball. | |
| Baseball was my life. | |
| So I started a police league within the softball league with the San Francisco Police Department. | |
| I included the FBI, the ATF, any agency that had law enforcement. | |
| They were allowed to join the league. | |
| And that gave me the outlet that I needed. | |
| And when I was home, my father, who was a big inspiration in my life, he was a carpenter. | |
| He died when I was eight years old. | |
| So building was also a passion of mine. | |
| So between the hammer and nails, the softball and the bat, I was able to survive handling one homicide case after another because I would find time and enjoy myself with my friends. | |
| So that kind of preempts a question that I was going to ask, you don't need to now really, was how you were able to unplug from it, you know, after a day. | |
| I would sometimes wonder how my father, who was for most of his career a police sergeant in Liverpool, but I would know that he would have dealt with real bloody cases and terrible, awful accidents and the aftermath of those accidents. | |
| You know, you only have to imagine the kind of things that he would have seen, yet he was still able to switch off, come home from a late shift, have his dinner, talk to me. | |
| I'd wait up for him coming in, watch a little bit of television and go to bed. | |
| You know, that takes, like I say, a particular amount of fortitude to be able to cope with it. | |
| And you have to have other things in your life, family, the other things that you did, I suspect, in order to be able to handle it. | |
| Otherwise, as you say, you end up like that colleague of yours and that is turning to drink. | |
| The main thing in my life has been, from day one until today, was my four children, my wife, my faith, and that faith of having a family. | |
| I would never talk about my cases at the table, but I would look at those sweet, innocent faces that I tried to protect, and it just proved to me that there was something better in life than this horrible, seedy side of life I was seeing on the job. | |
| So it made me appreciate life, family, wife, children, and today, grandchildren. | |
| I have nine grandchildren, all college graduates now. | |
| So I'm looking at my life like, oh boy, were you lucky. | |
| You hit nothing but ACEs. | |
| And I think that really pushed me into writing the book, 5 Henry 7. | |
| The five stood for the Inspector's Bureau. | |
| The Henry stood for homicide. | |
| And number 7 was me. | |
| So 5 Henry 7 was the name of our book. | |
| and I'm glad I wrote it because I was able to unload a lot that I kept inside for so many years. | |
| There's a lot of... | |
| There's a lot of heart, a lot of feeling in this book. | |
| I was expecting to get this book, and I knew for a couple of weeks it was on the way, but I was expecting to get it and read a very mechanical list of investigations and things that were done as part of the mechanistic process of catching a killer. | |
| But there's an awful lot of heart and feeling in there. | |
| There's an awful lot of how you felt, what this meant, and how it was. | |
| So I can see that it comes straight from your heart. | |
| You know, I think it was the way I was raised, Howard. | |
| And I like to think I had the best mom, the best dad. | |
| Losing my dad and watching my mom raise four children on her own, I saw the sacrifice that she made, and I think it just made me a better person. | |
| And I always wanted the best for my family. | |
| So being the top cop, I had a huge ego also, I have to admit that. | |
| And seeing my name in the press and seeing myself on television solving One major case after another. | |
| It made me feel important in my city and always wanting to be the ball player and hit the home run. | |
| You don't hit a home run working homicide unless you solve your case. | |
| And so I liked hitting home runs. | |
| And it was good to achieve those things. | |
| And you have to work very hard as you hint there to stay grounded. | |
| Okay, definition. | |
| Homicide inspectors, this is in the book, ranked as sergeants on today's force, were viewed as elites among their peers. | |
| It was the pinnacle of police work. | |
| They tended to be mature, physically fit, tough, proud, determined, smart, and resourceful. | |
| You had to be all of these things for some of these cases. | |
| Perhaps, I don't know, it's probably wrong to rank this as being the foremost case because there are some very prominent cases. | |
| But the case in the 1980s of Richard Rambirez, the Night Stalker. | |
| I mean, literally, you told Fox News in an interview that you did for them in October, I was watching today, that this was murder on steroids. | |
| This was a guy who invaded people's homes on what could only be described as a murder spree, not only in San Francisco, but, you know, it all started in Los Angeles. | |
| Talk to me about Richard Ramirez and the hunt. | |
| Well, talk to me about Richard Ramirez' crimes and the hunt for him. | |
| Richard Ramirez was bluntly a sick psychotic killer. | |
| He had been on a rampage down in the Los Angeles area. | |
| It's about a six-hour drive from San Francisco. | |
| And in the Los Angeles area, he was hitting, it seemed like every other day. | |
| And it was big news. | |
| It did make the papers up in San Francisco, but we were working our own cases. | |
| So we really weren't that worried about L.A. And he was being called the valley intruder, the walk-in killer. | |
| And then one, I think it was August 14th, we got a call, 1985, that there was a killing out on Eucalyptus Street by San Francisco Zoo and Ocean Beach, a very nice upscale neighborhood with manicured lawns. | |
| And en route to that crime scene, I was thinking it had to be a husband-wife dispute. | |
| I never expected what we were about to walk into. | |
| What we saw that day was so grotesque. | |
| This killer, Richard Amaris, he pried open the basement window with a tire iron from a Toyota vehicle, went into the basement, climbed the backstairs into the bedroom where the husband and wife were asleep. | |
| He shot the husband in the head, shot the wife in the head, dragged her body down to the end of the bed as she was moaning from the gunshot wound, had sex with her. | |
| After having sex with her. | |
| And we just have to repeat our warning about some of this material that viewer discretion advised. | |
| If this kind of thing is not for you, turn it off now. | |
| Sorry, you were saying, Frank. | |
| Okay, continue. | |
| After he had sex with the dying woman, he went into her kitchen, ate their food from the night before, regurgitated on their floor, went into their living room, drew a pentagram, a star and a circle on the wall, pleasured himself by masturbating in front of the symbol. | |
| I think we get the picture of how depraved and how vicious and cruel and unthinking and appalling this person was. | |
| So in the face of something like that, you turn up at the scene and all of that horror. | |
| What do you think? | |
| And what's the first thing you do? | |
| We initially thought this is going to be out-of-the-box thinking to solve this case. | |
| And we didn't know which direction we were going to end up going in. | |
| But within two days, Glendale, right outside of Los Angeles area, police detective named John Perkins contacted our homicide unit and said he was working on a case very similar to ours. | |
| And he starts telling us about this walk-in killer, the Valley Intruder. | |
| And lo and behold, he mentioned to my partner about a bullet from their crime scene that had a pink primer. | |
| Bingo. | |
| We also had a pink primer. | |
| So we have a connection with Los Angeles. | |
| My partner and I immediately jumped on a plane, flew to L.A., and we worked the next three days, four days, with the LAPD and the L.A. Sheriff's Department, gleaming every piece of information we could on their, I think at that time they had 15 murder cases. | |
| What we didn't know, he wasn't as prolific up in San Francisco, but he had killed before in the city, and we had not made a connection. | |
| But over the next weeks, when we left LA, we had a name, the name Rick. | |
| And that came about when an LA police motorcycle cop made a stop of an individual. | |
| And when the cop asked for identification, Richard Maris gave him this dentist card with the name Rick on it. | |
| And then he ran away, didn't he? | |
| And then he ran away. | |
| He ran into the park. | |
| The cops couldn't find him. | |
| He got away. | |
| So they staked out that dentist office with no luck at all. | |
| So what I did next was I pulled all burglary reports in San Francisco within a one-month period surrounding our murder. | |
| And lo and behold, there was a murder out on near Bay Street and the marina area, a very high-scaled area of a dentist house. | |
| He was out with his wife and his niece and the girlfriend were downstairs in the basement asleep. | |
| And Ramirez climbs through their bathroom window and he's searching the house and gathering a bunch of stolen articles. | |
| And the dentist and his wife return home and because of the way the curtains were left, We assume that he was looking out, saw the dentist pull into his garage, and he exited the front door that was found ajar when the dentist came up outside the basement into his home. | |
| It saved the two young girls' lives downstairs. | |
| It saved them from a sadistic attack. | |
| And what happened, the report was made by my then-oldest son, Dan, who was working Northern Station, and he listed a bracelet that had the dentist's identification engraved on the inside of that bracelet. | |
| We were able to find out that that bracelet came from Lompoc, California, which is halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. | |
| We contacted the sergeant down in Lompoc. | |
| It didn't go initially well. | |
| He told me he was going to give up his informant. | |
| And I explained to him in no uncertain terms. | |
| I said, Sergeant, I can understand you feeling not wanting to give up an informant. | |
| I'm telling you now, if somebody's murdered this weekend and I could determine that you withheld evidence, I'm coming down there and I'm putting you in handcuffs myself. | |
| And he said, calm down, Inspector. | |
| He says, my informant will call you in the next five minutes. | |
| That informant called me and he said he got the bracelet from his mother. | |
| His mother, Donna Myers, lived over in San Pablo, California, which is right over the Bay Bridge. | |
| We ran over to this mother of the informant and lo and behold, she's telling us one thing after another, virtually identifying the man that we had learned was the Night Stalker. | |
| And she said his name was Rick, that he wore an ACDC hat, that he wore a members-only black jacket, he had rotten teeth, and he smelled horrible, and he was a devil worshiper. | |
| All things that we had learned throughout our investigation. | |
| So we know we're hot on the trail. | |
| We asked who gave her the bracelet. | |
| She said his best friend, who she claimed was her boyfriend. | |
| That best friend was Armando Rodriguez. | |
| Armando Rodriguez. | |
| Here you go. | |
| Done. | |
| I can't answer. | |
| I tell you what, let's hold this because this was a key point in the investigation. | |
| This gold bracelet was very important. | |
| There was the man called Armando. | |
| You had to get the crucial bit of information. | |
| That was the final identification of this guy, Richard Ramirez, the most depraved, the most appalling of killers. | |
| Frank Fauson, one of San Francisco's very finest, has written about his life and times investigating some of the most awful homicides the world has seen. | |
| His book is called San Francisco Homicide Inspector 5 Henry 7, and you heard a little earlier in this conversation what that derives from. | |
| So, Frank, you reach a crucial point with the hunt for Richard Ramirez, the night stalker, and his terrible crimes not only in Los Angeles and San Francisco. | |
| You get a colleague in Los Angeles to give up the name of an informant, and the informant eventually, with a little persuasion, leads you to the man himself, yeah? | |
| Yes. | |
| We were at a point where we found out that Armando Rodriguez, the best friend, the fellow devil worshiper of Richard Ramaris, was living in El Sabronte, about a five-minute drive from San Pablo. | |
| So we proceeded over to El Sabronte. | |
| At that time, we were also in the company of a San Pablo police officer. | |
| It's always protocol if you're in somebody else's jurisdiction to pick up one of their officers. | |
| When we arrived at the house in El Sabrante, where Armando Rodriguez lived, it was a house up on a hill with iron gates about 10 feet tall. | |
| There was no way in. | |
| So I noticed across the street was the El Sabrante Police Fire Department, the El Sabrante Fire Department. | |
| Walked across the street. | |
| The firemen were very cooperative. | |
| They allowed us to use their phone. | |
| We placed a call into Armando. | |
| We told him we had vital information and for him to come down to the gate. | |
| We had to share this information. | |
| It was very important for him to know what we knew. | |
| I left the impression that it might be a family member. | |
| I emphasized the word homicide and the San Francisco Police Department. | |
| So next thing I know, we go back across the street. | |
| Coming down this long hill is Armando Rodriguez, and he's got two Doberman pinchers on leashes, and he appears at the gate, and these two dogs are growling. | |
| And I'm looking at them, and I said, you know, Armando, the information I have is so vitally important. | |
| I'm not going to stand here talking to you with two dogs growling at me. | |
| I said, you want to know this information? | |
| Come out. | |
| And it was pretty much a bluff on my part. | |
| I turned around, started walking towards the San Pablo police car. | |
| And when I turned around, there was Armando Rodriguez standing right behind me. | |
| The Doberman pinchers were behind the gate, and I sighed a serious relief that these dogs were not out in front. | |
| So at that point, I told him that we had information his best friend Rick was the Night Stalker. | |
| And he went off. | |
| He started calling me every MF name he could think of, MF mother, MF. | |
| He was calling me every name. | |
| My friend Rick is not the Night Stalker. | |
| When he's in LA, murders are happening in San Francisco. | |
| When he's in San Francisco, murders are happening in L.A. I know he's not the killer. | |
| Well, I told him, I said, You know, Armando, that's not up to you to decide. | |
| That's my job. | |
| Tell me his name. | |
| I'll look into it. | |
| And if your friend is clear, we're gone. | |
| We're out of your life. | |
| But let me know the last name. | |
| And again, I got the barrage of MFs, and I patted him down. | |
| My partner instinctively opened the back door. | |
| I told him he was under arrest for stolen property, mainly the bracelet that was taken from the residence in San Francisco, the dentist's house. | |
| I placed him in the back seat. | |
| My partner went, sat down next to him in the back seat. | |
| San Pablo cop got in the driver's side, and I was in the passenger seat. | |
| I leaned over, and prior to getting in, I noticed across the street, there were six or seven El Sebrante firemen out front watching every move I was making. | |
| So I leaned over the seat, and I said, look, we're trying to be nice. | |
| We're trying to be friendly. | |
| We're trying to be as cordial as we can with you. | |
| And all I got was another barrage of MFs. | |
| And he looked at my hand. | |
| And as I was talking, my hand was resting on the top of the front seat. | |
| And I had formed a fist unconsciously. | |
| And he says, oh, tough mother effer, you want to fight. | |
| And his fist came up. | |
| Well, I fired a fist into the back seat. | |
| Once somebody challenges me, I'm not paid enough to take punches. | |
| So I fired a punch, hit him in the eye. | |
| He fell over on top of my partner, Carl Klatz. | |
| Carl lifts him up, and Armando reaches up and he dabs underneath his left eye, and he sees blood. | |
| And when he sees the blood, he says, oh, you mother effer, you really think you're a tough SOB. | |
| He said, well, let's go. | |
| And he puts his fist up again. | |
| I said, no, Armando. | |
| I called him Pretty Boy because he was a nice-looking Latino. | |
| I said, pretty boy, I said, I'm not a tough guy. | |
| I said, but I'll tell you what I'm going to do. | |
| And then he says. | |
| And I've read the description in the book. | |
| If we can moderate the language a little for our audience, Frank, but I've read what was said. | |
| Carry on, sorry. | |
| Change your language. | |
| Yeah, I'm not using the word. | |
| I'm just using what you say. | |
| No, no, that's cool. | |
| I just didn't want to go there. | |
| So if we can go around there, but not necessarily there. | |
| I'll do the best I can. | |
| Sure. | |
| All I know is I was getting a barrage of very violent language. | |
| And I said, no, I'm not tough, pretty boy. | |
| And he said, well, is that as hard as you can hit? | |
| And I said, no. | |
| And I'm about to show you how hard I can hit. | |
| I'm going to split you from the top of your head down to your behind. | |
| And I started over the seat like I was going to deliver a very powerful blow. | |
| And he fell back on the seat, formed a cross with his hands protecting his face, and he screamed, Richard Amaris, Richard Amaris, that's his name, Richard Ramaris. | |
| So now we had the name. | |
| Once we had the name, within hours, our case was broke. | |
| We solved the Peter Pan murder out on Eucalyptus Street out by the zoo, and we solved all 15 cases down in L.A. All those cases were made with the learning of that name, Richard Ramirez. | |
| Had Richard Ramirez had, remind me, had he had dealings, presumably he had dealings with the police before? | |
| Not in San Francisco. | |
| He had been involved in the Los Angeles area. | |
| And ironically, most of the cases he was involved in were not heavy crimes. | |
| They were all petty crimes. | |
| He was one lucky guy. | |
| He had offered up his life to the devil. | |
| Everything he did was dedicated to Satan. | |
| So he felt any heinous, sick, demented crime he committed, he was being protected by that. | |
| So it was all done in the name of that twisted, so-called logic of his. | |
| I mean, presumably you had a fair amount to do with him when he was apprehended and taken in. | |
| What was it like to have to talk with and gather evidence from somebody like that? | |
| I had the opportunity to be face-to-face with him when he was en route to San Quentin Prison, and he was taken to the San Francisco County Jail, where we were going to place our murder arrest warrant on him in case the LA cases were overturned. | |
| At that meeting up in the jail, we placed our charges on him, and when the deputies, the sheriff deputies, were moving Richard to the holding cell, he turned around and he hollered, hey, Falzon. | |
| And I had no idea he knew my name. | |
| And I was walking towards the elevator. | |
| And when I turned around, he looked at me. | |
| He says, you'd like to know about those two old ladies, wouldn't you? | |
| And at first, I didn't know what he was talking about. | |
| And I said, two old ladies, what are you talking about? | |
| He says, you know, the two old ladies up on Telegraph Hill and bingo. | |
| I knew exactly what he's talking about. | |
| It was one of my unsolved cases with my partner, Carl Klotz. | |
| Two old ladies, I think one was 58, one might have been about 72. | |
| And he got into their apartment, viciously stabbed both of them to death. | |
| One made it to the window and was trying to open it to scream out, and he pulled her head back and sliced her neck from one side to the other. | |
| I mean, just once again to say, obviously, viewer discretion advised in this material. | |
| I think you get that impression now. | |
| But how else can you talk about the process of catching depraved individuals like this without giving you a flavor of what actually happened? | |
| So this man, when you spoke with him, seemed to be actually proud of what he was done. | |
| He was almost boasting about that, wasn't he? | |
| Well, he made a stupid remark about, I'll see you in L.A. at Disneyland. | |
| I knew this was going to be the end someday. | |
| I'm prepared for whatever you want to give me. | |
| He never showed any remorse. | |
| He was a very hollow, very shallow individual. | |
| Having dedicated his life to the devil, he felt he was going to be an archangel in hell. | |
| And that's pretty much where he belonged. | |
| He faced 14 charges in the end. | |
| The United States is full of the smartest lawyers in the world. | |
| Did anybody in his defense, I don't know the details of the trial, but did anybody try to say that this man was mentally unfit to stand trial because of his devil worship, etc. | |
| No, the devil part was all part of who he was, but it really didn't play much in the case. | |
| These were just sick, sadistic murders that he was able to play out. | |
| And then by praying to the devil, he would do horrible things. | |
| Like in one case, he tore out the eyes of a woman. | |
| Just sick, demented stuff. | |
| So what became of him then? | |
| What was the penalty? | |
| Well, believe it or not, he got married in prison, and he died a few years ago from cancer. | |
| So he is no longer with us. | |
| Thank God. | |
| Well, the world can breathe a sigh of relief, but what a terrible individual. | |
| And, I mean, look, there are a whole load of other cases I was going to talk with you about. | |
| We're not really going to have time for that, but this is the most impactful case. | |
| And I apologize to my viewer that these details are far from pleasant. | |
| But this is what the man did, and that's how he ended up. | |
| And as I used to think of with my own father, who never handled, thankfully, as far as I'm aware, cases as bloody and awful as that. | |
| People like Frank do that job and think about those things so that you and me, we don't have to. | |
| That's the point of all of this. | |
| There have to be people like Frank in this world, because otherwise, people like Richard Ramirez and those who are doing those things probably today as we speak those words, are going to walk free. | |
| And then where are we? | |
| What about you, Frank, after dealing with a case like that, that is just Horrible is the only one that I can come up with. | |
| What was the coming down from that for you like? | |
| When it was resolved, when this guy was sentenced, when he was put away and presumably sent to San Quentin, wherever he was sent permanently? | |
| What about you? | |
| You know, it was a tremendous, and I do mean tremendous, uplifting feeling of satisfaction. | |
| And I was fortunate enough to bring all the detectives from L.A. and celebrate at a high-end restaurant in San Francisco. | |
| And then with the two men that worked directly with me, we took our wives to South Lake Tahoe and we celebrated a whole weekend enjoying shows, dinner shows, and doing a little gambling and just celebrated the fact that we had such success. | |
| It was one of the biggest manhunts in the history of the state of California. | |
| Everybody was involved from the top of California all the way to the bottom. | |
| Every law enforcement officer was looking for Richard Ramirez. | |
| And for us to have broken that case, it was a great achievement. | |
| And I was very, very proud of my partners and our accomplishment in solving so many homicides. | |
| Is there a flaw in the majority of murderers, in the majority of brutal killers, in their modus operandi, the way that they do what they do or the way that they are, that means that inevitably most of them will get caught? | |
| Have most of the cases that you've dealt with, I know that not all of them are solved cases because in this world we can't do that. | |
| We're human beings. | |
| But is there some flaw in most of these people that inevitably it's just a question of time leads to their apprehension? | |
| The thing that I noticed that seemed to be most consistent is drugs. | |
| Money from drugs. | |
| And once you make a large sum of money, you need a gun. | |
| You need a gun to protect yourself. | |
| Well, you have a gun and something comes up that's not right. | |
| You're going to use the gun. | |
| So between drugs and money and guns, that's what I found was a link to most homicide cases. | |
| And does that, those flaws and weaknesses and they would see them as necessities that those people have, those are the things that allow you the leeway to find them, yeah, by tracing it back. | |
| Exactly. | |
| You don't know what you don't know until you start investigating. | |
| And that's what anybody that doesn't work homicide doesn't understand. | |
| The first thing you do, most people keep some sort of documentation as to what their daily activity is. | |
| You want those calendars. | |
| You want those daily books that most people keep. | |
| You want their little black book in their wallet as to phone numbers. | |
| And then once you start talking to people, and most people on a homicide case, they want to help. | |
| And that's the difference between drug cases and other cases. | |
| Homicide cases, most of the time, you get help. | |
| Because people are motivated. | |
| We've only got seconds now, Frank, and thank you for this. | |
| It's been a very powerful conversation. | |
| Is it easier to catch people like Ramirez now? | |
| I mean, there will always be people like that, unfortunately. | |
| It's part of the human condition. | |
| But is it easier with technology and training and all those things we have now? | |
| I would think today it would be much easier because we did have fingerprints in, I think, one of the L.A. cases, and we definitely had fingerprints in the Peter Pan case, But we didn't have the single print computer that we have today. | |
| But regarding the Ramirez case, that had existed for six months down in LA and had been unsolved until we got involved. | |
| And with the help of the Glendale Police Department, that case we had was solved in 14 days. | |
| And so that's the satisfaction that we felt up in San Francisco. | |
| Frank Fauson, I know that you'll be able to sleep well tonight and every night because of your service and having done the right thing. | |
| On behalf of all of those people who you got answers for in their lifetimes, thank you. | |
| And thank you very much for talking to me about the book. | |
| It's San Francisco Homicide Inspector 5 Henry 7. | |
| And the man that we have been speaking with is Frank Fauson. | |
| And when you think about police officers, Chilling, disturbing, fascinating, all of those words apply. | |
| Frank Fauzon, and you heard details of his book, I can tell you that it's wonderfully written, incredibly conversational, deeply compelling, but like the whole conversation, it is not one for the kids. | |
| More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained online, so until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained. | |
| And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch with me. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |