Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer

Six-year-old Anastasia Hronas was in bed one hot summer’s night in 1985 when Richard Ramirez opened her window. The serial killer abducted her and drove her across Los Angeles to his home.A quarter of a century later, Hronas recalled her ordeal. “I don’t know how long I was in the car. He wanted me to look at him and touch him and things like that.” Once at his house, Ramirez zipped her into a duffel bag and only let her out to repeatedly sexually assault her. “I remember saying: ‘Stop, this hurts.’ Something in the way that he would look at me, it was almost like: ‘I’m sorry that I’m doing this to you. But I’m not sorry, ’cause I’m not gonna stop.Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer Season 1 Download.

Hronas was one of the victims of a man who became known as the Night Stalker and attacked men, women and children aged six to 83 at night. He was eventually convicted of 13 murders and 11 sex assaults. Tiller Russell, the director of this Netflix series, has said that his aim was to tell the story from victims’ and cops’ perspectives, while deglamorising the Night Stalker. He airbrushed Ramirez so much from this four-part series that he appears only in police sketches during the final episode.

Fair enough, particularly given the 2016 film The Night Stalker, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Ramirez, focused on the killer rather than his victims, but this docuseries was hardly as noble as that might suggest. There were slaveringly repeated, hackneyed sequences such as a blood-soaked hammer tumbling to the floor. Interviews were shot at night to further fetishise the milieu in which Ramirez raped and murdered.Worse, there was an actor voicing Ramirez’s boring satanist philosophy that made the cops suspect for a while he was a Charles Manson copycat.