Richard Chase Part I

 

Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980) was an American serial killer, cannibal, and necrophile who killed six people in Sacramento, California, from December 1977 to January 1978. He was nicknamed The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains.

Early life

Chase was a native of Sacramento, California. He was born shortly after his parents got married, and had a younger sister named Pamela. His parents were prone to arguing with each other during his childhood. On one camping trip in Oregon, his mother Beatrice accused her husband of having an affair with a woman hiding in the bushes, which is described as having ruined this trip. Chase's mother also said that her husband was annoying her in bed while she was sleeping, and that he must have somehow drugged her to do this. It has been claimed that Chase's father physically disciplined Richard as a child, but that his actions were not out of the ordinary for families during that era. By the age of 5, Chase privately exhibited evidence of all three parts of the Macdonald triad, a theory suggesting the development of violent psychopathy. The triad links cruelty to animals, obsession with fire-setting and persistent bedwetting past the age of five, to violent behaviors, particularly homicidal behavior and sexually predatory behavior. These internal issues did not affect his early school life, with over 60 children coming to one of his birthday parties. In his adolescence, he was said to be a heavy user of drugs such as marijuana and LSD. As a teenager, Chase also discovered that he was impotent, which prevented him from having sexual relationships with women.

One of Chase's first instances of strange behavior as an early teen occurred when he started to believe he was a member of the James–Younger Gang. Chase even pasted his head onto photos of them. He tried to sell these photos to people, and wanted his mother to buy him a cowboy hat, but she refused. Chase would also sometimes sleep in his family's lounge room, and when he did this he would take off all his clothes, turn the heater on as high as it would go, and then open the windows. While Chase was described as being popular and clean-cut during his high school years, he started to become withdrawn once he entered adulthood, and had a more unkempt appearance. Chase got a girlfriend in high school, whom he began dating in 1965. In subsequent interviews, this woman used the pseudonym "Libby Christopher". They were unable to have sex the first time they attempted to do so due to his impotence. The relationship continued nonetheless, although his continual failure to achieve an erection led to their eventual split in 1966. Once graduating from high school, Chase attended American River College between 1968 and 1971. His grades were declining and he started not attending classes, eventually dropping out.

Early adulthood

Chase developed hypochondria as he matured. He often complained that his heart would occasionally "stop beating", or that "someone had stolen his pulmonary artery". He would hold oranges on his head, believing Vitamin C would be absorbed by his brain via diffusion. Chase additionally thought that his cranial bones had become separated and were moving around, so he once shaved his head to be able to watch this activity.

Chase first worked in a typing and phone answering job for Retailers Credit Association during 1969, while enrolled in American River College. In the next few years, Chase continued to find other odd jobs in Sacramento, but he was still using heavy amounts of drugs and none of them lasted long. Shortly before dropping out of American River College, Chase shared an apartment with Cyd Evans DeMarchi and Rachel Statum in 1971 — the two found him sitting on their front lawn one day in February 1971 and began talking, with Chase convincing them to let him become a roommate of theirs. His parents gave him 50 dollars each month to help him pay his share of the rent. DeMarchi and Statum both moved out due to Chase's behavior. He was usually high on drugs and walked around naked in front of visitors. He also barricaded himself in his room, explaining that he did this so no one would be able to sneak up on him. He then shared the apartment with Statum's brother and his friends. These new roommates had a rock band, and Chase often interrupted their jamming, wanting to play the conga with them. However, they didn't want him to since he didn't sound good. This caused arguments, and he joined in anyway. Statum's brother and his friends also eventually moved out, and Chase was unable to afford the rent by himself. Chase's parents divorced in June 1972, and he frequently fought with his mother. He believed that she was trying to poison him, something which she had accused her husband of doing to her when Richard was a child. During one lone trip to Utah in 1972, Chase was arrested for driving under the influence, and he told his parents that he had been gassed in the local jail, and that he wanted to sue the police. His father bailed him out of jail and convinced him against suing the police.

He alternated between living in his mother's residence and his father's new residence, since they were both finding it difficult to deal with his increasingly erratic behavior. When Chase's father kicked him out of his residence, neighbors reported that he would stand still by the property, blankly staring at it for extended periods of time. At this point, his father didn't believe that the troubles in his life were due to mental illness, but rather a lazy work ethic and misguided values. In late 1972, Chase's mother attempted to call the police on him during an argument, when suddenly Richard grabbed the phone and whacked her on the head with it. She was still able to call the police, and he ran outside and jumped over the fence. The police said they could press charges against her son, but she decided not to. Following this incident, Chase had two separate stints living with his paternal grandmother in Los Angeles, who noted his odd behavior. During the first stay with his grandmother, Chase worked for his uncle, as a bus driver of mentally disabled children. However, he was fired for never cleaning the bus and letting it run low on oil. All he had to do to change the oil was to take it to a particular station, but he never followed through on this instruction. After getting fired from the bus job, he spent most of the day in his bed, roaming the house at night. He became convinced that someone was trying to enter his grandmother's house through a window. His grandmother heard him talking to himself, and also once found him standing on his head in the corner of his room. He told her that he was trying to get the blood to run back down to his head. At other times, he complained to her that his heart was hurting and spoke of pain in his legs. During his second stint in Los Angeles, he found a job working at a paint store, but was fired within a few days. Chase's grandmother said that both his mental state and physical appearance had deteriorated during his second stay with her.

When Chase returned to Sacramento for good in the summer of 1973, he began cutting out photos of human organs from a medical book, and pasting them all over his bedroom. This was in an effort to understand what was wrong with him. Around this time, Chase called an ambulance to his house, who arrived with a stretcher that he had requested. However, they refused to take him to hospital when they found out that he was not suffering from a medical emergency. Chase later went to his mother "begging" her for help with his supposed medical conditions. She responded by getting him in contact with two different doctors. Chase was dissatisfied with the prognosis these doctors gave him, so he went to see Doctor Donald Ansel. Ansel found there to be nothing physically wrong with him, and concluded that Chase had a "psychiatric disturbance of major proportion." In 1973, Chase killed one of his cats when he saw a television story about a cat that had received high quality medical treatments. The story aggravated him since he believed that he deserved these treatments.

Institutionalization

Chase spent two days in a psychiatric ward in December 1973, after walking into the emergency room of American River Hospital, complaining about a variety of imagined ailments. Chase said that he couldn't breathe, that the blood had stopped flowing through his body and that he was suffering cardiac arrest. He also mentioned that he'd lost his "pulmonary vein". Doctor Irwin Lyons noted in his report that Chase was "tense, nervous and wild eyed", describing him as a "filthy, disheveled, deteriorated and foul smelling white male". The hospital diagnosed Chase with acute paranoid schizophrenia, although they said that it was possible he was also suffering a drug-induced psychosis. Chase was discharged when his mother confronted the psychiatric ward staff. In his report, Lyons said she was "highly aggressive, hostile [and] provocative", adding that she was "the so-called schizophrenic mother". After being discharged, Chase's mental health allegedly improved over the next two years, once he started taking the hospital's medication. He was given an oxygen tank, presumably to help him deal with panic attacks, and also added 20 pounds to his thin frame. Chase's mother claimed that his mental state deteriorated once he started using illegal drugs again. However, his father disagreed with this assessment. Chase's mother said that as his mental state grew worse, she would overhear him talking to himself, just as his grandmother had. According to his mother, he began to have trouble even signing his own name, and on two occasions, he also ordered her to stop controlling his mind, with Chase later accusing his sister Pamela of controlling his mind as well. Once Chase slapped his mother in the face, and sometimes when he argued with her, she would put his father on the phone, which led him to have fits of rage, causing damage throughout the house. Chase's mother would accuse her ex-husband of telling him to behave like this. Chase became too much for either parent to handle, so they got him his own apartment.

Once living in this apartment, Chase began riding his bicycle to a rabbit farm, and after purchasing the rabbits he consumed them raw. Chase kept the apartment relatively clean, and his father would come over for games of chess. When Chase's father asked why he had live rabbits, Chase responded by saying that he was eating them, and his father never looked into this any further, having already grown accustomed to his strange statements. In 1976, he was involuntarily committed to a mental institution for the second time. This occurred when he was taken to the emergency room of American River Hospital, after injecting rabbit's blood into his veins. His father found him vomiting in his apartment and barely able to move, following blood poisoning. The emergency staff said that Chase gave them a "bizarre story" about eating a rabbit which had battery acid in its stomach, and they again concluded that he was mentally ill. He was sent to American River Hospital's psychiatric health facility, and there Chase complained of heart weakness and said his body was falling apart. He refused to participate in any group activities, eventually being transferred to the Beverly Manor Psychiatric Hospital. The staff at this institution nicknamed him "Dracula" because of his blood fixation. He broke the necks of two birds he caught through the institution window and drank their blood. He also extracted blood from therapy dogs with stolen syringes.

After undergoing a battery of treatments involving psychotropic drugs, Chase was deemed no longer a danger to society, and later in 1976, he was released to his mother's custody. The mental institution's staff disagreed with this decision, which was ordered by a doctor. Shortly after Chase's murders, one of the staff members told TV reporters that, "it was his turn to be released, and anything we had to say or do about it was irrelevant", adding that he thought that Chase was "sick and dangerous." Another female staff member who was interviewed said, "He needed extensive care. He was not receiving as much care as he should have gotten."

Without consulting doctors, Chase's mother weaned him off his medication, since she disliked how it made him "like a zombie". She got him another apartment, and in it, Chase progressed from eating birds and rabbits to eating dogs. He purchased puppies and hanged them in his apartment. Chase would then cut open their stomachs, drinking their blood and eating their raw guts. Some of the dogs he purchased were suspicious and didn't want to go with him. Chase's neighbor Dawn Larson said that he would aimlessly walk around their apartment complex with his mouth open, and that he didn't respond to her when she said hello. She also remembered seeing him bring dogs and a cat, even though pets weren't allowed. She never saw the animals again and didn't know what became of them. Initially, Chase only allowed his mother to enter the door of his apartment, but he soon would not allow anyone to come in, and would speak to his mother through a crack in the door.

Later investigation uncovered that, in August 1977, Chase was stopped and arrested on a Native American reservation in the Pyramid Lake, Nevada, area. His naked body was smeared with blood and a bucket with a liver was found in his truck, with police suspecting that a homicide had occurred. Witnesses reported that Chase had a dog with him earlier that day, but it was never recovered. When questioned by police at the scene, Chase claimed that the blood was seeping out of him and that he didn't know what had happened to the dog. The blood was determined to be cow's blood, and no charges were filed.

Murders

Lead up to the murders and Griffin shooting

Chase purchased a .22 caliber pistol in December 1977, and lied about his history of mental illness in order to do so. Neighbors soon heard shooting noises in his apartment. Chase later claimed that he had been shooting at voices that he heard, with bullet holes in the walls corroborating this story. Chase continued to kill and eat dogs, and would now shoot them in the head. Chase said this made it easier for him to collect the blood, since he could put cups next to the bullet wounds. After killing small dogs, including Labrador puppies, he eventually tried to steal a large St. Bernard from a residence, but was unsuccessful. On December 29, 1977, Chase killed his first known human victim in a drive-by shooting. The victim, Ambrose Griffin, was a 51-year-old engineer and father of two. Griffin had been unloading groceries in his driveway, with his wife initially believing that he had suffered a heart attack. The shooting baffled police, who viewed it as being a random, motiveless crime. Chase claimed that in the lead up to the murder, he was angered by his mother's refusal to allow to him to come over to her house for Christmas. She wouldn't allow him in her house since his sister had become afraid of him, following a recent incident where he ripped apart a cat in front of his mother during an argument, smearing its blood over his body.

Two weeks after the Griffin murder, he attempted to enter the home of a woman, but because her doors were locked, he walked away. Chase went on to tell detectives that he took locked doors as a sign that he was not welcome, but unlocked doors were an invitation to come inside. On one occasion, he was caught and chased off by a couple returning home as he pilfered their belongings; he had also urinated and defecated on their infant child's bed and clothing. He broke into another unoccupied house and attempted to set fire to one of the drapes. Chase later said that he believed the residents of this house had been spying on him, and that he wanted them to leave the neighborhood.

Wallin murder

On January 23, 1978, Chase broke into a house and shot Teresa Wallin (three months pregnant at the time). She had been taking out the trash, and he first shot her in the hand, as she attempted to protect herself. He then shot her in the cheek, breaking her jaw, before shooting her in the head, and rendering her unconscious. He had sexual intercourse with her corpse while stabbing her in the stomach with a butcher's knife from her kitchen. Multiple organs were removed, including the spleen, which was completely cut out of her body. Both her kidneys were severed, and Chase moved them around, placing them on the left side beneath her liver. He then cut off one of her nipples and drank her blood through a yogurt cup he found in her trash bag. He stuffed dog feces from Wallin's yard down her throat, before leaving her house. Despite wearing rubber gloves to the murder, Chase made no effort to cover up the crime scene, and he left behind the butcher's knife. It was determined that Wallin was still alive while some of the mutilation was occurring, and remnants of her unborn fetus were also found. Wallin's corpse was discovered by her husband, a truck driver who was at work when the murder happened. The husband only saw a split second of the corpse before screaming and getting out of there. He called his parents to come over and was hoping that they wouldn't have to look at her corpse, but they did eventually see it. Police called to the scene were told that the victim had been shot and "opened up with a knife". They did standard procedures to check if she was alive, such as putting a flashlight to her face, even though it was obvious she was dead. Wallin's eyes were open and her tongue was sticking out, with Detective Wayne Irey saying that the terrified expression on her face had continued to haunt him over the years. Irey added, "It was a horrific homicide, because not only had he killed her, but she was pregnant at the time, so he killed an unborn child." Sacramento officer Frank Davidson remembered in 2010, "I've been to a lot of homicide scenes and took a lot of pictures and done a lot of evidence, and he was the strangest I've ever seen, [and that] a lot of the other people have ever seen. You don't have everyday someone cutting somebody opens, looking through their intestines and moving their things about." Chase later told a psychiatrist that he spent the rest of that day watching television in his apartment. In the following days, Chase had a phone conversation with his mother. She said that he talked about rockets, spaceships and "little green men".