Richard Trenton CHASE became known as the Vampire Killer of Sacramento after a four day blood binge in January, 1978, in which he claimed six lives. Previously he had tried to inject rabbit's blood into his veins and had been institutionalized for exhibiting such strange behavior that merited the nickname "Dracula" within the hospital staff. In the hospital he complained that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery and that his head kept changing shape. Rich thought that his blood was turning into powder and that a Nazi crime syndicate that was haunting him from high school was paying his mother money to poison him. So he did what any other red-blooded American would do under such duress. He became a vampire. A typically "disorganized" killer, Chase picked his victims randomly and left as much evidence as he could around his home and the crime scene. He drained his victim's blood, blended it with body organs and drank it to stop his own blood from turning into powder. He also took some body parts of his victims home to munch on later. It's seems that Ritchie should have never been taken off medication. Chase moved into another apartment and began to catch and torture cats, dogs, and rabbits. He killed them to drink their blood. Sometimes he stole neighborhood pets, and he once even called a family whose dog was missing to tell them what he had done to the animal. He bought guns and started to practice with them. Although he was on psychiatric medication, he remained unsupervised. His mother weaned him from the medications herself, deciding that he did not really need them. In 1977, the court-awarded conservatorship expired, and his parents did nothing to renew it, leaving Chase on his own. One day he paid his mother a visit. She heard a loud noise and opened the door to see her son holding a dead cat. He threw the animal to the ground and tore it open, smearing the blood all over his face and neck. His mother failed to act and never reported the incident. On August 3 that same year, police officers found Chase's Ford Ranchero stuck in sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Two rifles lay on the seat, along with a pile of men's clothing. Blood smears on the inside and a blood-filled white plastic bucket containing a liver made them suspicious. When they spotted Chase through binoculars, he was nude and covered in blood. He saw them and ran, but they caught up with him and took him back to his pick-up. He claimed that the blood was his. It had 'seeped out' of him. The liver, it turned out, was from a cow. Chase soon became a fan of the Hillside Strangler, operating not far away, and he avidly read the newspaper articles about the killings. He had guns, he had a fear of other people, and he had no sense of boundaries-a lethal combination even without his weird blood fantasies. FBI agent Robert Ressler once asked Chase how he selected his victims. He said that he went down the streets testing doors to find one that was unlocked. "If the door was locked," he said, "That means you're not welcome." Apparently he found the door at the Wallin home unlocked. He encountered Teresa Wallin, 22 and three months pregnant. Before entering, Chase deposited a .22-caliber bullet in the mailbox. He opened the door and ran into Terry as she was taking out the garbage. She dropped the bag as he raised his pistol and shot her twice. One bullet entered her palm, held up defensively, and traveled up her arm to exit out her elbow and nick her neck. The other went through the top part of her skull. She fell and Chase then knelt over her prostrate body, firing another bullet into her temple. His next move was to drag her into the bedroom, leaving a trail of blood behind. He then retrieved a knife from the kitchen and an empty yogurt container from the trash bag that Terry had been carrying. Her sweater was pulled up over her breasts and her pants and underwear down around her ankles. Her knees were splayed open in the position of a sexual assault. Her left nipple was carved off, her torso cut open below the sternum, and her spleen and intestines pulled out. Chase had stabbed her repeatedly in the lung, liver, diaphragm, and left breast. He also had cut out her kidneys and severed her pancreas in two. He placed the kidneys together back inside her. There was blood in the bathroom and it was later learned that Chase had smeared Terry's blood all over his face and hands, licking it off his fingers. The discarded yogurt container near her body was also bloodstained, as if he had used it to drink her blood. His most heinous act, however, was to stuff animal feces into her mouth. There were odd rings of blood around the body, as if someone had placed a bucket there. Two days later, a puppy was found killed and mutilated not far from the Wallin home. A strange man with stringy hair and driving a Ranchero had bought two puppies from the family with seemingly no concern whether he got males or females, and then they found one of the other puppies from the litter dead. On January 27th, Evelyn Miroth, 38, was baby-sitting her twenty-month old nephew in her home, one mile from the Wallin residence. Her 51-year-old friend, Dan Meredith, came over. Evelyn was about to send her son Jason, 6, to a friend's house and when Jason failed to arrive, the friend sent her daughter over to check. The little girl saw movement inside from the front window, and then turned around to report that no one had answered the door. Neighbors grew worried and one finally entered the house and saw what had happened that morning. Danny Meredith lay in the hallway in a pool of blood. The deputy who checked him saw a gunshot wound on his head, and then saw blood in the bathroom, and what looked like bloody water in the tub. Then he found Evelyn lying naked on the bed in her bedroom, her legs splayed open. She had a gunshot wound to the head, and her abdomen had been cut open and her intestines pulled out. Two carving knives, stained red, lay nearby. It appeared that she had been taking a bath when surprised by her killer, and then dragged to the bed. He sodomized her, stabbed her through the anus into her uterus at least six times, made several slices across her neck, and tried to cut out an eye. Bloody ringlets on the carpet indicated that he had once again used some kind of container to collect blood. He stabbed several internal organs as well, which the coroner later noted would facilitate getting at blood in the abdomen. Inside Evelyn's rectum was a large amount of semen. On the other side of the bed, police officers discovered the body of a boy, who turned out to be Jason. He had been shot twice in the head at close range. The intruder had left bloody footprints behind which resembled the shoe marks found at the Wallin murder scene. Then they located an eleven year-old girl in the neighborhood who described a man near the victims' residence around eleven o'clock. She described him in his early twenties. He fit the description of a man seen repeatedly in that area walking around asking people for magazines. Dan Meredith's red station wagon was missing from the front of the house where neighbors had seen it parked that morning. Then Karen Ferreira arrived, seeking the whereabouts of her son, David, left with her sister-in-law, Evelyn, that morning. No one had seen him, but a bullet hole was discovered in the pillow that had been in a crib. There was a lot of blood. It later turned out that Chase had drank Evelyn's blood and had mutilated the baby's body in the bathroom, opening the head and spilling pieces of the brain into the tub. A knock on the door must have interrupted him and he had fled with the body. As police looked for him, he took the baby to his home and severed the head. He removed several organs and consumed them. It seemed to Chase that he would get away with this brutal series of murders, but he did not realize how quickly the police were closing in. Detectives apprehended him, but not without a mighty struggle on his part. They noticed he was wearing an orange parka that had dark stains on it and his shoes appeared to be covered in blood. A .22 semiautomatic handgun was taken from him, which also had bloodstains on it. Then they found Dan Meredith's wallet in Chase's back pocket, along with a pair of latex gloves. The contents of the box he was carrying also proved interesting: pieces of bloodstained paper and rags. They took him to the police station and tried to get him to confess. He admitted to killing several dogs but stubbornly resisted talking about the murders. While he was in custody, detectives searched his apartment in hopes of finding a clue about the missing baby. What they found in the putrid-smelling place was disgusting. Nearly everything was bloodstained, including food and drinking glasses. In the kitchen, they found several small pieces of bone, and some dishes in the refrigerator with body parts. One container held human brain tissue. An electric blender was badly stained and smelled of rot. There were three pet collars but no animals to be found. Photographic overlays on human organs from a science book lay on a table, along with newspapers on which ads selling dogs were circled. A calendar showed the inscription 'Today' on the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders, and chillingly, the same word was written on forty-four more dates yet to come during that year. At one point, Chase admitted to another inmate that he had drunk the blood of his victims because he had blood poisoning. He needed blood and he had grown tired of hunting and killing animals. Finally, the baby was found. On March 24th, a church janitor came upon a box containing the remains of a male baby. He called the police. When they arrived, they recognized the clothing. It was the missing boy from the Miroth home. The baby had been decapitated and the head lay underneath the torso, which was partially mummified. A hole in the center of the head indicated the child had been shot. There were several other stab wounds to the body and several ribs were broken. Beneath the body, too, was a ring of keys that fit Dan Meredith's now-impounded car. The lead prosecutor for the case of California v. Richard Trenton Chase was Ronald W. Tochterman. He intended to seek the death penalty. The defense entered a plea of 'Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity,' but Tochterman was determined to show that he knew the difference between right and wrong and that he was not compelled to murder. Part of his strategy included boning up on the legends of Dracula. He also read about blood-related crimes and blood rituals in various cultures, noting that some people believed that ingesting another person's blood would strengthen or heal them. He wanted to show that while this might be a belief, it was not a viable reason for murder. A change of venue was requested, given the local notoriety of the case, and the trial was moved one hundred twenty miles south to Santa Clara County. By the time it was all over, a dozen psychiatrists had examined Chase. He admitted to one that he was disturbed about killing his victims and he was afraid they might come for him from the dead. There was no evidence in his admissions that he had ever felt compelled. He simply thought the blood was therapeutic. One psychiatrist found him to be an antisocial personality, not schizophrenic. His thought processes were not disrupted, and he was aware of what he had done and that it was wrong. On January 2, 1979, the trial began. Chase was charged with six counts of murder. The prosecutor emphasized throughout the trial that Chase had had a choice, and mentioned several times that he had brought rubber gloves with him to the victims' homes with the intent of murder. Altogether, there were 250 prosecution exhibits, the strongest of which were Chase's gun and Dan Meredith's wallet, found in Chase's pocket. Chase then took the stand in his own defense. He looked awful, having dropped in weight to 107 pounds. His eyes were sunken and lusterless. He claimed to have been semi-conscious during the Wallin murder and he described in detail the way he had been mistreated much of his life. He admitted to drinking Wallin's blood. He did not recall much about the second series of murders, but knew that he had shot the baby in the head and decapitated it, leaving it in a bucket in the hope of getting more of its blood. He thought the baby was something else, but did not elaborate. He thought that his problems stemmed from his inability to have sex with girls as a teenager and he said he was sorry for the killings. The defense asked for a verdict of second degree murder, to spare Chase the death penalty, since he was clearly insane and had never been given proper help. Tochterman argued that he was a sexual sadist, a monster who knew what he was doing and who could not be salvaged. On May 8, 1978, after five hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of six counts of first degree murder. During the sanity phase, the jury found Chase legally sane after deliberating an hour. It took them four hours to decide that Chase should die in the gas chamber at San Quentin Penitentiary. On the day after Christmas in 1980, one day short of the third anniversary of the killing spree, the guard looked in on Richard Chase. The condemned man was lying on his back in his bunk, breathing normally. He did not return the guard's greeting, which was not unusual. At 11:05, the same guard looked into the cell again. Chase was on his stomach, both legs extended off his bunk, and his feet were on the floor. His head was against the mattress and his arms extended toward the pillow. The guard called out to Chase, who failed to move. He went in and pulled Chase off the bed. It was clear to him that the "Vampire of Sacramento", aka, "Dracula," was dead. K. P. Holmes, the coroner, was called. He searched the cell and located a strange suicide note about taking some pills. Chase had been taking a daily dose of Sinequan for hallucinations and depression, which came to his cell in a package of three pills. Apparently he had hoarded the pills and then overdosed. The cause of his death was toxic ingestion. His heart was found to be normal and in good shape, despite his life-long concerns. The prison psychiatrist noted that Chase had been psychotic since the time he had entered the prison, but no one much bothered about the nature of his bizarre obsession with blood. In 1992, a movie called Unspeakable was made based on Chase as a model for the killer. His case is still used by the FBI as the archetypal model for understanding the disorganized killer.