Richard Trenton Chase killed six people in Sacramento, California, between December 1977 and January 1978. He got the nickname the Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victims’ blood and ate their body parts. Chase had severe mental illness and believed that drinking blood would stop him from dying.
As per Wikipedia, Chase was born on May 23, 1950, in Sacramento. As a child, he showed scary signs like being cruel to animals, starting fires, and wetting the bed. When he was a teenager, he used a lot of drugs and his mental health got worse. Doctors said he had paranoid schizophrenia and he spent time in mental hospitals. Chase thought his blood was turning to powder and that he needed to drink blood to stay alive. He started by killing and eating animals like rabbits and dogs in his apartment.
His first human victim was Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer who was shot in a drive-by shooting on December 29, 1977. On January 23, 1978, Chase broke into the home of Teresa Wallin, who was three months pregnant. He killed her and drank her blood using a yogurt cup. Four days later, he went into the home of Evelyn Miroth and killed four people, including Miroth, her six-year-old son Jason, her 22-month-old nephew David Ferreira, and her friend Dan Meredith.
The FBI stepped in, and neighbors noticed the smell
Chase took the baby’s body to his apartment. A neighbor heard about what happened and called the police. When officers got there, they found what detective Ray Biondi called a house of carnage.
FBI agents Robert Ressler and Russ Vorpagel made a profile of the killer. They thought he was a white man in his twenties with serious mental illness who lived alone near where the crimes happened. The profile was right. A woman named Nancy Holden knew Chase from high school and saw him at a shopping center. She saw that he was very thin with sunken eyes and had blood stains on his orange jacket. She told the police about him.
Richard Chase was an American serial killer who killed and mutilated the bodies of his six victims.
— Morbid Knowledge (@Morbidful) June 30, 2023
He was nicknamed The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains.
Chase later told detectives that If he attempted to enter the… pic.twitter.com/oFx5Yex4iM
Police caught Chase on January 27, 1978, after watching his apartment. When they looked inside his home, they found blood all over the walls, floor, and ceiling. Three blenders had blood in them, and dishes in the fridge had body parts. They also found several dog collars and a calendar with the word today written on the dates when the murders happened. The baby’s body was found later in a garbage bin in March 1978.
Dawn Larson, who lived near Chase, later said that he would walk around the apartment complex with his mouth open and never said anything back when she said hello. She also remembered seeing him bring dogs and a cat to his apartment even though pets were not allowed. She never saw the animals again and did not know what happened to them, though police would later find out the horrible truth.
Richard Chase, un cannibal, necrophile et tueur en série, n'entrait jamais dans une maison si la porte n'était pas ouverte. Si elle était ouverte, il entrait en pensant être «invité». Il a tué 6 personnes et a été surnommé le «Vampire de Sacramento» car il buvait leur sang. pic.twitter.com/XdMUCligXu
— Bouteflikov(@Bouteflikov) April 10, 2021
Chase went to trial in 1979 for six counts of murder. His lawyers said he was not guilty because of insanity, but the jury did not agree. Prosecutor Ronald Tochterman made the jury believe that Chase knew what he was doing was wrong. The fact that Chase wore rubber gloves when he did the murders showed he was trying not to leave proof behind. On May 8, 1979, the jury said he was guilty of first degree murder and gave him the death penalty in the gas chamber. Chase’s case is like other well-known serial killers in history who did terrible acts of violence.
Chase was sent to San Quentin prison where other prisoners were scared of him and told him to kill himself. He was found dead in his cell on December 26, 1980. An autopsy showed he died from taking too much Sinequan, a medicine for depression.
He had been secretly saving up pills and took 36 times the normal amount. He was 30 years old. People still talk about whether serial killers are born this way or become this way because Chase’s story showed a mix of mental illness, bad things that happened to him as a child, and strange behavior from when he was young.
