The Beginning
Chase was a native of Sacramento, California. Richard Chase showed signs of mental illness when he was young, but his strict and sometimes violent father didn’t do much to get him help.
Chase was a troubled and unhappy child, and these feelings got worse as he got older. He started a few small fires, wet the bed often, and showed signs of being cruel to animals.
Some people call these three habits the “Macdonald triad” or “the triad of sociopathy.” Psychiatrist J.M. Macdonald came up with it in 1963 as a way to predict if a patient was sociopathic.
When Chase’s father supposedly kicked him out of the house, his problems got worse. Chase turned to alcohol and drugs when he didn’t have anyone to watch over him. This quickly turned into substance abuse.
Fearing that he didn’t have enough vitamin C, he reportedly pressed whole oranges to the skin of his forehead, thinking that his brain would absorb the nutrients directly.
One of his strangest and most powerful delusions was about his head. He thought that his skull bones had broken apart and were moving around under his skin, swapping places and getting all mixed up like puzzle pieces. He shaved his head so he could watch how they moved.
Chase was 25 years old when he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was put in an institution in 1976 so he wouldn’t hurt himself. He was released later that year.
The people who worked at the mental hospital gave him the name “Dracula” because he was so interested in blood. They saw him kill several birds and try to drink the blood to stop the effects of a poison he thought was turning his blood into powder.
The reason he was put in a hospital was because he tried to inject himself with rabbit’s blood, which made him violently sick.
Even though Chase had done similar things before, the staff thought they had helped him change, so they let him go live with his mother.
Life After His Discharge From Hospital
It was a bad choice, because Chase’s condition was getting worse, not better.
Soon after he got out of the mental hospital, he moved out, saying later that he thought his mother was trying to poison him.
He moved into an apartment with a group of young men he called friends.
But it seems like they didn’t know Chase very well, and when he kept doing strange things, like taking drugs that made him always high and walking around the apartment naked, they asked him to leave.
Richard Chase, on the other hand, said no, and his roommates thought the easiest thing to do would be to leave the apartment and find other places to stay.
Chase was once again living on his own, which made the symptoms of his condition worse almost every time.
His interest in blood came back, and he started to catch and kill small animals. He would eat them raw or mix their organs with soda and drink the mixture.
In August of 1977, Nevada police found him in the Lake Tahoe area late at night. He was covered in blood and was carrying a bucket with a liver in it.
Since the blood and organ were from a cow and not a person, they let Chase go.
Yet again, Richard Chase got past systems that could have helped him and kept others safe.
Since he was alone and no one was there to keep an eye on him or stop him, he gave in to his delusions more and more, until they finally made him do the unthinkable.
Richard Chase Resorts To Crime
Richard Chase was upset and lonely on December 29, 1977. He would remember that his mother had not let him come home for Christmas, and he was angry.
The first person he killed was Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old man who was helping his wife bring in groceries. Chase pulled out a.22-caliber pistol and shot him in the chest as he drove by their street.
On January 23, 1978, Chase went into the house of pregnant Teresa Wallin, whose front door was unlocked.
During questioning, he would say that an unlocked door felt like an invitation to him and an excuse for what he did next. From then on, he only hurt people whose doors were left unlocked.
Richard Chase used the same gun to shoot both Griffin and Teresa Wallin. He shot her three times. Chase then used a butcher’s knife to stab her. He then cut out her organs and drank her blood.
The last murders Chase committed were the worst of all.
Four days after Wallin was killed, on January 27, 1978, Chase found Evelyn Miroth’s door unlocked. Inside were her 6-year-old son Jason Miroth, her 22-month-old nephew David Ferreira, and a friend named Dan Meredith.
Meredith was shot in the head and killed by her killer in the hallway. After that, Chase took his car keys.
The two of them were found in Evelyn’s room with Jason. The boy had been shot in the head twice.
Evelyn was partially cannibalized. Her stomach had been cut open, and she was missing a number of organs. Also, someone tried to take out one of her eyes but failed, and her body had been sodomized.
Evelyn Miroth was babysitting a small child, David Ferreira, but he was not at the scene of the crime.
After a few months, the headless body of the child was found behind a church.
In Miroth’s blood, the police were able to find Chase’s prints. When the police went to Chase’s apartment, they found that all of his cooking tools had blood on them and that his fridge was full of human brains.
Arrest and Trial
The trial of the Vampire of Sacramento, which was a big deal, started on January 2, 1979, and went on for five months. The defense lawyers opposed the idea of the death penalty because according to them, Chase was not guilty because he was crazy.
After five hours of deliberation, the jury decided in favor of the prosecution. The Vampire Killer, Richard Chase, was found guilty of six murders and sentenced to death.
His fellow prisoners were scared of him because they knew what he had done. They told him often that he should kill himself.
Richard Chase did just that. He saved up the anti-anxiety medicine the jail staff gave him until he had enough to kill himself. On the day after Christmas in 1980, his body was found in his jail cell.
Credits: Vocal Media