Richard Chase’s actions in the span of a year would earn him the title of infamous serial killer, mentioned among the likes of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and the Son of Sam. He was just 27.
His method got him the name, ‘Vampire of Sacramento’, so it does not come as a shock that Chase’s trademark was drinking his victim’s blood and eating their organs after he killed them.
Prior to his spiral into darkness, Chase had many run-ins with the law. The year before he committed a murder spree, Chase was found in a field, completely naked, except for a thick coat of cow blood.
This behavior did not come as a surprise to those close to him. Chase’s childhood was filled with cases of animal torture and blood drinking.
Richard Chase, before becoming Dracula
Richard Trenton Chase was born in Sacramento, California, on May 23, 1950. His parents, Richard Chase Sr. and Beatrice Lorene Neese Chase had two children. His sister, Pamela was born four years after him.
The home environment was typical of that era. His father was a strict disciplinarian, and his mother was a pillar of support. That said, Chase was well loved by both his parents.
However, the warning signs came early. By the time Chase was 10, he was killing cats. Beatrice once called a neighbor over, and pointed to some flower boxes. She told the neighbor that her son had buried a cat inside. The neighbor was horrified. Around that time, several cats disappeared in the neighborhood.
At home, his parents also constantly bickered, and when Chase turned 14, they separated for a brief time. This resulted in Richard, Pamela, and their mother moving to Los Angeles to live with relatives.
Richard Sr and Beatrice reconciled soon afterward, causing them to move back to Sacramento, but the fighting did not stop. They tried to make the marriage work for another six years, but ultimately separated again in 1972. They divorced in 1973.
According to those who went to high school with him, the parental squabbles did not seem to have an obvious effect on him. Chase was also popular at school with girls and boys. He was well groomed and had good manners.
Chase had at least two relationships during his high school years. These girls would later mention that they tried to initiate sexual intimacy with him on multiple occasions, but it appeared as though his body was not in it. Chase was not able to sustain an erection.
This issue caused him significant stress and when he turned 18, Chase saw a therapist. The psychiatrist listened to his symptoms and suggested that repressed anger might have been a cause of his impotence. The therapist also surmised that Chase may have had mental issues, but implemented no further actions.
Chase had crafted a clean image at school by this time, but this was not so outside. By the age of 16 he had already been arrested once for possession of marijuana.
On graduating from high school, his parents urged him to go to college. Chase struggled though the initial years of junior college, but ultimately dropped out.
His father also noticed that Chase began neglecting his appearance, with fewer friends coming over anymore. His son had begun to withdraw from his social circles. Beatrice claimed she did not notice saying, that’s how the kids dressed in the hippie era.
Chase moved out of his parents’ house in 1970 and lived with two female roommates in a house on Annadel Lane, Sacramento. He had known one of them since high school. The other was his roommate’s friend.
According to the elder one, Chase was a slob who never bathed or washed his clothes. He continued to withdraw even from his roommates and the rest of the world. Chase once boarded the door to his bedroom, and knocked a hole in the wall of his closet. He then nailed the closet door shut from the inside.
When asked about his weird behavior, he said people had been sneaking up on him from inside. That is why he had to nail the door shut.
His strange behavior stressed his roommates, who politely asked him to move. Chase refused. Not wanting to pursue the issue with a potentially dangerous individual, they moved out. These roommates would later testify that Chase smoked marijuana daily and used any drugs that came his way.
There were other concerning incidents. On one occasion, Chase strolled out of his room naked, and began an unintelligible conversation with a few female friends, his roommates had invited over.
Without the roommates to assist with rent, and Chase’s inability to keep any job, he decided to leave Sacramento to seek greener pastures.
In 1972, he moved to Utah and got a minor traffic violation, which required bail money. His father provided the bond money, and Chase returned to California.
Chase was also preoccupied with imaginary symptoms of diseases he thought he had. Beatrice then took him to the American River Hospital to treat his symptoms. He was claiming that he had had a cardiac arrest and someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. Chase also claimed that his blood had stopped flowing. The doctor found nothing wrong with him.
A psychiatrist was then called in, and she noted that Chase was filthy, wild-eyed, and appearing to suffer from delusions. She gave a diagnosis of chronic paranoid schizophrenia. They considered that it could be due to a drug-induced toxic psychosis.
The hospital mandated that Chase be held for 72 hours, and it was recommended that he stay. Though he was allowed to leave whenever he wanted. He was eventually released.
Chase then began to kill and disembowel rabbits, which he either bought or caught. He ate their intestines raw. Sometimes, he placed their intestines and the blood in a blender before drinking the combination. He once even injected rabbit blood into his veins and got sick from blood poisoning.
Chase was committed in the hospital as a schizophrenic, who had delusions. Doctors gave him anti-psychotics but they were of little help. This was a sign the condition may have been brought by drug use.
Chase escaped, and showed up at his mother’s house, however, he was admitted to an institution for the criminally insane. There, he earned the nickname ‘Dracula’ because he was fascinated with blood. He often spoke about killing rabbits and was often found with blood around his mouth.
Eventually, he was released because they deemed him harmless. Though Chase was on medication, he was not supervised. Beatrice weaned him off the medication, deciding that he really did not need them.
On August 3, 1977, police found Chase’s Ford stuck in the sand near Pyramid Lake. There were two rifles and a pair of men’s clothing on the seat. The interior was covered in blood smears, and a white plastic bucket filled with blood and a liver was significantly suspicious.
Chase spotted the police from afar and ran. He was nude and covered in blood. The police soon caught up and took him back to the vehicle. He claimed the liver was from a cow, and the rest of the blood was his. They let him go.
Chase also developed an obsession with the Hillside Strangler at the time, and avidly read about the killings. What no one knew, is he was internally ramping up to kill people.
Ambrose Griffin
On December 29, 1977, Ambrose and Carol Griffin had just come back from a shopping trip. They had just taken out a bag of potatoes from their vehicle and put it in the house. Griffin went back to the car to take the rest of their groceries.
His wife and their three sons then heard popping sounds. They thought it was a car back firing and put it out of their mind. As time passed though, Carol went to check on her husband.
She found him lying in the front yard and at first thought it might have been a heart attack before her husband gasped out that he had been shot. Griffin was immediately taken to American River Hospital, but he died an hour later, while undergoing emergency treatment.
At the time, Griffin was a family man with no enemies so the killing did not make any sense. The bullet that killed him was a 22. Caliber.
Investigators from the sheriff’s office dismissed the incident as a random act of violence. This was because the neighborhood had occasionally been terrorized by vandals the preceding months. It made sense that someone was aiming at the street lights, and probably did not see Griffin in the driveway.
One of the bullets hit Griffin while the other hit a tree beside him. The police did have it right that the shooting was random, as Chase only focused on Griffin because he was an easy target. Chase only had to drive up and squeeze two shots from his gun and drive away. It was also a major confidence booster.
Teresa Wallin
On January 23, 1978, less than one month after the Griffin murder, Chase was rock hunting with his father. Richard Senior noticed that his son was anxious, but it was not alarming, according to his account.
An hour after their meeting, Chase spotted a girl he knew from high school named Nancy Holden. She was browsing items in a store, and Chase repeatedly tried to engage her attention. Nancy finally recognized him, but was very uncomfortable due to his deranged look and aggressive approach. Chase tried to get a ride from her, but she refused.
Chase vented his frustration by breaking into the house of a married couple on the same street, and stole some of their valuables.
He proceeded to urinate in the drawer that had their baby’s clothing and defecated on the bed. When the couple came back home, Chase was still there. The husband attacked him, but Chase escaped.
Chase then came across the house of David and Teresa Wallen. Teresa was three months pregnant and had left the front door unlocked. In Chase’s mind, this meant he was welcome.
Chase surprised her in her home and shot her three times. One bullet was to her hand, which was up in a defensive posture, the others were to the head. Chase then dragged the body to the bedroom and raped it. When he finished, he carved the body open and removed Teresa’s organs.
He used a bucket to collect the blood and organs, then took it to the bathroom to bathe in it. Chase also drank her blood. Before leaving, he found some dog feces in the yard and returned to the house to stuff it in Teresa’s mouth.
Escalation and Mass Murder
On January 27, Chase entered the house of Evelyn Myroth while she was babysitting David, her 22-month-old nephew. Jason, her six-year-old son, was also present in the house, along with Dan Meredith, a neighbor who had come to check on Evelyn.
Dan was watching the kids, while Evelyn bathed when Chase burst in. He shot Dan in the head at point-blank range with his 22. Caliber handgun. It was the same gun he had used in the previous killings.
Chase turned Dan’s body over, and took his car keys as well as his wallet. Seeing this unfold, Jason tried to run to his mother’s bedroom, and Chase followed, shooting him in the head twice. On the way, he shot the baby in the head as well.
Chase then went to the bath, and shot a terrified Evelyn in the head once. He sodomized the body, stabbed her through her anus into the uterus multiple times, and sliced Evelyn’s neck.
From the scene later, it was evident that Chase had collected her blood. The coroner would determine that many of the internal organs were stabbed, hence the large amount of blood in the abdomen.
Chase then retrieved David’s corpse, and split open his skull in the bathtub, before consuming the brain matter.
A six-year-old girl, with whom Jason had a play date, came to knock on the door. This startled Chase, and he fled. Chase stole Dan’s car and took David’s body along.
Capture of the Sacramento Vampire
Following the Wallin murder, Federal agents Russ Vorpagel and Robert Resller were called to create a profile of the murderer. They determined he was an unclean, physically malnourished drifter, with a rising appetite for gore.
Earlier on after the Wallin killings, Nancy Holden contacted the authorities telling them about her experience with Richard Chase. She had seen a police sketch of the disheveled man and knew this was the man they were looking for.
The detectives determined his address and went to his apartment a day after the mass murders. They knocked repeatedly, but Chase did not open the door, so they pretended to leave and waited.
Chase opened the door, emerging with a box in his hands. He did not resist. They took a 22. Caliber semiautomatic handgun with bloodstains from it. The box also had pieces of bloodstained paper and rags.
His apartment was the stuff of nightmares. Everything was bloodstained. In the kitchen were pieces of bone. Some dishes had body parts. An electric blender was badly stained and smelled of decomposition. There was a calendar with the dates of the Wallin and Miroth murders, inscribed, ‘Today’. The same was done on 40 more future dates in 1978.
Trial and Aftermath
There was a mountain of evidence from the house, his clothing, and his person. When they took blood samples, though, Chase had to be restrained because of a primal fear of losing his blood.
Chase was appeared before Judge John Scatz on January 2, 1979. He was charged with six counts of first-degree murder.
He pled guilty to the murders but claimed no memory of the actions. The defense team claimed Chase’s mental illness meant he could not stand trial.
The jury found him guilty of all six counts on May 6, 1979. Judge Scatz, though, determined that he was not insane in the legal sense. Chase was sentenced to death by gas chamber.
In prison, other inmates who were aware of the ghastly nature of Chase’s crimes were afraid to interact with him. These inmates sometimes tried to convince Chase to kill himself. On December 26, 1980, Chase committed suicide by overdosing on antidepressants.
He had been hoarding medication and used them to overdose. The prison psychiatrist also noted that Chase had been psychotic from the time he began serving his sentence.
In 1992, a movie titled Unspeakable was released. It was based on the crimes of Richard Chase. The case is still used by the FBI as a profile for disorganized serial killers.