Just crazy for blood: Richard Trenton Chase, a.k.a. the Vampire of Sacramento

Of all his terrors, and there were many, the greatest fear that plagued Richard Trenton Chase through the mid-1970s was that he was going to disappear.

Everybody was after him - Nazis, the FBI, space aliens - and their weapon was an innocent-looking item in his bathroom: the soap dish. It was there that those who wanted to do him in had hidden a secret poison that was slowly turning his blood to powder.

Chase knew only fresh blood could save him and he didn't care where it came from or how he got it.

The seeds of his mania appeared to have been planted with the marital strife of his parents, a middle-class Sacramento couple, sometime around 1962, when Chase was 12. For the better part of a decade the Mom-and-Pop battle raged. By the time it ended, with the combatants divorced and the father remarried, the boy was showing definite signs that he was out of his mind.

Some were ordinary acts of rebellion - drinking, drugs and wild parties. Other actions could not, by any stretch, be considered ordinary, such as killing small animals and drinking their blood.

In 1976, his attempt to inject rabbit blood directly into his body made him very sick, and he ended up in a mental ward. Nurses and fellow inmates alike were terrified of him, due in large measure to his pastime of catching and biting the heads off of birds. Despite that, by 1977, doctors declared him well enough to go about in society, if he was on his meds, and released him to the care of his mother. She set him up in his own apartment, paid his rent, and asked no questions.

That summer, several neighborhood pets, including his mother's cat, would fall victim to Chase's thirst. Using a couple of blenders, he'd mix up blood-and-guts cocktails, but soon it was not enough. He was ready for larger game.

In August, police picked up Chase wandering around near Lake Tahoe, Nev., his body smeared with blood and a bucket of blood in his truck. In this case the victim was bovine, so Chase was sent on his way.

Human sacrifices would start a few months later. The first to be discovered was on Jan. 23, 1978, when truck driver David Wallin, 24, returned from work to his North Sacramento home to find his pregnant wife, Terry, 22, murdered, her torso slit open. The killer had apparently eaten parts of his victim's body and, using a yogurt container as a cup, drank her blood.

Police worked together with the newly established FBI behavioral science unit to come up with a profile of the killer, recalled Robert Ressler in his 1993 book, "Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI." Ressler and colleague Russ Vorpagel sketched a close likeness of Chase, a scrawny young loner, unkempt, dirty and disorganized, subsisting on someone else's money.

The profile was, as it would become clear later, very accurate, but it didn't come quickly enough to prevent further tragedy. Four days after the Wallin murder, Sacramento police were investigating another gory crime scene. Evelyn Miroth, 38, a divorcee and mother of three, her friend Daniel Meredith, 52, and Evelyn's son Jason Miroth, 6, were found shot with a .22 and slashed. Another boy, David Ferreira, Miroth's 22-month-nephew, had been left in his aunt's care that day. He was missing, and there was a large blood stain in his crib. The child's decapitated corpse would be found months later.

Like the first victim, Miroth's body had been mutilated, her torso ripped open. Unlike Wallin, however, she had also been sodomized.

It was not long before detectives, led by Lt. Ray Biondi, zeroed in on Chase, apprehending him as he tried to flee his stinking apartment.

Blood-stained rags and a blender with bloody residue, a .22-caliber pistol, and dishes with human brain and body parts in the fridge left no doubt that police had their man. Further proof came with the discovery of Meredith's wallet.

Particularly terrifying was Chase's wall calendar, with the word "Today" written on the dates of the killings. There were 44 future dates marked in the same way.

After his arrest, Chase was linked to another murder, the Dec. 29, 1977, drive-by shooting of Ambrose Griffin, 51, an engineer. He and his wife were unloading the car after grocery shopping when two .22-caliber bullets tore into his chest. Chase confessed that Griffin's was the first human blood he shed. He did it, he said, out of frustration because his mother had not let him come home for Christmas.

When later asked how he chose his other victims, he said that he entered homes where the doors had been left unlocked.

At Chase's trial, which opened on Jan. 2, 1979, prosecutors sought the death penalty, even though his defense team held that their client was not guilty by reason of insanity. After five months of testimony, and five hours of deliberation, the jury sided with prosecutors, finding Chase sane enough to know that his actions were wrong and guilty of six counts of murder in the first degree, punishable by death.

While waiting for execution, Chase hoarded the anti-depressants offered to calm him. On Dec. 26, 1980, The Vampire of Sacramento swallowed them all, and, finally, made himself disappear.

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