Richard Chase: The Vampire of Sacramento
By: Delani R. Bartlette
Tags: True Crime, Serial Killers, Murder, History, Crime

In late January 1978, police were called to an apparent break-in at a home on Burnece Street, not far from where the Griffin shooting had occurred. The residents, Robert and Barbara Edwards, were just returning from a shopping trip when they heard a loud noise inside their house. Robert saw the intruder in the backyard and ran to stop him, but the man escaped by jumping over a fence.

When the Edwards entered their home, they found the house in shambles, as though they had interrupted a burglary.

But there were other, more confusing clues left behind. The intruder had urinated on the baby’s clean clothes and defecated on a child’s bed.

Robert described the man as a fairly tall, skinny, dirty white man with long dark hair.

As police canvassed the area, they discovered that a man fitting that description had been seen earlier that day. Neighbor Jeanne Layton told police the man had tried to open her patio door, then her windows. When she walked up to him, he showed no emotion, just lit a cigarette and walked away.

That same evening, shortly after 6 p.m., David Wallin called the police. He had come home from work to find his pregnant wife had been brutally murdered.

Blood stains and drag marks led from the front yard into the bedroom. There, Teresa Wallin lay on the floor, her top pushed up to her chin and her pants around her ankles. Her abdomen had been cut open, and several of her organs had been removed or moved. An autopsy would reveal that she had been shot twice — once through the hand and once in the temple — then dragged into the bedroom, stabbed repeatedly, and sexually assaulted before being mutilated. The killer had then stuffed the family dog’s feces in her mouth.

At the scene, police found a bloody yogurt cup with lip impressions on the rim, as though someone had drunk blood from it.

The brutality of the murder was shocking. Sacramento police reached out to the FBI’s newly formed criminal profiling unit for help. The case ended up on the desk of Special Agent Russ Vorpagel, who recognized that the brutality and disorganized nature of the crime meant the killer would likely strike again soon. Vorpagel called in his friend, pioneering criminal profiler Robert Ressler, for help.

The two quickly developed a profile based on the evidence at the crime scene. They believed the killer to be white, based on the fact that his victim was too. According to the profile, he would have a history of and mental illness, since the crime appeared to be done by someone in a full-fledged psychosis. Severe mental illness like schizophrenia doesn’t manifest until a person’s mid-teens, and it would take about a decade for it to devolve to this point, so the killer would likely be in his mid to late 20s. Because of his mental illness, the killer would probably be skinny, dirty, and unkempt. He would probably live alone and not have a job.

Police were still following leads when, four days after Teresa Wallin’s murder, an even more shocking crime was reported. When 6-year-old Jason Miroth didn’t arrive at a neighbor’s house as planned, the neighbor went to check on him. Inside, she found a gruesome scene. Dan Meredith, a friend of Jason’s mother, Evelyn, was lying in the hallway in a pool of blood. He had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber weapon. The bathroom was bloody as well, the tub half-filled with bloody water. In the master bedroom, Evelyn was lying, naked and spread-eagled, on the bed. Like Wallin, she had been shot in the head, her abdomen sliced open, and some of her organs removed. She, too, had been sexually assaulted after she was shot.

Next to the bed, police found Jason. He had been shot twice in the head at close range.

But the most troubling aspect of the crime soon came to the police’s attention: that day, Evelyn had been babysitting her nephew, 22-month-old David Ferreia. The toddler was nowhere to be seen.

Inside a pillow found in a blood-soaked crib, investigators found a .22-caliber slug.

Now police needed to find not only the killer, but the baby, hopefully before it was too late.

Thankfully, the crime scene contained a lot of evidence, including handprints and boot prints in the victims’ blood. The boot prints were similar to those found at the Wallins’ house.

A young neighbor told police she had seen a man near the Miroths’ home around 11 p.m. Her description of a skinny, disheveled man wearing an orange parka matched the description of the man others had seen at the earlier disturbances. Police created a composite sketch and released it to the media, desperate for information that might help them find little David and hopefully prevent any more death.

The day after the Miroth/Meredith murders, a woman named Nancy Holden came forward with some information. The day Wallin was murdered, she told police, she had been out shopping when a strange man wearing an orange parka approached her. The skinny, filthy man asked her about her high-school boyfriend. She asked how the man would know about that, and he asked her, “Don’t you recognize me?”

He told her he was Rick Chase, an old high-school classmate. She told police he looked completely different from the quiet, studious boy she had known all those years ago.

His current appearance frightened her; she thought she might have seen blood on his hands. So she quickly got in her car, locked the doors, and drove off. She hadn’t thought about the encounter again until she saw the composite sketch and description.

The encounter had taken place at a shopping center very near the Wallins’ house. And it was also near Chase’s apartment on Watt Avenue.

Police conducted a background check on Chase, and what they found wasn’t so much a red flag as a field full of them.