Read Married to Murder: The Bizarre and True Accounts of People Who Married Murderers for Free Online Page A

to consummate his marriage to Shirlee Book in a Washington State prison.

She Married the Night Stalker: Doreen Lioy
     
    Death row seems like a strange place to find a spouse, but not to Doreen Lioy. She not only found a husband there; she married the most notorious butcher on California’s death row, Richard Ramirez, the notorious Night Stalker. Ramirez was the Satanist who terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1984 and 1985. During his reign of terror, Ramirez is believed to have killed more than 13 people.
    If there is a profile for serial killer groupies – poor and uneducated – Doreen Lioy certainly doesn’t fit it. Lioy is a professional journalist and freelance magazine editor with a bachelor’s degree in English. She is also five years older than Ramirez; she was 41 at the time of their wedding at San Quentin Prison in 1996.
     

Opposites Attract
    Richard Ramirez seems to be Lioy’s polar opposite. He is the uneducated son of a railroad laborer from El Paso, Texas. The motives for Ramirez’s rampage are not known, but some experts think the young man might have been imitating his cousin Mike Ramirez, who claimed to be a Special Forces veteran that had openly boasted of atrocities he had committed during the Vietnam War. Mike even showed his cousin and admirer pictures of severed heads of Vietnamese women he claimed to have killed.
    Mike Ramirez’s grisly war stories might or might not be true, but 13-year-old Richard Ramirez was present when Mike shot and killed his wife. Some accounts indicate blood spattered on Richard Ramirez’s shirt during the murder.
    The Night Stalker crimes began after Ramirez moved to Los Angeles. Unlike most serial killers, Ramirez used a variety of methods of killing. He sometimes shot his victims, beat them with a hammer, and stabbed to death. Ramirez often raped his female victims, and sometimes forced them to perform oral sex on him. Another difference was that Ramirez was an equal opportunity killer who targeted victims of all ages, races, and colors, although he did seem to signal out Asian victims for his butchery. Ramirez murdered 83-year-old women and 9-year-old girls. Ramirez had one thing in common with most serial killers – he robbed his victims after murdering them.
    The most frightening thing about Richard Ramirez was that he killed most of his victims in their own homes. His usual modus operandi was to simply walk into a home and start killing or raping. Ramirez’s original names in the media were the Walk-in Killer and The Valley Intruder. The name Night Stalker came later and its origins are hard to fathom. The most likely source is a popular 1970s TV show called Kolchak the Night Stalker . The show had nothing to do with serial killers; instead, it revolved around a badly dressed reporter played by Darren McGavin who chased werewolves, Satanists, space aliens, and other ‘B’ movie monsters.
    Richard Ramirez was not caught by clever police work, but by an angry mob of East Los Angeles residents that had seen his picture on TV. The mob chased the Night Stalker down and beat him to a pulp. At the end of his reign of terror, the fearsome Night Stalker had to be rescued from the people he had preyed upon by the police. Cops on scene believe that Ramirez might have been lynched if they hadn’t arrived in time.
     

Courting on Death Row
    Richard Ramirez first caught Doreen Lioy’s eye when he was arrested in 1985 and identified as the Night Stalker. She actively pursued Ramirez for 12 years, visiting him in prison and sending him as many as 75 letters.
    The frightening thing is Doreen Lioy was not the only woman trying to land Richard Ramirez. Press reports indicate that several other women were visiting Ramirez, and one of them threatened Doreen with violence if she didn’t break off her pursuit.
    Most reports indicate that Ramirez proposed to Lioy shortly before his trial began in 1988. The marriage had to be delayed because of prison rules for death