Killing his victims in cold blood, draining them, drinking their blood, eating their insides… All these are habits we would link to a vampire. But on this occasion, it was all the work of a man who claimed to be a human being.
Richard Chase, infamously known as the Vampire of Sacramento, is the protagonist of one of the darkest stories in the history of serial killings in the US. Chase killed six people in the span of one month. He cannibalized the remains of his victims, and like all the worst serial killers, he never showed signs of regret.
But like most serial killers, Chase didn’t have the best upbringing.
Richard Chase’s mugshot
Born in 1950, little Richard had a childhood in which his father beat him up and his mother probably abused him. As a teenager, Chase was already an alcoholic and had as his favourite pastime killing animals to then tear them apart.
Alcoholism and this obsession for killing things weren’t the only aspects of his teenage years. Apparently, Chase had erectile dysfunction problems, and the only way he managed to get aroused was with violence.
When Chase grew up, things didn’t exactly get better. He lived by himself, yes, but that did nothing but worsen his psychotic side. It was then that he developed his true nature even more: he kept killing animals and disembowelling them. Then he ate them raw and used their bowels and blood to make smoothies. Because of course, Chase considered himself as a victim of a Nazi/UFO conspiracy theory and believed they were poisoning him to turn his blood into powder. Apparently, the man must have read somewhere than drinking animal’s blood stopped you from being poisoned by the Nazis. Who knows. The smoothies also prevented his heart from shrinking, or so he claimed.
It is not surprising then that he was admitted to a mental institution after he got blood poisoning for injecting himself rabbit’s blood. It was at the mental institution that the staff started to call him “Dracula’. But the worst was yet to come.
He got out of the institution in 1976 (someone was very wrong about letting him go) and his situation became chaotic. He kept killing animals and even killed his neighbour’s pet, boasting then about it. It was only a matter of time before killing animals stopped being enough for him.
So, on December 29, 1977, the first of seven victims was killed, a father of two. It wasn’t until a month later that he killed his second victim, but in between murders, Chase broke into houses, where he stole what he could find and defecated on beds and floors.
Richard Chase is taken to court after his arrest in Sacramento
The second murder was even more disturbing. The victim was a three-months pregnant woman, and like he did with all his victims, Chase shot her. Then, he raped her while stabbing her at the same time, and then he opened the corpse and removed most of her internal organs, using later the blood that poured out to take a bath. After that, he cut off one of her breasts and drank her blood. And as if that weren’t enough, he went outside, grabbed some dog faeces and then stuffed them down the dead woman’s mouth.
A week after this atrocity, Chase committed his final act (not before buying two puppies to then kill them, drink their blood and dropping their remains by his neighbour’s house).
He entered the house of Evelyn Miroth, who was looking after her baby nephew. Besides Evelyn and the baby, in the house were also her toddler son and a neighbour. While Evelyn was in the bathroom, Chase shot the three male victims and then rushed to Evelyn to kill her as well, to then sodomise her corpse while drinking her blood at the same time. After he was finished with her, he took the baby’s body and split open his skull to eat parts of his brain.
It didn’t take long for the police to find him. After all, he had never hidden what he did to animals, and showing your neighbour that you have killed their pet is probably not going to get you any friends.
The blender found in Chase’s flat
In Chase’s flat, the police found the blender he used for his smoothies all covered in blood and rests of internal organs. He kept animal body parts in the fridge, and what he still hadn’t eaten of the baby’s brain was in a Tupperware, while other body parts were wrapped in paper, along with internal organs.
Obviously, Chase was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. In prison, even the other inmates were terrified of him, and kept trying to convince him to commit suicide (so that he wouldn’t be around to kill them). Even waiting to die, Chase was convinced that what he did was right, because he only killed to avoid being murdered by Nazi UFOs – because according to him, that was a thing.
Chase didn’t wait to die in the gas chamber, though. In 1980, he overdosed with the antidepressants he was supposed to have been taking daily. Surely, no one would miss him, but his terrifying actions of that winter in Sacramento will sadly be remembered forever.