126 Facts About Richard Chase

Richard Trenton Chase was an American serial killer, cannibal, and necrophile who killed six people in Sacramento, California, from December 1977 to January 1978.

Richard Chase was nicknamed The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains.

Richard Chase was born shortly after his parents got married, and had a younger sister named Pamela.

Richard Chase's parents were prone to arguing with each other during his childhood.

Richard Chase tried to sell these photos to people, and wanted his mother to buy him a cowboy hat, but she refused.

Richard Chase began dating a girlfriend in high school in 1965.

Once graduating from high school, Richard Chase attended American River College between 1968 and 1971.

Richard Chase's grades were declining, and he stopped attending classes, eventually dropping out.

Richard Chase often complained that his heart would occasionally "stop beating", or that "someone had stolen his pulmonary artery".

Richard Chase would hold oranges on his head, believing Vitamin C would be absorbed by his brain via diffusion.

Richard Chase additionally thought that his cranial bones had become separated and were moving around, so he once shaved his head to be able to watch this activity.

Richard Chase first worked in a typing and phone answering job for Retailers Credit Association in 1969, while enrolled in American River College.

Shortly before dropping out of American River College, Richard Chase shared an apartment with Cyd Evans DeMarchi and Rachel Statum in the two found him sitting on their front lawn one day in February 1971 and began talking, with Richard Chase convincing them to let him become a roommate of theirs.

Richard Chase's parents gave him 50 dollars each month to help him pay his share of the rent.

Richard Chase was usually high on drugs and walked around naked in front of visitors.

Richard Chase barricaded himself in his room, explaining that he did this so no one would be able to sneak up on him.

Richard Chase then shared the apartment with Statum's brother and his friends.

Statum's brother and his friends eventually moved out, and Richard Chase was unable to afford the rent by himself.

Richard Chase's parents divorced in June 1972, and he frequently fought with his mother.

Richard Chase believed that she was trying to poison him, something which she had accused her husband of doing to her when Richard was a child.

Richard Chase's father bailed him out of jail and convinced him against suing the police.

Richard Chase alternated between living in his mother's residence and his father's new residence, since they were both finding it difficult to deal with his increasingly erratic behavior.

When Richard Chase's father kicked him out of his residence, neighbors reported that he would stand still by the property, blankly staring at it for extended periods of time.

In late 1972, Chase's mother attempted to call the police on him during an argument, when suddenly Richard grabbed the phone and whacked her on the head with it.

Richard Chase was still able to call the police, and he ran outside and jumped over the fence.

Richard Chase became convinced that someone was trying to enter his grandmother's house through a window.

Richard Chase's grandmother heard him talking to himself, and once found him standing on his head in the corner of his room.

Richard Chase told her that he was trying to get the blood to run back down to his head.

Richard Chase's grandmother said that both his mental state and physical appearance had deteriorated during his second stay with her.

When Richard Chase returned to Sacramento for good in the summer of 1973, he began cutting out photos of human organs from a medical book, and pasting them all over his bedroom.

Around this time, Richard Chase called an ambulance to his house, which arrived with a stretcher that he had requested.

Richard Chase later went to his mother, "begging" her for help with his supposed medical conditions.

Richard Chase responded by getting him in contact with two different doctors.

Richard Chase was dissatisfied with the prognosis these doctors gave him, so he went to see Doctor Donald Ansel.

Richard Chase spent two days in a psychiatric ward in December 1973, after walking into the emergency room of American River Hospital, complaining about a variety of imagined ailments.

Richard Chase said that he couldn't breathe, that the blood had stopped flowing through his body, and that he was suffering cardiac arrest.

Richard Chase was discharged when his mother confronted the psychiatric ward staff.

Richard Chase was given an oxygen tank, presumably to help him deal with panic attacks, and he added 20 pounds to his thin frame.

Richard Chase's mother claimed that his mental state deteriorated once he started using illegal drugs again.

Richard Chase's mother said that as his mental state grew worse, she would overhear him talking to himself, just as his grandmother had.

Once Richard Chase slapped his mother in the face, and sometimes when he argued with her, she would put his father on the phone, which led him to have fits of rage, causing damage throughout the house.

Richard Chase became too much for either parent to handle, so they got him his own apartment.

Once living in this apartment, Richard Chase began riding his bicycle to a rabbit farm, and after purchasing the rabbits, he consumed them raw.

Richard Chase kept the apartment relatively clean, and his father would come over for games of chess.

When Richard Chase's father asked why he had live rabbits, Richard Chase responded by saying that he was eating them, and his father never looked into this any further, having already grown accustomed to his strange statements.

Richard Chase's father found him vomiting in his apartment and barely able to move, following blood poisoning.

The emergency staff said that Richard Chase gave them a "bizarre story" about eating a rabbit which had battery acid in its stomach, and they again concluded that he was mentally ill.

Richard Chase was sent to American River Hospital's psychiatric health facility, and there Chase complained of heart weakness and said his body was falling apart.

Richard Chase refused to participate in any group activities, eventually being transferred to the Beverly Manor Psychiatric Hospital.

Richard Chase broke the necks of two birds he caught through the institution window and drank their blood.

Richard Chase extracted blood from therapy dogs with stolen syringes.

Richard Chase was not receiving as much care as he should have gotten.

Richard Chase got him another apartment, and in it, Chase progressed from eating birds and rabbits to eating dogs.

Richard Chase purchased puppies and hanged them in his apartment.

Richard Chase remembered seeing him bring dogs and a cat, even though pets weren't allowed.

Richard Chase never saw the animals again and didn't know what became of them.

Later investigation uncovered that, in August 1977, Richard Chase was stopped and arrested on a Native American reservation in the Pyramid Lake, Nevada, area.

Witnesses reported that Richard Chase had a dog with him earlier that day, but it was never recovered.

When questioned by police at the scene, Richard Chase claimed that the blood was seeping out of him and that he didn't know what had happened to the dog.

Richard Chase later claimed that he had been shooting at voices that he heard, with bullet holes in the walls corroborating this story.

Richard Chase continued to kill and eat dogs, and would now shoot them in the head.

Richard Chase said this made it easier for him to collect the blood, since he could put cups next to the bullet wounds.

On December 29,1977, Richard Chase killed his first known human victim in a drive-by shooting.

Richard Chase claimed that in the lead up to the murder, he was angered by his mother's refusal to allow him to come over to her house for Christmas.

Richard Chase wouldn't allow him in her house since his sister had become afraid of him, following a recent incident where he ripped apart a cat in front of his mother during an argument, smearing its blood over his body.

Richard Chase went on to tell detectives that he took locked doors as a sign that he was not welcome, but unlocked doors were an invitation to come inside.

Richard Chase later said that he believed the residents of this house had been spying on him, and that he wanted them to leave the neighborhood.

On January 23,1978, Richard Chase broke into a house and shot Teresa Wallin.

Richard Chase had been taking out the trash, and he first shot her in the hand, as she attempted to protect herself.

Richard Chase then shot her in the cheek, breaking her jaw, before shooting her in the head, and rendering her unconscious.

Richard Chase then cut off one of her nipples and drank her blood through a yogurt cup he found in her trash bag.

Richard Chase stuffed dog feces from Wallin's yard down her throat, before leaving her house.

Richard Chase called his parents to come over and was hoping that they wouldn't have to look at her corpse, but they did eventually see it.

Richard Chase said that he talked about rockets, spaceships and "little green men".

Richard Chase said he was only semi-conscious when this happened, so the exact sequence of events is unclear.

Richard Chase shot him twice in the head, fatally shooting in the head Miroth, her six-year-old son Jason, and her 22-month-old nephew David Ferreira, before mutilating Miroth with a knife from her kitchen and engaging in necrophilia and cannibalism.

Richard Chase stabbed Ferreira in the anus and cut open a section at the back of his skull, so it would be easier to drink his blood.

Evidence suggests that Richard Chase shot Ferreira in the head while he was in his crib, and that Evelyn's corpse was dragged to the bed in which it was found.

Investigators who worked on the case have said it is possible that Richard Chase was bathing in this bathtub full of blood.

Richard Chase said that this startled him, and so he "took the baby and split".

Three different knives were being used, with Richard Chase leaving two behind at Miroth's house, and leaving another outside her yard.

Richard Chase fled in Meredith's car with Ferreira's body and took it to his apartment, saying that he had another blackout while fleeing.

At his apartment, Richard Chase went on to decapitate the baby and consumed parts of the brain.

When subsequently asked why he did this, Richard Chase claimed it was because he was hungry.

Nancy Westfall, an old high school acquaintance of Richard Chase, later told police that a man in an orange ski parka had approached her while she was shopping.

Westfall didn't realize it was Richard Chase at first since his appearance had changed so much since he was a teenager.

Richard Chase noted that he had blood stains on him, and noticed a yellow crust encircled around his mouth.

Richard Chase said it looked as though his eyes were sunken into their sockets.

When Richard Chase first approached Westfall, he asked her if she had been on the motorcycle when Curt was killed.

Richard Chase introduced himself as Rick and she soon realized it was Chase.

Richard Chase was arrested after this woman came forward and they checked his background.

Police who searched Richard Chase's apartment found that the walls, floor, ceiling, refrigerator, and all of Richard Chase's eating and drinking utensils were soaked in blood.

Richard Chase had been reading gun magazines, psychology magazines, a book titled Psychic People and he had circled classified ads in the paper about dogs for sale.

At first, Richard Chase wouldn't let police in his apartment, so they loudly spoke to each other outside it, pretending that they were leaving.

When Richard Chase saw police, he initially tried to run from them, and resisted arrest when they tackled him.

Richard Chase was armed at the time, and it wasn't known whether David Ferreira was still alive or not, so Detective Wayne Irey contemplated shooting Richard Chase.

Once captured, Richard Chase was uncooperative with police, claiming that he had only killed some dogs, and that he was being framed by the Italians.

Richard Chase speculated that the murders had been committed by a blond man in an orange jacket, and that someone had been coming in and out of his apartment.

Richard Chase said that he saw lights in the sky that might be UFOs, and incorrectly claimed that he was Jewish, saying that he was beaten up by gangs of Italians because of his ethnicity.

In 1979, Richard Chase stood trial on six counts of murder.

Richard Chase ordered his defense attorney to have the food tested, and it came back negative.

Farris Salamy stated in 2010 that Richard Chase was "the most deranged" person he'd ever met, and that his case was "one of mental disease".

Richard Chase believed that his lack of blood was preventing him from living a normal life.

Richard Chase told the jury that he was a good person, but had a weak heart and mind.

Richard Chase said that he was afraid that his victims would come back from the dead.

One day during the trial, Richard Chase's mother confronted him, and criticized their German Shepherd for not protecting them the day the murder happened.

Tochterman subsequently said he knew that it was going to be a difficult task trying to convince jurors that Richard Chase was legally sane.

The fact that Richard Chase wore gloves during the murders helped prove there was a level of premeditation.

Richard Chase never got a haircut, he wandered in and out of people's yards.

Richard Chase never seemed to be trying to conceal this appearance, which is kind of the other side of it.

Richard Chase was described as behaving psychotically from the moment he entered prison, and was temporarily sent to a facility for the criminally insane in Vacaville, California during December 1979.

Richard Chase wanted to be transferred to a prison on the east coast in 1979, so he could be closer to the government and safe from UFOs, and that same year he had written several documents, in which he blamed the murders on UFOs, the CIA, the mafia and airline disasters.

In one of the documents, Richard Chase wrote that UFO intelligence began tracking him six months prior to the murder spree, theorizing that he was born as a result of UFO cloning experiments, and claiming that his mother had been secretly poisoning him since he was a year old.

Richard Chase wrote that he had been born with a Jewish Star of David symbol on his forehead, and that this was as a result of the UFO cloning experiment.

When Ressler met Richard Chase, he noted that he was very thin, and described his eyes as being like black dots rather than normal pupils, saying that they resembled those of a shark.

Richard Chase told Ressler that he was going to appeal his death sentence, and this was since he was the victim of soap-dish poisoning.

Richard Chase explained to Ressler that everyone has a soap-dish, and if they lift up the soap and the part underneath the soap is dry, they are fine, but if it's gooey, that means they have soap-dish poisoning.

When Ressler asked what the soap-dish poisoning had done to Richard Chase, he responded by saying it had turned his blood to powder, and that the reason he killed was to replenish his blood.

Richard Chase added that the soap-dish poisoning was being perpetuated by Nazi UFOs, and asked Ressler to give him access to a radar gun, with which he could apprehend the Nazi UFOs, so that the Nazis could stand trial for the murders.

Richard Chase again claimed that he was Jewish, and said that there was a Star of David symbol on his forehead.

Richard Chase handed Ressler a large amount of macaroni and cheese, which he had been hoarding in his pants pockets, believing that the prison officials were in league with the Nazis and attempting to kill him with poisoned food.

Richard Chase wanted Ressler to have the food tested at the FBI lab in Quantico, and Ressler said he would do this.

At 11:05 am on December 26,1980, Richard Chase was found dead in his prison cell at San Quentin.

Richard Chase took 36 times the normal dose, and had been secretly hoarding the pills in his cell, unbeknownst to officers.

Richard Chase was lying on his stomach with his head buried in the mattress, and his legs extended off his bunk.

Ressler stated in 1992 that some believed Richard Chase's death was accidental rather than a suicide, and that he had taken the large dose of pills in an effort to quiet the voices in his head.