Two decades after "Night Stalker" satanic killer Richard Ramirez was sentenced to die for 13 Southern California murders, DNA evidence has tied him to the 1984 rape-slaying of a 9-year-old girl in the Tenderloin, San Francisco authorities said today.The DNA links Ramirez and possibly a second, unknown attacker to the April 10, 1984, killing of Mei Leung, who was found hanging over a pipe in the basement of her apartment building at 765 O'Farrell St., police said.
The girl was with her 8-year-old brother when she dropped a dollar bill that went under a door of the basement and went looking for it, police said. The boy wandered away, then came back and found his sister dead. Police said she had been beaten, raped and stabbed.
The police cold-case unit recently revived the case, and officials issued a $100,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.
The killing happened more than two months before Ramirez's first known murder, the slaying June 28, 1984, of 79-year-old Jennie Vincow of the Glassell Park area of Los Angeles.
For more than a year, Ramirez terrified Southern California with a string of killings, earning the "Night Stalker" nickname because he murdered his victims as they slept. At some of the scenes he scrawled pentagrams, often associated with devil worship, and some of his victims were mutilated with the symbols.
Ramirez was arrested in August 1985 in Los Angeles after he tried to steal a car and was pursued by residents. He was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders and 30 other felonies, among them child rape and sodomy.
Now 49, he remains on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison as his appeals work through the courts.
In addition to the Southern California killings, Ramirez was charged in a 1985 attack on a San Francisco couple, but was never tried.
On Aug. 17, 1985, about two weeks before his arrest, Ramirez allegedly shot and killed Peter Pan, 66, in his home near Lake Merced and beat Pan's wife, Barbara. She survived but was left disabled.
On the walls, the killer scrawled pentagrams and "Jack the Knife" in lipstick. Authorities later learned that someone matching Ramirez's description had pawned Barbara Pan's jewelry in El Sobrante.
Police also have long suspected him of killing Masataka Kobayashi, 45, chef and part owner of Masa's restaurant on Bush Street, on Nov. 13, 1984. He was never charged in that slaying.
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