Richard Ramirez: the Intelligence Fallacy
If you think he had a high IQ, yours must be low.
You will often see people on the internet quoting Richard Ramirez’s IQ at 134 - 140. This is Mensa level (excluding Cattell B).
It’s not true. It’s laughably untrue.
His IQ was tested several times in his life and found to be around 86-91.
The idea that Richard Ramirez was fiercely intelligent is all part of the Night Stalker myth and needs to be corrected. As with so many Ramirez myths, it seems to have started with Detective Gil Carrillo. He frequently claims on podcasts that Richard was “the smartest murderer” he’d ever interrogated. He talks about Richard’s “encyclopedic" knowledge of serial killers and how, when being interviewed, he gave lots of information on the history of crimes. He has told stories about Richard playing games with the legal system in order to overturn his sentences.
Even the prosecutor Philip Halpin made baseless claims that Richard was an “intelligent fellow.” How can he assert this when he barely spoke at trial, except to give a psychotic statement after his conviction?
Then there are reporters like Mike Watkiss, who interviewed Richard in 1991, claiming he was an intelligent man who must have had an extremely high IQ. But Richard never said anything profoundly intelligent in the Watkiss interview. Nor does he in his 1991 outburst on the Maury show, nor in the 1993 interview.
The Mike Watkiss conversation is heavily edited, which makes it difficult to judge - manipulated versions on YouTube show different responses to Watkiss’ questions. But what we can see is Richard answering inappropriately. A question about groupie visitors led to Richard answering about people being brainwashed puppets, America’s violent past, serial killers and government hypocrisy. This can be interpreted as justifying his crimes. He completely lost the thread of what he was saying about the women. Richard’s mind was clearly drifting and reverting to what he wanted to say to look impressive to ‘fans’, which came from books or magazines.
Richard grins when Mike Watkiss mocks him for “reading from a script” because he had bullet points and notes guiding him on what to say. And yet he still never makes clear points.
In fairness, Watkiss cuts him off and ruins his flow - but there is enough material in these short clips to compare to what his psychiatrists said about him: his thoughts were fragmented and disconnected.
What “true crime enthusiasts” perceive as his “intelligence” is nothing more than vague phrases he parroted from books. In particular, he liked to ramble about Satanism. These were answers to the dumb, basic level of questions Mike Watkiss asked - the stuff modern Richard Ramirez groupies only care about - and yet Richard failed to deliver intelligent answers.
What we have of his conversation style is a tiny window into what his psychiatrists witnessed and described. This is from Dr. Anne Evans, who assessed him between 1991-1995.
He was incapable of staying on topic or focusing on key points in conversations. It can also be seen in his pen pal letters, where there were multiple subject changes in a single paragraph. People have interpreted this as “emotionless psychopathy” and a failure to properly engage with other humans. But it’s not, it’s his cognitive disability in action. He didn’t mean to be like that. He just was. If you read his psychiatric evaluations, you no longer need to do this armchair psychologist hybristophile bimbo speculation.
Their “intelligent psychopath” is nothing more than a man with frontal and temporal lobe damage who had problems staying in touch with reality and following thought trains. It’s actually quite tragic.
He quotes philosophers and Shakespeare in interviews. He doesn’t adequately shut down inappropriate questions nor does he respond normally to them - this also includes his 1993 Inside Edition interview, which was part of Michal Ben Horin’s My Project X interview. In that, he comes across as childlike, giggles and makes inappropriate facial expressions before saying “no comment.”
The statements that people interpret as incriminating are the result of severely impaired judgment. Would a clever man really act like this in his few opportunities to be on TV? Ramirez cared more about looking like an “expert” on killers than defending his own case - and even then, he said nothing insightful. As a result, he damaged his appeal efforts with strange statements on TV that seem to justify murder.
Despite knowing he had been the victim of extreme media bias, he was still surprised that he was portrayed badly on TV. This is from an assessment by Dr. Elise Taylor.
The Cognitive Tests
Over on Expendable for a Cause, writer Jay wrote a summary of Dr. Dale Watson’s battery of cognitive tests. It shows examples of evaluations he was given which I won’t repeat because I’m lazy. You can see them here.
To sum them up further, for the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, he scored in the 2nd percentile. This is the moderately-impaired-to-impaired range. The 2nd percentile means that 98% of people of his age (he was 40 at the time) and educational background would perform better than him.
Failing the card test meant that he was unable to learn new patterns and adapt to rule changes. Dr. Watson suggested he was drawn to the colors of the cards rather than trying to solve the task.
Richard was also assessed by Dr. Myla Young when he was 34 years old. She assessed that his overall intellectual functioning was in the 21st percentile (this an approximate WAIS scale IQ of 90) and his Wisconsin Card Sorting Test results were severely impaired - his ability to complete it fell below the 1st percentile.
On the Stroop Colour and Word Test, he fell within the low-average range.
On the Trailmaking Test, where he had to draw lines joining numbers in ascending order within a time limit, Richard’s results were average.
Further Disabilities
Dr. Dale Watson administered the Smell Identification Test. He found that Ramirez had a reduced sense of smell - "microsmia.” This can be caused by traumatic brain injury through shearing, tearing or contusion. Such injuries are accompanied by damage to the basilar, orbiomedial, frontal and prefrontal regions of the neocortex. (Reynolds, C.R. Test Review: The Smell Identification Test, Journal of Forensic Neuropsychology, Vol 1(4), The Haworth Press, Inc., 45.)
Ramirez’s results fell within the 13th percentile. His sense of smell was worse than 87% of males his age (40).
Next was the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS). Dr. Watson said,
“He had particular deficits in the recall of paragraph length auditory material where his performance was at only the 1st percentile.”
99% of people had better listening recall than him. This is why he struggled to correctly answer Mike Watkiss’ questions and went on to other topics.
Dr. Watson said he was equally impaired when asked to copy a complex geometric figure and recall it several minutes later. He fell “well below the 1st percentile.” This is the worst result possible.
His auditory processing was also impaired. On the Dichotic Word Listening Test, Ramirez performed at the 5th percentile in his right auditory channel. He was asked to repeat different words that were presented simultaneously to his left and right ears via stereo headphones. He was “below the cutoff for identifying both words” - these findings also relate to temporal lobe malfunction.
At the end, he was assessed with the Test of Memory Malingering. This showed he was putting in full effort with these tests, and he failed them badly. He was not faking being cognitively impaired.
Intelligent Psychopathic Bad Boy
I understand that Richard Ramirez ended up being reasonably well-read from being in prison. He read books before he went to prison and watched films in his cell, learning a lot from these sources. This also meant he had a reasonable vocabulary. He could also be funny and often thoughtful - you can see this in some letters. He also didn’t sound like the average dumb thug school dropout or Chicano gang member. But if you listen to him and think he was clever, it probably means you’re not.
This “intelligent psychopathic bad boy killer” was suffering from moderate to severe neurocognitive impairments - and all this is without delving into the psychotic delusions he was concurrently experiencing.
The idea that he was intelligent, manipulative and scheming is all part of the cover-up. Someone like him should not have been on death row - it violated his constitutional rights and actually gave him grounds for habeas corpus (such appeals can’t be granted on exculpatory evidence alone - there must be constitutional violations). What the system did to him was inhumane.
If he wasn’t cognitively impaired, he would have fought those charges and yelled about the exculpatory evidence at every opportunity, but instead he rambled about killers, sex, phone privileges and Satan. If you can’t see this, it’s because you don’t want to.
Sources:
Dr. Anne Evans: habeas corpus document 16.7
Dr. Dale Watson: habeas corpus document 7.21
Dr. Myla Young: habeas corpus document 20.3
Dr. Elise Taylor: habeas corpus document 20.3
Expendable for a Cause “The Fragmented Mind”
Zola, Emily et al, The Appeal of the Night Stalker: The Railroading of Richard Ramirez
A well-written piece and compelling argument. Extreme media bias sums it up. They create a caricature and expect us to believe without questioning. And the scarier the better. They elevate these characters into almost mythical beings, so far removed from reality yet somehow making it unacceptable for us to ask questions.
How dare people call him intelligent, lol. He was impaired and that is proof he was very difficult to work with. Psychologists and experts should be jury and judges and have the final say. Not a lay jury. This man should have been let go, get full disability benefits and be free to sleep with a ton of groupies lol. Shame on everyone involved in his guilty conviction and keeping the mentally ill in prison! Give the man a break!