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Artwork for Killer Summer
Killer Summer · July 3 · 21 min

We Got Our Guy

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Episode 3 captures the extraordinary morning the Night Stalker's reign ended — not with a SWAT raid, but with East L.A. residents Manuel de la Torre and Faustino Penon chasing down and subduing Richard Ramirez with their bare hands and a lead pipe. Woven from archival broadcast audio of the capture, the crowds outside the police station, and Mayor Tom Bradley's on-camera relief, the episode traces the narrator's own reckoning with that summer — a season that, months later, collided with the Challenger disaster to permanently reshape how a fourth grader understood the world. It's a meditation on fear, memory, and the moment true crime stopped being background noise and became personal history.

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Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Episode 3 captures the extraordinary morning the Night Stalker's reign ended — not with a SWAT raid, but with East L.A. residents Manuel de la Torre and Faustino Penon chasing down and subduing Richard Ramirez with their bare hands and a lead pipe. Woven from archival broadcast audio of the capture, the crowds outside the police station, and Mayor Tom Bradley's on-camera relief, the episode traces the narrator's own reckoning with that summer — a season that, months later, collided with the Challenger disaster to permanently reshape how a fourth grader understood the world. It's a meditation on fear, memory, and the moment true crime stopped being background noise and became personal history.

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