The two-part docuseries Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes, directed by Amy Goodman Kass, features a never-before-heard interview with Richard Ramirez, who terrorized both Northern and Southern California in 1985, eventually earning the name The Night Stalker. The recordings are culled from about 100 hours of interviews author Philip Carlo conducted with Ramirez while he was on death row, along with family members and some of the women who fell for the handsome serial killer after his arrest, including his eventual wife, Doreen Lioy.

Opening Shot: “SAN QUENTIN REHABILITATION CENTER, 1994.” Shots of the prison then a closeup of a cassette recorder and microphone.

The Gist: The first episode of the series describes Ramirez’s tough childhood in El Paso, TX, and the many times he suffered concussions and other head injuries that may have hurt the part of his brain that would control murderous impulses. The situation was not helped by his abuse of any illicit drug he could get his hands on.

It then documents the many murders he committed, with the killings happening in both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas, as his nomadic life took him back and forth.

As authorities ended up linking some of these killings together, despite the randomness of the victims and the manner in which they were killed, a common description from survivors emerged. Eventually, with the help of a then-rare Avia shoe print and a partial fingerprint, authorities zeroed in on Ramirez, who was eventually subdued and captured by people who recognized him in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood, beating him into submission.

After his capture, pictures of him rifled through the media, and he ended up attracting lots of women drawn to either his dark aura, or just his handsome face and calm manner. Lioy, an editor for Tiger Beat at the time, was one of them; she decried his treatment in letters to the editor of local papers, then met him in prison in 1988. She married him in 1996, and stayed married to him until his death in 2013.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Any number of serial-killer-related docuseries can be compared to Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes. Ones with actual interviews with the killers, like Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, are the closest comparisons. There’s also Night Stalker: The Hunt For A Serial Killer, a 2021 Netflix doc which covers most of the same ground, minus the tapes.

Our Take: Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes takes a pretty straightforward look at Ramirez’s crimes, along with getting reactions from the families of victims, from members of his family, and from people that became “friends” with him after his arrest — with the major exception of Lioy. We hear from Lioy via Carlo’s interview with her in 1994, along with some archival interviews with her right before she married Ramirez in 1996.

What’s interesting is that, while the title of the docuseries makes the viewer think that they’re going to hear a lot from Ramirez during the series, there seems to be less of his interview with Carlo than we were expecting. Not that the interviews with family members, Lioy and others aren’t fascinating. But when you sit down to one of these kinds of series, you want to hear how killers like Ramirez think. Yet we seem to get more insight from psychologists interviewed by the filmmakers than from Ramirez himself.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: We see Lioy in a television interview right before she married Ramirez in 1996.

Sleeper Star: Eva O, who was one of Ramirez’s “friends”, is quite the character; she still plays the “children of the night” card with how she presents herself, and manages to pull it off.

Most Pilot-y Line: Eve O wrote a song called “Night Stalker,” which she plays during her interview. It’s… interesting. In another scene, a co-worker of Lioy’s refers to Ramirez as “Richie,” which sent a shiver up our spines.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker Tapes doesn’t try to do too much, which is always a good thing in true crime docuseries. In this case, though, we were left wanting to hear from Ramirez himself a bit more.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.