The late 70s were a pretty wild time to be alive (especially if you were hoping to stay that way) in the U.S.  It didn’t just seem like there were suddenly serial killers everywhere…there really were suddenly serial killers everywhere.  My family took a summer vacation in 1976 that found us in New York City when the Son of Sam was doing his thing.  Shortly after that, the whole country learned that Ted Bundy was loose and driving around what seemed like the entire United States killing women.  Shortly after that, John Wayne Gacy was arrested and they started pulling dozens of bodies from under the crawlspace of his house.

Meanwhile, here in my own backyard in Sacramento, the man who would eventually become known as the Golden State Killer was known as the East Area Rapist, and each week, the news would report another attack in neighborhoods I was very familiar with.

And right in the middle of all that, a vampire came to Sacramento.

December 29th, 1977, while the rest of the nation was still wrestling with the bloated ghost of Christmas turkey past, something altogether less festive was uncording itself in the sun-bleached, spiritually bankrupt suburbs of Sac Town.

Enter Richard Chase, a man whose internal landscape was a topographical map of Hell designed by a committee of amphetamine-addled surrealists.  Here was a specimen of late-20th-century Americana so profoundly broken, so spectacularly miswired, that he makes your normal, friendly neighborhood psychopath look like a reasonable candidate for PTA president.  Chase was operating under a truly unique and, one must admit, poetically deranged mandate: his blood, he believed with unshakeable certainty, was turning to powder.  A fine, desiccated dust circulating through veins that ought to have been humming with life’s sweet crimson vintage.  The solution, as he saw it, was not a new diet or a trip to a specialist, but a simple, albeit socially frowned-upon, act of replenishment.

On this day, the theory was put into rather savage practice.  The first data point in Chase’s bloody thesis was a 51-year-old engineer named Ambrose Griffin.  Ambrose was just doing his part for the domestic dream – hauling groceries, probably thinking about football or the state of his lawn – when Chase, from the sanctum of his car, performed a lethal, long-distance act of radical phlebotomy via drive-by shooting. Griffin collapsed in his driveway while his wife unloaded groceries.

This was merely an overture.  The prelude to a month-long symphony of absolute mayhem that would see the official crowning of the “Vampire of Sacramento.”  The initial act, the shooting of Griffin, was a clumsy, almost impersonal transaction.  A proof of concept.  But Chase’s methodology evolved…it became intimate.  Over the next month, five more souls would be violently expropriated from their bodies to service his delusion.  In his head, he wasn’t killing: he was harvesting.  It was a panicked, frantic resource grab driven by a paranoid schizophrenia so profound it could wilt flowers from across the room.

He would later graduate from the relative sterility of firearms to something far more hands-on.  He would break into homes – unlocked doors being, in his scrambled calculus, a direct invitation – and turn domestic sanctuaries into abattoirs.  The accounts read like a Nyquil dream transcribed by a madman.  He didn’t only kill.  He drank.  He consumed.  He engaged in acts of such primal, stomach-churning grotesquerie that they defy neat, clinical language of criminology.  He was a walking, breathing refutation of all the tidy lies we tell ourselves about civilization and progress, all because of a little voice whispering that he was drying up from the inside out.  Another reminder that the suburbs are only peaceful if you don’t look too closely.  Another entry in the long, deranged anthology of people who believed their private madness required public sacrifice.

Raise a glass (preferably not of anything red) to the memory of Ambrose Griffin, the first victim of a month-long descent into vampiric chaos.  And raise another to the uncomfortable truth that history’s darkest chapters often begin not with a scream, but with a single, almost unnoticeable crack in the human mind.

N.P.: “Gimme Gimme Gimme” – Beseech