How the Night Stalker Was Identified by a Single Fingerprint
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, in 1984, Los Angeles police officer Bob Alaniz arrested a suspicious car thief without realizing he was detaining one of California’s most dangerous serial killers. That man was Richard Ramirez, later known as the Night Stalker. Though Ramirez was released, the fingerprints Alaniz took during booking would become the key to identifying him months later, after a single print was recovered from a crime scene. Alaniz recounts the moment he realized his routine police work had cracked the case, joined by firearms historian and regular contributor Ashley Hlebinsky. It is a story about chance, forensic science, and how one small detail helped stop a reign of terror.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:13.8 | And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:18.1 | Sergeant Bob Alanese was assigned to patrol for the Los Angeles PD in December of |
| 0:23.6 | 1984 when he arrested Richard Ramirez for stealing a car. Nobody had known at the time that |
| 0:30.1 | Ramirez was the night stalker. Ultimately, the photo and prints he took of Ramirez led to his |
| 0:36.2 | ID and arrest. |
| 0:38.2 | Today, Bob is the chairman of the Los Angeles Police Museum and is here to tell the story |
| 0:42.8 | along with Ashley Lubinsky. |
| 0:44.9 | Ashley is the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms. |
| 0:49.6 | Take it away, Ashley. |
| 0:52.8 | Between June 1984 and August 1985, serial killer Richard Ramirez, who's better known |
| 0:59.8 | infamously as the Nightstalker, preyed on victims in Los Angeles. He was arrested on August 31st, |
| 1:06.4 | 1985, after his identity was initially released by the police and a group of citizens recognized him. |
| 1:12.6 | In this case, it's an example of a large investigation coming down to something as small as a fingerprint. |
| 1:23.6 | Dating back to 3,300 BCE, it's believed that fingerprints were used for some level of identification |
| 1:31.3 | purposes. |
| 1:32.3 | In the 1880s, though, a Frenchman named Alphonse Bertillon ventured away from the fingerprint |
| 1:38.3 | to develop a system of identifying people based on body measurements as well as photographing faces. |
| 1:45.0 | And this is the origin of the mugshot. |
| 1:48.0 | In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published the first classification system for fingerprints, and |
| 1:54.0 | in 1901, Scotland Yard established its first fingerprint bureau. |
... |
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