Serial Killers and Haunted Places

Richard Chase

Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980) was an American serial killer who killed six people in the span of a month in California. He earned the nickname The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank the blood of his victims and ate their internal organs. He did this as part of a delusion that he needed to prevent Nazis from turning his blood into powder via poison they had planted beneath his soap dish.

Early years/first signs of mental illness

Born in 1950, he was raised in a strict household and was beaten often by his father. In his teens, he became an alcoholic and also developed a penchant for killing and mutilating animals and fire starting, all common traits amongst serial killers in their youth.

In high school, Chase had a handful of girlfriends, none of whom he was able to maintain a steady relationship with, partly due to his inability to achieve or maintain an erection, and because of an inability to become aroused in the presence of females. Upon consulting a psychiatrist, Chase was told that the root of his problems was either repressed rage or mental illness. Chase did not seek any further treatment after this diagnosis; it would later be determined that Chase had an aversion to conventional sex and could only achieve arousal and orgasm through violent or disturbing acts, such as killing animals and necrophilia.

Early adulthood

As an adult, Chase moved back in with his mother, where he began to accuse her of attempting to murder him via poison. Chase's father purchased an apartment for him and forced him to move out of the house.

Alone in his new apartment, Chase began to capture, kill, and disembowel various animals, which he would then devour raw. He then began to put the entrails of the animals he had killed into a blender in order to make smoothies. Chase reasoned that by drinking these smoothies he was preventing his heart from shrinking; he feared that if it shrank too much it would disappear and then he would die.

Institutionalization

In 1975, Chase was involuntarily committed to a mental institution after being taken to a hospital for blood poisoning, which he contracted after injecting rabbit's blood into his veins.

Chase escaped from the hospital and went home to his mother; he was apprehended and sent to an institution for the criminally insane, where he often shared with the staff fantasies about killing rabbits. He was once found with blood smeared around his mouth; hospital staff discovered that he had captured two birds through the bars on his bedroom windows, snapped their necks, and sucked their blood out. Among themselves, the staff began referring to him as "Dracula."

After undergoing a battery of treatments involving psychotropic drugs, Chase was deemed no longer a danger to society, and in 1976, he was released into the recognizance of his parents; his mother, deciding that her son did not need to be on the antischizophrenic medication that he had been prescribed, weaned him off it.

Post-institutionalization/worsening behavior

His parents put him up in an apartment, where he began to capture, torture to death, and then drink the blood of rabbits, dogs, and cats; on occasion, he killed and ate neighbor's pets, and at least once contacted the neighbor by telephone to explain what he had done. At the same time, he developed a fascination for firearms and purchased several handguns, with which he practiced obsessively. He became fascinated by the crimes of the Hillside Strangler; he believed the Strangler was also the victim of the Nazi/UFO conspiracy that he believed he was the victim of.

Chase also began to lose interest in caring for himself; he neglected personal hygiene such as bathing, grooming, and brushing his teeth. He stopped eating and dropped to the fairly meager weight of 145 lb.