Bloodlust and Madness: The Vampire Crimes of Richard Chase

Bloodlines of Chaos: The Troubled Origin of Richard Chase

When it comes to true crime, some cases read like poorly thought-out fiction—implausible, grotesque, and baffling. Then there’s Richard Chase, whose life was a parade of warning signs ignored until the catastrophic crescendo. Chase wasn’t so much born into chaos as he was marinated in it. Every aspect of his life seemed to scream for intervention, but no one picked up the phone.

Born in 1950 in Sacramento, California, Richard Chase arrived as an unplanned stress test for a marriage already teetering on the brink. His parents weren’t exactly relationship goals; their arguments made the Hatfields and McCoys look like diplomats. Richard’s mother, a master class in paranoia, regularly accused her husband of poisoning her. Why? So he could supposedly have his way with her while she slept—a claim as baseless as it was disturbing.

The accusations didn’t stop there. According to her, there was also a secret mistress involved—one so dedicated to skulking that she supposedly hid in the bushes during a family trip. No one else ever saw this phantom bush lady, but the allegation stuck around like a bad houseguest.

By the time Richard was a teenager, all that parental toxicity had soaked straight into his DNA. He was a walking testament to unresolved trauma, channeling his angst into drugs—likely to numb the festering unease that his childhood had left behind. Unfortunately, those substances didn’t just dull the edges; they fueled the peculiar behaviors that would become his calling card.

It’s safe to say Richard’s early years were a disaster unfolding in slow motion, setting the stage for the chilling chapters to come.

The Slow Burn of Richard Chase’s Descent

Richard Chase had a knack for behavior that left people scratching their heads and avoiding eye contact. One of his more peculiar habits? Falling asleep completely naked in the family room, the heaters blasting at maximum capacity while every window in the house stood wide open. Was it a teenage rebellion against his chaotic upbringing? Or was it the early tremor of something far more disturbing? Hindsight, as they say, is twenty-twenty—and in this case, it’s downright unsettling.

Despite his quirks, Richard maintained a facade of normalcy—popular, well-dressed, and outwardly composed. But beneath that polished surface brewed a cauldron of dread and anxiety. It was a storm he could no longer suppress once he got a girlfriend. Things fell apart when she revealed that Richard’s impotence had become the breaking point in their relationship.

The breakup marked the beginning of his unraveling, starting with the basics: personal hygiene. Richard stopped cutting his hair, stopped bathing, and basically stopped caring. High school, where he’d been a decent student, ended with good grades, but college was a different story. He dropped out after poor attendance and test results proved academia wasn’t his refuge.

Then came the symptoms—or at least, Richard believed they were symptoms. He began complaining that his heart would randomly stop beating. Medical tests revealed no abnormalities, no physical explanation for this phantom ailment. But logic wasn’t enough to quell his certainty: something was catastrophically wrong inside him.

What started as an inexplicable complaint soon spiraled into a cornerstone of Richard’s increasingly fractured reality, the first in a series of delusions that would come to define—and destroy—his life.

The Delusional Collapse of Richard Chase

Richard Chase’s heart wasn’t just metaphorically broken—he became utterly convinced it was physically disintegrating. His delusions escalated quickly. First, he believed someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. Then, things took a turn for the even-more-impossible when he became convinced that the bones in his skull had detached and were freely rattling around in his head.

As his mental state unraveled, so did his physical health. Richard became painfully thin and jittery, a side effect of heavy drug use and his increasingly bizarre behavior. The combination made it impossible for him to hold down a job, and one particularly horrifying incident at home led to him being kicked out. Richard, now believing his heart was shrinking and his blood had turned to dust, killed the family dog and drank its blood in a desperate attempt to fix what he thought was wrong inside him.

After this, Richard found a new living arrangement in the most unexpected way: by loitering on the front yard of two strangers, Cyd DeMarchi and Rachel Statum. Through what must have been a truly wild conversation, he convinced them to let him move in as a roommate. His parents even chipped in $50 a month to cover his rent.

But, unsurprisingly, Richard’s strange habits didn’t make him the ideal housemate. He often wandered around the house naked and under the influence of who-knows-what. Sometimes, he’d barricade himself in his room and nail his wardrobe shut to “stop people” from invading his space.

Cyd and Rachel couldn’t deal with him for long and moved out, leaving their rooms to Rachel’s brother and his friends. That arrangement didn’t last, either. Richard’s behavior drove them out too, leaving him with a lease he couldn’t afford and no one willing to split the bills.

Richard was now teetering on the edge, both financially and mentally, as his isolation and delusions grew darker.

The Nomadic Chaos of Richard Chase’s Home Life

After years of erratic behavior and escalating paranoia, Richard Chase found himself back where so many troubled adults reluctantly land: his parents’ house. But things were far from stable there, too. His parents had recently divorced, and Richard’s delusions kicked into high gear. Living alone with his mother, he became convinced she was poisoning him. Naturally, he packed up and moved in with his father instead. But that wasn’t a solution, either. His erratic behavior proved too much for his father, so Richard ping-ponged between households, leaving both parents exhausted and desperate.

The breaking point came in 1972. Richard’s mother called the police on him after an argument escalated into violence. While she was on the phone with dispatchers, Richard attacked her, hitting her over the head with the very phone she was holding. In a move that’s baffling in hindsight, his mother decided not to press charges. Still, the incident effectively evicted Richard from her home for good.

He then moved to Los Angeles to live with his grandmother, but his mental health was clearly unraveling. She reported hearing him muttering to himself as he wandered around the house at night, sometimes holding full conversations with no one in particular. One evening, she walked into his room and found him standing on his head. Richard casually explained that this was his method of getting blood to flow back into his head—a DIY solution for a problem no doctor had ever identified.

As Richard grew thinner, more disheveled, and more erratic, his obsessions became harder to ignore. His fixation with human anatomy spiraled into a macabre hobby: cutting pictures of organs out of medical books and pinning them up on his walls like gruesome wallpaper. On at least one occasion, his paranoia led him to call an ambulance, insisting he was suffering from severe heart pain. Unsurprisingly, doctors found nothing physically wrong with him. But the bigger, untreated problem was becoming painfully obvious to everyone—except, it seems, his family.

A Diagnosis Ignored: The Warning Signs Intensify

When Richard Chase was finally evaluated by medical professionals, the diagnosis was clear: he was suffering from a “psychiatric disturbance of major proportion.” The doctors didn’t mince words. But his parents? They weren’t buying it. Instead of seeking the treatment he desperately needed, they dismissed the diagnosis and brought him back home—a decision that would prove catastrophic.

It didn’t take long for Richard’s behavior to escalate. One evening, while watching television, he saw a program about a cat receiving medical treatment. This mundane scene set off a tidal wave of resentment. In Richard’s warped mind, even a cat was receiving better care and compassion than he ever had. Fueled by rage and delusion, he took the family cat outside. His mother recalled hearing a gunshot and rushing out to investigate. What she found was horrifying: Richard, covered in the cat’s blood, tearing apart its remains and smearing them across his body.

This grotesque act was the tipping point, and Richard was admitted to a hospital once again. This time, the staff diagnosed him with acute paranoid schizophrenia—a serious mental illness that required extensive treatment. But once again, his mother intervened. Convinced she knew better than the medical experts, she removed Richard from their care and brought him back home. She later insisted that her son had made a miraculous recovery under her watchful eye, a claim that would soon be proven devastatingly false.

The Blood Rituals Begin: Richard Chase’s Descent Into Madness

Richard Chase’s father had a different perspective on his son’s unraveling. According to him, Richard’s relationship with his mother was a battlefield. Richard believed she was somehow controlling his mind, and their constant arguments often turned physical. After each altercation, she’d call Richard’s father for help. Unfortunately, these interventions only seemed to make things worse—Richard’s anger would escalate further after speaking with his father, and his mother would, in turn, blame his father for Richard’s behavior.

At their wits’ end, Richard’s parents decided to set him up in his own apartment. They hoped independence might stabilize him, but they weren’t about to let go completely. His father made regular visits, often stopping by to play chess. One day, however, he found something far from a casual game. Richard was sprawled on the floor, barely alive.

Richard had developed his own twisted solution for his perceived medical ailments. Convinced his heart was shrinking and his blood had turned to powder, he believed consuming fresh blood was the only cure. He’d been purchasing rabbits in bulk from a local farm, hanging them, cutting them open, and eating their raw organs. Sometimes, he’d blend their intestines with blood into a grotesque smoothie. But this time, he took it further: injecting rabbit blood directly into his veins. The result was blood poisoning that nearly killed him.

Richard was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he continued to insist his heart was failing and fresh blood was the only remedy. Despite his bizarre and dangerous behavior, the medical staff eventually gave him a clean bill of health and released him—right back into the care of his mother.

What followed was another catastrophic misstep. Richard’s mother, uncomfortable with the way the prescribed medication affected her son’s behavior, began weaning him off it. Any fragile progress Richard had made unraveled as his untreated psychosis deepened, pushing him further into the darkness of his delusions and violent compulsions.

The Final Descent: From Animal Cruelty to Mass Murder

After being weaned off his medication, Richard Chase’s behavior spiraled into even darker territory. He began purchasing puppies and small pets through classified ads, taking them home to his apartment, and killing them in gruesome rituals. It’s unclear if this was purely delusional compulsion or practice for what was to come.

Then Richard managed to get his hands on a gun, which only amplified the danger. Neighbors frequently reported hearing gunshots from his apartment. Sometimes, he was shooting the animals he planned to consume. Other times, he was aiming at the voices in his head, trying to silence them the only way he knew how.

But on December 29, 1977, Richard Chase turned his violence outward. After being denied the chance to spend the holidays at his mother’s house—his younger sister was too terrified to have him there—Richard took his rage to the streets. He spotted 51-year-old Ambrose Griffin unloading groceries in his driveway and, in a senseless drive-by shooting, killed him. Ambrose Griffin became Richard’s first human victim, but he was tragically far from the last.

On January 23, 1978, Richard broke into the home of Teresa Wallin. Teresa was taking out the trash when Richard attacked, shooting her three times. He then mutilated her body, repeatedly stabbing her in the stomach before sexually assaulting her. The horror didn’t end there. Richard cut open her body, removing and mutilating her organs. Disturbingly, the autopsy revealed Teresa was alive for much of the mutilation. She was also three months pregnant at the time of her murder.

Four days later, on January 27, Richard escalated further. He broke into the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, where he encountered a house full of people: Evelyn, her six-year-old son Jason, her 22-month-old nephew David Ferreira, and her friend Dan Meredith. Richard shot Dan twice in the head before killing Evelyn, Jason, and David. He then set about mutilating Evelyn’s body, sexually assaulting her remains, and doing the same to little David. He was interrupted before he could continue further, fleeing the scene with David’s remains in his car.

The aftermath was a bloodbath that sickened even seasoned investigators. The crime scene mirrored the brutality seen at Teresa Wallin’s home, and neighbors reported seeing a disheveled man in an orange ski parka lurking around the area. When police released a composite sketch, a woman who had known Richard in high school came forward. She’d recently seen him wearing the same distinctive parka and reported her concerns to the authorities.

When police arrived at Richard’s apartment, the scene was as horrific as they feared. Blood covered the walls, and David Ferreira’s remains were found in a box in the trash.

In his own words, Richard explained to psychiatrists, “I was sick… I was trying to get free of poison place and go live with my grandmother’s relatives.”

The End of Richard Chase

Richard was arrested and admitted to a mental facility while the courts debated whether he was competent to stand trial. Ultimately, he was convicted and sentenced to death. But Richard would not live long enough to face execution. On December 26, 1980, he was found dead in his cell after overdosing on antidepressant medication he’d been stockpiling.

Beside him lay a four-page note. Part of it was written in code, and the rest revealed his final delusion: he believed taking his own life was the only way to stop his heart from beating for good.

Richard Chase’s short, horrifying reign of terror was over, but his story remains a chilling reminder of what can happen when untreated mental illness, delusion, and violence collide.