You’ve probably never heard of Bill Carns.
After all, Bill was just a crime victim, a Mission Viejo resident who was shot three times in the head by a vicious psychopath 21 years ago. And after all that time, who ever remembers the victims?
The courts certainly don’t.
But you almost certainly remember the man who shot Bill Carns and then brutally raped his fiance. His name is Richard Ramirez, better known as “The Night Stalker,” the Satanist serial killer and rapist who terrorized Southern California in the mid-1980s with a string of 13 grisly murders and dozens of other savage crimes.
Unfortunately, Ramirez is still alive. Although he was sentenced to death in 1989, the glacial pace of executions in California means that he’s not even close to being put to death.
In fact, just two weeks ago Ramirez was in the news again when his appeals lawyer argued before the state Supreme Court that Ramirez should get a new trial because his original trial lawyers were incompetent. That appeal is pending.
There’s a terrible irony there, and an awful injustice. You and I and the other taxpayers of California have spent millions upon millions of dollars feeding and housing Richard Ramirez on Death Row and paying for his lawyers and making sure his rights are protected. We even paid for the prison dentists who fixed his rotten teeth.
Meanwhile, more than two decades later Bill Carns is still struggling to put his life back together. And he’s astonished that the man who all but destroyed his life is not only still breathing air, but is still trying to beat the system.
“I try not to dwell on it,” Bill told me by phone from a Midwestern state, where he lives with his mother. “But it bothers me that with such overwhelming proof of guilt that he can even attempt to appeal it.”
It hasn’t been easy for Bill since that night 21 years ago when Ramirez sneaked into his Mission Viejo home, shot Bill three times in the head as he was sleeping – one of the bullets is still in there – and then savagely attacked his fiance.
It’s hard to apply the word “lucky” to what happened to Bill and his fiance, but compared with the fate of many of Ramirez’s other victims, they were fortunate; at least they lived. In other attacks, Ramirez not only killed his victims but sometimes mutilated their bodies, in ways too awful to be described here.
But although he survived, the shooting left Bill, now 50, with permanent brain damage and partial paralysis on his left side. Once a young electronics engineer with a bright future, he spent years in rehab centers, struggling to relearn how to walk and partially use his left hand. He now has a part-time job as a products demonstrator at department stores. His big goal is to try to get his driver’s license.
Sadly, Bill never married. The trauma of the attack and the personality changes caused by the head wounds caused Bill and his fiance to draw apart, and finally they broke up.
“She’s married now,” Bill told me. “It still breaks my heart. But who knows? Maybe I’ll get married someday.”
Unbelievably, while Bill never married, Richard Ramirez did. In another example of a legal and penal system gone stark raving mad, 10 years ago Ramirez was allowed to marry a woman pen-pal in a prison wedding ceremony.
True, it was a non-conjugal marriage, sparing society the threat that this depraved murderer and the lunatic who married him would breed. But still. The mind reels, and the stomach sickens.
Now, I know that for many of you this is frustrating to read. You may wonder if there’s anything you can do to help speed Ramirez along to the execution he so richly deserves. Bill Carns and his mother, Anne, certainly do.
“We want to write to the governor of California and tell him this man does not deserve an appeal,” Anne told me.
But there’s really nothing the governor can do – or you, either. The case is in the realm of the appeals courts, which are notoriously impervious to public opinion, or even common sense.
So the Night Stalker case will drag along, most likely for years and years and more years. We’ll keep providing Richard Ramirez with three hots and a cot in a private room, and Bill Carns will continue struggling to repair his life.
“I would just like it to be over,” Bill says.
But it won’t be over for Richard Ramirez anytime soon. And for Bill Carns and countless other living victims of vicious criminals who are being coddled by a legal system gone amok, justice will be a long time coming.
Contact the writer: (714) 796-7953 or gdill ow@ocregister.com