ABLENews Extra

               SF Plays Beat the Clock

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Clearlake, CA--Laurie Gregg made the 1985 telephone call that
ultimately stopped "Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez's killing spree and
sent Ramirez to death row.
   
But whether or not Ramirez ever gets his due for more than a dozen
brutal murders, the terminally ill Gregg isn't sure she'll ever get
hers.
   
Gregg is trying to collect a $10,000 reward from San Francisco in the
year or so doctors tell her she has left to live.
   
She sees the reward as the only way of seeing a daughter and two
grandchildren in Florida before she dies.
   
Gregg, 45, suffers from advanced emphysema and gets by month to month
on a roughly $1,000 disability check, much of which goes to medical
aides.
   
She was a truck driver raising two children in the late 1970s when she
met a young drifter her brother had taken into his Richmond home.
   
Ramirez was a close friend to the family and "Uncle Rick" to Gregg's
nieces, but his behavior became increasingly irrational.
   
"One minute he'd be fine and the next minute he'd be screaming and
raging," Gregg recalled.
   
Ramirez began listening to satanic music, and Gregg's brother and his
family finally kicked him out when he started abusing drugs.
   
Years later, the same brother was watching when a TV station broadcast
one of the first composite drawings of the "Night Stalker," who was
terrorizing mainly Los Angeles area homes with break-ins that ended in
beatings, mutilations, rapes and death.
   
"It looks like Rick," brother Sonny Gregg told her as they stared at
the sketch.
   
"And I said, `It looks exactly like Rick,'" she said.
   
Gregg called police and gave them the name that broke that case.
Residents of a Los Angeles neighborhood later recognized Ramirez from
a photograph that police had released of their prime suspect, and
cornered him.
   
Ramirez was convicted of 13 murders and 30 other crimes.
   
Besides supplying police with the name, Gregg had given authorities a
ring and a bracelet that Ramirez had just sold to a relative of hers.
   
The jewelry tied Ramirez to the 1985 killing of a San Francisco
accountant.
   
While Los Angeles, Los Angeles County and the governor's office gave
Gregg a total of $5,775, San Francisco is waiting for Ramirez to be
tried and convicted in the accountant's killing before it will give
the promised $10,000 reward. The trial is expected this summer or
early fall.
   
[Dying Woman Still Waiting for `Night Stalker' Reward, San Jose
Mercury News, February 21, 1995]
                                   
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