Member-only story
How the Night Stalker Was Brought Down by a Kid
The Intruder
On a hot August night in 1985, 13-year-old James Romero couldn't sleep. Earlier that day, his family had driven home from a camping trip near the Mexican-American border to their home in Mission Viejo, and he'd slept most of the way. Wide awake and unaware there was a killer on the loose, James headed to the garage to work on his bike.
That day, The Los Angeles Times ran a story with the headline, "Slaying of S.F. Man Linked to Valley Intruder." But James, only 13, didn't read the news and had no idea he and his family were in danger. The article revealed that forensics linked Peter and Barbara Pan of San Francisco to the same killer who had viciously murdered ten people in the greater Los Angeles area. The connection was identical shoe prints found at both crime scenes.
The Romero home, located on Via Zaragosa, didn't have a side gate, making it possible for anyone, or anything, to enter the backyard via a gravel path. When James heard rustling, he figured it was another coyote or opossum, frequent nighttime visitors. James went to investigate, suspecting nothing out of the ordinary, crunching his way along the gravel path. He stood in the dark backyard and listened, scanning the yard. The rustling had stopped, and it was too dark to make anything out, so James returned to the garage. However, James didn't look at the house. He didn't look at the bushes near his parents' sliding glass door. If he had, he might have noticed the intruder.
Close Call
James switched on the light in the garage and started working on his bike, which lay in the garage's far corner. That was when James heard footsteps on the gravel path heading towards him from the backyard. The steps stopped outside a large ventilation grate in the garage wall, a grate that James couched in front of while working on his bike. James held still, barely breathing. Realization dawned that there was no animal in the yard. There was a person, and they were searching for him. They had watched him from the shadows in the yard as he investigated the rustling.
James knew it wouldn't take long for the person to figure out he was in the lit garage. He'd entered through the side door, which wasn’t locked and had a glass pane at the top…
