![]() Richard Chase shot Teresa Wallin three times using the same gun he used to shoot Griffin. From that time on, all his victims were people who had left their door unlocked. He felt, he would say during interrogation, that an unlocked door was a kind of invitation to him, a justification for what happened next. On January 23, 1978, Chase entered the home of Teresa Wallin, who was pregnant, through her unlocked front door. 22-caliber pistol and shot him in the chest. While driving by their street, Chase pulled out a. His mother hadn’t allowed him to come home for Christmas, he would later recall, and he was mad.Īmbrose Griffin, a 51-year-old man who was helping his wife bring in groceries, became his first victim. On December 29, 1977, Richard Chase was frustrated and lonely. YouTube A bloody footprint Chase left behind at the scene of his second murder. He would eat them raw or blend their organs with soda and drink the mixture. His fascination with blood resurfaced, and he began capturing and killing small animals. Richard Chase, however, refused, and it seemed the path of least resistance to his sometime roommates to abandon the apartment and find other lodgings.Ĭhase was once again living on his own - a circumstance that almost always exacerbated the symptoms of his condition. He moved in to an apartment he shared with a group of young men he called friends.īut it seems they didn’t know Chase well, and when he persisted in unusual behavior - notably drug abuse that left him constantly high and a proclivity for walking around the apartment without any clothing - they asked him to leave. Not long after his release from the psychiatric hospital, he moved out, later saying he thought his mother was poisoning him. ![]() Though Richard Chase had been released into his mother’s care, there was nothing legally binding that forced him to stay with her. Public Domain Richard Chase, the Vampire Killer, was ruled by his delusions - and a number of institutions failed to get him the help he needed. The Vampire Killer Begins To Develop His Habits It was a fatal decision, as Chase’s condition wasn’t improving - he was growing worse. ![]() In spite of several similar incidents, the staff believed that they had rehabilitated Chase, and he was released to live with his mother. It was his attempt to inject himself with rabbit’s blood - which made him violently ill - that had resulted in his institutionalization. His fascination with blood earned him the nickname “Dracula” among the psychiatric hospital’s assistants, who witnessed him kill and attempt to drink the blood of several birds in an effort to stave off the effects a poison that was, he imagined, slowly turning his own blood to powder. Unsurprisingly, at the age of 25, Chase was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized in 1975 to prevent him from becoming a danger to himself. He shaved his head in an effort to monitor their movements. One of his strangest and most powerful delusions involved his skull: he felt that his cranial bones had split apart and begun to shift beneath his skin, changing places and jumbling like puzzle pieces. Like the vampire whose moniker he would soon adopt, he became convinced on several occasions that his heart had stopped at times, he thought he was a walking corpse.īut being occasionally dead was no reason to neglect his health fearing that he lacked vitamin C, he reportedly pressed whole oranges to the skin of his forehead, believing that his brain would absorb the nutrients directly. Psychotropic drugs exacerbated the symptoms of his illness. Without supervision, Chase turned to alcohol and drugs, which quickly turned into substance abuse. Macdonald in 1963 as a predictor of sociopathy in a patient.Ĭhase’s problems grew worse when his father allegedly kicked him out of the house. ![]() These three habits are sometimes called the Macdonald triad, or the triad of sociopathy, proposed by psychiatrist J.M. He set several small fires, frequently wet the bed, and displayed signs of cruelty toward animals. Richard Chase showed signs of mental illness at a young age - but his father, a strict and sometimes physically abusive parent - did little to get him help.Ĭhase was disturbed and unhappy as a child, and his symptoms grew worse in adolescence. Wikimedia Commons A stereotypical image of a vampire from a 19th-century penny dreadful.
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