Richard Chase

Okay.

I was the guy that was dressed as Richard Chase at the Donner dinner party in Atlanta a while back.

What's going on? Good to see you remember that.

I remember that [laughs] truly.

Think those are all my serial killers.

Oh, no, also have Richard Chase, the Vampire of Sacramento.

But I tried to put in some lighter ones too.

Also doing an episode on why we like being scared.

This is...

Richard Trenton Chase.

This is, it was like, you just go through and you're like, Oh, okay.

So yeah, that's pretty cool.

Dr. Lewis was deeply interested in the role of childhood trauma, brain injury, neurological dysfunction, disassociation, and severe mental illness in producing violent behavior.

She interviewed people like Ted Bundy, Richard Chase, we spoke about her during our coverage of Richard Chase, Mark David Chapman, and eventually Arthur Shawcross, sometimes becoming so interested in their inner worlds, which I completely understand, that critics accused her of getting too close to the people that she was evaluating.

She used hypnosis.

She took multiple personalities seriously at a time when plenty of her colleagues thought that the entire concept smelled like bullshit.

But this is an armchair diagnosis from fans and writers after the fact, so we don't really know if he truly did suffer from Cotard syndrome.

This walking corpse syndrome has also been retroactively connected to disturbing high-profile cases like Richard Chase.

He was never formally diagnosed, but a retrospective analysis of his case suggests that he may have had it.

Chase, for those who don't know, was a serial killer sensationalized in the media as Dracula and as the Vampire of Sacramento, and he killed six people in the late 1970s.

He then felt compelled to kill and eat raw animals and later people.

The idea is that the blood and body parts once consumed would restore his own, and this is actually another psychological disorder called Dracula syndrome or clinical vampirism.

Richard Chase was later sentenced to death, but instead he fatally overdosed in prison.

Fall never arrives all at once.

Like, at least she, he shot her in the head first, and then he was just playing around with her dead body, man.

And it's all the like, you know, it's like when we talk about Richard Chase, pretty messed up and disgusting stuff that these, these Richards will do.

Uh, there were w- there were no screams of pain to excite Ricky as he butchered her lifeless body, feeling her blood.

She was already deceased, and the excitement was gone.

He's holding a gun to his temple, but now he's talking about aliens and having weird behaviors, it sounds like.

So I initially was thinking, okay, is he setting himself up for a mental defense or is he setting up a, let's say, a meth-induced psychosis type of defense? However, him randomly walking around looking for unlocked doors, that immediately caused me to think of Richard Trenton Chase out of Sacramento, the vampire killer.

Now, this guy was truly psychotic.

He literally was going through neighborhoods and the neighborhood, the house that had the unlocked door, he went in and just butchered his victims.

It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen.

The blood-drinking killer was 27-year-old Richard Chase, who would go on to be known as the Vampire of Sacramento.

He wanted to consume the blood of his victims.

This really is something straight out of a movie or horror book.

He doesn't just want to kill people, he wants to consume them.

Within a month, he randomly slaughtered six people, including two children, his youngest victim being a 22-month-old toddler whose body he decapitated, placed in an old cardboard box, and then dumped.

He drank his victim's blood and terrorized the city of Sacramento, making Richard Chase one of the world's most evil killers.

The 27th of January, 1978,