By August 22, the Los Angeles police credited him with over sixty-eight felonies including multiple counts of assault and rape, and at least fourteen killings.
On the evening of August 24th, the Night Stalker ventured outside of his usual stalking area and traveled fifty miles south of Los Angeles into Mission Viejo. There, he broke into the home of Bill Carns whom he shot, and his fiancée Inez Erickson whom he raped. The Stalker fled in a stolen orange Toyota, but not before being spotted by a sharp-eyed local teenager, James Romero III. He had spied a suspicious car of the same general description prowling the neighborhood. Romero jotted down the Toyota station wagon's license plate number and gave it to the police. Police in the rampart area of Los Angeles found the vehicle two days later. While officers kept the area under surveillance, a forensic team processing the case decided to try a still-new fuming technique to see if any latent prints could be raised. To do so, a saucer of superglue was placed in the car, the windows were closed, and then the vehicle was left overnight. The following morning, a laser was used to search for prints. One single usable print was found.
In the past, this evidence would not have amounted to much. At any given time, the Los Angeles Police had as many as 1.7 million fingerprint cards to search and compare. The work was exceptionally laborious and time-consuming and pretty much amounted to "eyeballing." As luck would have it, however, the LAPD had recently begun installation of the much touted, but very new, Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). This remarkable tool empowered analysts in Sacramento to substantially lower the amount of time necessary for matching prints. Using this new system, more than 60,000 fingerprints per second could be compared and cross analyzed.
A match came up almost instantly using the new system: a twenty-five-year-old car thief name Ricardo "Richard" Levya Munoz Ramirez.