In the 2013 French documentary Je suis amoureuse d’un condamné (“I’m in Love with a Convict”), Misty was interviewed as one of Richard Ramirez’s admirers. Ramirez, the “Night Stalker”, was convicted of 13 murders in the United States.
Over several months, she exchanged more than 700 letters with him. Their correspondence included sexual fantasies: he told her about his desires, and from afar, she built up an image of him that she could feed with words.
So she decided to visit him at San Quentin State Prison in California and sit across from him. Misty said she was almost “in a trance” as they stared into each other’s eyes. Up close, he seemed enormous to her: she described his hands as gigantic next to hers and his eyes as those of a shark. Suddenly, fascination turned to fear.
That was when Ramirez leaned forward and began to unbutton his clothes. The next thing she remembers is having his penis right in front of her face.
But this unexpected act, which she had so desperately wanted and imagined, did not bring the fantasy closer to reality; on the contrary, it destroyed it.
—Do you mean you were in love with him until you saw him? Because you saw him and then stopped being in love with him.
—Yes, it was as if someone had burst the bubble I was in and brought me back to reality.
The distance had allowed Misty to idealize a convicted killer through hundreds of letters. She wasn’t the only one, but fortunately, she realized her mistake in time.