Hey y’all, it’s Julie Mattson, your host on Pushing Up Lilies. This week, we’re kicking off a two-part deep dive into one of the most chilling cases in true crime history—the terrifying story of Richard Chase, better known as the Sacramento Vampire. In Part 1, we’re taking a close look at his early years, from childhood to young adulthood. I’ll walk you through how Chase’s twisted motives and disturbed mind led him to commit unspeakable acts. What factors led to his disturbing descent into madness? Were there warning signs that were ignored? Join me as we dig into the events that shaped one of the most infamous killers in history, setting the stage for the horror that was yet to come. Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll explore his gruesome crimes and the investigation that brought his reign of terror to an end. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey guys, I hope everyone's having an amazing week.
0:35 My week is going to be super exciting and I'm excited to share what I'll be doing with y'all.
0:41 I will be driving to Tulsa tomorrow, and I'll be staying there for a week, and I am there because I am on a reality TV competition show, and this show is focused on entrepreneurship.
1:02 So this is where aspiring business owners participate in a weeklong boot camp, and then we compete against each other through various challenges.
1:14 The winner will be crowned the best startup on the block by the end of the series.
1:20 It's kind of a high-pressure environment designed to develop our business skills, and we're also being filmed for entertainment reasons.
1:31 Now I know most of y'all know that I own a med spa in Texas.
1:35 I do work full time for the medical examiner and do this podcast on the side and I'm also in grad school but growing the podcast and growing my med spa business are top priorities for me and so I've always kind of been a bit of an entrepreneur.
1:58 When I was a kid, I was the one that was selling Halloween candy door to door without my parents' knowledge.
2:05 And coming home with a handful of money, but we are going to be living together in kind of a business incubator in this hotel.
2:17 And of course, we each have our own rooms, but it's going to be kind of immersive.
2:21 It's going to be very intense and we're going to be ranked daily on our performance.
2:29 And we're going to get a lot of valuable information from the judges who will be our mentors, and we will also just network, and that in itself is invaluable.
2:45 There will be so many people there who own all different kinds of businesses that I know I can learn from and I'm just always excited about growing my group of friends.
2:57 This will air on Prime Video.
3:01 I don't know when yet, so as soon as I do know, I'll let you know, but we will be filming all this week.
3:08 I'm excited and I'm a little nervous.
3:11 Yeah, we'll just see how it goes.
3:13 I feel like I'm always ready to learn.
3:17 My husband and I just started another business called Taps and Tunes, which is a mobile beer trailer that is refrigerated that has 10 taps on it, and we can be available for weddings and corporate events and all kinds of different things.
3:36 This focus on entrepreneurship is perfect for me.
3:39 I love the opportunity again to meet like-minded business owners and, you know, I feel like that the podcast will benefit from it as well.
3:51 Super excited, wanted to kind of let y'all know what was going on.
3:55 We are finalizing the cereal box for you.
4:00 That is about to roll out, I had to make a few changes to the design.
4:04 And that should be shipped out soon.
4:08 Just be sure again to shoot me an email if you're interested in receiving one of the very first ones.
4:15 I'll actually sign the boxes for you.
4:18 I'm excited to get your input.
4:20 I think there'll probably be 30 in the first round.
4:24 If you are interested, please, please, please let me know.
4:27 Shoot me an email, Julie at pushinguplilies.com or just private message me on my Facebook page, which is under Julie Matson, or my Pushing up Lily's Facebook page.
4:40 You will probably be able to see my video that I'm going to be taken of myself during the show filming process on my Med Spa Facebook page, which is called the Filling Station.
4:57 There's several ways to find me, several ways to look me up, and feel free to message me in any way that you feel best that's most convenient for you.
5:05 Kind of excited about a story that I found to share with y'all.
5:11 I never heard this story, and I was amazed that this serial killer had so many crimes under his belt, yet I've never really seen a special or any kind of documentary on him.
5:24 Maybe it was because it was too long ago, because it was kind of back in the 70s whenever he wreaked his havoc.
5:32 But his name is Richard Chase, and he was a native of Sacramento, California.
5:38 Now he was born shortly after his parents got married, and he did have a younger sister named Pamela.
5:46 His parents argued a lot, and y'all know I like to go way back and look into the childhood of some of these serial killers because it's interesting to just see how they were raised and how they were brought up.
5:58 His parents argued a lot when he was younger, and his mother, Beatrice, many times would accuse her husband of having affairs.
6:08 Just like it was with most families back in the day, Charles's father was the one who physically disciplined him as a child.
6:19 And by the age of 5, Chase exhibited evidence of the McDonald triad.
6:25 And I want to discuss that a little with y'all, because I don't think we've done that before, but it's kind of interesting.
6:31 This is a triad of problems.
6:35 If a lot of these issues happen past the age of 5, they say that the person could be particularly homicidal and a sexual predator as they get older.
6:49 The triad is cruelty to animals, that's one thing.
6:54 Another issue would be obsession with setting fires.
6:58 And another issue would be persistent bedwetting.
7:02 So again, if this happens past the age of 5, to kids with violent behaviors or homicidal behaviors, then they say that they could potentially grow up to be homicidal and sexual predators.
7:19 It's kind of interesting when you think about it.
7:22 Now arson is considered to be a less severe or first shot at releasing aggression for these people.
7:32 It's believed that some offenders kill animals as a rehearsal for killing humans.
7:39 Cruelty to animals is said to be used to vent frustration and anger.
7:44 And during their childhood, serial killers can't really retaliate like if their father disciplined them.
7:50 How are you going to retaliate against your dad?
7:52 I mean, he's your father figure, he's stronger than you, he's older than you, he's probably bigger than you, makes it very difficult to retaliate.
8:01 These children choose animals to harm.
8:07And that's because animals are viewed as weak and vulnerable.
8:11 In a study of 45 male prison inmates who were deemed violent offenders, 56% of them admitted to having committed acts of violence against animals.
8:24 Children who abused animals were more often the victims of parental abuse than children who did not abuse animals.
8:34 And we've all heard this about Dahmer, but this is one reason why I like to go back to the childhood.
8:40 Now, bed wetting is persistent in a lot of these children who exhibit this triad.
8:48 It usually is like twice a week for at least 3 consecutive months.
8:54 Let's go back to a little bit about Chase.
8:58 Now, in adolescence, he was said to be a heavy user of drugs.
9:03 He used marijuana and LSD and as a teenager, he discovered that he was impotent, and that prevented him from having sexual relationships with women, so he didn't date a lot when he discovered this was a problem.
9:18 Now, as an early teen, Chase, he just had some weird beliefs.
9:24 He started to believe that he was a member of the James Younger gang.
9:30 He posted his head onto photos of the gang, and then he tried to sell those photos to people, so he posed as a gang member.
9:42 He would sometimes sleep in his family's lounge room.
9:46 This kind of tells you how weird this guy was.
9:48 He would take off all of his clothes and then turn the heater on as high as it would go and then open the windows.
9:56 He was described as being popular and clean cut when he was in high school.
10:03 But he started to become a little more withdrawn when he entered adulthood, and he really had an unkempt appearance at that point.
10:11 And when I looked up his picture online, you do that, and you could see what I'm talking about.
10:16 He does not look like a guy who takes care of himself.
10:20 Looking to see how old he was, he was born May 23rd of 1950.
10:26 He started dating in 1965, so he was only 15.
10:31 He did get a girlfriend, and the two split up in 1966, so it didn't last very long due to his impotence.
10:40 Now, when he graduated high school, He attended American River College between 1968 and 1971, but he eventually dropped out because his grades were declining and he just decided he didn't want to go anymore.
10:56 He's like, forget it, this is not something that I need to do with my life.
11:01 Over the years as he got older, he developed hypochondria.
11:06 He would often complain that someone stole his pulmonary artery, and we know that's not possible, and that his heart would stop beating, and he had this strange belief that if he put oranges on top of his head, that vitamin C would be absorbed by his brain via diffusion, and then he also thought that his cranial bones, so the bones in his head, had become separated and were moving around.
11:36 He told people that if he shaved his head, that you would be able to see these bones moving in his head.
11:41 Just weird beliefs, just a weird guy all the way around.
11:47 His first job was typing and answering the phone for retailers' Credit Association, and this was in 1969, so he was 19, and he was going to college at the same time.
12:02 He continued to find other odd jobs in Sacramento, California, but he also continued to use drugs, so none of those jobs really lasted very long.
12:13 Before he dropped out of college, he shared an apartment with Sid Evans DeMarchi and Rachel Stratum, and this was in 1971, so we're 21 years old.
12:26 They found him sitting on their front lawn in February of that year.
12:32 And he convinced them to let him become a roommate.
12:36 They did not know him from Adam, y'all.
12:38 They just walked outside one day.
12:40 He's literally sitting in their yard, homeless, and he convinces them to allow him to move in.
12:47 Suddenly he's got a place to live.
12:49 He can move out of his parents' home, and he's got roommates.
12:54 Now his parents gave him $50 a month to help pay his share of the rent.
12:58 I know that was a long time ago.
13:00 I don't know what their rent was.
13:01 $50 didn't seem like it would go very far even back then, but his parents probably loved the fact that he wasn't going to be at home anymore.
13:12 Because he's crazy.
13:14 DeMarchi and Stratum both moved out eventually due to his odd behavior.
13:20 And this is because he was usually high on drugs, and he walked around naked in front of their visitors that they invited to their own house.
13:31 So, yeah, no.
13:33 He would also barricade himself in his bedroom, and he would say that he did it so that no one could sneak up on him.
13:41 It's a little bit paranoid, hypochondriac, just weirdo.
13:47 He then shared an apartment with Stratum's brother and his friends.
13:52 And these new roommates had a rock band.
13:56 Of course they would practice, and Chase would often interrupt their practice sessions.
14:03 They also all eventually moved out, and at that point, Chase was unable to afford the rent on his own.
14:12 Now his parents divorced in June of 1972, so he was 22.
14:19 After that time, he frequently fought with his mother.
14:24 Now, again, we know he's nuts, and he believed that she was trying to poison him.
14:30 And that was oddly something that she used to accuse her husband of doing when Richard was a child.
14:39 Now he alternated, as a lot of kids do, between living with his mother and father.
14:47 Because they were both having a lot of trouble dealing with his increasingly erratic behavior, and they probably had to just take turns because you need a break every once in a while.
15:00Now, when his father eventually kicked him out, neighbors said that he would stand by the property just blankly staring for extended periods of time.
15:11 His father didn't believe that his troubles were due to mental illness.
15:16 His father just believed that he was lazy, he didn't have any values or work ethic and just had a general belief that he wasn't ever going to amount to anything.
15:28 His father didn't really think anything was wrong with him mentally.
15:33 Now, in 1972, his mother attempted to call the police on him during an argument when he grabbed the phone while she was making the phone call and whacked her over the head with the phone.
15:47 Now this was back before cell phones, so this was a big heavy landline phone, and he basically just whacked her with it.
15:58 She still phoned the police, and he ran outside and jumped the fence, and so she decided not to press charges.
16:08 Probably knowing that it would happen again, or a similar incident would happen again.
16:15 But after the incident, he had two stints of living with his paternal grandmother in LA.
16:24 And she also kind of noted his strange behavior.
16:29 During the first stay with her, he worked for his uncle as a bus driver for mentally disabled children, which is scary to me.
16:39 Apparently, the uncle and the grandmother didn't think anything was wrong with him, but he was put in a situation where he worked with children who were mentally disabled.
16:49 He was fired from that job for never cleaning the bus and allowing the bus to run low on oil.
16:58 And after he got fired, I guess he went through a little stint of depression, and he would spend most of the day in bed.
17:08 Now his grandmother many times would hear him talking to himself.
17:14 She would walk into his room to check on him and find him standing on his head in the corner of the room.
17:20 Now, during the 2nd stint of living with her, he found a job working at a paint store, but he didn't last long there.
17:29 He was fired within a couple of days.
17:32 His mental state and physical appearance gradually at that point, began to deteriorate.
17:41 He returned to Sacramento in 1973, and guess what he did?
17:47 He began cutting out photos of human organs from a medical book and pasting them all over his bedroom walls.
17:55 Super strange, major red flag, and I can say if I was the parent to this guy.
18:03 There is no way in hell that I would close my eyes at night and allow him to sleep in the same house as me, because I would fear for my life.
18:12 Chase went to his mother begging her to help him with his medical condition, and it's the sad part of it is it sounds like he knew something was wrong with him.
18:22 Now she contacted two doctors, and they both said that he had a psychiatric disturbance of major proportion, so they agreed there's something wrong with him.
18:35 In 1973, Chase killed one of his cats when he saw a TV story about a cat that received high quality medical treatment.
18:46 He killed one of his own cats because he was mad that the cat on TV was getting better medical care than he was.
18:55 Now, in December of that year, 1973, Chase spent two days in a psych ward after he walked into a hospital complaining of not being able to breathe.
19:09 He told the doctor that his blood had stopped flowing through his body and that he was having a heart attack.
19:15 And he also told them that he lost his pulmonary vein.
19:19 Yeah.
19:21 The doctor pretty much came to the conclusion that this guy is nuts.
19:26 So following that visit, he spent 2 days in a psych ward.
19:32 Now, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
19:36 And he was discharged.
19:38 I mean, he needed to stay longer, but he was discharged after those two days when his mom came up there and confronted staff.
19:46 They sent him home because the doctor said that his mom was highly aggressive and hostile.
19:53 Now, once he was discharged, his mental health improved because they prescribed him medications that he could start taking.
20:01 Strangely enough, he was given an oxygen tank to help him deal with panic attacks because it would cause him to feel short of breath.
20:10 He then deteriorated pretty quickly because even though he was taking the psych meds, he started using illegal drugs again.
20:19 He would have fits of rage.
20:21 He would slap his mother in the face.
20:23 He would damage the home by just completely going off, and he became too much for his parents, as you can imagine.
20:32 I mean, I can honestly say I love my kids, but I would fear for my life and I don't think I would have been able to last this long, but they gave him his own apartment at that point cause they were like, this is too much.
20:47 Now once he was on his own, he got a bicycle, and he began riding his bike to a rabbit farm and he would buy rabbits and literally eat them raw.
20:59 He kept his apartment very clean, reportedly, and his father came over one day and asked him why he had live rabbits like inside his apartment.
21:09 And he told his dad he was eating them.
21:12 But I think, you know, his behavior was so odd anyway.
21:16 And he always made strange statements.
21:19 So that was kind of like, yeah, whatever.
21:22 You know, I'm going to let this one go because this is not one that I want to deal with right now.
21:27 He just thought nothing of it.
21:30 In 1976, he voluntarily committed to a mental institution for the second time.
21:37 And the reason this happened is because he was taken to the after injecting rabbit's blood into his veins.
21:46 Also, there was an incident where his father found him vomiting in his apartment and barely able to move.
21:53 He went to the and Chase told them that he ate a rabbit that had battery acid in its stomach.
21:59 So his stories are odd, like, this is not something that a normal person is going to say when they come into the.
22:09 The staff concluded that he was definitely mentally ill, and he was sent to American Riverside facility.
22:19 And of course, when he was there, because he's a hypochondriac, he started complaining of heart weakness.
22:25 He did not want to participate in group activities.
22:29 He wasn't really doing the things he needed to do to, quote unquote, rehabilitate, and he was transferred to Beverly Manor Psych Hospital.
22:41 And there at Beverly Manor, they nicknamed him Dracula because he had a fixation on blood.
22:51 Now, while he was there, this is kind of scary.
22:55 OK, everything this guy has done so far scares me.
22:58 I mean, if anyone I knew did any of those things, yeah.
23:02 He broke the necks of two birds that he caught through a window at this psych hospital.
23:09 And then he drank their blood.
23:12 There were some, I guess, therapy dogs that they brought in occasionally to help the patients that were there.
23:19 And he stole syringes and drew blood or extracted blood from these therapy dogs and drank it while he was at this facility.
23:32 So, obviously, an obsession with blood, we see that a lot of his behavior was very much like that of Dahmer.
23:41 And again, this is why I kind of like to go back and look into the childhood and the background of serial killers, because it seems like there are a lot of similarities.
23:54 Now after he underwent a battery of treatments, they put him on psychotropic drugs.
23:59 For some reason, he was deemed no longer a danger to society, and he was released into his mother's custody in 1976.
24:10 The mental institutions staff actually disagreed, which I think that I do as well, but they disagreed with the decision to discharge him, which was ordered by a doctor.
24:26 Staff members said that he needed extensive care.
24:29 And he did not receive the care that he should have gotten while he was at the facility, but nonetheless, he was discharged because that's what the doctor decided was best for him.
24:41 Now, without consulting doctors, once he got home, his mom weaned him off of his medications.
24:49She said it made him like a zombie, and she did not like that.
24:54 So she got him another apartment.
24:57 And Chase progressed at that point from eating birds and rabbits to eating dogs.
25:05 Sorry to all of you who like animals more than people, and I know that all of this is hard to hear, but this is like a true story.
25:15 This is what really kind of freaks me out about people is that this stuff really happens, like this is not made up and it's not a movie.
25:22 Mom got him another apartment.
25:24 He purchased puppies, and he hanged them in his apartment, and then he would cut open their stomachs and drink their blood and eat them raw.
25:35 Some of the dogs he purchased were reportedly a little suspicious.
25:38 I feel like animals can kind of sense things, and they didn't want to go with him.
25:45 Chase's neighbor, Don Larson said that he would aimlessly walk around their apartment complex with his mouth open, and then any time she said hello to him, he would never respond.
25:56 But she did see him bring dogs and cats into his apartment, even though they weren't allowed.
26:04 She never saw the animals again, so she wasn't sure what he was doing with them, but she did see him carry him into his apartment.
26:13 He only allowed his mother to enter his apartment, but soon after that, he would not allow anyone to come in.
26:20 Anytime his mom would come over, he would insist on speaking to her through a crack in the door.
26:27 Now, in August of 1977, he was stopped and arrested in a Native American reservation near Pyramid Lake, Nevada.
26:38 His naked body was smeared with blood, and a bucket with a liver in it was found inside his truck.
26:48 Police began suspecting that a homicide had occurred, but witnesses reported that Chase had a dog with him earlier that day.
26:57 No one was ever able to find the dog.
27:00 When the police questioned him, he claimed that the blood was seeping out of him and that he didn't know what happened to the dog.
27:08 The blood was determined to be cow's blood, and so there were no charges filed, but y'all, this guy is certifiably crazy.
27:18 Because it is kind of a long story.
27:20 I wanted to make this a two parter, because again, I felt like going a little bit over his childhood was important.
27:28 I feel like that that will kind of set the stage for what this guy did.
27:33 So tune in next week and we hate to do this to y'all because I hate when Netflix does this to me, but we are going to talk about the murders that he committed and just how strange this guy really was.
27:48 I hope that y'all's week is amazing.
27:51 Again, I will be out of pocket in Tulsa and super excited.
27:56 I will record my week a little bit each night in the hotel, and I hope to be able to share all of that with you.
28:08 Have an amazing week and I look forward to next week.
28:11 Bye y'all.
28:13 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
28:17 If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast.
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28:28 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.