New Podcast Killer Summer Revisits the Summer Richard Ramirez Terrorized Los Angeles
The Californer/10351527

LOS ANGELES - Californer -- In the summer of 1985, a serial killer known as the Night Stalker murdered at least 13 people across Southern California, sending an entire region into a state of terror. Windows were bolted shut despite triple-digit heat. Gun stores sold out. A generation of children went to bed afraid.

Scott A. Weiss was nine years old that summer, growing up on a cul-de-sac in Canoga Park in the western San Fernando Valley. He was not a victim. Nobody in his family was hurt. But something shifted that year — quietly, the way things shift when you're a child and you don't yet have the language for what's happening.

Forty years later, Weiss has made a podcast about it.

Killer Summer is a three-part narrated memoir podcast that takes listeners back to the San Fernando Valley of 1985 — the backyard pools and strip malls, the Rick Dees morning show, the Showtime Lakers, the Ghostbusters cereal — and into the slowly gathering dread of a community realizing something was very wrong. Woven throughout are archival broadcast audio clips from that summer: local news reports, weather forecasts, period commercials, the actual voices of investigators and terrified residents.

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The result is something rare in true crime: a story told not from the perspective of the investigation, but from the neighborhood. From the cul-de-sac. From the couch of a nine-year-old boy, alone with the television, watching a composite sketch appear on the screen for the first time.

"This isn't only my story," Weiss says. "Hundreds of thousands of kids grew up in those same Valley zip codes that summer. I think a lot of them carried something home from it that they've never quite named. Some of them may not even realize it. This podcast is my attempt to name it."

Killer Summer is available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and wherever podcasts are streamed. Listen: https://killersummerpodcast.com