Why Serial Killers Like Richard Ramirez and Larry Eyler Embraced the Pentagram

Serial killers have long utilized symbols in crimes, marking their scenes or victims to intimidate. One such favored symbol is the pentagram, whose origins date back millennia.

While much has been assumed about this symbol, there’s more to it than meets the eye. In fact, it’s one of the oldest spiritual, natural and even mathematical images, deserving of its history to be reclaimed.

Unlike the pentacle–a five-point star enclosed in a circle–the pentagram is a magical tool. “It was used to ward off evil, harm and malice,” Salvatore Santoro, a practitioner of the occult for 30-plus years and co-owner of occult apothecary The Crooked Path, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “The upward orientation reflects harmony and the supremacy of spirit over matter. It is deeply symbolic, representing earth, air, fire, water [and] spirit.”

The upside-down pentagram holds profound, albeit different, significance. “You’ve got the inverted pentagram, which is the pentagram of Earth, meaning it’s getting into the inner demons of humanity,” Griffin Ced, Witchfather of the Ced tradition and manager/teacher at The Green Man, a mystical supply shop in Burbank, Calif., tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Ced explains, “[The pentagram’s] geographic origin is not anywhere on Earth. If you think about the pentagram and the celestial motions of Venus representing the synergy that brings together time and space into a harmonic relationship, we start to see the mathematics of it represent[ed] in the golden ratio. And this whole idea of harmony and beauty and perfection starts to be passed down.”

The pentagram’s use dates back to ancient Mesopotamia and then appeared in Babylon and later spread throughout Europe.

The pentagram and its meanings were passed down through magic practitioners until the Industrial Revolution. “Around the 1850s, there was a lot of people [who] had the ability to study things like esoteric mysteries,” Ced says. “Amongst these was a fellow called Éliphas Lévi, [who] took an old mystery about Baphomet.”

Lévi, a French occultist, was first to draw this occult figure, depicting a goat-human hybrid with a pentagram on its forehead. His image unintentionally muddled the pentagram’s harmonious meaning in mainstream society.

From the 1960s, the United States underwent several societal changes. “Music was getting louder, hair was getting longer and people were becoming less complacent with the status quo,” California State University, Los Angeles criminal justice professor Dr. Khadija Monk tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Church attendance dropped. Women entered the workforce, breaking up traditional nuclear families. Occult-based movies like The Exorcist were box office draws. And the music industry grew darker. “[The pentagram] suddenly became a wonderful tag for rock-and-rollers who wanted to present themselves as revolutionary anarchists,” Ced explains, cautioning, “They weren’t picking up the esoteric. They were simply picking up on the badassery.”

Occult imagery peaked with the controversial book Michelle Remembers. Its author, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder claimed to have unleashed the latent memories of a woman who, as a child, was turned over to a Satanic cult where she suffered abuse and partook in horrific rituals. Despite being debunked, Michelle Remembers increased public paranoia over anything “Satanic.”

“People genuinely believed in organized networks of Satanists conducting ritual child abuse and murder,” clinical/forensic psychologist and private investigator Joni E. Johnston, Psy.D. tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Investigation[s] found virtually no evidence for these networks, but the panic destroyed lives, led to wrongful convictions and distorted the justice system’s response to actual abuse.” As a result, Santoro explains, “The pentagram was increasingly portrayed as a subversive or ‘evil’ emblem.”

Violent crime fueled the Satanic Panic. According to Monk, “The Satanic Panic is really a delayed or lingering reaction from the Manson Family days. We have to remember that society was fairly naïve when it came to exposure to violence.” By the 1980s, people were more mistrustful, exacerbated by serial killers’ occult iconography.

In 1983, Larry Eyler drew a pentagram and an inverted cross in an abandoned farmhouse near his burial site of several male victims. In 1995, 18-year-old Christa Pike murdered a female classmate by cutting a pentagram into her chest. Israel Keyes, who raped and murdered 11 individuals, left a suicide note in 2012 where he’d drawn a pentagram alongside 11 skulls—the only acknowledgment of his victims.

But Richard Ramirez took the symbolism to shocking heights. He committed dozens of crimes against women in Los Angeles and San Francisco and became infamous for drawing pentagrams on the walls of crime scenes and the body of an elderly victim. When Ramirez, known as the “Night Stalker,” showed up to his first court appearance in 1985, he flashed a pentagram he’d drawn onto his hand and yelled, “Hail Satan.” “Ramirez’s case in particular hit right at the Panic’s crescendo,” Johnston says. “The symbol was about power and transgression—ultimate rebellion.”

Ramirez was convicted in 1989 of 13 murders, as well as charges of rape, sodomy, oral copulation, burglary and attempted murder.

“This anarchist identity came into fruition, and that’s why a serial killer would pick it up,” Ced says. “Because they would identify with the torment of the anarchist’s soul going to the darkest of places and finding that everything’s permissible.”

Decades after the Satanic Panic, the occultist fears once held in society—though not eradicated—have cooled. “The serial killers who used the pentagram played a role in our confirmation bias,” Monk remarks, adding, “While symbols are a sign of communication, I would focus more on their choice of victim and location rather than the symbols themselves.”

Johnston concurs that the link between the pentagram and serial killers continues to grow fainter: “Most serial killers who use symbols aren’t actually practicing occultists. The symbols are tools for intimidation, or self-mythologizing. Pathology drives the killing; the symbol is decoration or justification.”

Santoro, meanwhile, remains hopeful that the pentagram will undergo a rebrand in the future. “With younger generations becoming parents and witchcraft gaining wider acceptance, people today tend to view it more naturally, or even positively,” he says. “Of course, in some ultra-conservative religious or closed-off families, there may still be a lingering sense of fear or misunderstanding, but that’s far less common than it once was.”