Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Vampire in Sacramento

Come closer, and listen slowly. This is not a tale of fantasy, but a true and troubling story, one that shows how a broken mind can turn fear into violence.

There was a man named Richard Trenton Chase. The world came to know him as the “Vampire of Sacramento.” His story is often spoken of when people talk about clinical vampirism, a condition where a person believes they must drink blood to survive.

Richard was born in California in 1950. From a very early age, his life was filled with pain. Psychologists later noted that he showed signs of what is often called the Macdonald Triad in childhood. This is a group of three behaviors that some experts believe may appear in certain violent offenders later in life. These behaviors are bedwetting beyond the age of five or six, cruelty to animals, and deliberately setting fires.

Richard’s childhood was described as hell. He was constantly harassed by his father, and his mother had mental illness. She had been diagnosed as a teenager. Richard grew up feeling alone, deeply sad, and cut off from others. Depression and social isolation followed him everywhere.

To understand how the law later looked at his mind, we must pause for a moment and look at something called the M’Naghten Rules. These rules, sometimes misspelled as MacDonald or McNaughton, are still used in many countries today. They came from an old case in 1843, during the time of British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. That year, a man named Daniel M’Naghten was tried for murder.

Under the M’Naghten Act, a person can be found legally insane if mental illness made them unable to understand what they were doing, or unable to know that what they were doing was wrong. Simply put, the illness pulls the person so far away from reality that they no longer grasp the weight of their actions.

When Richard Chase turned 21, his mind began to slip further away from the real world. Strange and terrifying delusions took hold. He believed his blood was turning to dust. He felt that his heart was shrinking and stopping. He thought someone had stolen his pulmonary artery, and that the bones of his skull were coming apart. These were somatic delusions, false beliefs about his own body.

Slowly, one terrible idea settled firmly in his mind: there was no way to survive except by drinking blood. Richard truly believed this.

As this belief grew stronger, he began to hunt dogs, cats, birds, and other small animals. He killed them and drank their blood. Sometimes he kept their remains in containers. At times, he even injected blood into his own body.

Eventually, he was admitted to a hospital. The signs were clear. Doctors noticed blood around his mouth. When asked about it, he gave strange answers, once blaming a shaving wound. His hospital records noted this clearly:

A patient who believes his blood is turning to dust and that he must drink animal blood to survive. He has many delusions. The strongest is the belief that someone is trying to harm him.

The illness was seen. But a grave mistake followed. The hospital staff believed he had improved. His medication was stopped. His delusions never left him. Instead, they grew stronger. He became convinced that an alien creature was controlling his blood, pulling it away from him, forcing him to drink blood again.

And so, he began to enter houses. First, he took animals. Then, he killed people.

The pattern was always the same. He killed, drank their blood, sometimes injected it into himself, collected what remained, and engaged in necrophilia, having sex with the bodies of the dead.

In 1979, Richard Trenton Chase was convicted of six murders. During the trial, something chilling became clear. He felt no guilt. He showed no fear. When a psychiatrist asked him, “Do you feel guilty?” Richard answered calmly,

“Why? Wouldn’t I have died if I hadn’t done that?”

In prison, he refused food and water, believing they were poisoned or bad.

In 1980, while on death row at San Quentin State Prison, Richard Trenton Chase committed suicide. He had been taking antidepressants, and prison records noted overeating before his death.

And so, this story ends—not with peace, but with a warning whispered through time:

“Madness is not born of monsters.

It is born when the mind tries too hard to save itself.”