The 9-year-old girl at the heart of a reignited 1984 San Francisco cold case was sacrificed during a ritual-style slaying, The Post has exclusively learned.
SFPD Inspectors Michael Mullane and Ronald Schneider got the call that fateful night on April 10, 1984, and were sickened by the sight of little Mei “Linda” Leung’s partially nude corpse hanging by her blouse from a water spigot in the basement of the Tenderloin apartment building where she lived with her family.
“Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez, an avowed Satanist, raped, stabbed and strangled Mei before suspending her body, leaving her feet just inches off the ground. A “second suspect” was recently tied to the case, police said.
“If you can picture Christ on the cross, that’s the way she looked. Her head was drooped and her chin down,” recalled Schneider, who is now retired from the police force. “It was a sad sight to see. She kind of got to me.”
An occult expert who works nationally with law enforcement agencies on such matters believes the case is “a ritual killing” by the way Mei’s body was posed like Jesus Christ.
“It would make sense for a Satanist to pose the body in that formation symbolizing a desecration,” said the expert, who requested anonymity because he’s not involved in the probe.
Mullane, who retired from the SFPD in 1995, said the weight of Mei’s body leaning forward combined with her blouse tightening around her neck strangled her to death.
“Had she been a little taller, she could have transferred her weight to her feet on the ground and screamed and somebody could have come and helped her,” Mullane said, adding, “This was one of the tougher ones. One of the ones you’d like to solve. I had little children at the time.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was then mayor of San Francisco, held a press conference days after the slaying, offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.
In 2009, Ramirez was linked to the murder through DNA, but was never charged with the crime. He died from lymphoma four years later on California’s death row at the age of 53.
On Monday, The Post exclusively reported that a “second suspect” had been tied to the case around 2012 after police got a DNA match from a handkerchief left at the crime scene, according to SFPD Homicide Inspector John Miller.
The suspect — a juvenile at the time of the murder — is a convicted felon who has been identified. But San Francisco authorities have refused to release any details on the perpetrator and his felony record.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the SFPD was trying to undermine its own scientific findings, telling a local newspaper that the second suspect’s DNA profile was flawed because it was incomplete and could, therefore, result in a false positive ID.
“It shouldn’t have gone in [the CODIS system] because it didn’t meet the standards,” SFPD lab technician John Sanchez told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Any ID (made from the flawed sample) would require further investigation.”
But Rockne Harmon, a DNA expert and former prosecutor who was a consultant on Mei’s case, dismissed the news report.
“There may be a valid technical point involved, but [the SFPD’s] explanation is gibberish,” Harmon said.