Bill & Ted Screenwriter Recalls the Brief Time He was A Night Stalker Suspect

In things you never expect to hear, famed Bill & Ted and Men in Black screenwriter Ed Solomon revealed that in the 1980s he was a prime suspect in the Night Stalker murders….at least for a few minutes. As true crime obsessives know, the actual Night Stalker was Richard Ramirez who committed a series of assaults and murders through Los Angeles and later San Francisco. According to Solomon he first became aware that he was a suspect in August of 1985 when a journalist called his home and asked “Are you the Night Stalker?” After this, another report let him know that he was “a prime suspect” in the murder spree.

“The reporter explained that my car was found at the crime scene, which made no sense because I looked out my window & saw it was still in the parking space of my Westwood apartment,” Solomon wrote in a series of tweets. “I had to hang up because the police were walking up my driveway – but weirdly slowly. They had an odd attitude when they arrived, saying something about needing to just ‘check it out’ because it was already not seeming likely that I was ‘the one.’Apparently by the time they’d gotten to my place there was new information, & now they were just kind of annoyed – like they’d been given busy work and the *good* stuff was happening an hour or so away.

He went to reveal that despite the police not telling him why he was a suspect, he figured it out on his own, adding: “3 years earlier my (then) roommate (& best friend) was buying a used car, & since he was in med school & I had an actual job (my Laverne & Shirley gig), he had me sign (or maybe co-sign?) for his loan. As such, the car was registered to my address, even though he’d just sold it. The guy who’d bought it was eating dinner in a Chinese restaurant downtown, where the car (a crappy red Toyota station wagon) was stolen – by Ramirez – and driven to the murder site, where it was abandoned.”

Solomon went on to say that the entire “ordeal” of getting his mysterious call, the police knocking on his door, and them losing interest as it became clear he wasn’t their perp, only lasted about five minutes.

Ramirez was arrested for his crimes on August 31, 1985, seemingly not long after Solomon became aware he was a person of interest. Netflix recently released the four-part series Night Stalker: The Hunt For a Serial Killer which goes into detail about the case, though seemingly leaves Solomon’s story out of the narrative.