Night Stalker Victim Wins Long Battle to Live Again : Crime: Shot in the head nine years ago, a man slowly recovers from brain damage. But much is lost forever.

Gunshot wounds mark Bill Carns’ forehead and neck. His arm rests in a sling. His left leg is strapped in a brace. A bullet remains lodged in his skull. “At first,” he says, “I would tell people I fell off a bicycle, because I didn’t want to get into it.

“But, now, I can tell people I was the final victim of this guy called the Night Stalker.”

Southern California has had nine years to get over the summer when it lived in fear, when the man the newspapers called the Night Stalker crept in unlocked windows and doors after dark and murdered and raped and robbed at random. Richard Ramirez, who expressed his allegiance to Satan, was eventually convicted of killing 13 and committing 30 other felonies on his way to Death Row.

For those nine years, Carns, 38, has been in and out of hospitals, rehabilitative therapy programs and group homes, reassembling his life, relearning the basics and coping with short-term memory loss that can sometimes leave him frustrated.

But this month he finished the last of the programs. Now living in his home state of North Dakota, Carns putters in his garden, tackles crossword puzzles and volunteers at a local radio station where he reads the news for the visually impaired. Having a job, he says, was a requisite for being discharged from his rehabilitation program.

“I can take care of myself,” he said. “I have my own house with an automatic ice maker. Have you ever tried to get ice out of an ice tray with one hand?”

Carns’ re-entry into the world of mainstream living is a story of personal triumph--an inspiring postscript to a crime spree that for one uneasy summer held a region in its grip.

Carns has no memory of what happened to him that hot August night in Mission Viejo. But it is a chilling story, told and retold. It was 1985. For five months, the Night Stalker had terrorized Southern California residents with his random nocturnal killings.

As the murder spree continued unchecked, the manhunt intensified, the public became more frantic, and news of the Night Stalker spread nationwide. But living in south Orange County, Bill Carns felt pretty secure. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he told his mother one day when she called him long distance and asked about the killings. “He’s up in L.A., miles away from Orange County.”

On Aug. 25, the one night when Carns should have heeded his mother’s advice, the heat was unbearable and he left the living room window open. For Ramirez, it was an invitation.

Dressed in black, he entered the house through the window and crept into the bedroom where Carns and his girlfriend were sleeping. He pumped three bullets into Carns, then bound his girlfriend with neckties, beat and raped her. He dragged her around the house by her hair looking for valuables and forced her at gunpoint to say she loved Satan.

Although the couple lived through the ordeal, the Night Stalker had forever altered their lives in a terrifying 45 minutes.

Carns, once an active outdoorsman, was left partially paralyzed, unable to use the left side of his body. He suffered significant brain damage, losing his short-term memory. The injuries ended his career as a computer engineer, and not long after, he and his girlfriend--the woman he had planned to marry--broke up, both unable to handle the aftermath of the ordeal.

At the same time, the crime sent a chill through Orange County, where residents like Carns had, until then, considered the Night Stalker mostly a distant threat. Carns and his girlfriend became the stalker’s 21st and 22nd victims--and as it turns out, the final ones. An alert teen-ager on his bicycle got part of Ramirez’s license plate number, and on Aug. 31, he was arrested. In 1989, he was convicted of 13 murders and other charges and sentenced to death.

It took years of specialized treatment at more than six hospitals around the country for Carns to retrain his once-sharp brain and muscular body. His short-term memory has been replaced by a pocket notebook and a small tape recorder.

But he still calls himself lucky.

“I used to be so independent and now it’s slowly coming back,” he said. “The use of my left hand is coming back. I can even make a fist.”

He remembers when the computer company granted his wish and transferred him to Mission Viejo. He and his girlfriend left North Dakota, bought a fixer-upper house on Chrisanta Drive in February, 1985, and completed renovations that summer. Carns remembers nothing from the shooting, only that he found himself in a hospital room.

“I woke up and wondered what in the world happened--I knew I was in trouble,” he said. In the mirror, he saw a man with a shaved head and a hole almost the size of a golf ball above his left eye.

Carns’ younger sister, Kathy, said she will never forget the first time she saw her brother in the hospital. “I was seeing this muscular guy lying there with tubes and wires and machines,” she said. “At first it was a touch-and-go situation. We waited for seven days before we knew whether he would live or die.”

Carns was in a coma. When he regained consciousness, doctors told him what had happened. One bullet in his neck, another lodged at the base of his skull that remains there today because it was too risky to remove. A third bullet went in through one cheek and out the other.

“At first I was in total denial and disbelief. I thought, ‘What did I do to deserve this?,’ he said. “I thought it was like a cold or flu and would go away--but it didn’t.”

For six years, Carns was in and out of rehabilitation homes, each one specializing in different areas of treatment for people with severe head injuries. He was filled with anger, he said, because he was an average, law-abiding citizen and couldn’t understand why he had been victimized.

His doctors advised him to channel his anger into getting better. In addition to countless therapy sessions, he had to take mood-altering drugs that he said sometimes took him on an emotional roller coaster.

“It was an awful experience,” he said. “One minute I was higher than a kite, the next minute I was so low I would be reading a newspaper article about a boy getting hit by a car and I would cry.

“When your brain is injured, you have to retrain it. I had to learn how to walk again, tie my shoes, cook with one hand.”

His journey to recovery began at Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Laguna Hills, where he was a patient for five months. Then he was admitted to a hospital in Long Beach, where he endured intense, daily eight-hour sessions for mobility, speech therapy and memory training.

Next he was moved to a hospital in Texas for behavior modification work. And finally, to three different group homes and adult learning centers in the Midwest to learn how to live on his own.

Carns’ medical bills escalated to tens of thousands of dollars. Members of the community in Mission Viejo, from restaurants to schools, held fund-raisers to defray his expenses.

Ironically, months before the attack, his dad had encouraged him to sign up for his company’s disability insurance program, telling his son, “you never know what could happen.” Carns said he now lives off that disability insurance, which pays him about $40,000 a year.

Three years ago, Carns moved back to North Dakota to start life anew near his two sisters and parents.

Before he was shot, his hobbies were electronics, whittling and tinkering with cars. Now he concentrates on his love for music. He rebuilds amplifiers and speakers with help from his brother-in-law. Sometimes he goes to clubs and listens to bands. Bowling is his latest passion. Recently, he joined an adult bowling league for the first time.

His sister said that although his rehabilitation is completed, he still needs someone to take care of his finances, help him do laundry and other household tasks.

“Bill has always been my guardian. Now the tables are turned,” Kathy said. “I’m with him every day. Sometimes it’s like taking care of a child.”

The struggle to remember is ongoing. He has good days and bad days when it seems like he has regressed and he forgets what day or time it is. In telephone conversations, he has to write down the caller’s name as a reminder. He has a talking message machine on his refrigerator. A blinking red light signals him that he has something to remember.

“It’s a little tape recorder,” said Carns, who never leaves the house without a pocket notebook. “You push a button and it will say, ‘Bill, remember to buy milk.’ ”

Everyday he has to take potassium supplements, anti-depressants and medication to help him replace the functions that were lost when his brain was injured.

But his progress exceeds what doctors predicted.

“He has come so far in the last nine years, beyond what doctors told our family,” Kathy said. “It’s really incredible.”

For the first year, his girlfriend took care of him: She drove him to the doctor, fed him, bathed him. But the strain of the attack and its permanent physical and mental effects on both of them were overwhelming, he said.

In the second year after the attack, he and his girlfriend, whom he still calls his “sweetheart,” went their separate ways, hoping to put their lives back together. “She nursed me until she couldn’t handle it,” Carns said. “She decided we both needed to do our own thing because she took care of me and became more like a mother than a girlfriend.

“It was awful. I cried and cried. It took a year to get over (the breakup).”

Now living in Northern California, the former girlfriend said in an interview that, although she loved him, the pain and burden of caring for Carns were unbearable. She has moved away, but still occasionally talks to him.

“For the first full year, I was sure I could care for him for the rest of my life. He’s the greatest guy I’ve ever met,” she said, her voice breaking with emotion. “I still miss him.”

She was there when Carns took his first step after the injury. She had to teach him how to shower and dress. She had to watch him constantly. “I have emotional scars, but Bill has mental and physical scars,” she said. “A head injury is devastating. I tried for two years to be able to hang in there, but he’s a different person.”

Although the two have moved away, they are not forgotten in Mission Viejo. Roger Bradshaw and his wife, Sandy, who lived across the street, were close to the young couple. Bradshaw remembers Carns as very intelligent, friendly and outgoing.

“They were a good couple,” he said. “Everybody was in shock.”

With the attack, the neighborhood changed overnight, becoming the focus of the state’s collective fear. Its quiet, tree-lined streets were jammed with looky-loos, police and television cameras.

Residents rushed to install security systems and deadbolts. “It put a pall over everything; you didn’t know who you could trust,” Bradshaw said. “My wife was a basket case.”

Fear escalated to a near-panic stage until Ramirez was captured Aug. 31, six days after his Mission Viejo attack, by a group of angry citizens in East Los Angeles. “There was a collective sigh of relief,” said Bradshaw.

Carns’ girlfriend testified for five hours at Ramirez’s trial in Los Angeles. On Sept. 20, 1989, Ramirez was found guilty on 43 counts: 13 murders and 30 felonies including burglary, sodomy and rape. On Nov. 7 of that year he was sentenced to die in the gas chamber.

“I would like to be there to flip the switch,” Carns said.

Because his girlfriend didn’t want to testify twice and because Ramirez was already sentenced to death in Los Angeles, prosecutors never brought him to trial in Orange County.

Carns says he has put it all behind him.

“I’m thankful that I’m still here,” he said. “I look at other handicapped people and am glad I can walk and talk. I’m taking one step at a time.”