There are things David Wallin wants to remember about his wife, Teresa, and things he cannot forget.

Among the former are how easily they hit it off, their camping trips to the Sierra Buttes, and time they spent in the coastal town of Jenner, where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean.

Jenner is where they honeymooned in the mid-1970s, and where Terry said she wanted to be buried, Wallin said.

So it's also where a grieving Wallin, 57, scattered her ashes 33 years ago, shortly after coming home one night to the scene that he cannot forget – his wife lying murdered on the floor of their bedroom, shot twice in the head, her body disemboweled.

Teresa Wallin, then 22 and several months pregnant, was killed Jan. 23, 1978, a victim of the Sacramento serial killer dubbed the "Vampire Killer" because he drank the blood of some of his victims.

For David Wallin, who found her in their North Sacramento home on Tioga Way, the image is still fresh.

"Every time you see something on TV, read anything, it takes you there," Wallin said. "That image, I wish it could've been eliminated, but you can't get it out of there."

Instead, as the survivor of a loved one who was murdered, he has had to learn to coexist with the memory.

"You see a lot of victims say there's no 'closure,' " Wallin said. "You can throw the word out. I don't care if you put the guy to death – my loved one is not here. It goes on."

The killer, Richard Trenton Chase, was a gaunt, 27-year-old graduate of Mira Loma High School, tormented by delusionary fears, when he went on a killing spree in North Sacramento between December 1977 and January 1978.

He murdered six people, including two women and two children, in what one veteran lawman called "the most grotesque" crimes he'd ever seen.

Both female victims were mutilated. Near Terry Wallin's body, investigators reportedly found a crumpled container that Chase had used to drink her blood.

Soon after the murder, Wallin said, he went back to work, while friends looked after him to make sure he didn't "go over the deep end."

But for many survivors of murder victims, the pain of loss is "like a tattoo in your brain," said Carole McDonald, founder of Volunteers in Victim Assistance, a Sacramento organization that provides crisis intervention and counseling to victims of violent crime and trauma.

"You get to a place where you're able to function, where you're able to live your life," McDonald said. "But that doesn't mean you forget."

Wallin lived a "self-destructive" lifestyle for months, he said. He sought counseling briefly. He found himself wondering if Terry's life might have been saved had he come home earlier that night.

Randy Fandrich, 57, of Sacramento, a longtime close friend of Wallin's, said that before Terry's death Wallin had never owned a watch. Afterward, he said, Wallin became "paranoid" about punctuality.

That near-obsession went on to affect Wallin's second marriage and his relationship with his daughter.

"If she was five minutes, 10 minutes late showing up someplace, I'd think the worst," Wallin said. "You don't ever want to walk through that doorway again, if there's any possibility."

Both men also said that people with whom they had been close before the murder began to keep a distance and avoid conversation. They would regard Wallin with a wary glance that Wallin and Fandrich came to call "the look," Fandrich said.

People Wallin met would find out his story, he said, and then tell him they simply did not know what to say to him.

"He wanted to be treated like the same person he was – even though he wasn't," Fandrich said of Wallin. "I guess it was an unrealistic goal."

In June 1979, about five months after he was arrested outside his Watt Avenue apartment carrying a gun and a box of bloody rags, Chase was sentenced to death. On Dec. 26, 1980, he was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his cell at San Quentin State Prison.

Since then, Wallin has gone on to work 26 years as a driver and successful salesman for a local linen company. He has spent much of his time coaching young athletes.

In the 1980s, he began volunteering with Volunteers in Victim Assistance, fundraising and helping to counsel other people who had lost loved ones to violence, he said.

"It gave him something positive to focus on, that he felt he could help somebody else," Fandrich said.

Fandrich said Wallin himself usually emerged from talks with other survivors seeming to carry less of an emotional burden.

Wallin never went back into the house he shared with Terry on Tioga Way, which has since been torn down.

Sometimes, he will still visit Jenner – "take a drive over," he said, "just to talk to her."

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