On February 13, 1973, Herbert Mullin was driving a load of firewood through Santa Cruz when he saw Fred Perez, a seventy-two-year-old retired prizefighter and fishmonger, working in his garden. He made a U-turn, came back down the street, stopped, laid a rifle across the hood of his station wagon and shot Perez once through the heart, in full view of a neighbor who took down his license number. Minutes after the description went out on the police radio a patrolman pulled him over. He was docile. On the seat beside him lay the .22 pistol he had used to kill five people in two houses a few weeks before. Perez was the thirteenth person he had killed in four months.
He was born in Salinas on April 18, 1947, the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a coincidence he came to think deeply significant. The family moved to San Francisco when he was small and later to Felton in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and at San Lorenzo Valley High School he had many friends and was voted most likely to succeed. Shortly after he graduated in 1965 a friend, Dean Richardson, was killed in a car accident; Mullin built shrines to him in his bedroom and became obsessed with reincarnation. He earned an associate degree in civil highway technology at Cabrillo College in 1967. In 1969 he was admitted to Mendocino State Hospital, and over the next few years he went into five mental hospitals and was discharged each time as posing no danger to himself or others. By his mid-twenties he had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, worsened by LSD, and in 1972 he was twenty-five and living with his parents again in Felton.
He had come to believe that American deaths in Vietnam had served as a blood sacrifice holding back a catastrophic earthquake, and that with the war winding down he would have to supply the deaths himself. He later said his father had ordered him telepathically to kill. On October 13, 1972, he pretended to have car trouble, and when Lawrence White, a fifty-five-year-old drifter who had offered to help in exchange for a ride, bent over the engine, Mullin beat him to death with a baseball bat and dragged the body into the woods. On October 24 he picked up Mary Guilfoyle, twenty-four, a Cabrillo College student late for an appointment, stabbed her as he drove and later cut open her body to examine her organs for signs of pollution. She was not found until February. On November 2, doubting the voices, he went to confession at St. Mary's Church in Los Gatos, and there he beat, kicked and stabbed the Reverend Henri Tomei, sixty-four, to death in the confessional. He later claimed the priest had volunteered to be the next sacrifice.
By early 1973 he had given up drugs and blamed them for everything wrong in his life. On January 25 he went looking for Jim Gianera, an old high school friend he held responsible for first giving him marijuana. A neighbor, Kathy Francis, directed him to Gianera's cabin. There he demanded to know why Gianera had started him on drugs, found the answer unsatisfactory and shot him; as Gianera crawled toward the bathroom to warn his wife, Mullin broke down the door and shot Joan Gianera too. Then he went back to Kathy Francis's house and shot her and her sons, Daemon Francis, four, and David Hughes, nine, stabbing each of them after death. The police took both scenes for drug killings. Sources give the Gianeras' ages differently, as twenty-five and twenty-one or twenty-four and twenty-three.
On February 10, hiking in a state park near Santa Cruz, he came on four young campers, Robert Spector and David Oliker, both eighteen, Brian Scott Card, nineteen, and Mark Dreibelbis, fifteen. He told them he was a park ranger and that they were polluting the forest. They waved him off and stayed in their tent. The next day he came back and shot all four in the head, and took their .22 rifle and twenty dollars. The rifle was the one he used on Fred Perez three days later. His killings overlapped with Edmund Kemper's in the same county, and the two men's arrests, a few weeks apart, closed out twenty-one deaths.
Santa Cruz County charged him with ten murders, and his trial opened on July 30, 1973. He had admitted the killings, so the question was his sanity. The prosecutor, Chris Cottle, pointed to the premeditation and the tracks he had covered; the public defender, Jim Jackson, argued that the delusions made him kill. On August 19, after fourteen hours, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder for Jim Gianera and Kathy Francis, whose killings it thought planned, and second-degree murder for the eight others. He entered state prison on September 18, 1973, to serve two concurrent life terms and eight concurrent terms of five years to life. On December 11, 1973, the day his Santa Clara County trial for the Tomei killing was to begin, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and on December 21 he was given a consecutive term of five years to life. White and Guilfoyle were never charged.
For a time he and Kemper had adjoining cells. Kemper later said he threw water on Mullin to stop his singing and rewarded him with peanuts when he behaved, and described him as a man with "a lot of hate inside" aimed at strangers "because he didn't dare do anything to the people he knew." Mullin became eligible for parole in the 1980s and was refused every time. At his last hearing, in March 2021, he again admitted all thirteen killings but blamed his parents and his sister for them, and the Santa Cruz County district attorney, Jeffrey Rosell, told the board he had never shown true remorse. He died of natural causes at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton on August 18, 2022, aged seventy-five.