Herbert William Mullin was born in Salinas on April 18, 1947, and was voted most likely to succeed at his high school. After a close friend died in a car crash in 1965 he built a shrine to him and began to deteriorate, and by 1969 he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was admitted voluntarily to psychiatric hospitals five times between 1969 and 1972 and released each time, in a period when California was closing its state hospitals under the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act and community provision to replace them did not exist.
He came to believe that his father was telepathically instructing him, and that the great earthquake overdue on the San Andreas fault could be held off if a certain number of people died first. He counted the days.
He killed thirteen people between October 1972 and February 1973: a homeless man on a road near Santa Cruz, a student he picked up hitchhiking, a priest in a confessional at Los Gatos, a man he had once bought drugs from along with the man's wife and two young sons, four teenage boys camping in a state park, and finally an elderly man working in his garden, which is what caught him, because a neighbour took his registration.
The dead were Lawrence White, fifty-five; Mary Guilfoyle, twenty-four; the Reverend Henri Tomei, sixty-four; James Gianera, twenty-four, and Joan Gianera, twenty-three; Kathleen Prentiss, also known as Kathy Francis, thirty, and her sons David Hughes, nine, and Daemon Francis, four; and Robert Spector and David Oliker, both eighteen.
He was tried in Santa Cruz in 1973 in a county that was simultaneously prosecuting Edmund Kemper. The jury rejected insanity, convicting him in August 1973 of two counts of first degree and eight of second degree murder. He was denied parole repeatedly and died in prison on August 18, 2022, aged seventy-five. His case is cited constantly in the American argument about deinstitutionalisation, because he asked for help, got it, and was let out.