A note on classification first. Frazier killed five people in one attack in one place on one night. That is mass murder, not serial murder, which requires separate killings with an interval between them. He is filed among serial killers because his case is bracketed in the popular memory with Edmund Kemper and Herbert Mullin, who were both killing around Santa Cruz in the same brief period and who were serial killers, and because 1970 to 1973 gave the town a reputation it has never lost.
John Linley Frazier was born in 1946 and grew up in Ohio and California. He was working as a mechanic in Santa Cruz until 1970, when he crashed his car, left his wife, moved into a six-by-six shack in the woods above Soquel, took a great deal of LSD, and began telling people that he had been chosen to save the earth from those who were destroying it.
On October 19, 1970, he walked down to the house of Dr Victor Ohta, a prominent Santa Cruz eye surgeon, on Rodeo Gulch Road. He held the household at gunpoint, tied them with coloured scarves, and shot Ohta, his wife Virginia, their sons Derrick, twelve, and Taggart, eleven, and Ohta's secretary Dorothy Cadwallader. He put the bodies in the swimming pool, set the house alight, and left a typed note under the windscreen wiper of a Rolls-Royce in the drive. It was signed with four tarot suits and declared that materialism must die and that anyone who did not put a stop to it would be killed.
He was arrested three days later, having been identified by people who had heard him talking. His defence was insanity. He was convicted in November 1971 on five counts of first degree murder and sentenced to death, and the sentence became life the following year when California's death penalty was struck down. The California press called him the Killer Prophet, after the apocalyptic notes he left and talked about.
He was denied parole repeatedly. He hanged himself in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison on August 13, 2009, aged sixty-two.