SLAYER OF 10 AWAITS SENTENCING: OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER, AUGUST 20, 1973

Herbert Mullin sat tight-lipped in an orange prison uniform, his ankles chained, staring straight ahead as the verdicts were read in Santa Cruz County Superior Court on Sunday, August 19, 1973. A jury of six men and six women, in its third day of deliberations, found him guilty of first-degree murder on two counts and second-degree murder on eight, and sane on all ten. Nobody in the courtroom doubted who had done the killing. His own lawyers had admitted it. The trial had been about his mind, and the jury had just answered the only question left. The Associated Press report ran the next day in Utah, in the Ogden Standard-Examiner.

The paper sets out the defense in Mullin's own terms. On the witness stand he said every killing had been a human sacrifice, meant to hold off a disastrous earthquake, and that telepathic messages from his father and others had goaded him to kill. Psychiatrists on both sides agreed he was a paranoid schizophrenic and parted only on whether he could tell right from wrong. He also admitted three deaths the jury was not asked to judge: a transient, a coed hitchhiker, and a priest in Los Gatos stabbed to death in his confessional. His attorney, James Jackson, called the verdict irrational. "If he's not mentally diminished, nobody is," he said.

The story ends with the dead, and gives most of them names. Kathy Francis, twenty-nine, was killed in her backwoods cabin near Santa Cruz with her sons, David, nine, and Daemon, four. James Gianera, a high school friend of Mullin's, was killed with his wife, Joan, in their house. Then came four boys shot in the forehead at a mountain campsite: Robert Michael Spector, eighteen, and Brian Scott Card, nineteen, of Van Nuys; David Allan Oliker, eighteen, of Sherman Oaks; and Mark Dreibelbis, fifteen, of Fleetwood, Pennsylvania. The tenth, the "elderly ex-prizefighter," goes unnamed. He was Fred Perez, seventy-two, shot in his own garden on February 13, 1973, minutes before Mullin's arrest.

This is wire copy written on the day of the verdict, not a court record, and it parts from the record at a few points. Kathy Francis's older son is recorded as David Hughes. The paper gives the Gianeras' ages as twenty-four and twenty-one; other accounts give twenty-five and twenty-one, or twenty-four and twenty-three. Its "three-week shooting spree" fits only the ten deaths on trial: Mullin killed thirteen people between October 13, 1972, and February 13, 1973. These ten verdicts became ten of his eleven murder convictions; the eleventh, for the Reverend Henri Tomei, came from a guilty plea to second-degree murder in December 1973. No charge was ever brought for Lawrence White or Mary Guilfoyle, the transient and the student of his testimony.

The Ogden Standard-Examiner printed the story on page 5A of its August 20, 1973, issue as Associated Press copy, credited "(AP)" with no staff byline. The only copyright notices anywhere in that issue belong to a syndicated cartoon page and the AP stock tables; there is none on this story or on the masthead, and in 1973 an American publication needed a notice to keep its copyright. Utah Digital Newspapers, at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, supplied the scan and rates the issue "No Copyright - United States." Its citation and rights statement appear under the scan.

Every word below was taken from the scan, and none needed an [illegible] mark. The story wraps around an advertisement, so the scan comes in two pieces, the headline with the tops of all four columns and then the foot of the first column; read the first column through before moving on to the second. The judge's definition of legal insanity is kept exactly as the paper set it, "diseased or deranged position of mind," although "condition" was almost certainly the word meant.

Transcription

Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.

Slayer of 10 Awaits Sentencing

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) — Herbert W. Mullin, convicted of murdering 10 persons in a three-week shooting spree early this year, is to be sentenced Sept. 18.

Mullin, wearing an orange prison uniform and with his ankles chained, sat tight-lipped, staring straight ahead as the verdict was read Sunday in Santa Cruz County Superior Court.

The defense had admitted that Mullin, a 26-year-old former college honor student, committed the slayings. But it sought verdicts of innocent and innocent by reason of insanity.

A six-man, six-woman jury in its third day of deliberations found Mullin guilty on two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of second-degree murder. He was judged sane on all 10 counts.

Because the defense case was based solely on Mullin's mental state, the guilt and sanity phases of the trial were held simultaneously.

TOOK STAND

Mullin, son of a retired Marine Corps sergeant from nearby Felton, was convicted of killing a young couple, a woman and her two young sons, four teen-age campers and an elderly ex-prizefighter.

Mullin took the witness stand late in the three-week trial and admitted killing three more persons—a transient, a coed hitchhiker and a Los Gatos, Calif., priest stabbed to death in his confessional.

He said all the slayings were human sacrifices aimed at preventing a disastrous earthquake. He also said telepathic messages from his father and others goaded him to kill.

Mullin, who dropped out of college despite high grades, had been in at least two mental institutions and had a long history of drug use, authorities said.

Psychiatrists who testified for both sides agreed Mullin was a paranoid schizophrenic but disagreed on whether he was capable of distinguishing right from wrong.

Judge Charles S. Franich told jurors that legal insanity required a finding of a "diseased or deranged position of mind which makes the defendant incapable of knowing the nature or quality of his acts."

Jury foreman Kenneth Springer, owner of a Felton television repair shop, said jurors "deliberated on every question."

"We took several votes on several counts," he said. "We were never further away on any count than a question mark put beside a finding on the question of sanity."

Defense attorney James Jackson said the verdict was irrational. "If he's not mentally diminished, nobody is," he said of Mullin.

"Most people think about what's going to happen to the guy if he goes to a hospital and some doctor lets him out," Jackson said. "If he went to a hospital and was never going to get out, I think we'd have a lot more insanity verdicts."

Mullin was found guilty of first-degree murder in the Jan. 25 slayings of Kathy Francis, 29, and James R. Gianera, 24.

Mrs. Francis was killed in her backwoods cabin near Santa Cruz with sons David, 9, and Daemon, 4. Gianera, a high school friend of Mullin, was killed with his wife Joan, 21, in their house here.

Mullin's next victims were four boys shot in the forehead at their mountain campsite. They were Robert Michael Spector, 18, and Brian Scott Card, 19, Van Nuys, Calif.; David Allan Oliker, 18, Sherman Oaks, Calif.; and Mark Dreibelbis, 15, of Fleetwood, Pa.

Notes: "deranged position of mind" as printed (presumably "condition"). "Defense" is letter-spaced in the scan. The story wraps round an advertisement. Column 1 runs down the page while columns 2 to 4 sit above a "WANTED" advertisement and a shoe-shop advertisement. So it is supplied as ARTICLE-CROP.jpg (the headline and the tops of all four columns; it also takes in the "WANTED" advertisement) and ARTICLE-CROP-PART-2.jpg (the foot of column 1). Read all of column 1 first, then columns 2, 3 and 4. No words were illegible.