Herbert Mullin

This acid-dropping, pot-smoking flower child was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" by his high school class. After a stint in a mental institution he started hearing voices that told him to do strange things, like burn his dick with a cigarette. Then the voices started coming from strangers asking him to put them out of their misery. Good Herb was happy to comply.

Around the same time Edmund Kemper was killing, a second serial killer roamed the area. But Herbert Mullin had a motive far different than that of any other serial killer of that time. In Mullin's view, his murders were the only way to prevent another earthquake from destroying California.

Mullin, born on April 18, 1947 (the 41st anniversary of the San Fransico earthquake of 1906) in Salinas, California. By the time he was in his twenties, he had became a moody, hostile dabbler in Eastern religions and illegal drugs. He was prone to violent outbursts. In 1969 he began immatating every movement of his brother-in-law, which terrified his parents. This behavior was known as echopraxia, and it was a strong symptom of schizophrenia.

The day after he began mimicing his brother-in-law, Mullin checked into a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as a schitzophrenic. He checked out six weeks later. By October of that year he had re-admitted himself to another mental institute, only to be re-released weeks later. In 1972, a 24 year old Mullin arrived in Santa Cruz to visit his parents. Soon, he began recieving telepathic messages from his father saying "Herb, I want you to kill me somebody." On the 13th of October, he did just that. He clubbed an old man to death on a road in the Santa Cruz mountains.

A few weeks later he stabbed a young female hitchhiker to death and left her body in the hills. On November 2, All Soulds Day, Mullin stabbed a Roman Catholic priest to death in his confessional. Around this time, he believed he'd been chosen by Albert Einstein as the "designated leader" of his generation, and his voices had changed; now they belonged to his victims, giving their permission to be killed. In January of 1973, Mullin killed 5 more to prevent the disaster from occuring. In early February, he found a tent with four teenage campers inside. he told them to leave, then shot them, and left them dead where they fell.

On February 13, while loading firewood into his car, Mullin heard the voices yet again. He then drove through Santa Cruz, shot an old man, then left. Witnesses gave a description of the car, and police had him captured within minutes. He accepted his arrest. During his trial Mullin gave rambling discussions of his earthquake theory, and a rationale of his crimes: "A rock doesn't make a decision while it's falling, it just falls." The jury decided that he was sane, and found him guilty on 10 counts of murder. He currently resides at Mule Creek State Prison in California.

After thirteen acts of mercy police arrested him. Herb believed that the deaths during the Vietnam war worked as sacrifices that kept California from sliding into the ocean during a cataclysmic earthquake. With the end of the war, Herb was telepathically told by his father to continue with the human sacrifice so to save California from the big one. And, of course, Herb did as he was told.