Herbert Mullin was convicted of 11 murders, and admitted two more that were never charged, committed in Santa Cruz County and nearby Los Gatos in a little over four months, from October 13, 1972, to February 13, 1973. His victims ranged from a 4-year-old boy to a retired fisherman in his seventies. Among them were a homeless man, a college student, a Catholic priest hearing confessions, a former classmate and his wife, a mother and her two sons, and four young men camping in a state park. He was 25 and lived in Felton, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, when the killings began, according to KRON4.
Mullin had a long history of mental illness. He later told authorities that voices had ordered him to kill to save California from catastrophic earthquakes. He was arrested minutes after the last killing, when a neighbor of the victim noticed his station wagon. At his trial in Santa Cruz in 1973, his lawyer argued that he was insane. The jury convicted him of ten murders, two in the first degree and eight in the second. He then pleaded guilty in Santa Clara County to the murder of the priest. Two killings he admitted were never charged. He was refused parole many times and died in state custody in August 2022, aged 75.
His crimes overlapped in time and place with those of Edmund Kemper, who was killing young women in the same county in the same months. The two men acted independently of each other. Together their cases, coming soon after the 1970 killings by John Linley Frazier, gave Santa Cruz a label that its residents resented for years: "the Murder Capital of the World."
Herbert William Mullin was born on April 18, 1947, in Salinas, California, KION reported. The date was the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a coincidence he reportedly found significant.
He spent his adolescence and early adulthood in the San Lorenzo Valley of Santa Cruz County, the historian Geoffrey Dunn wrote in Good Times in 2022. He graduated from San Lorenzo Valley High School, the Press Banner noted in 2011. The Santa Cruz Sentinel described him as a one-time honor student, according to a 2022 Cox Media Group account that drew on the Sentinel's archives.
By the time of the killings his life had gone badly wrong. The Sentinel reported that his mental illness was made worse by his use of LSD and by the death of a close friend. A 1993 story cited by The Pajaronian in 2021 said he had been in and out of mental institutions five times before his conviction. At trial his defense said he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Sentinel reported that he had been hearing voices for weeks before he began to kill.
In custody he would describe a belief system built around those voices. He said they told him that killing was needed to protect California from earthquakes. He said that some of his victims had been killed on the voices' orders, and he spoke of a plot he called "kill joy sadism," designed, he said, to ruin his life. He also said he had been denied maturity and never taught society's "pecking order." Prosecutors and a jury would later decide that, whatever his illness, he understood what he was doing.
The first killing came on October 13, 1972. Lawrence White was 55 and homeless. According to the Cox account, Mullin pretended to have engine trouble by the side of a road, and when White came near he beat him to death with a baseball bat. He hid the body in nearby woods.
Mullin was never charged with White's death. Prosecutors said later that he had committed two murders that were never brought to trial, and news accounts name White as one of them. Little else about White's life was reported.
Mary Margaret Guilfoyle was 24 and a student at Cabrillo College. On October 24, 1972, she left the campus hitchhiking and was not seen again. Her family was worried enough by late November to hire a private investigator, the Sentinel reported on November 26, 1972. Reports cited in the Cox account said she had been stabbed. Her skeletal remains were found the following February near Bonny Doon.
Like White, she was among the victims Mullin admitted killing but was never tried for.
On November 2, 1972, All Souls' Day, a man came to St. Mary's Catholic Church in Los Gatos, in Santa Clara County, and asked for a priest to hear his confession. The Rev. Henri Tomei went into the church to hear it. Mullin beat him and stabbed him in the confessional, and he died there. A church secretary scared Mullin off, the Cox account says. The Sentinel later reported that his fingerprints were found in the confessional.
Father Tomei had come to California from France. A history published by St. Mary's parish says he was born in Marseilles and ordained there in 1933, and that he spent about 30 years as a priest in that city, where he directed the cathedral choir and its boys' choir, which toured Europe. According to the parish, he served as a hospital corpsman during the Second World War, ran an orphanage, and after the war set up two more for children who had lost their parents. He was an organist, pianist and composer, and wrote a song, "Virgin of Peace," after a bombardment of Marseilles. The parish says he came to the United States in 1962, was assigned first to Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Redwood City, and was moved to Los Gatos in 1964. It remembers him as a gentle and witty man whose former choir boys visited him as adults, and it built a shrine in his memory where the confessional had stood.
The day after his death KPIX-TV filmed at the church. A priest, possibly the Rev. Richard Howley, spoke about Father Tomei's character and vocation and urged the killer to give himself up, according to the station's archived newsfilm record.
At trial Mullin said a voice had told him to kill the priest. Father Tomei's death was the only one charged in Santa Clara County.
Mullin's next killings came on January 25, 1973. That day he went looking for Jim Gianera, a former classmate. James Ralph Gianera was 24, according to the Cox account; Emerson Murray, whose father was Gianera's roommate and close friend, gave his age as 25 in a 2024 article for Lookout Santa Cruz.
Testimony at the trial showed that Mullin first went to the cabin of Kathy Francis, near the Mystery Spot tourist attraction outside Santa Cruz, asking for Gianera. He then went on, found Gianera at home, and shot him and his wife, Joan, who was 21. Mullin told a defense psychiatrist that he had killed Joan Gianera because "she was a witness" and he did not want to be punished. The couple left a daughter who was 16 months old.
Mullin then returned to the Francis cabin. Kathy Francis was 29 and a friend of the Gianeras. He killed her and her two sons, David Hughes, 9, and Daemon Francis, 4. Prosecutors argued that he killed her because she knew he had been looking for Gianera that day, and that he went back to remove the witnesses. The Sentinel reported the Gianera and Francis killings the next day.
At trial Mullin claimed that the Gianeras had been part of the "kill joy sadism" plot against him. Prosecutors pointed to these killings in particular, and the planning and covering of tracks around them, as proof that he knew what he was doing.
Sixteen days after the Gianera killings, according to the Cox account, Mullin was hiking in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Felton when he came on four young men camping. They were Brian Scott Card, 19; David Oliker, 18; Robert Spector, 18; and Mark Dreibelbis, 15. Mullin told them he was a park ranger, said they were camping illegally and ordered them to leave. They refused. He came back later and shot all four of them.
Brian Card's brother found the four bodies near their tent on February 17, 1973, after Mullin's arrest, the Cox account says, and the Sentinel reported the killings the next day. KPIX filmed Santa Cruz County Sheriff Doug James at a press conference and the removal of the bodies from the park. Even though Mullin was already in custody and charged with multiple murders, the KPIX reporter Christopher Chow warned viewers that "a killer may still be at large." Mullin later said he believed the young men had "wanted to die as sacrifices to save the planet."
Fred Abbie Perez was 72. He came from a family that, according to the Cox account, founded one of the area's oldest fishing businesses in 1863, and he had been a fisherman. In his youth he had boxed under the name Freddie Bell and become middleweight champion of Central California. Dunn, writing about a family friend, called him a "beloved working-class Santa Cruz icon."
On February 13, 1973, Perez was working in his yard in Santa Cruz when he was shot with a .22 rifle. A neighbor saw a station wagon leaving just after the shot. Dunn writes that the witness was his aunt, Joan Stagnaro, who noticed an "STP" sticker on the car's bumper, and that her account was later given in depositions and in court.
Minutes after the shooting a Santa Cruz patrol officer spotted the wagon and stopped Mullin before he could leave town. Officers took a rifle and a .22-caliber handgun from the car, and ballistics tests later linked him to several of the killings.
For police, the arrest connected cases that had seemed unrelated. Over the following days KPIX covered the Henry Cowell discovery, the murder charges against Mullin, and the separate discovery of young women's bodies in the area. On February 20, 1973, the Santa Cruz County district attorney, Peter Chang, was asked on camera about the run of killings in his county. He said the community's way of life seemed to be changing radically and might be under threat. Chang later described Mullin as a "psychopathic killer" who had known many of his victims before he killed them, KRON4 reported.
Dunn writes that Chang, picking up on a question from a San Francisco reporter, called Santa Cruz "the Murder Capital of the World." The phrase spread around the world, into Time magazine among other places, and stayed with the community for years.
The weeks around Mullin's arrest were also the weeks of Edmund Kemper's crimes. On February 20, 1973, the same KPIX report that covered the Mullin charges also covered the discovery of the remains of two college students, Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe, near Castro Valley. Kemper, a man convicted in 1964 of killing his grandparents, had killed them. He went on to kill his mother and her friend, and turned himself in at Pueblo, Colorado, about two months after Fred Perez was shot, Dunn writes. Kemper was tried in October 1973.
Dunn counts 21 killings by Mullin and Kemper together in Santa Cruz County by the spring of 1973. The Cox account describes the two men as having operated at the same time "completely independent of one another." After his arrest, Kemper was held in the cell next to Mullin's.
James Jackson, the court-appointed defense lawyer, had represented John Linley Frazier, the man convicted of the 1970 killings of the Ohta family and Dorothy Cadwallader. KPIX interviewed Jackson outside court on March 1, 1973, in a report the station titled "Herbert Mullin Plea Rejected." The footage shows Mullin being led away from court in orange jail overalls.
Ten murders were charged in Santa Cruz County: the Gianeras, Kathy Francis and her two sons, the four campers, and Fred Perez. The Tomei killing was left to Santa Clara County. White and Guilfoyle were not charged.
KPIX filmed jury selection for the trial in Santa Cruz on July 9, 1973, showing Mullin, dressed in a suit and wearing leg shackles, being led in and out of the courtroom.
Mullin had admitted the killings, so the trial turned on his state of mind. Jackson told the jury that his client was insane. "He is stark raving mad," he said, according to the Sentinel. He argued that paranoid delusions had driven Mullin to kill and that he should not be held criminally responsible, and that some victims had been killed on the orders of the voices.
The prosecution argued that Mullin's illness had not left him unable to understand what he was doing. It pointed to premeditation and to the way he had covered his tracks, especially around the Gianera killings, as evidence that he was legally sane.
The jury agreed with the prosecution. It found Mullin guilty of the ten Santa Cruz County murders. According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the convictions were two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of second-degree murder. The reports do not say which two killings the jury found to be first-degree murder, how long it deliberated, or the date of the verdict.
On September 18, 1973, Mullin was admitted to state prison from Santa Cruz County to serve two concurrent terms of life with the possibility of parole for the first-degree counts and eight concurrent terms of five years to life for the second-degree counts.
Santa Clara County still had the case of Father Tomei. Mullin pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in his death. On December 21, 1973, he was sentenced in Santa Clara County to five years to life, to run consecutively to the Santa Cruz terms, according to the CDCR.
That brought his convictions to 11. The deaths of Lawrence White and Mary Guilfoyle, which he admitted, were never charged. The Santa Cruz County District Attorney's Office has described them as two murders for which he was never prosecuted.
Mullin's life terms carried the possibility of parole. He first became eligible in the 1980s, and parole boards turned him down again and again, the Cox account says.
On February 17, 2011, the Board of Prison Terms heard his case at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione. He was 63, and according to the district attorney's office he still partly blamed others for the killings. District Attorney Bob Lee argued that he should never be released. "It is clear that Mr. Mullin is incapable of morally and intellectually taking responsibility for these crimes," Lee said, as quoted by the Press Banner. The board denied parole and set his next hearing ten years away, in 2021.
That hearing came on March 18, 2021, held virtually before the California Board of Parole Hearings. Mullin, 74, was still at Mule Creek, The Pajaronian reported. District Attorney Jeff Rosell represented Santa Cruz County and argued against release because of the number and nature of the crimes and the risk Mullin would pose. Rosell's office said that Mullin admitted killing 13 people but again blamed his upbringing and others for what he had done. "Mr. Mullin continues to blame others for his actions," Rosell said. "He lacks insight and shows no true remorse for these brutal murders." He said Mullin continued to pose as high a risk to the community as he had in 1972 and 1973. The board denied parole for seven years. He would not have been eligible again until 2028.
Emerson Murray grew up with Mullin as a figure of fear. His father had been Jim Gianera's roommate and close friend, and as boys he and his brother were told stories about Mullin. "Logically, we knew he was in prison, but he was still like the boogeyman to us," he told Good Times. Murray went on to compile a large oral history of the Frazier, Mullin and Kemper cases, drawing on interviews, depositions, police reports and letters.
He attended the March 2021 parole hearing and, in December 2021, visited Mullin at Mule Creek, about eight months before his death. In a 2024 article for Lookout Santa Cruz he described finding a "confused, tiny shadow of a person," and wrote that after a lifetime of being afraid of him, the visit took that fear away. The two had written to each other.
At the end of his life Mullin was held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, a prison for patients with long-term medical needs or acute mental health conditions, according to KRON4.
Herbert Mullin died at the California Health Care Facility at 7:35 p.m. on August 18, 2022. He was 75. The CDCR announced the next day that he had died of natural causes and that the San Joaquin County medical examiner would determine the cause of death. He had been in state prison since September 18, 1973.
News coverage of his death reported his crimes in terms set by the prosecutors: 13 killings admitted, 11 convictions, and two murders never charged. The Associated Press, citing the Santa Cruz County District Attorney's Office, gave his victims' ages as 4 to 73.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Jim Gianera, Joan Gianera, Kathy Francis, David Hughes, Daemon Francis, Brian Scott Card, David Oliker, Robert Spector, Mark Dreibelbis and Fred Perez (Santa Cruz County, jury verdict, two first-degree and eight second-degree counts); the murder of the Rev. Henri Tomei (Santa Clara County, guilty plea to second-degree murder).
Admitted but never tried: the deaths of Lawrence White and Mary Guilfoyle. Prosecutors have consistently described them as murders he committed but for which he was never charged; no court has ruled on them.
Details that vary between sources:
Fred Perez's age and the oldest victim's age: 72 in the Cox account, Good Times and KION; the district attorney's office and AP give the oldest victim as 73.
Jim Gianera's age: 24 in the Cox account, 25 in Emerson Murray's Lookout article.
Father Tomei's age and birth year: 64 in the Cox account; KPIX's archive record gives a birth year of 1905; the St. Mary's parish history gives 1908.
The number of times Mullin was committed before 1973: The Pajaronian's 2021 reference to a 1993 story gives five; other reports give no figure.
Which two counts were first-degree: not reported.
April 18, 1947: Herbert William Mullin is born in Salinas, California.
Youth: grows up in the San Lorenzo Valley; graduates from San Lorenzo Valley High School.
Before 1973: in and out of mental institutions, reportedly five times.
October 13, 1972: Lawrence White, 55, is killed by a roadside.
October 24, 1972: Mary Guilfoyle, 24, a Cabrillo College student, disappears after hitchhiking from campus.
November 2, 1972: the Rev. Henri Tomei is killed in the confessional at St. Mary's Church, Los Gatos.
January 25, 1973: Jim and Joan Gianera, Kathy Francis and her sons David Hughes and Daemon Francis are killed.
February 1973: four young campers are killed in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park; Mary Guilfoyle's remains are found near Bonny Doon.
February 13, 1973: Fred Perez is shot in his yard; Mullin is arrested minutes later.
February 17, 1973: the campers' bodies are found.
February 19 and 20, 1973: KPIX reports on the murder charges and on District Attorney Peter Chang's response.
March 1, 1973: pretrial hearing; KPIX interviews defense lawyer James Jackson.
April 1973: Edmund Kemper surrenders in Pueblo, Colorado.
July 1973: jury selection begins in Santa Cruz.
1973: jury convicts Mullin of two first-degree and eight second-degree murders.
September 18, 1973: admitted to state prison from Santa Cruz County.
December 21, 1973: sentenced in Santa Clara County to a consecutive term of five years to life for the second-degree murder of Father Tomei.
1980s onward: repeatedly denied parole.
February 17, 2011: denied parole at Mule Creek State Prison; next hearing set for 2021.
March 18, 2021: denied parole for seven years.
December 2021: visited at Mule Creek by Emerson Murray.
August 18, 2022: dies of natural causes at the California Health Care Facility, Stockton, aged 75.