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Eskew Roberts
ENG 101-013
Dr. Cooke
10/29/15
Serial Killer Herbert Mullin
Original genre: standard journalism
Rewrite genre: Sensationalism
Paranoid schizophrenia is a mental illness in which the victim loses touch with reality.
This can be presented to the victim in many ways including hallucinations, hearing voices,
perceptional disturbances, and unnatural urges. Nowadays, detection and treatment this mental
illness can be managed through therapy or mental hospitalization, depending on the severity.
However, before modern medicine advanced to this point, those who had this illness were at the
whim of their urges, the lack of attention given by health officials, and the cold cruel world. For
example, take the story of Herbert Mullin, in whom paranoid schizophrenia started to manifest
soon after high school, and never got the proper treatment or attention he needed after dropping
out of college.
Herbert William Mullen was a normal guy on the surface. Born in Salinas, California,
and raised in Santa Cruz, Herbert was an extremely popular high school student. He was well
liked by his teachers, respected by his friends, and his classmates even voted him “most likely to
succeed”. Little did his peers know that Mullen was beginning to show signs of paranoid
schizophrenia and would commit the crime of which sheriff investigator Terry Medina would
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describe as, “…very unusual. We never had anything like it in Santa Cruz County before, and I
hope to God we never have anything like this again…”
In September of 1972, San Lorenzo Valley High School’s class of 1965’s “most likely to
succeed”, moved back in with his parents feeling like he failed at life. A mere month later, Terry
Medina was called to the scene of a nasty murder on the side of a winding mountain road. There,
was the body of an old man beaten to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Lawrence White, a beloved
local with no enemies, was found with his skull bashed in and blood all over the side of the road.
A week and a half later, Mary Guilfoyle, a student of Cabrillo College, was missing. Later, her
bloody, unrecognizable, dissected remains were found on a hillside. A week after that, a catholic
priest, Father Henry Tomei, was found with stab wounds bleeding to a horrific death. His dying
words were asking for forgiveness for the killer who he never named. Santa Cruz had a serial
killer on the loose.
After this small rampage, Muller moved out of his parent’s house and bought a gun. For a
brief moment of sanity, he wondered when had his life taken such a bad turn. He concluded that
his old friend, Jim Gianera, the buddy who first gave him marijuana, was the cause of all of his
problems. He went to Gianera’s old house and Kathy Francis, the new occupant, told him where
James was. Muller went to Jim’s new house and shot both Jim and his wife. Muller then went to
the corpses and started stabbing them repeatedly. In his rage, he traveled back to Kathy Francis’s
house and shot her, and her two sons. Yet, despite the bloody carnage he left at these two homes,
his most horrendous, heart-wrenching, and despicable murders were yet to come.
About a month later, in early February, Terry Medina was at the site of the latest in a
string of murders that was committed in Santa Cruz County. Four teenage boys were on a
camping trip and their tent was still up in the woods. Sheriff Medina walked into the tent and
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observed the brutal efficiency the boys were killed. Each of the four boys had a gunshot wound
to the head. Blood and brains were everywhere, and the killer was unknown.
Muller was finally caught after his 13th murder. On February 13, exactly 4 months after
his first murder, he drove by and shot Fred Perez in the middle of the day in a quiet
neighborhood. Terry Medina was finally able to capture the murderer who has escaped him and
terrorized Santa Cruz for the last four months.
When finally captured, Muller told the detectives that he saved California. While Muller
was living in San Francisco, Muller said that he had a revelation. Muller was born on April 18th,
the anniversary of the great 1906 earthquake, a point that the thought was extremely significant.
He began looking at demographics while he was in this rundown apartment and, he noticed that
as soon as the death rate began to fall below a certain point, a natural disaster would happen. He
then heard voices that told him that people will have to die in order to keep the disasters at bay.
In September of ‘72, he heard that an earthquake was predicted to hit California and knew that
people must be sacrificed to save others. However, according to him, all of his victims told him
telepathically that they are ready to be sacrificed for the greater good. When captured, he seemed
proud of the fact that the reason there hasn’t been any earthquakes in recent times, and claimed
that it was due to his handiwork.
In his trial, his attorney used the defense of insanity, and they did mention he was a
diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. It saved him from execution, but he is currently serving a life
sentence and won’t be eligible for parole until 2021 at the age of 73. Hopefully, he is getting the
treatment he needs there. May this story be a testament and a warning. Those who are diagnosed
with this illness shouldn’t be shrugged off or walked over. It’s a serious illness that needs proper
treatment, less another Herbert Mullin should appear in this cold, cruel, world.
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Works cited
Watts, Vernetta, Virginia Douglas, Doreen DeWitt, Erin Walker, Kelly Thompson, Adam
VanZandburgen, John Stacy, and Benji Soberano. "Herbert Mullen." Serial Killer
TImeline. Radford University, n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
<http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/Mullin,%20Herbert.htm>
.
Morrow, Jason Lucky. "Serial Killer Herbert Mullin." Mug Shot Monday! HIstorical Crime
Detective. N.p., 12 Oct. 2015. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
<http://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/msm-serial-killer-herbert-mullin/>.
"Herbert Mullen." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Oct. 2015. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Mullin>.
"Paranoid Schizophrenia." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Oct. 2015. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_schizophrenia>.