Herbert Mullin: The Serial Killer Who Thought His Murders Would Stop Earthquakes

April 18 is a terrible day in California history.

On April 18, 1906, an earthquake rocked San Francisco, killing 3,000 residents and leaving more than half of the survivors homeless.

And on April 18, 1947, Herbert Mullin was born.

A resident of Santa Cruz, Mullin would become obsessed with his birthdate, convinced by a schizophrenic delusion that another natural disaster would happen unless he killed people to prevent it.

Between 1972 and 1973, he made 13 "human sacrifices" to his cause before he was apprehended by police on February 13, 1973.

Some serial killers are obviously unwell from early childhood. They torture animals, like Jeffrey Dahmer did, or engage in other sadistic behavior.

But Mullin grew up well-adjusted. He was popular in high school, and voted "Most Likely to Succeed."

"He was normal looking, and his underlying disturbance was masked," Louis Schlesinger, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says.

But Schlesinger adds that Mullin's underlying disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, "manifested itself in [his] early 20s," though he "didn't show any overt signs of psychosis early on, but when it hit him, it hit him in full force."

After checking himself into California's Mendocino State Hospital at the age of 22, Mullin would spend the next several years entering and leaving mental institutions before finally turning to bloodshed in 1972.

At 25, Mullin, who was broke, moved from San Francisco back to his childhood home of Santa Cruz, where he lived with his parents. There, he began to hear voices telling him he had to kill people to prevent an earthquake from destroying California.

On October 13, 1972, he claimed his first victim: Lawrence White, a 55-year-old man whom he clubbed to death with a baseball bat. Eleven days later, he stabbed to death 24-year-old college student Mary Guilfoyle, whom he picked up when she was hitchhiking. He disemboweled her, hoping to find proof that her blood was "polluted."

On November 2, Mullin, a lifelong Catholic, went to confess his sins at St. Mary's Church in Los Gatos, but then stabbed and stomped to death the priest he was confessing to: Father Henri Tomei, whose body he left in the church confessional.

One of the most noteworthy aspects of Mullin’s killings was the lack of pattern. He killed with knife, bat and gun. He killed a young married couple, an entire family, a retired boxer and the aforementioned three.

And his killings would come in bunches: three victims in less than a month, then nothing for nearly three months, then five victims in a single day.

That's also not entirely unique within the world of serial murder, Schlesinger says, referring to this pattern of killing as "rapid sequence clusters."

"If you look at mental disorders, many of them have rapid sequence symptom expression," he says. "Some people are alcoholics, and there's a subgroup of alcoholics who are binge drinking. Some people have eating disorders; there's a subgroup that purge and binge. I'm in no way equating [these activities with serial murder], but it can be used as an exemplar to help understand."

On February 13, 1973, Mullin claimed his last victim: 72-year-old Fred Perez, whom he shot with a rifle in broad daylight as Perez tended to his yard. A neighbor recorded Mullin's license plate number as he fled the scene, and he was apprehended and arrested within minutes.

Mullin was tried and convicted for 10 murders: two counts of first-degree murder and eight counts of second-degree murder in Santa Cruz, for which he had unsuccessfully pleaded innocent by reason of LSD-induced insanity.

The murder of Tomei, the priest, was tried separately in Santa Clara County, and likewise resulted in a second-degree murder conviction.

Mullin was serving multiple life sentences when he died on August 18, 2022 at the age of 75 of natural causes while incarcerated at California Health Care Facility in Stockton, Calif.

Investigators in Santa Cruz were stymied at first by a bewildering coincidence: At the time of his killing spree, Mullin wasn't the only serial killer operating in the city of less than 150,000 inhabitants. Ed Kemper, a 6-foot-9 sexual sadist and necrophiliac, who became known as the "Co-Ed Killer," also killed eight people between 1972 and 1973.

"In the beginning, [the police] didn't know who was doing what," says Dary Matera, author of Ed Kemper: Conversations with a Killer, which details Kemper's crime spree.

It felt so extreme that District Attorney Peter Chang called Santa Cruz "Murdersville, U.S.A."

Following Kemper's apprehension, the two men were placed in neighboring cells at San Mateo County Jail, where they formed an unusual relationship.

"Kemper had a theory that it would be best for society to just kill Mullin," Matera says. "He figured he would do the world a favor, and then they would gas chamber him."

But later, the animus began to wane. When Mullin pleased him, Kemper would feed his fellow serial killer peanuts. When Mullin displeased him, he would throw water on him.

Eventually, the two men were moved into separate facilities, where Matera says there is no evidence that they stayed in touch. Kemper remains incarcerated at California Medical Facility in Vacaville, Calif.