Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (28 page)

On December 16, Mullin went to a Santa Cruz auto parts dealership that also sold handguns. He picked out a .22-caliber pistol and filled out the required gun purchase application form, giving his occupation as sketch artist and checking off truthfully “No” when asked if he had any felony convictions or narcotic addictions. (Both marijuana and LSD are not considered physically addictive, and he was off them anyway.) A week later he returned for the weapon, paying $22.99 for it.

After he became seriously mentally ill, Mullin ceased to use drugs. Now he became convinced that it was precisely those drugs that were the cause of his condition. On January 25, 1973, taking his handgun with him, Mullin went to find his former high school football teammate James Gianera, who had first shared a marijuana joint with him. Mistakenly, he arrived at a neighboring house instead. Kathy Francis was at home with her two children when Mullin knocked on her door. She knew Gianera and directed Mullin to his house. According to Mullin, she also told him that she and her children wanted to be sacrificed. She was found by police on the kitchen floor stabbed in the chest and shot through the head. Her two sons were found in their bunk bed, stabbed through the back and also shot in the head. The house appeared undisturbed.

Mullin then wandered over to James Gianera’s house. After a brief conversation about old times and drug consumption, Mullin shot James dead. Gianera’s wife, Joan, who was taking a shower upstairs, was shot dead as she tried to escape. Again the house was not disturbed. Police identified the same weapon in all five murders. They also determined that the two families were jointly involved in a small-time marijuana-dealing business, and classified their deaths as drug-business related.

Mullin was a disorganized visionary serial killer. His eight killings so far were mission-driven but entirely unplanned and haphazard. No connection would appear between the beating death of the vagrant, the mutilation of the college girl, the stabbing of the priest, and the multiple shootings of the five recent victims. Each crime appeared different not only in the method but also in the apparent motive. This kind of hidden logic is what makes disorganized serial killers not only difficult to apprehend, but sometimes even difficult to notice.

On February 10, 1973, Mullin came upon four teenagers camping in Cowell State Park, about two miles away from his parents’ house. He shot all four dead, because, as he later explained, he believed they were disturbing the environment. Their bodies would not be found until a week after Mullin was already in custody.

On February 11, hunters finally discovered the remains of Mullin’s second victim, her intestines hanging in the tree branches. On February 13, Mullin set out in his station wagon. Later there would be some speculation that Mullin was obsessed with the number thirteen, and indeed his first murder was committed on November 13, and his thirteenth victim would die on February 13.

Seventy-three-year-old Fred Perez had fought as a U.S. Marine in the Boxer Rebellion in China, and during the 1920s he had been a champion middleweight fighter in California. He had four children, seven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. Around 8:00
A
.
M
. he was gardening in his front yard when Mullin stopped his car about 150 feet away. Perez’s niece and a neighbor saw Mullin lean out from his window, brace a .22-caliber rifle, and squeeze off a single shot that hit Perez in the side of the chest. Mullin then calmly drove away as the neighbor phoned the police. The wound was so small that when a police officer arrived at the scene, he assumed that Perez was having a heart attack and assured him that he would be okay. But Perez died in his garden before paramedics could arrive.

With the description of the car on air, police quickly apprehended Mullin and seized both the rifle and the handgun still in his car. Mullin refused to cooperate with the police and at his arraignment he asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. A week after his arrest, the bodies of the four teenagers were found and ballistics linked their deaths to Mullin.

It is debatable how disorganized a serial killer Mullin was. He defied the traditional definition in purchasing a weapon prior to his later homicides and bringing it with him to the scene where he committed his offenses. When arrested he steadfastly denied having committed the murders. Yet at the same time there is no evidence that Mullin planned his murders and stalked his victims. They were highly random, improvised acts of violence. Mullin would eventually be indicted for eleven murders. His lawyer, on the condition that Mullin not be charged, had to inform the police of the November murders of Lawrence White and Mary Guilfoyle. The police would not have linked them to Mullin otherwise.

Mullin was convinced that voices were directing him as the “savior of the world.” Mullin explained, “Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don’t want to do.” By killing people (causing “small disasters”), Mullin believed that he was going to prevent the great disastrous earthquake and tidal wave that threatened California. The transcript of Mullin’s police interrogation clearly shows the extent of his delusions:

MULLIN
: We human beings, through the history of the world, have protected our continents from cataclysmic earthquakes by murder. In other words, a minor natural disaster avoids a major natural disaster.

QUESTION
: But if murder is a natural disaster, then why should you be locked up for it, if it’s natural and has a good effect?

MULLIN
: Your laws. You see, the thing is, people get together, say, in the White House. People like to sing the die song, you know, people like to sing the die song. If I am president of my class when I graduate from high school, I can tell two, possibly three young male
homo sapiens
to die. I can sing that song to them and they’ll have to kill themselves or be killed—an automobile accident, a knifing, a gunshot would. You ask me why this is? And I say, well, they have to do that in order to protect the ground from an earthquake, because all of the other people in the community had been dying all year long, and my class, we have to chip in so to speak to the darkness. We have to die also. And people would rather sing the die song than murder.

QUESTION
: What is the die song?

MULLIN
: Just that. I’m telling you to die. I’m telling you to kill yourself, or be killed so that my continent will not fall off into the ocean. See, it’s all based on reincarnation, this dies to protect my strata.

Although Mullin was obviously insane, a California jury felt he was fit to stand trial—he was convicted of ten homicides (having committed thirteen). It is believed, however, that the jury deliberately chose to ignore his insanity, fearing that if he were committed to a hospital he would later be released back into the community (not an unfounded fear at the time of the Mullin case). Mullin was sentenced to life in prison.

MISSIONARIES

Missionary killers feel compelled to kill a certain type of victim whom they believe is worthy of death. Often the choice of victim is somehow influenced by the killer’s past experience or current beliefs that lead him to conclude that a certain type of person is “undesirable.” Prostitutes, homosexuals, homeless people, and members of a specific race are the most frequent candidates for missionary serial killers.

Missionary killers are highly organized, compulsively seeking out and stalking their victim type and killing them quickly. Usually no sexual offenses are associated with the crime, but there are exceptions, particularly in the murder of prostitutes. Missionary serial killers are often stable, gainfully employed, long-term residents of the geographical territory in which they kill. They are frequently intelligent and white-collar or professional workers. They usually refrain from posing or mutilating the corpse of their victim—the kill is the mission. The body is frequently found at the location of the murder, as the missionary killer has minimum contact with his victim because he is uncomfortable relating to the object of his hate in an attempt to lure the victim to another location.

Missionary serial killers sometimes team up into groups and can be arguably also classified as “cult serial killers” when they do.

 Joseph P. Franklin

A former Klansman, Joseph Franklin was convicted in 1980 of four homicides: the sniper shooting of two black men jogging with a white woman in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the shooting of a black-white couple in Madison, Wisconsin. He is believed to have committed up to fifteen murders in seven states between 1977 and 1980—in one double homicide of a mixed-race couple, he was released after being arrested because of a lack of evidence. His victims were either blacks or interracial couples. He apparently killed one woman he picked up hitchhiking when she told him she had dated a Jamaican. Franklin stated, “Race-mixing is a sin against God and nature . . . I feel it is my duty as a servant of God to protect white womanhood from injury or degradation.”

 “The Zebra Killers”

The Zebra Killers, who were named for the interracial nature of their crimes, consisted of five black offenders who murdered fifteen white men, women, and youths in 1973 and 1974 in San Francisco over a span of 170 days. They belonged to an inner cult within the Elijah Mohammad’s Nation of Islam movement called the “Death Angels.” It was never ascertained how high in the movement approval and complicity in the Death Angels went. Membership, or “wings,” in the Death Angels was open to anyone who killed (“stung”) at least nine white men, five white women, or four white children. Once a member committed the required number of homicides, the member’s photograph was posted on a bulletin board at Nation of Islam centers with a pair of wings drawn in extending from his back. In October 1973 there were apparently fifteen Death Angels in the California chapter of the Nation of Islam.
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The five new aspiring members of the cult patrolled in groups of two or three and killed their victims randomly at bus stops, in telephone booths, at a late-night laundry, or on the street. The men were “killing grafted snakes for Allah—blue-eyed devils.” Although they were supposed to only kill, they robbed or raped their victims on several occasions, which was against the rules of the cult. Most victims were shot dead, some were stabbed and hacked, and a few victims were kidnapped and tortured. While the earlier Death Angel murders were discreet, the new batch were blatant and committed with the same weapon, allowing the police to quickly link the murders together and alarming the city of San Francisco.

One of the aspiring Angels allegedly flew to Chicago, where the Nation of Islam was headquartered, and demanded an early promotion into the Death Angels. Upon being rebuffed he intensified the killing spree. When a senior, yet unidentified member of the movement came to California and attempted to defuse the killings by agreeing to promote the aspirants into the Angels without their fully qualifying in the number of kills, it became his turn to be rebuffed. He was told by one of them that they would not be comfortable with other Death Angels, not having themselves equaled in the number of kills. They continued in the killing campaign.

In May 1974, one of the five aspiring Angels fell out with the group and turned state’s evidence, implicating a number of fellow cult members. Only four men—Jesse Cook, Larry Greene, Manuel Moore, and J. C. Simon—were indicted, and it turned out that two of them had no criminal record previously. After what was at that time California’s longest trial, running more than a year, the four were sentenced to life in prison. It is believed that the Death Angels in California might have murdered as many as 135 men, 75 women, and 60 children, all of them white, but there was not sufficient evidence to charge the remaining fifteen to twenty people implicated in the cult.
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