Further reading for Herbet Mullin
Deadly Voices: The True Story of Serial Killer Herbert Mullin by CL Swinney
The Die Song: A Journey into the Mind of a Mass Murderer by Donalt T. Lunde and Jefferson Morgan
Herbert Mullin is the name that comes to mind when people think of the unhinged serial killer. A raving mad man brutally dispatching his victims and mutilating their remains for elaborate motives understood only by the killer. In the early 1970’s, at the exact same time that Bumblebutt Ed Kemper was decapitating coeds in Santa Cruz, California, Herbert Mullin killed 13 men, women, and children in a rampage that lasted four gory months. Why did he do this? Mullin suffered from acute schizophrenia and had established an elaborate delusion in his mind that, in order to avert a natural disaster that would leave California utterly devastated, he would have to satisfy God’s thirst for blood by murdering people that the voices of his schizophrenia had identified as sacrifices.
There is debate that Mullin may not have been as crazy as he portrayed himself to be. Where a similarly brutal murderer, propelled by schizophrenia, Richard Chase, was the textbook disorganized killer, leaving behind massive evidence of his involvement. Mullin was an organized killer who often took steps to conceal his involvement. Chase killed because he wanted the blood to replace his own, which he thought was turning to dust. The right and wrong of his crimes never came under consideration. Mullin, on the other hand, knew that what he had done was criminal. After his arrest, he insisted that he had to conceal his crimes in order to keep killing because if he were to be arrested, California would be doomed. Ultimately, Mullin was, in fact, quite sick.
A body count of 13 in such a short amount of time is staggering in the serial killer world but because of his victimology, killing purely out of convenience, having no preference that serial murderers typically have, and using a broad range of methods, the same trick that kept Henry Lee Lucas on the run for as long as he was, not to mention an entirely different serial killer on the loose at the same time, Mullin was able to tear his way through the community in such a short amount of time. Ultimately, Mullin’s casually homicidal nature caught up to him and he committed a murder in broad daylight, with witnesses and was arrested shortly after.
