Editing Herbert Mullin

'''Herbert Mullen''' was an American serial killer and spree killer arrested for thirteen murders in California attributed to drug-induced and trauma-originating paranoid schizophrenia.

== History ==
Mullen was born in April 18, 1947 in Salinas, California. His family moved to a farming area near San Francisco shortly before Mullen turned five. His father gave him a strict upbringing, and Martin William "Bill" Mullen taught his young son Herbert how to properly use guns and told him about his time serving in World War II, Bill working in furniture sales at the time. When the family moved to Felton in Santa Cruz County, Mullen attended San Lorenzo Valley High School. In those years of his life, Mullen suffered from his earliest signs of paranoid schizophrenia. But he had a celebrated experience in high school, with plenty friends, a girlfriend, a history in varsity football, and a successful vote of "Most Likely to Succeed" in his graduating class.


Mullen's life took a nosedive shortly after he graduated, when a car crash killed his best friend Dean Richardson in June 1975. The unbearable grief Mullen never got over led him to built shrines for Dean he'd spend much of his daily time with. He became fixated with a paranoid delusion that Dean's death had a grander, cosmic explanation to cope. But Mullen took it further and followed research on reincarnation, turning his major from Engineering toward Philosophy and studying Eastern Religions independently.


Assuming he was gay, Mullen broke off his relationship with his girlfriend in 1968. Mullen consented to a mental hospital commitment by his family, moving in and out of five hospitals for years and each discharge being deemed harmless. Mullen drifted through California between numerous small jobs, even once fighting as a boxer, but was once pulled out of the ring the moment he refused to stop beating his opponent during one match. Mullen had conflicting sociopolitical beliefs, being significantly conservative and attempting to become a priest, but also practicing yoga, meditation, macrobiotic diets, and use of LSD, marijuana, and amphetamine, the first two he supported legalization of. He alleged himself "bi-everything" by describing himself as bisexual, (inaccurately) biracial, bipolitical, bicultural, and bispiritual.


Mullen lost his apartment due to screaming and slamming the floor when he was alone but acted like he was with other people. He tried applying for the U.S. Marine Corps and Coast Guard. He passed physical and psychiatric exams for the marines, but he was rejected because of his arrest and behavioral records. The Coast Guard rejected him at the psychiatric exam, and Mullen's paranoia, which had amplified at that point from both his mental illness and drug use, made him blame the rejections as an alleged "conspiracy" that "provoked" him toward his crimes. Mullen's mentality shifted to the belief that human sacrifice prevented mass casualties from disasters, which was only amplified by his perspective on the Vietnam War and his birthday being the anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.

== Criminal history ==
When Mullen moved back to Felton, and as the Vietnam war was drawing to a close, Mullen believed he needed to kill people to sacrifice to nature, as he believed his father telepathically communicated while Mullen was still unhinged. Mullen also would burn himself with cigarettes under his paranoia. On October 13, 1972, Mullen met a 55-year-old homeless man named Lawrence White, a.k.a. "Whitey". Mullen hallucinated Whitey was Jonah telling him "Hey, man, pick me up and throw me over the boat. Kill me so that others will be saved." Mullen pulled over and lied his car was having trouble, popping the hood to ask Whitey for help. Whitey agreed in exchange for a ride. Mullen beat his head in with a baseball bat, dragged him dead into the woods, and left him to be found the next day.

Mullen alleged his father "communicated" a need to "test" the likelihood of an earthquake by killing someone else and measuring how polluted the environment was. On October 24, he found Mary Margaret Guilfoyle, age 24, who he picked up on a highway while she was hitchhiking. While driving, Mullen stabbed her chest, then took her outside and cut her open after she died. He examined her organs and hung them on tree branches to look for "pollutants". Her decomposed remains were found months later.

With Mullen doubting his own hallucinations, he went on November 2, All Souls' Day, to confessional at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Los Gatos, meeting 65-year-old Father Henri Tomei, who was also a veteran of the French Resistance and the Archdiocese of Marseille' former music director. Hallucinating Father Tomei telling Mullen he wanted to be killed next for a sacrifice, Mullen beat and stabbed Father Tomei in the booth and left him to die before fleeing. A parishioner witnessed Mullen's escape, but Mullen's described appearance didn't go far. This was when Mullen tried to join the Corps, believing he had a license to kill in the military. When he was refused, he stopped using drugs, but that didn't stop his killings.

Instead, Mullen remembered his old classmate and football teammate Jim Ralph Gianera gave him his first taste of marijuana, so Mullen decided to get revenge. On Januay 25, 1975, Mullen went to the last address he knew Jim stayed at, a cabin near Santa Cruz's Mystery Spot attraction. A family, the Francises, mother Kathy age 29, youngest son Daemon age 4, and oldest son David Hughes age 9, were residing there, and Kathy clarified Jim lived down the road. When Mullen found the house, Jim was there with his wife Joan. Mullen, not getting answers he wanted when asking Jim why he "ruined his life", ended up shooting the both of them in their heads with a revolver before stabbing them repeatedly after they died. Jim had tried to get to his wife to get her to lock her door, but Mullen had failed. As Mullen said he hallucinated Kathy and her sons alleging they "wanted to be blood sacrifices", and to eliminate them as witnesses as popularly theorized, Mullen returned to the cabin and shot all three Francis family members dead with the same revolver, stabbing them all after they were dead as well. Police assumed the killings were drug murders, because of Jim's history and Kathy's husband Bob dealing drugs, so Mullen wasn't a suspect and his crimes weren't connected. Generally, because the people he killed and the means he murdered by were dissimilar, and because serial killer [[Edmund Kemper]] was active in the same area, he wouldn't be connected for the entire span of his four-month spree.

On February 10, Mullen went through the Santa Cruz Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and saw four teenagers setting up a legally unapproved campsite. Robert Spector and David Oliker were 18, Brian Scott Card was 19, and Mark Dreibelbeis was 15. Mullen pretended to be a park ranger and tried to make the kids leave when accusing them of "polluting" the forest, but they paid no mind and stayed at the site. Mullen's schizophrenia-afflicted mind processed they all "telepathically communicated" they "gave permission" to be murdered. Mullen arrived the next day with his revolver and shot all four men and boys dead and stole their rifle and twenty bucks.

On February 13, while driving firewood in his station wagon, Mullen passed retired prizefighter and fishmonger Fred Abbie Perez, aged 72, while he worked in his garden. Mullen turned his car around and, with a neighbor as a witness, shot Perez in his heart with the rifle aimed over the hood before driving off. The neighbor got Mullen's license plate and called the police, a patrolman arresting Mullen with a "docile" surrender three minutes after the description of Mullen and the car was on the police scanner. When Kemper was arrested and the two killers shared adjoining cells, Kemper lambasted Mullen for allegedly using the same sites to leave murder victims. As remaining victims came to be found, Mullen's charges continued to mount. He didn't cooperate and shouted "Silence!" at every question.

Mullen's trial began on July 30, charged with ten of the thirteen murders he committed. Mullen's legal sanity was evaluated during the first phase of the trial, and he was deemed competent due to his premeditation and crime scene cleanup. Mullen's charges were a mixture of murder in the first, or of premeditation, and second, or on impulse. On August 19, Mullen was convicted, on premeditation for killing Kathy and Jim, and for impulse on murdering eight more people. Mullen was to be tried on December 11 for killing Father Tomei on murder one charges, where Mullen previously pleaded insanity, but he pleaded guilty that very day to murder two.

Mullen confessed that his crimes were intended to "save the environment", leading to his diagnosis of paranoid-type schizophrenic reaction. Mullen was sentenced to life and repeatedly denied parole. Kemper was with Mullen in the same prison, where they once had adjacent cells, and they interacted. Kemper was abusive to Mullen often, conditioning him to not sing by splashing him with water to make him stop and feeding him peanuts when he complied. Kemper felt his own way of connection to Mullen, but was in denial that he killed out of insanity and believed abuse was his motive, like it was with Kemper. Mullen died naturally at age 75 on August 18, 2022.