American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, “the Tool Box Killers,” met in prison and, with nothing to do, constructed a mutual fantasy to murder seven teenage girls, one of every age from thirteen to nineteen. Upon release they acquired a van with a sliding door on the side through which they could easily snatch up a victim in a parking lot or street. They nicknamed their van “Murder Mac” and installed a bed into it and outfitted it with a “toolbox” full of torture implements like pliers, ice picks and ball-peen hammers. In 1979, they lured five teenage girls into their van from beachside parking lots and shopping malls, brutally torturing them with the tools and raping and killing them while recording audio that eventually ended up being played in court during their trial.

  Gerald Gallego and Charlene Gallego, “the Sex Slave Killers,” a husband-and-wife team, murdered nine teenage girls in Sacramento from 1978 to 1980. (A tenth victim was a male date of one of their female victims.) Charlene afterward claimed to be an “abused spouse” forced into the murders and testified against her husband. The jury bought into her story even though at one point she nearly shot her husband dead in a rage when he began raping a victim in the back of their van while she was driving without waiting for her to join in. Gerald was sentenced to death while Charlene received a reduced sentence and was released in 1997, commenting, “There were victims who died, and there were victims who lived. It’s taken me a hell of a long time to realize that I’m one of the ones who lived.”31 Coming from a wealthy family, Charlene returned to Sacramento, where for the last twenty years she has been doing “charity work.”

  Joseph James DeAngelo, “the Golden State Killer,” a disgraced police officer, would begin in 1975 his series of thirteen murders and over fifty rapes in various regions of California. He wouldn’t be identified and apprehended until 2018.

  John Linley Frazier, “The Environmentalist Killer”

  While a cluster of serial killers in a huge metropolis like New York or Los Angeles was not surprising, the cluster of emerging killers in a smaller city like Santa Cruz in California was much more puzzling and alarming because it was so out of scale to the region’s population. The murders were “witchy” in that California-coast way, kind of like the way the Manson murders were in the summer of 1969.

  The first in the series was actually a mass murder, when on October 19, 1970, twenty-four-year-old John Linley Frazier entered the home of a wealthy eye surgeon Victor Ohta and shot him dead with a .38 handgun along with his wife, two sons, Ohta’s secretary and the family cat. He set their bodies floating in the home’s swimming pool and typed a delusional note on a typewriter in Ohta’s office before setting the house on fire. Similar to the recent environmentalist ATWA (Air Trees Water Animals) manifesto rants of Charlie Manson and the future correspondence of the Son of Sam, Frazier wrote:

  Halloween, 1970. Today World War III will begin, as bought to you by the People of the Free Universe. From this day forward, anyone and/or everyone or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the People of the Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die, or Mankind will stop.

  KNIGHT OF WANDS

  KNIGHT OF CUPS

  KNIGHT OF PENTACLES

  KNIGHT OF SWORDS

  Frazier had a history of petty crimes as a youngster but appeared to settle down after he dropped out of high school, married and found steady work as an auto mechanic. Then six months before the killings, he suddenly became delusional. Frazier had convinced himself that he was the John referred to in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation and incorporated the occult and environmental agendas into his madness.

  Frazier declared he had stopped driving, for example, on orders from the Almighty. An acquaintance later recalled, “He said God had told him that by driving his car he was polluting the environment and he would be killed if he drove anymore.” (It is disconcerting reading today what was thought of as symptoms of madness in the 1970s.)

  Frazier transformed into a Manson hippie / Ted Kaczynski Unabomber–like ecoterrorist persona, withdrawing to a small primitive cabin in the forest near the Ohtas’ home. He became enraged at how many trees were cleared to make way for the Ohtas’ luxury home, declaring that materialist people like that “should be snuffed.”

  Frazier was quickly tracked down to the nearby cabin and arrested a few days after the murders. Frazier’s defense entered a plea of insanity, but by then, with dramatically rising murders, juries were reluctant to accept insanity pleas. Frazier was sentenced to death, and the sentence was later commuted to life. Frazier committed suicide in his cell in 2009 at the age of sixty-three.

  Herbert Mullin, “The Die Song Killer”

  Herbert Mullin was born in 1947 in Salinas, California, the son of a US Marine captain who had fought in the Pacific in the Solomon Islands campaign.32 By most accounts he grew up in a stable and nurturing, but perhaps too strict, Roman Catholic household. In high school he was smallish—five feet seven, weighing in at 120 pounds—but he was popular with both boys and girls. He played offensive guard on the school football team, was unfailingly polite and well-mannered, got excellent grades and was voted “most likely to succeed” by fellow students. The first indication of some kind of instability in Mullin cropped up at age eighteen, when a friend of his was killed in a road accident. Mullin set up a shrine for him in his bedroom and began to obsess that he might be a homosexual.

  Nonetheless, Mullin went on to graduate junior college with a two-year degree in road engineering in the summer of 1967 and was engaged to be married. But by the end of 1967 things began go wrong. Mullin began to hear distant voices—a classic symptom of paranoid schizophrenia—and his behavior became odd and erratic. He broke up with his fiancée. His condition perhaps was further aggravated by his consumption of marijuana and the hallucinogenic LSD.

  In September 1972, Mullin began deeply contemplating the Bible. Mullin later stated that he discovered that killing was a biblical tradition, and that his father, the ex-Marine, had reinforced that in him. According to Mullin, his father used to urge, almost force, him to go deer hunting to develop his masculinity.

  Mullin began to hear the disembodied voice of his father ordering him to sacrifice lives to stave off the natural disaster threatening California’s coast. Mullin called it “the die song.”

  A psychiatrist asked Mullin, “What is the die song?”

  “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.”33

  On October 13, 1972, Mullin was driving down a highway when he noticed Lawrence White, a fifty-five-year-old vagrant, walking along the roadside. Mullin stopped his vehicle ahead of him, and when White approached him, Mullin killed him with blows to the head with a baseball bat. He then dragged White’s body into the bush and left it there.

  Soon Mullin began to hear his father’s voice explaining that pollution was coming from inside people’s bodies. He had just been reading accounts of Michelangelo’s dissections in Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy when on October 24 he picked up twenty-four-year-old Cabrillo College student Mary Guilfoyle, who was hitchhiking. When she climbed into his vehicle, he plunged a knife into her chest, killing her. He then dragged her body out into the woods and cut open her abdomen, taking out her organs and inspecting them for traces of pollution. So he could better inspect the intestines, he strung them across the branches of a tree. Her body would not be found for months.

  Even today, with all the advances in profiling, it is hard to imagine investigators linking these two seemingly different crimes to the same perpetrator or understanding the motives behind the mutilation of Mary Guilfoyle. Most likely they were attributed to Jack the Ripper–type sexual lust, but in fact, these were not sexu
al fantasies driving Mullin—they were not really even fantasies, but hallucinations.

  Still deeply linked to his Catholic faith, Mullin went in the afternoon of November 2 to St. Mary’s Church in Los Gatos, a suburb of Santa Cruz, to seek help from a priest. Father Henri Tomei entered the confessional booth at random to listen to Mullin. Mullin began to hallucinate that Father Tomei was asking Mullin to kill him. Mullin recalls that he told the priest that his father had been telepathically ordering him to sacrifice people.

  In Mullin’s recollection of the conversation, the priest asked him, “Herbert, do you read the Bible?”

  “Yes.”

  “The commandments, where it says to honor thy father and mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know how important it is to do as your father says.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it is so important that I want to volunteer to be your next sacrifice,” the priest said, according to Mullin.34 Mullin stepped over into the priest’s compartment and beat and kicked him and stabbed him six times in the chest and back, leaving him to die in the confessional booth.

  Mullin then acquired a handgun just as he became convinced that recreational drugs were poisoning his mind. 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 strolled 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. 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 what would be later classified as a rare “disorganized visionary mission” serial killer. His eight killings so far were mission driven but entirely unplanned and haphazard and rooted in organic paranoid schizophrenia. Mullin was simply mad. 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.

  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 13, 1973, 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-two-year-old Fred Perez was a former champion middleweight fighter in California in the 1920s (fighting under the name Freddie Bell) and a retired fish wholesaler.* Perez 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 immediately 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.

  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.

  Mullin’s insanity plea at trial was rejected by a jury for the same reasons that Frazier’s insanity plea was, a fear that he would be later certified “cured” and released. Mullin is currently serving out life imprisonment in California for the thirteen murders he committed. Somebody maintains an Instagram account and a web page (herbertwilliammullin.org) where his current prison writings and photos are posted.

  Edmund Kemper, “The Coed Killer,” Santa Cruz, California, 1972–1973

  Some newspapers reporting on the arrest of Herbert Mullin were reporting on the same page that students on the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus were forming search parties to locate two missing coeds, Alice Liu and Rosalind Thorpe. The San Francisco Examiner reporting on Mullin’s arrest for the murder of Perez unknowingly stated there had been no connection to his murder and the mutilation murder of Mary Guilfoyle, who “was the latest victim of the unknown killer or killers preying on girl students from UCSC and Cabrillo since last summer.” It noted that Guilfoyle was the third coed from Santa Cruz murdered in recent months and described a string of similar recent mutilation murders and rapes: “Cynthia Ann Schall, 19, of San Rafael was identified from parts of her body that floated ashore here and in Monterey last month. . . . The head of Mary Ann Pesce, 19, a Fresno State University student, was found last August on Prieta Mountain. . . . Nine girls have reported being raped in the campus area in the last month by a man who picked them up while they were hitchhiking.”35

  Edmund Emil Kemper III had come home to Mother.

  Mother and Son Reunion: Clarnell’s Boy Comes Home

  In the six years that Edmund was away in Atascadero, Clarnell married and divorced for a third time and moved to Santa Cruz, where she found work as an administrative assistant on the UCSC campus. Anybody who has attended university knows how formidably competent and yet flamingly neurotic university department and faculty secretaries can be. Some hold graduate degrees and for various reasons bitterly grasp at university secretarial work as a “respectable” last resort after being unable to put their degree to work in some other professional career. They hold in their powerful hands not only the smooth career path of their boss, but the futures of thousands of students. It’s a heady, powerful thing for an educated and competent woman—they are mostly women—who might feel she had not reached her potential. And that certainly was Clarnell, now going under the name Clarnell Strandberg.

  The California parole board put the recently released Edmund into the custody of Clarnell, and in early 1970, he moved into her duplex in Santa Cruz. Immediately, the neighbors started hearing loud arguments and doors slamming.

  “They paroled me right back to Mama,” Kemper will tell anybody who listens. “Well, my mother and I started right in on horrendous battles, just horrible battles, violent and vicious.”

  Clarnell blamed her troubles on Ed, telling him, “Because of you, my murderous son, I haven’t had sex with a man for five years.”

  By now Kemper was a six-feet-nine-inch, 280-pound giant. His ambition was to join the California Highway Patrol. His mother lobbied the psychiatrists to recommend his juvenile homicide record be sealed so that he could join the police, and eventually it was. But in the e
nd, his application was rejected on the grounds of his being too tall.

  Kemper found a job with the California Highway Department and moved out of his mother’s place to a small apartment of his own. He complained that he still could not get away from his mother, that she constantly phoned him and paid him surprise visits. Kemper described using his “Atascadero learning” to “push her toward where she would be a nice motherly type and quit being such a damned manipulating, controlling beast.”

  During this period, Kemper faithfully made regular required visits to his probation psychiatrist. At the same time, he started rehearsing for his upcoming series of kills. He picked up dozens of young women hitchhiking in the Santa Cruz area, developing a nonthreatening “gentle giant” persona. Later, Kemper described how when he stopped in front of a female hitchhiker and she appeared unsure of getting into his car, he deliberately glanced at his watch. Kemper explained that this gesture subtly transmitted to the woman the message that he was a busy man and that she was of minor interest to him.

  “Making Dolls”

  On May 7, 1972, he acted out what he must have been fantasizing for years. He picked up two college girls, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa, hitchhiking on a freeway ramp. Knowing the area well, Kemper managed to drive around without them realizing that he had changed directions from where they wanted to go. He then stopped his car in a remote area he was familiar with from his work with the highway department. Kemper first handcuffed Pesce in the back seat of the car. He later confessed, “I was really quite struck by her personality and her looks, and there was just almost a reverence there. . . . There was absolutely no contact with improper areas. In fact, I think once I accidentally—this bothers me too, personally—I brushed, I think the back of my hand when I was handcuffing her, against one of her breasts, and it embarrassed me. I even said, ‘Whoops, I’m sorry’ or something like that.”