'Murder capital of the world': The terrifying years when multiple serial killers stalked Santa Cruz

Editor's note: This story originally ran in April 2018 and has been updated to reflect the death of Herbert Mullin on Aug. 18, 2022.

It started with a fire in the hills above Santa Cruz on the night of Oct. 19, 1970.

When firefighters arrived at the Ohta residence, the Japanese-inspired, custom-built mansion was engulfed in flames. A fire chief went to look for another hydrant on the property, searching the yard for a spot to hook up a hose. As he swung his flashlight across the yard, the beam of light illuminated something floating in the pool. He looked closer.

The water was full of bodies.

They were soon identified as Dr. Victor Ohta, an eye surgeon, his wife, Virginia, their sons, Derrick, 12, and Taggart, 11, and Ohta’s secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader. They were tied up with bright silk scarves and shot to death, execution-style. Tucked under the windshield wiper of the family Rolls-Royce was a typewritten screed against "persons who misuse the natural environment." It was signed with Tarot symbols.

Police asked anyone with information to come forward, and it didn’t take long for several locals to call in tips about a man named John Linley Frazier.

Frazier’s erratic behavior left an impression on everyone he came in contact with. The 24-year-old, who was born in Hayward, lived in a dilapidated shack half a mile from the Ohta house. He sometimes holed up for days, obsessively studying the Bible. When he went out, he would warn anyone who would listen that the natural world was being destroyed by rich men like Victor Ohta. God, Frazier told friends, had chosen him to save the environment.

Four days after the Ohta murders, police arrested Frazier in his shack. Shaken locals — many of whom the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported were sleeping with loaded guns — thought they could breathe easy again.

It was just the beginning.

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From 1970 until early 1973, Santa Cruz was terrorized by two serial killers and one mass murderer, turning the once-sleepy beach town into the “murder capital of the world.” The murders were so random — a priest stabbed in a confessional, four teens killed in a state park, female co-eds who disappeared after hitchhiking — that law enforcement didn’t initially realize they had multiple serial killers. The crimes committed by Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper became so infamous that they would make even the horrific slaying of the Ohta family fade from memory.

Herbert William Mullin was born on April 18, 1947 — the 41st anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake — to an unremarkable Santa Cruz family. Classmates recall Mullin as fun and popular; in high school, he was voted most likely to succeed. But things changed for Mullin at 16, when his best friend was killed in a car crash. Mullin set up a shrine to his friend in his home and began quietly obsessing he might be gay. He began hearing voices.

For the next few years, Mullin would check himself in and out of mental facilities. He never stayed long and began using LSD and amphetamines, a habit that famed FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler speculated exacerbated Mullin’s paranoid schizophrenia. He tried to enlist with the Marines but was dismissed after his unusual behavior became apparent. In the summer of 1972, Mullin went to San Francisco, where he attempted to join an art collective on Geary Street. He was rejected there, too, and moved back in with his parents in Santa Cruz.

Now 25, Mullin started hearing a persistent voice in his head telling him that only human sacrifices could stop a massive earthquake from destroying California. The Vietnam War was sufficient in years prior, but Mullin worried that its end would precipitate the quake.

On Oct. 13, 1972, Mullin was driving in his car when he saw Lawrence White walking along the roadside. Mullin pulled off and, when White approached, Mullin beat him to death with a baseball bat. Eleven days later, Mullin picked up a hitchhiker, 24-year-old Cabrillo College student Mary Guilfoyle. He stabbed her to death and then opened up her body; he was convinced human bodies contained “pollution,” and he needed to find it. He left her remains in the Santa Cruz mountains. Unbeknownst to him, Kemper was using the same area as a dumping ground for his victims.

On Nov. 2, Mullin, a life-long Roman Catholic, decided he needed to confess. He wandered into St. Mary’s Church in Los Gatos, where he was met by Father Henri Tomei. As they spoke, Mullin heard the voice again. This time, it was telling him the priest was volunteering himself as a sacrifice. There, in the church, Mullin stabbed and stomped him to death. Tomei’s body was found in the confessional. Police thought it was a burglary gone wrong.

In February of 1973, the bodies of four teenagers camping in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park were discovered. Mullin had shot them to death with a .22 caliber rifle after warning them they were polluting nature. Their slayings brought the number of murders in Santa Cruz County since Jan. 9 to 13.

“This must be Murdersville, U.S.A.,” district attorney Peter Chang muttered to a reporter at the scene. The next day, several wire stories reported Chang had called Santa Cruz the “murder capital of the world.” Chang denied it, but the nickname stuck. It didn’t, after all, feel that far off.

Mullin committed his 13th and final murder on Feb. 13, 1973. Mullin was driving around Santa Cruz when he came across 72-year-old Fred Perez, who was weeding his front yard on Lighthouse Ave. Mullin pulled out a rifle and shot him in broad daylight. Multiple witnesses reported Mullin’s license plate number to the police, who found and arrested him without incident minutes later.

“We human beings, through the history of the world, have protected our continents from cataclysmic earthquakes by murder,” Mullin told investigators during an interrogation. ”In other words, a minor natural disaster avoids a major natural disaster.”

Mullin was finally in custody, but Santa Cruz police had another problem: Someone had just found the bodies of two UC Santa Cruz students. Their heads were missing.

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Few serial killers are as intensely studied as Edmund Emil Kemper, a man whose entire childhood seems to have carefully crafted him into the ultimate killer. By the age of eight, his mother Clarnell became convinced he was going to molest his sisters. She moved him into the basement, putting the kitchen table over the trap door so he couldn’t get out. In retaliation, Kemper killed and decapitated the family cat.

Years later during his trial, Kemper’s sister said she once teased young Ed for his crush on a teacher. She encouraged Ed to kiss the teacher.

“If I kiss her,” he replied, “I’d have to kill her first.”

Kemper’s parents divorced in 1957, leaving the teenager in the custody of his hated mother. When he turned 15, his mother sent him away to live with his grandparents. Soon after arriving, Kemper grabbed a rifle in the home and shot his grandmother and grandfather dead. When police asked the 6-foot-4 teen why he did it, he calmly said, "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot grandma.”

Kemper was sent to the criminally insane ward of Atascadero State Hospital, where he became a favorite of the staff for his near-genius IQ and penchant for rule-following. Kemper was so well-behaved, psychologists allowed him to administer tests to other inmates. In doing so, they gave him the keys to the system. He learned how to manipulate the staff and pass any mental assessment put in front of him. Simultaneously, Kemper learned from sex offenders how to avoid being caught. The first rule? Never leave a witness alive.

On his 21st birthday, Kemper was released to the custody of his mother, who later had his juvenile record sealed. Kemper loved law enforcement and was desperate to become a state trooper, but at 6-foot-9, he was rejected for being too tall. Undeterred, Kemper frequented bars and restaurants popular with Santa Cruz police. They loved him in return, affectionately nicknaming the so-called gentle giant "Big Ed." One Santa Cruz cop even gave him a police academy trainee’s badge.

Meanwhile, Kemper was field-testing techniques he’d soon put to homicidal use. He would take long drives in his yellow 1969 Ford Galaxie, picking up pretty female hitchhikers. In the car, he might hide handcuffs, guns or other weapons. He’d try locking women into the vehicle without them realizing. And he worked on a subtle cue he learned at Atascadero. If a woman was debating getting into the car with the massive man, he’d glance at his watch, signaling to her that he was in a hurry and no threat. It worked like a charm.

On May 7, 1972, Kemper put his plan into action. While driving in Berkeley, he came across two 18-year-old Fresno State students, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. He said he’d take them to Stanford, but he instead drove them to an isolated part of Alameda, where he killed them both. He put the bodies in his trunk and proceeded home. On the way, Kemper said he was stopped by a highway patrol officer, who noted his broken taillight. He was allowed to drive on.

Back in his apartment, Kemper raped, dissected and photographed the dead women.

“The neighbor downstairs hates my guts. I’m always making noise late at night,” Kemper would later joke. “He gets a broom and whacks on the ceiling. ‘Buddy,’ I say, ‘I’m sorry for that, dropped my head, sorry.’ That helped bring me out of the depression.”

Kemper took the remains of Pesce and Luchessa and buried them in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

A few months later, Kemper killed 15-year-old Aiko Koo, a student hitchhiking to her dance class in San Francisco. In January, he picked up Cabrillo College student Cindy Schall, who he shot to death and brought to his mother’s house, where he repeatedly violated the body. Kemper buried Schall’s head in the garden. He said he oriented the head toward his mother’s bedroom window because his mother wanted people to “look up to her.”

On Feb. 5, 1973, Kemper picked up UC Santa Cruz students, Rosalind Thorpe and Allison Liu, whose headless bodies were found shortly after Herbert Mullin’s arrest. The girls thought they were being cautious when they accepted a ride from Kemper; Santa Cruz officials were warning students to only hitchhike with drivers who had UCSC stickers on their cars. Kemper had one: His mother worked on campus.

As with Schall, Kemper brought the bodies of Thorpe and Liu back to his mother’s Santa Cruz home. After he was done desecrating their corpses, he left their remains off Eden Canyon Road in Castro Valley.

Panic was reaching a fever pitch in Santa Cruz. When reporters asked district attorney Chang how it was possible Mullin was in custody but bodies kept adding up, he replied, “We then have another homicidal maniac.”

Chang tried to pin the crimes on non-locals, telling the Santa Cruz Sentinel that “the geographical nature and location of Santa Cruz County has made it a burial ground for bodies of murder victims both from here and elsewhere.”

“We’ve always had our fair share of homicides and burglaries,” he concluded.

In truth, the police had no leads and no idea who was killing co-eds. And they admitted as much to Kemper, who received constant updates on the case from his friends at the police department.

But Kemper had finally reached his breaking point. On Easter weekend 1973, he attacked his mother, long the subconscious target of his rage, with a claw hammer. After killing her and raping the corpse, he put her larynx in the garbage disposal. 

“Even when she was dead, she was still bitching at me,” Kemper said. “I couldn’t get her to shut up.”

Kemper drove east with the radio on, expecting to hear news of his mother’s murder. He got to Colorado before realizing no one was covering it. He stopped off at a pay phone and called Santa Cruz police to confess. Recognizing Big Ed, they laughingly told him to stop messing around. He had to call back again for them to take him seriously. Once in custody, he also confessed to the six hitchhiker murders.

“Toward the end there, I started feeling the folly of the whole damn thing,” Kemper said. “... I wore out of it.”

Santa Cruz’s three years of terror had ended.

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Frazier, Mullin and Kemper were all given life sentences for their crimes. And although the killing had ended, the oddities didn’t cease.

Mullin was denied parole repeatedly, but that didn’t stop him from placing a personal ad in the Scotts Valley Banner in 1987.

Seeking an "Irish wife,” it read: "I am 40 years old. I am 14 years in prison. I desire to sire children now.”

It didn’t work. Mullin died of natural causes on Aug. 18, 2022 at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton; he was 75. Frazier killed himself at Mule Creek State Prison in 2009.

At the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, Kemper became head of a prisoner program to produce audiobooks for the blind. His voice now narrates hundreds of books. Kemper is still imprisoned there today. He is 73.

In the strangest bit of coincidence, during the early years of their respective incarcerations, Mullin and Kemper found themselves on the same prison block. Kemper professed to hating Mullin, who he considered “a cold-blooded killer … killing everybody he saw for no good reason.” As a hobby, Kemper trained Mullin to stop “bothering people” during their TV-watching time. He threw water on him when he was bad, and gave him peanuts (“Herbie liked peanuts”) when he was quiet.

Ever the amateur psychologist, Kemper proudly told FBI profilers of his experiment.

“Pretty soon he asked permission to sing,” he boasted. “That’s called behavior modification treatment.”