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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan.
Zufanski, Good Evening. Over twenty five people murdered in just over two and a half years. What was happening in the small coastal town of Santa Cruz between October nineteen seventy and February nineteen seventy three. John Linley Fraser home invasion murders of the Ota family and Dorothy Cadwalder in nineteen seventy and the serial murder spreees of Herbert Mullen and Edmund Kemper left tremors in Santa Cruz that can
still be felt today. Local law enforcement, victims, families and friends, classmates and acquaintance of the killers, local historians, voices from the past and present, and the killers themselves all come together to tell the horrific stories and explain why Santa Cruz was dubbed the murder Capital of the World in the early seventies. Murder Capital of the World is a primary source history telling the story of Santa Cruz in the early nineteen seventies through quotes and first persons stories.
The book that were featuring this evening is Murder Capital of the World. The Santa Cruz Community looks back at the John Linley Fraser, Herbert Mullen, and Edmund Kemper murder spreees of the early nineteen seventies with my special guests, journalist and author Emerson Emerson Murray. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Emerson Murray, thank.
You so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much. First Off, as I mentioned beforehand, a very very impressive package, the entire book and especially the incredibly astounding photos that you have, which are over three hundred in all in total. Let's start off right away with this, the acknowledgments where you've got this idea and the impetus and the unique format, and how you came to this book.
Yeah, so I tell people I've really been working on this book for about thirty years. The whole story itself, Aaron Sanakers has just been in our family since before I was born. One of my father's good friends, a man named Jim Genera, was murdered by Herbert Mullen, just a few months before I was born, actually, And so as we were growing up, and I tell the story in the book, there was always a picture of my dad and Jim hiking on my dad's wall, and it
was something that we just always knew. We knew Jim had been murdered by this serial killer, and of course that term wasn't around at that time, but he had been murdered by this man, and it was just something we talked about. And really, that whole time period was sort of in the air in Santa Cruz, you know, in the late seventies and early eighties when I was young, and I can remember my family being at parties and hearing other adults talking about these crimes and about all
the things that went down at that time period. So because Santa Cruz was such a small community, it was just there.
It was present.
Now, you mentioned the film The Lost Boys that was filmed in Santa Cruz under the fictional name of Santa Carlo explained how the relevance and the importance to the story and your book and The Lost Boys know.
Yeah, so I think a lot of people actually know Sannaker is just simply from the film The Lost Boys. They know it was filmed here, and when they came and filmed they changed a name. But Fannakers was known as the murder capital of the world at that time. And so in the beginning of the film, as the protagonist and his mom and his older brother are driving into town, they passed by this big billboard and it says,
you know, welcome to Santa Carla and all this. And as they passed by, the camera lingers on the sign, and on the back of the sign you can see somebody has scrawled the graffiti murder Capital of the World. So they sort of kept har Moniker. But I always make the joke that in the movie they just they had to deal with a handful of teenage vampires, and we had to deal with an eco terrorist and a serial killer who was killing people for earthquakes, and a
pscho sexual killer who was murdering teenage hitchhikers. It was like in the movie they had nothing on us.
Yeah, much stranger than fiction. Yeah. Yeah, your book also includes modern quotes and historic quotes, meaning back from the seventies when this occurred, seventies seventy three, but also modern quotes from many people like Herbert Mullen and Edmund Kemper and this Fraser, John Linley Fraser. Let's get to right away. You talk about a headline. You also talk about the district Attorney Peter Chang in an interview, asked if Santa Cruz was murder capital, and he said, right now, we
must be the murder capital. Now you talked about the format that this quotes us. So let's talk about the who is quoted, and let's talk about the first headline that you have in the book, with the Santa Cruz spent in al February thirteen, nineteen seventy three. I guess that really talks about this and really identifies what you're saying, that this recognizes that there's something very, very unusual and murderous going on.
Right Yeah, So first let me talk about the newspaper. So, yeah, that was from Tuesday, February thirteenth to nineteen seventy three, and that was the day that Herbert Mullen murdered his last victim, and he was caught just minutes later, and it sort of encapsulates what the entire book is about. If you look at this newspaper headline along the top, it's says something like crimes three sore is another murder, and then underneath the Santa Cruz Sentinel the banners the
senseless slaying of an old man. And then there's another murder that's unrelated to these three killers, about youth held in a capitol at death, about a young man who killed a woman named Ida Stein and sannikers. And then they're also talking about these bodies that are washing up on the ocean that are found and rape victims being picked up by hitchhikers, who are these hitchhikes, and then another kidnapping case and an article about women hitchhike. It
was unbelievable, and this is all from one day. It was just stunning, and it sort of exemplified what I wanted to talk about in the book, and that is, you know, it was absolute overwhelming chaos for law enforcement and for our community at that time. And you said it right. Peter Chang was being interviewed after four boys were murdered by Herbert Mullen, and their bodies were found.
He was being interviewed by a San Francisco Examiner reporter and the reporter was, you know, halfway joking around, you must be the murder capital of the world. And Peter Chang said, yeah, this time, we must be the murder capital.
And it just stuck.
It stuck to us like glue. And you know, our city council, our board of supervisors couldn't stand it. There's there's records I found in there's notes in the official records of the transcripts of our supervisor meetings, and they're railing against this. Oh who gave us this stupid title. It's ridiculous and stupid to quote they use that word. And so but it just stuck. So when I, for myself,
I had read the for using quotes. I had read a book by a man named Rudolph Gray who wrote a book about the filmmaker Edward and he had used quotes. This is like in the late nineteen eighties or early nineteen nineties, and I thought, what a great way to tell a very nuanced story. Because Edward was a complicated person and to some people, you know, he was, you know, a wacko, and to some people he was you know,
they loved him like a brother. And I thought God for something like this, a true crime story where there's a lot of different stories going on and people are remembering events slightly different. As well as the fact that you know, we'll say Edmund Kemper, he's alone with a victim at night, and what happened to that victim and what he did only he knows, nobody knows. You know, maybe we may have some CSI information from the crime scene, but it really went down the way that he said it.
So rather than come in like a heavy handed author and say that this is what happened here, this is what happened here, this is what happened here, I really wanted to get a well rounded picture of everyone's point of view. And you know, we're talking to the old hippies, we're talking to the old law enforcement, We're talking to everyone to sort of get this picture of what Santa
Cruz was like at that time. And I talked to well over one hundred people and I grabbed quotes from every So I think I make a joke in the book, you know, I stole and robbed them from every source I could find, from every newspaper, just trying to get a picture, you know, what was going on back then. So yeah, we jump around and I put the year there so you can see Edmin Kemper telling his story in the nineteen seventies, right after he got caught. This happened,
This happened. And then you can see him again in nineteen ninety one at a parole hearing and his story changes slightly. And then in twenty seventeen again at another parole hearing, and it changes. His story changes drastically. And what did he have to lose and gain all along the way when he's telling these different stories in different ways?
And why is this story one way? Well, it may have something to do with his defense attorney just filed the insanity to insanity please, So it's just for me. I found it a great way to tell a story on many many layers.
Absolutely, it's very, very very effective. One of the three people featured in this book are John Linley Fraser, Herbert William Mullen, and Edmund Kemper. The third Herbert Willie Mullen and Edmund Kemper. People know the basic stories and we'll get you to just outline him as you do this, the very basic ones. But very interestingly, this John Linley Fraser is not as well known yet when you include very early on in the book the great iconic or
infamous half and half photo. So before we talk about John Linley Fraser, tell us about this very dramatic photo that you have of the half and half photo.
Yeah, that's like one of the most important pictures, and that like it has to be in the book.
Yeah.
So John lean Lee Fraser was and his attorneys, the public defenders they had, were just going into the insanity phase of the trial to see if he was insane or not. So John Lelely Fraser shows up to court and he before you know, had long hair and a beard. But he walks into court and half of his head is shaved from left to right, and his head's bald, and his eyebrows are gone, and his beard and his mustache are gone, and he just presents this stark image.
And of course, you know, the public defender's office and they're quoted in there saying, what the heck is he doing? You know, like that that doesn't prove anything, and what kind of law enforcement would give him a race and prisoned. They were in jail to even do this. So, yeah, it's a very stark, stark image. And I can get into John Linley Fraser. Would you talk about and talk about that story, do you think?
Yeah, tell us basically for people don't know, and I wasn't so aware of him at all, tell us basically outline of the murders he was convicted of and committed.
Okay, So the Oda family was what they always say, sort of quote unquote, a prominent family in Santa Cruise, and I always wondered what exactly does that mean? So in doing my research, I learned doctor Oda was an eye surgeon. Not only was he a very accomplished eye surgeon, but he did a lot of surgeries for free, and he helped out people in the community that couldn't necessarily
afford some of his work. His wife was Virginia Oda was very involved in the community, and she's actually if you look at all newspapers, she's in the newspaper much more than he ever was, on functions and volunteer work and things like that.
They had four.
Children, two sons and two daughters, and in nineteen seventy his two daughters were away at school. One was in Monterey, California, and one was in a design school in New York. The two sons were living at home. Doctor Oda also had an assistant named Dorothy Cott Walater, and she really took care of the kids and she was really a part of the family.
Well.
John len Ley Frasier was another local. He was from the Santa CRUs area, and he began having these usions that he was going to start an environmental movement, and how much he was inspired by the Manson killings in the late nineteen sixties, or even the McDonald killing where the gentleman of Fort Bragg was accused of killing his wife and kids and he said a hippie cult came
in and did it. So I'm not exactly sure how much he was influenced by that, but he was started to have these delusions that he was going to start an environmental movement where he would go to these rich people's houses, these pigs as he called them, in rednecks as he called them, and convinced them to burn down their house, and then they would join his group and they would march to the next rich person's house and burn down their house, and he would just start this
global movement and have this brigade, this squad or this army. So he lived and not far from the Oda House, which was a prominent, beautiful, beautiful house design by an architect named Aaron Green who was a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright.
So they built it.
Up on this hill, and Aaron Green was very careful to work with the Oda family not to even cut down a single tree when they're building the house. And actually even today the house is built around trees, you know. But Fraser didn't see it that way. He saw it as they were polluting the environment. We're going to burn down this house. So on October nineteen, nineteen seventy, he
basically ambushed the family in the house. He killed each member of the family and Dorothy Codwallader in a terrible fashion, and left this surreal note almost sort of like a Zodiac type note with terret codes and all these things, as if this was this massive movement and not one man. And he was captured very shortly after because he had been spouting off all of these ideas to his friends and neighbors, so with him a couple of days he
was caught for those murders. But you know, the flood of the press descended on Santa CRUs and this made headlines all over the world. One of the district attorneys was actually in Africa and he saw a newspaper and there was in the headlines in Africa, in Africa, and he said, oh, my goodness, I better go home. So that and then, as you talked about before, hot on the heels of that. Right after the trial, both Herbert Mullen and Edmund Kemper started their murder spree.
Right and people know that Herbert William Mullen between October seventy two and seventy three, right, he murdered thirteen, apparently after the death of his best friend and excessive use of eleuggenic drugs. Of course, he showed signs of mental illness and soon began killing. He stated that he believed the murders could at earthquakes. Edmund Kemper, the third, is
more well known. Tell us a little bit about Edmund Kemper, because he did a lot of talking and according according to your book as well, John Douglas and Robert K. Wrestler, when they decided to do their impromptu visits to the prisons to speak to serial killers, or before that term was even coined. The first person that they spoke to was Edmund Kemper. So he was very cooperative in trying to have some insights into exactly how he became how he became.
Yeah, so yeah, very quickly, Yeah, Edmund Kemper. When he was fifteen years old, he had murdered his grandparents. He desperately wanted to live with his father. He lived with his mother, who I'm sure most of your listeners know was very abusive or somewhat abusive, and she shipped him or he ran away from home to live with his fathers. Fathers shipped him off to his parents in this very
remote area of California. He ended up killing his grandparents and he was sent to the SAYA, the California Youth Authority, and then also to a Taska Daro, which was sort
of a mental hospital. And he had stated many and that many times, but a couple of times that at a Taska zero, you know, as a young man, he saw that the hospital was full of rapists that had been caught, and so he started to formulate these ideas that well, I want to do that and I will not be caught, so he started working on his ideas. I always think of Edmund Kemper as almost like a hunter,
hunter of people. He was a very clever man, very intelligent man who knew law enforcement, knew the techniques, and really practiced. So anyway, he gets out of a taskadero the mental hospital, they tell the CYA, you know, whatever you do, do not release him to of the custody of his mother, because she's sort of the triggering factor in his violence. So in their infinite wisdom, the CYA releases him to the custody of his mother and he
goes to live with her in Sankers, California. So very shortly after, Edmond Kimper starts picking up hitchhikers and sort of perfecting his plans. You know, by his own account, he picked up hundreds of hitchhikers and dropped them off safely right where they wanted to go. But in his mind he starts planning what clothes am I going to wear? What glasses am I going to wear that make me
look less intimidating. He starts developing little techniques, but like looking at his watch when he's picking, I don't know if I have time to take you where you need to go, I guess, so get in. He starts designing even his car. His car had these pull handles, and he could drop a chapstick or a broken off door handle in it, and the person would be the hitchhiker
would effectively be locked in with him. And of course, you know, he's six foot nine and he's got a pistol, he's got a knife, and they're not going to be able to stop him. So he started formulating all of these ideas, and I would say a few months or more than that, several months later he started enacting as plan, and he killed a total of six hitchhikers in the
Sanakers area. The first three he had picked up in the Berkeley area, but he ultimately brought their bodies to Sannakers And and that's when, you know, at the almost simultaneous time, like you said, Herbert Mullen, who had experienced this tragic loss of his friend and started experimenting with drugs, sort of went over the edge and started having these these ideations in his head about I'm going to save California from this massive earthquake and falling into the ocean,
and that the Aztecs had it right. Really, the only way we can do this is through human sacrifice. And I guess I will be that that that person that saves California. Yeah, I will be that sadist as he said, So he started killing people. He picked up a hitchhiker as well, but almost simultaneously with Edmund Kimper. And that's where sort of the impact on the community really started to get felt. You know, everyone was breathing the sigh of relief after the Fraser crimes, and here we go again.
Bodies start washing up in the ocean, they start finding heads out in the wilderness, and people are being.
Killed now in the media and you say it disattracted worldwide attention. So you talk about Santa Cruz being a lumber and fishing town, and Peter Chang says, you go from a crowded metropolis to a deserted forest in about three minutes, and that's why you have things happen here that don't happen anywhere else. Tell us more about Santa Cruz.
You talk about the phenomen of hitchhiking and its contribution, but just Santa Cruz in general at this time and its effect from again, this murder capital of the world tag.
Yeah.
Sure, So Santa Cruz, you know, it had been for many, many years sort of a sleepy retirement community. Sure there were surfers here and things.
Like that because the beach is so beautiful, but.
Mostly there was this conservative retirement community, you know, like you said, fishermen, lumberjacks. You know, we had logging up in the mountains. And in nineteen sixty five, the University of California at Santa CRUs was opened up up on the hill and Santa Cruz and that brought in just a flood of youth and new ideas and society just
started changing. So that was sixty five. And as the sixties roll on, you have the anti war movement, you have women's movements, you have all you know, drugs start coming into the community. So the community started to go. I mean, if I say it went to war with itself, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. It became a very hot place. And they actually performed the study at that time and about this what they called an undesirable transient element, the utes, and who are
these utes? And so they the bort of Supervisors paid this company. The company came in and they were hoping they were going.
To say, oh, yeah, there's homeless people.
And drugs and all this. And the study came back with two big findings. One Santa Cruz was very unique in the state of California, and that it had a massive population of elderly and older people and a massive population of young in youth and not a large population of middle aged people, and so it was creating this conflict within itself. And also, hey, yes there's a lot of hippies. Drugs are coming in, but these people are number one, they're mostly just smoking dope. They're not you know.
The people that are doing hard drugs are look look more like you and me than this is them talking to the Board of Supervisors than these hippies. And number two, they move on. The hippies move on. And number three, a lot of them that are staying they're your kids. They're not coming in from the outside. They're your kids. So, of course, needless to say, the Bord of Supervisors hated the report. They refused, they refuted the report.
But that's what it was like here.
It was just a hot, tense place. You know, my father, he was a big hippie in the valley and he had a bus. So you can see it at the beginning of the Monterey Pop documentary. You can see my dad and they're in his big hippie buss. Well, the local fire department tried to fire bombit. They they threw molotov cocktails at it, and so people were getting beaten up.
And the idea of hippies, you know, which maybe in the early sixties or as it was formulating, oh, peace and love, you know, by the time of the Manson killings, by the time of the McDonald murders, by the time you know, it was sort of the notion of it was headed south and this peace and love was turning into something dark.
So we've dealt with that.
In Santa Cruz. There was also a change in the welfare laws here where you didn't have to live in the community that you got your check, and so it just made Santa Cruise and the whole state of California a little more transient or transiatory, where people were moving around and had the freedom to move around. So you had all of these elements sort of stacked on top of each other, and then these crimes start happening and the fingers start pointing.
A very interesting way of telling the stories that you mentioned with this source helement or source documents and then quotes from people important to the story, and very much that's demonstrative in the Oda family and Dorothy godwallerder murders. You have quotes from Lark Oda, you have quotes from a person named Harold Cartwright. You have the psychologist and expert witness for the defense, David Marlowe, you have Donald Lund.
Tell us just a little bit of some of these people's quotes or any example of some of these quotes, because it was so important all of them to tell the story of this. John Lindley Fraser.
Yeah, I'll tell you about Lark Oda. Lark Oda ended up she's the sole survivor of the Oda family. Her sister ended up committing suicide a few years after them. She just, you know, and directly blamed the murders. Doctor Oda's mother committed suicide after the murders. So Lark has for a very long time been the soul survivor.
And I wrote Lark a letter and reached out to her.
It was right at the fiftieth anniversary of the murders in twenty twenty and I was shocked because there was nothing in our local newspapers about the murders. Here was the fiftieth anniversary, and they had always done every ten years a story because it was so impactful, and I thought to myself, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Does this mean that we're healing or does this mean that we're forgetting? And so I reached out.
I always had intended to reach out to Lark, but sort of that was the trigger was Wow, this is interesting, and she was gracious enough to call me back, and we ended up talking for many, many hours about her family and about Santa CRUs in general. She doesn't have like a complete awareness of the crime. She has self censored herself in a very what I would call a very healthy way, so she doesn't have a lot of details.
In fact, I actually made a one off book. I had one printed at one of those print on demands where I cut out all the pages regarding that particular crime.
Just for her.
So there's a Murder Capital of the World, like one off edition, just the larco To edition for her. But she was what I would call a partner. She was a great partner in it, and her quotes really give you an in depth look into that family and who
they were as people. And really, Dan, that was like my goal, that was, I really want this book to tell the story of the victims and who are the victims and what happened to the community and that rather than you know, sometimes you get the books that are sort of serial killer as rock Star, and I I just didn't want to do that with this. I wanted something completely different, you know.
Yes, And then a lot of people talk about, you know, talking and focusing on the victims, but you very much do. And especially the photo array, the best photo selection I've seen on people that have passed away. It's very that's much an honor for these people in terms of at least the dignity wise, the portrayal in this book and the attention.
I really appreciate you saying that I do, because you never knew. I never knew when I was reaching out to the families. You know exactly how I always sent a letter first. When I was dealing with the families. If it was somebody professionally involved in the case, I felt comfortable calling them, but if it was like family, and some of them, you know, were like, how dare you even contacting or you know that, but like I want to say, it was Mullen's second victim. I reached
out to her family and they were just gracious. They sent me pictures and they were so kind. Her name is Mary Guilfoyle, and there's the only person left that I could find at the time was her brother's wife, so it would be her sister in law. And she sent pictures and she told me, thank you so much for doing this, because we've seen books about the killer, we've seen movies or documentaries about the killer, and no one, no one has ever talked about Mary or asked us
or contacted us about Mary. And so for me, that was like, oh, that's like a badge of honor. I was very proud and sure enough that she's got a chapter, we've got pictures nobody's ever seen before, and you and her life was very interesting. You know, she was born in a taxiicab and had heart surgery when she was like six years old.
She was in medical textbook she skipped the grade, and she was.
In New York. This is all in New York. She came out to Santa Cruz and strangely, no one is alive that remembers exactly why she came to santag like how that connection was made. But she ended up here. And then Herbert Mullen was driving in front of Cabrio College and he saw a car in front of it and belonged to a man named ray Leebenberg, who was
sort of a local character here. Even I can remember ray Leabnberg, and Mullan heard in his head ray Leevenberg's voice and it said, Oh, you're going to need to kill someone for me, and Mullen, you know, being a good soldier, said, oh, yes, sir. So the next day he's driving in front of Cabrill College in this exact same spot, and who's standing out of the cars not there, but who's standing out there with her thumb out. It was Mary Guilfoyle, and unfortunately Mullen picked her up killed
her immediately. And he even said like, oh, she was a willing participant. She agreed to be sacrificed. And I knew that because after I had stabbed her in the heart, rather than get blood on my seat, she ducked down under the dashboard on the floor of the car, and that was to him, was a sign that she was a willing participation in her own death, which of course is absolutely sick.
But yeah, that's the mindset. Yes, this esus as an opportunity. Emerson to stop for a second to hear from our sponsor, which is zip Recruiter. If you're a business owner, it can be tough to hire top talent for your team, especially when you're competing with other businesses to find the right people. So how can you get the hiring edge
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go on his murderous spree. You also, when we talked about John Lindsay Fraser, you also had interestingly quotes from his mother, Pat Pascal, from right from the time nineteen seventy Again, what are the kinds of things and the information that she imparted that if you included as part of this book.
Yeah, so Pat Pascal was an interesting character. She was another sort of local character. She ran a bunny ranch which I think was called bunny Haven, and it sounds cute and fun and everything, and she would show off her bunnies at local fairs and around the state and in competitions and things like that. But she was actually interviewed by our local newspaper and it's it's sort of funny.
She's talking about bunnies and it's great. And then at the bottom there's a little excerpt and it's a recipe for rabbit lakes stew that she had written. So it's like, not it wasn't all fun and games, you know, she was also breeding the rabbits for food. So the information that I got the interviews with her were from I believe it was the District attorney's officer, from the Public Defender's office. I can't remember off the top of my head. But she went yeah in depth on on Frasier's childhood
and his upbringing. He was he was very sickly as a child. He was born in New Mexico. The father really did not have anything to do with the picture, and he was just in and out of hospitals constantly through his youth and getting misdiagnosed and just very unhealthy troubles. And he always said that she sort of treated him like a friend as he was growing up and not really as a mom. So he started getting in trouble very early on. They moved to California, I think when
he was in junior high or middle school. He started getting in trouble at school. He ended up running away from home. They put him in foster care, and he stole a gun from his foster father, and then he was sent down to like an aunt or a grandparent I can't remember, down in southern California, where he got in even more trouble. So he gets sent back up here. And it wasn't until he met his wife that he started to settle down and they moved up to into north I think it was Portland or in Oregon, and
really started making go of it and working. He became an auto mechanic and a very successful auto mechanic. I mean, he was well known as being a good auto mechanic, very proficient, and then he started he also started having mental health issues. We're becoming more paranoid and things like that. And then he actually was in a car accident, which strangely enough is about a mile from where I'm sitting right now where I live, and supposedly had a head
injury and the police report doesn't bear that out. But he went home from that automobile accident, which really shook him up, and just started ranting to his wife and their roommate that was living with them about you know, nature and man, and he was never going to drive another car. And that's where he really started down that path. As I was explaining earlier of this idea that hey, we got to get rid of these pigs and these what he called rednecks that were polluting the land and
destroying nature and get back to nature. And he had a Bible he would edit and cross out ideas, and his mother had this property. His mother is the one that lived near the Oda. Family later went to go live with her in a little milk barn, but she also had a water tower and he'd sit up on top of the water tower and meditate because he was afraid of these invisible enemies that were going to try
to crawl up the water tower. And he just had a lot of mental health issues that sort of went undiagnosed. And I think he was in a culture. He was not really in the hippie culture, but he was around that culture where a lot of people were doing drugs, and I think a lot of the issues that he had were sort of mistaken, possibly for being drug related, when really they were mental health issues.
You talk about the September nine, nineteen seventy two, and Herbert Mullen, his parents are away, right, and he has an intense LSD high or an intense trip and then he writes into housing journals all night. That's what happens after or shortly after. Yeah.
So yeah, So he had just moved back into the area from San Francisco, and he had actually gotten those drugs from Jim Jeneia, who was his high school friend, and that is when he really started to lose it.
While his parents were.
On vacation, he moved back into the house or he was staying in the house, and then they came back and he agreed, and that's when he really started imagining, you know, that the Aztecs were right and that we have to do this and I have to make my
family proud. And he started hearing his mother and his father's voices, and just days later, well roughly a month later, on Friday, October thirteenth, nineteen seventy two, he was leaving the house in Felton to I forget he was going to return a book to the library of the San Francisco Library, and ironically the book was Einstein on Peace. And he's driving and he sees a man walking alongside the road and this is very rural road out in.
The forest of redwood forests.
And the man was a man named Lawrence Whitey White, and he was a known homeless person in the area. Herbert Mullen passed and passed Whitey. He turned around, went drove out in front of Whitey and pulled over his car and acted like he was having car troubles. Mister White went out to help him and say, you need some help, and while he was looking under the hood, Mullen murdered him with a baseball bat and dragged his
body off. And that was Herbert Mullen's first victim was Lawrence White and so, and that actually was not discovered. They did not discover that he had killed Lawrence White until the trial began, and he admitted that crime as well as the second crime, which was the Mary Guilfoyle one. They were not aware that those were Herbert Mullen crimes until the trial.
He wrote about briefly about the trials as well and offer quotes about Herbert Mullins trial. What quotes stuck out most dramatically importantly from the trial Herbert Mullins.
Well, yeah, in Herbert Mullen's trial, that was really where it was, you know, to the public and everyone else, that that is when it came out what his belief system was and what he was thinking, what was going on in his head. Because you have to remember that his crimes were so random. Even for us, like when
we were kids, we knew Herbert Mullen. Logically, we knew he was in prison, but he was still sort of like a boogeyman to us because he killed men, he killed women, he killed children, he killed a priest right outside his own confessional. And so that for me is you know, like, if you're not a female and you're not hitchhiking, you know Edmond kemper Is, you're never going to run across them in any kind of violent way. So but with Herbert Mullen, it was just it was random.
And I think that was really what struck so much fear in Santa Cruz was you know, what is going on here? Who's killing these children, who's killing you know, these people that you know it's a homeless man over here, and then somebody that was selling drugs over here, and then these four boys that were camping out camping. And so when it hits the trial and and Mullin actually took the stand for himself, everybody was just completely blown away by these ideas that he's talking about in these
rants that he's going on. And and I mean, I think clearly, and I think the jury knew this. He had mental health issues. He may not have been insane by the definition of the law according to the Monoton standard, but he clearly had mental health issues. He was not not fit, he was not mentally healthy in any way.
No, he's not taking it. Certainly quite a bit of quite a bit of this book has Edmund Camp like I mentioned, he'd likes to talk, and you have him quoted from seventy three, eighty one, nineteen eighty four, and nineteen ninety one, with variations in stories as you say, but also just more elaboration and some other specifics that he didn't go into in seventy three that he may have done in the future. There are some incredible stuff
about this. Nine days after murdering this Aco coup, Kemper gets engaged to his girlfriend, he tells a little bit about some of the stuff that you have concluded about Kemper.
Yeah, yes, sir. So a lot of in the more modern quotes were taken from parole transcripts, and like you said, he doesn't stop talking. So you can go on YouTube and find interviews with him, you know, from nineteen ninety one, in various interviews, and I think one of the videos is even recorded by John Douglas and the FBI for
a presentation they were given. But a lot of the earlier quotes were taken from interviews that I had discovered from the Public Defender's office and with psychologists that he met with with Lundy, doctor Lundy, with Donald T. Lundy, and so a lot of them were very early on, right after he had been caught, and even transcripts from Pueblo, Colorado, right after he turned himself in and they traveled out
there to interview him. So these are the first time he's opening his mouth and sort of what it just comes flooding out, you know, he's gushing out with all of this because he loves to talk and he wants to talk about himself, so finally he can do So it got to the point actually where he was held in jail. They're getting ready for the trial, and he keeps calling into the District attorney's office to tell them more, and to tell them more, and tell them another story,
and tell him another story. They finally had to call the public Defender's office and said, look, you got to get this guy to stop calling us. This is wholly inappropriate. So they just could not get him to stop talking. And you know, like like you mentioned earlier, John Douglas and Robert Russeler went out and you know, you want
to get started on an interviewing serial killers. Man, here, here's a guy that's going to go in depth, remembers every single detail, you know, down to the socks people were wearing, you know, every single detail, and and you can't get him to stop. You can't get him to stop talking. So I don't remember what your original question was.
It's just some of the things that I wanted you to expound upon.
For sure.
It was interesting too when he talked about the one victim, a who I believe decapitated and put in the backyard of his mom's place, and he confessed to that you feature of one of the well you feature many victims, Like I say, and then you it's a more much more respectful treatment. And I would you would expect to see in any true crime book you talk about this Cynthia. You write about Cynthia of Shall and you have people like for a Shaw being able to talk and some
of the things that Cynthia Shall had said. So tell us about this story and what with some of the profound things that you quote.
Okay, great, Yeah, So Cynthia Shaul, Yeah, she was actually another Cabrio College student like Mary Guilfoyle when Edmun Kemper picked her up. She was actually over at the university near near the University of California, Santacher's on the other side of town. But she was known in the in the community. She was a babysitter and she actually was
a babysitter for some of the local police. So and she was you know, I interviewed for shaw That's that was her brother, and they you know, he admitted and we talked about it that they had a very kind of a rough upbringing with their mom was was rough on them and everything. But yeah, Cynthia Shawl she was
picked up by Edmund Kemper. She was driven out to her remote area, and you know, he used his line, Know, I'm feeling suicidal and I just really want someone to talk to, but my neighbors are going to see you, and I can't have that happen. Will you get in the trunk? She got in the trunk. He shot her dead right there in the trunk, and he described as like sort of the lights going out. She didn't move,
didn't clinched, like hardly anything. She just passed away. And then, you know, Kemper did what he did with many of his victims, dissected her body, and and hers was the head that he had buried in his backyard for you know that. Again, he tells the story different ways for why why he did it, whether she's looking up at his mother, or whether you know, he likes the idea of her head being back there, or whether he was simply doing it for identification purposes. He tells different stories
at different times. So at any rate, he drives her body south down to Monterey and it's been cut up, and he throws it in the in the ocean, and he drives back to Santa Cruise, well within a day or two. He clearly didn't look at the tides and how the tides work. The body washes up on the beaches of Santa Cruz, the body parts start washing up on the beaches of Santa Cruise. So and of course that's another one for the newspapers where they're all over at a torso walk washes up, an arm washes up,
the lake washes on the beaches of Santa Cruise. It's just shocking, shocking crimes. And she has been, you know, missing, She had been missing for a couple of days. And yeah, I was lucky enough with Cynthia Shaw's case to have Forest and Forrest was very open about it.
Her brother.
I also found some old records where the the Sheriff's department had interviewed the gentleman she was living with, and he was she was babysitting his kids, taking care of his kids, and you know, he had certainly had a perspective of her. Oh she's drug free and all this other stuff. And then they interview her friends and they're like, oh, she was on drugs a lot and was hitchhiking a lot and stuff. So there again you get to see
sort of the multi multi faceted angles of somebody. But yeah, a very bright girl, very very loved person, and her death was very obviously, very impactful to the community just because of the grizzly nature that you know that the incidents that happened after she passed away.
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Now we're talking about Edmund Kemper more and one of the most fascinating profound things in your book is a really dapper photo of Edmund Kemper smoking a cigarette I guess awaiting trial. That looks like and again, very dapper, very stylish. I don't know, movie star looks. I guess, I don't know. I won't I can't go that far. But anyway, will you write in this time that Edmund Kemper says, he explains is murderous bent and he says, part of it was fear. Some of what was regret
are other parts of it were the opportunities. I didn't just rush out and look for the opportunities. If you'll notice, there was a greater time spend between the first and second and the second and third, and there was and then there was anywhere else. But he besides that, he didn't want blood was not an actual plan in the sea. Blood was got in his way. What he really wanted, what he's interested in doing is seeing the death and
having that power. Can you explain more about this quote that I'm talking about, this long thing that he says.
Kemper says, yeah, so yeah, And it's an interesting quote because it's a little different than some of the other explanations he gives and things. You know, I forgot who it was, Willy something who said Willie Sutton who said, you know, I rob bank?
Why do I rob banks?
Because that's where the money is and he has said sort of something about, you know, college students and all these beautiful college students and upper middle class. He wasn't attracted to hippie types. And honestly, I think, you know, after all this research, that he really was like a psycho sexual killer. You know, if that's even a terminal, I'm just saying that, but he was like a sexual killer in that the power. He was somebody that was
bullied most of his life. He was somebody that was you know, never stood up for himself, and the simply the power and the sexuality of it all. Yeah, blood wasn't an issue. His first two victims he used a knife and he didn't after that. After that, you know, he strangled like okou. And then he started with firearms and very quick quick deaths, not you know, no no torture or anything like that, anything horrendous. As if murder's not horrendous, but anything more horrendous I should say happened
after the victims had passed away. And so yeah, that quote is an interesting one because you know, he's candid, but he's also a nuanced he doesn't forget that. You know, oftentimes the fights or he would have fights with his mother. They drank, both drank a lot, and they would get in these terrible fights, and then he would go out hunting as a way to relieve him, release himself, you know, and to get over it. He also said I had bought a new pistol in one case, and he was
excited to try out this pistol. And so you know, a woman has to lose her life because edmun Kemper bought a new pistol. So you know, there's it's it's even the reasons I think are multifaceted, So it's not just in those cases. I wouldn't say always changing his story. You know, there's a variety of reasons of why he's going out and doing that. There's not one simple explanation.
Like some people want to believe, because it just isn't isn't.
So Yeah, he writes that what he wanted to see was the death, and he wanted to see the triumph, the exultation of the death. It was like eating or a narcotic something that drove me more and more and more.
Yeah.
He even talked about opening his trunk after he had killed him in and looking and he felt like a hunter, you know, like, oh, I had bagged this thing, you know, it's just and with the early victims, he was too. He took polaroids as if he had propped up their bodies, like he was some sort of hunter. And this is you know, it's just it's unbelievable.
Yeah.
Yeah, you provide the Pablo Peblo, Colorado, April twenty fourth, nineteen seventy three, when Kemper calls Santa Cruz Police Department and asked to talk to Lieutenant Sharer, the lead investigator on related co ed murders, You provide this amazing telephone transcript. Just again, very very interesting and amazing. Uh just told us a little bit about that. Franscaript.
Yeah, yeah, so I had all my life I had heard about this call. You know, you had, We had always heard he called in and they didn't believe him. They didn't believe him because he had gone to a place called the jury room, which was a bar. I think a lot of your listeners will know this, and he he had hung out with law enforcement, with police and deputies in the jury room and sort of you know, listening in what's going on with these crimes?
What's going on? Where are you guys? At with these things. But he was also just attracted to power. He was attracted.
He wanted, you know, wanted to be And when we were kids, we always heard, oh, he.
Was too tall.
Well he wasn't too tall. He may have been, but really it was he had killed his grandparents. You can't be a remember a law enforcement after something.
Like that back then.
So sure anyway, so he had he knew these people, and it took me a while to find a local law enforcement person that would say, yeah, I hung out with Ed Keimper, But I found a couple of them. One gentleman named Dave Alcoorn said, I, you know, Kemper was kind of annoying, but I liked hanging out with him because he's six foot nine, but I could beat him in arm wrestling, which I thought was sort of funny.
So Kemper knows these guys, and sure enough, when he goes out to Pueblo, he kills his mother, he kills her friend, drives out to Pueblo, Colorado, and he had actually driven past and come back. But he calls in and sure enough he knows the guy there, Ed Connor, and Ed was somebody that he had hung out with in the jury room, and we had just heard these stories all my life about you know, they wouldn't believe him and whatever. And sure enough, when I talked to Ed,
he said, yeah, I had a tough time believe. I'm like, oh, yeah, I know him. You know, even before I was a police officer, I had been delivering tires. I work at a tire place and he worked at a gas station, So I knew Ed. We visited all the time. And so he's telling me the coed killer and he had killed his grandparents. It was just sort of sort of mind blowing. And to actually find that the transcript there,
it is like, Holy Toledo. It was sort of like a gold mine after hearing about this for so long. And the the Sheer thing, the Chuck Sheer thing, was sort of interesting. Kemper had this idea that everybody was after him and they had this big posse's formed and big investigations and they were all after him. Well nobody on the law enforcement side had a clue. They just
didn't know, And and that was sort of interesting. When I went into the book, I thought, Oh, this is going to be a hard boiled detective thing, and we're going to I'm going to really write about what they were doing. Well, when I talked to Mickey Aloofi, who was a deputy sheriff and really a big part of the Kemper investigation, Mickey said, we didn't have any idea. We did, you know, we were these killings were happening over here, over here, the victim types were all different.
Were confident. We thought there were two killers, but you know, they were. They just weren't on it. And with technology and everything the times in such a small department, they didn't have a chance. So I quickly got rid of that idea for the book. It's not going to be that. And yeah, so that was Yeah, that was Kemper and Publo. That was quite a fine. That's pretty It just blew my mind reading that for the first time.
Absolutely me too. You talk about the Momen trial in August seventy three, and you write about the Kemper trial November seventy three, and that offers some dramatic and profound quotes. You also have a chapter per se a prison life and parole hearings, and it seems like there's some artwork there. Why include this? What was what did you want to convey with this little bit of information.
Yeah, so I sort of I did one chat which was an aftermath of for Santa Cruz and where we were at and where they're different players, and the people that had been in the story, how they were doing and what they went on to do, you know, the people that were still alive, and just how they were impacted.
But I thought it would be sort of important to also follow these gentlemen because I'm and I use that term lessly because at the time, the death penalty was taken off the table, so they all three of them ended up with life with the possibility of parole. So Mullan just was up for parole in March, and of course it was denied. Fraser went up for parole. He didn't really attend his parole hearings, but in one case I think he stood out in the hallway and was
yelling in at the pro board. But he ultimately committed suicide in prison and Mule Creek Prison in two thousand and nine and August thirteenth, I think it was. And so they went on to have these long lives and Mullin.
Is still alive.
You can see some of the artwork in the book that he's still doing. Kemper A lot of people know, you know, he started reading books on tape for the blind for a program. He started making the pottery and cups and bowls and things like that. I also thought it was important to catch up with their parole hearings to see how their stories had changed over the years. Were Kemper suddenly said I was not a cannibal, I never ate anybody, and and sort of changed his story
on that. Strangely enough, just last weekend, we're recording this. On Friday last weekend, I went to Mule Creek Prison and met Herbert Mullin, which was quite a cleansing. I had been afraid of this man my entire life, and you know, you know, he had killed my dad's friend, and just hearing about it from my dad, and my dad was a big guy, you know, just a big tough guy. And to hear my dad talk about him in those kind of scary terms was you know, as
a kid, you're just impacted by that. And so to go and meet this little old man in Meal Creek just felt, you know, it was just I guess the cleansing is the only real real word for it, but it was like he's still there, and he there, he shall remain until he dies. And yeah, it's just interesting. I had never been in a prison before.
Wow, that's the whole program talking about that visit. I'm sure. I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking about this murder Capital of the world. The Santa Cruz community looks back at the John Linley Fraser, Herbert Mullen, and Edmund Kemper murder spreeze of the early nineteen seventies, Emerson Murray. Where can people take a look more so about this book as they're interested, tell us more about that.
Yeah, okay, for sure. Yep. It's a self published book.
I did it myself. It's Murder Capital of Theworld dot com. I will I package up the books myself. I got my two daughters. We'll package them up and get them sent out to you a SAP if you order it. If you're in the Santa CRUs area, which this is a big podcast, it's in a couple of local bookstores. You can get the kindle on Amazon, but the kindle only has like twenty five pictures. You're not going to get the same the same impact as the paperback. So
I had a series of a thousand printed. They're signed and numbered. I have about one hundred and fifty left and I'm going to get five hundred more. That'll be a second second printing. But yep, Murder Capital of Theworld dot com.
Thank you so.
Much, Thank you so much, Emerson Murray, Murder Capital of the World. It's been fascinating. Thank you so much. You have great evening, and thank you for this interview.
Thank you, good night.