(dramatic music) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] At school, Herbert
William Mullin's classmates voted him most likely to succeed. By the time he was 25,
he would take the lives of 13 men, women, and children with knife. - He cut her open and pulled
out all of her intestines and laid them out. - [Narrator] Pistol. - [Terry] People running for their life. - [Narrator] Bat. - Bam! - [Narrator] And rifle. - Shoots him, kills him, and drives off. - [Narrator] He would claim to be on an extraordinary mission, to save lives through murder. - He's gonna do something
heroic and significant. - [Narrator] But was this
heinous serial killer driven by nature or nurture? We asked the investigators that
had to unravel the mystery. - The purpose of my job with Herb Mullin was trying to figure
out what made him tick. - [Narrator] And the murderer himself. - [Herbert] They are to blame for causing me to commit the crimes. - [Narrator] Was Herbert
William Mullin born to kill? (suspenseful blues music) (man singing) (suspenseful music) - [Herbert] I was a good Catholic. I said my prayers every day. I went to church every Sunday. I made sure that I went to
confession at least once a month. Between October 13th, 1972
and February 13th, 1973, I did, in fact, murder 13 people. (eerie music) (suspenseful music)
(birds chirping) - [Narrator] In January, 1973, sheriff's detective, Terry Medina, encountered a crime scene
he would never forget. - You know, when you work
homicide as long as I did, there are things that get into your mind that you wish you could
not have there anymore. (melancholy music)
(birds chirping) This cabin was one of those scenes that
haunts me a little bit. - [Narrator] Medina had been
called to a woodland cabin near an old tourist attraction in the Santa Cruz Mountains,
known as the Mystery Spot. - It's this place where they
advertise the phenomenon of the unknown, where the planet and gravity don't exist as it does in other places. The fact is, the night that
these bodies were discovered certainly wasn't the course of nature as we know it. It was around Christmas time. It was drizzly, rainy, wet. I remember this was a dirt road and this small cabin was
just off to the right. - [Narrator] The cabin was home to 30-year-old Kathy
Francis and her family. - There were three bodies
that were found in that cabin. There were Mrs. Francis and her two sons, and they were pretty young. The first thing that hit me was this, the Christmas tree was knocked down and the decorations were broken. It was supposed to be such
a good time of year and... (kettle squealing) There was obviously a violent
struggle in that cabin. She put up a big fight. - [Narrator] Kathy's boys had
been playing Chinese checkers in their bunk. The killer had shot them, then stabbed them with a hunting knife. - One of them, he had to pull by the foot to draw closer and stabbed him. (melancholy music) You know, it seems so peaceful when you hear those birds. Who would have thought that something this tragic woulda happened in such a quiet, pretty place? (waves whooshing) - [Narrator] The unexplained
murder at the Mystery Spot was just one of many to terrify the laid-back
coastal community of Santa Cruz during four months of madness. - You know, this was a strange
time, to say the least. (suspenseful music) - The DA came out and called us the murder
capital of the world. - [Narrator] A killer was
striking indiscriminately. - The community and the people
that lived in this county were really on edge. - [Narrator] Young women. - He surprised her and,
you know, killed her in a horrible way. - [Narrator] Children - People were frightened. They didn't have a clue
as to who was involved. - [Narrator] A priest - Oh my God. It raised the hackles of so many people. - [Narrator] The elderly - We haven't had anything like this in Santa Cruz County before and I hope to God we never
have anything like this again. - [Narrator] No one was safe. - This was going on with
unbelievable frequency. - [Helen] We've had so many. When will this stop? - There was a lot of
pressure on the police and the detectives. There's so many bodies turning up. - They were killed in
very, very different ways under different sets of circumstances. And, from a law enforcement perspective, you can't make really a
connection between these people. - [Narrator] Then February the 13th, 1973, a single rifle shot would ring
out on the Santa Cruz cliffs and the mystery would begin to unravel. (suspenseful music) 73-year-old Fred Perez was
starting some gardening when a young man drove into
the quiet neighborhood. (suspenseful music) - Driving down the street
on a Sunday morning, an elderly gentlemen
working in his front yard and he shoots him, kills
him, and drives off. - [Narrator] A neighbor
had spotted the car leaving and police soon stopped it. The occupant was 25-year-old
Santa Cruz resident, Herbert William Mullin, a seemingly mild-mannered young man. - He was unassuming, withdrawn, quiet. - If you looked at him and talked to him, you'd think he was a law-abiding citizen. He was interested in the community. He was a moral person. That's what he was on the face of it. - [Narrator] But
investigators soon realized there was more to this
quiet and polite young man than met the eye. (suspenseful music) - Santa Cruz, California, 25-year-old Herbert Mullin was charged with the fatal shootings of six persons in the past three weeks. - [Narrator] Herbert
Mullin was suspected of as many as 13 murders. - Mullin, who had been
voted the most likely to succeed in his high school class and held a college scholarship, reportedly was involved with
the Santa Cruz drug culture. - [Narrator] With Mullin
in custody, detectives, including defense investigator
Harold Cartwright, began searching for an answer to the question on everyone's lips. Why? - The purpose of my job with Herb Mullin was trying to figure
out what made him tick. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Cartwright's
investigation would begin in Mullin's small hometown of Felton, nestled amongst the redwoods
of the Santa Cruz Mountains. - This is San Lorenzo Valley High School. Herb Mullin graduated from here in 1965. He was voted most likely to succeed. He was an excellent student from all we've been able to determine. He was a well-liked, good football player, even though he was quite small. Here's this wonderful young man, and a few years later, he's a mass murderer and a serial killer. I mean, that's not something that happens to the average person. What happened? - [Narrator] No one could have known it but the moment of Herbert Mullin's birth would later take on a terrible
and tragic significance. - [Herbert] My name is
Herbert William Mullin and I was born on April
18th, 1947 at 6:06 AM. My earliest memory was I was crawling on my hands and knees and I
was looking into a puddle. I saw myself and the
redwood trees reflected and the sunlight, the sun. And I touched the sun with my finger and it created little circular waves extending outward in all directions. (water whooshing)
(birds chirping) I felt peaceful and calm,
inquisitive, curious, content, grateful and hopeful. - [Narrator] So what had turned this optimistic infant into a killer? - I remember the first, one of the first times I
ever got him to say anything in response to one of my questions. We were there and he wasn't
having anything of it and he finally looked at me and he just looked up on the table and he said, "When God
speaks to you, you listen." - [Narrator] Investigators
were about to uncover one of the most bizarre stories
in criminal history. (suspenseful music) (suspenseful music) In February, 1973, Santa Cruz resident, Herbert William Mullin, had been arrested for the seemingly random shooting of an old man working in his yard. As Mullin was interviewed
by detectives and doctors, he began to reveal the
details of 12 more murders that had terrified the community, along with an extraordinary motive. - I mean, the hair on the
back of my neck just stood up and I was, it sent chills
all the way down my spine. - His premise was that he had to save the
world after hearing voices. - The voices told him that he was, you know, one of the chosen people and that it was God's plan that
people had to be sacrificed. - He was gonna prevent
cataclysmic earthquakes by killing people. - The earthquake was gonna
take California into the sea and he had to perform ritual sacrifices to prevent the earthquake from knocking California into the sea. - [Narrator] Mullin claimed
that willing victims would offer themselves
to him telepathically. Though Detective Medina hadn't
realized it at the time, in October, 1972, he'd responded to the first of Herbert Mullin's murders. (melancholy music) - At the time, I was just thinking, I'm going to another murder scene. - [Narrator] The body was that of familiar local hobo,
Lawrence White, known as Whitey. (melancholy music) - We're only about a mile
from the city of Santa Cruz. We got called to an area
right off the road here and there was an old man dead,
obviously been bludgeoned. - Mullin knows that the people who will be willing sacrifices will let him know telepathically
they're ready to die, and that's exactly what he says happens. He sees a man on the road, he drives by. He hears a man say, I'm
Jonah, throw me over. There's the first one. - He parked the '58 Chevy
Nomad, put the hood up, the universal sign of distress. There's something wrong with the car, who should come along? Poor old Whitey. He had Whitey looking under the hood. Mullin comes around with a baseball bat while Lawrence White's looking, bam! - Kills him. - Of course, you start to
look who his associates are and that's usually, in
these cases, you know, that's where the connection is. Wow. All of his friends were trying to help us. He didn't have an enemy. Nobody could say, oh,
there was an argument. There was a conflict. He owed money. It was just an old man beat to death on the side of a road. - [Narrator] The investigation
into Lawrence White's death would lead to a dead end, but, on October the 24th, Herbert Mullin would strike again, offering a ride to 24-year-old Cabrillo College
student, Mary Guilfoyle. (dramatic music) - He was gonna take her
to a particular location. She soon realized that she wasn't on her way to that location. He surprised her and killed
her in a horrible way, right there in the car. - He not only stabbed her, but
he essentially cut her open, pulled out all of her
intestines and laid them out. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] The once-popular
high school student was now killing without remorse - With Guilfoyle, there was blood on the floor mat of his vehicle. And he talked to me about how he could never get all
that blood off the floor mat. There wasn't any emotion when he talked about killing these people. - [Narrator] And now
Herbert Mullin was about to commit a crime that would
shock the whole community to its very core. (suspenseful music) All Souls Day, November '72, Herbert Mullin enters St.
Mary's Church in Los Gatos. Beloved local priest, Father
Tomei, is taking confession. - This priest, who was
extremely well-respected, had been a World War II
French resistance fighter - Mullin had been raised as a Catholic and he went there for confession. - [William] I was thoroughly
indoctrinated into the ideas and concepts and belief
systems of Roman Catholicism. Many of those doctrines and
concepts require a great deal of faith that isn't based
on logic or reasoning. I think that was detrimental
to my mental health. - He went into the confessional and discussed some things. One would hope it was
his previous killings. - He then opens the
door to the confessional and he stabs the priest in the heart. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Mullin would
later claim that Father Tomei had willingly offered
himself as a sacrifice. - The thing that was so awful about it was that the priest was,
even after being stabbed, dying, bleeding to death, still said words to the
effect that he forgave him for what he had done. It's almost like the crucifix scene. (melancholy music) - [Narrator] So what had driven Mullin to such a shocking crime? Sheriffs detective, Terry Medina, also began to delve
into Mullin's childhood. - During the investigation, we had to interview his parents and you know, his mother
was just a very nice, typical mom of the time. Herb's father, he was a regular guy. He worked for the post office. He was a former Marine,
but he was very strict. I mean, there was bright
line of right and wrong. - [William] I entered St.
Stephen's Grammar School. I was a good student I think, from my point of view. I always did my homework at night and I was always on first team. I was a pretty good athlete. I thought that it was leading me towards a beneficial lifetime. You know, so that I could be
a good member of my family and the community. (melancholy music) - [Narrator] Detailed
investigations failed to turn up anything significant or unusual about Mullins' childhood,
until his late teens. - After high school, he started clearly deteriorating mentally - [Narrator] Mullin began to change. - [William] I'd been dating a girl during 1964, '65, and '66, and '67. 1967, we became engaged to be married. I think that is basically when mental health issues
started to take effect. - I spoke with his high school girlfriend, a nice, nice young woman. They got engaged to be married and he started acting
stranger and stranger and she was afraid of him at times. He got to where he didn't want
her to make any decisions. And I recall that he would slap her legs if he got annoyed with her,
if he got angry with her. - [Herbert] My fiance and
my friends were going along with the idea of my parents that I should be kept naive
little boy and immature. - [Narrator] The young Herb Mullin was beginning to show
signs of severe paranoia. - We don't know what
triggers a paranoid disorder. There are a lot of theories early on that the reason somebody
became paranoid was because they had an
unacted-upon homosexual urges, and became terrified
of the homosexual urge. And so what they would
do is they would turn this into somebody is
going to try to get me. They're talking about me. They're going to hurt me. They're conspiring against me. They're gonna make me do
things that I don't wanna do. And this is not a sexual identity problem. I think people would get that confused that, oh, they're gay
and they don't wanna be this is much more of a
terror-based feeling. - [Narrator] So what
was causing this change in the previously devout,
clean-cut Catholic? - When I spoke with Herb's sister, she mentioned the first
time that she really became concerned about her
brother was he was having dinner with her family and he started mimicking
everything her husband did. If her husband picked
up a fork or a knife, he would pick up a fork or a knife. If her husband got up
and went to the sink, he would get up and go to the sink. And this went on for some period of time and she described it as him, like he was being in a trance. That he really wasn't in
control of what he was doing. He was just being controlled
by his brother-in-law. - [Narrator] This trance-like
mimicking is known as echopraxia and can be a
symptom of schizophrenia. - It used to be thought of
as a young person's disease. The schizophrenic frequently
doesn't manifest symptoms until late teens or early 20s, although there are exceptions to that. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Mullin would also allege that his high school friend, Jim Gianera, had turned him
onto mind-altering drugs. - [Herbert] Two illegal drugs
that I became familiar with was marijuana and LSD. - [Narrator] Mullin dropped
Catholicism in favor of an obsession with Eastern religions and registered as a
conscientious objector. His family began to believe
drugs were the cause of the extreme changes in his behavior. - A lot of people at that time, including his parents, thought it was because
he was experimenting with marijuana and LSD. I don't believe that at all. - We could never find anything that indicated that at
some point in his life, his drug life snapped him
into some other reality. It just didn't seem to be there. - It may have been connected with some of his psychedelic drug taking, but that will not, by itself, make somebody permanently psychotic, unless the person was
already tending toward that or had begun to show some signs of it. - [Narrator] Mullin
himself, however, disagrees - [Herbert] I was talked into using LSD by other people that I knew
at that particular time, people that I had gone
to high school with. I was a forced victim. I asked that guy if he had any marijuana. I know that both marijuana and LSD were very, very detrimental
to my mental health. - [Narrator] By January, 1973,
Mullin had killed a hobo, a college girl, and a priest. His next killing would
be much more personal. (suspenseful music) - He felt that Gianera had
introduced him to marijuana and that that had been the thing that had really ruined his life. So at some point, he became fixated on this idea that Gianera was responsible for all of Herb's problems. - Gianera crime scene was horrific also. Mullin, at that point, he had a gun. (suspenseful music) - [Harold] He shot Mr.
Gianera and he took a knife and stabbed Mrs. Gianera. - Well, that's the messy
part of his delusion is he blames the person who
introduced him to drugs, and that whole thing doesn't fit with his idea that people are volunteers. But, on the other hand, it's more like, well, you know, I've gotta kill people, might as well get that
guy too and punish him. That's not really part of the vision. - [Narrator] The Gianeras' death would provide the explanation
for the Mystery Spot murder. Earlier that morning at her cabin, Kathy Francis had given
Mullin Jim Gianera's address. She would pay for her kindness. - He went back to the Francis house which clearly showed that
he was covering his trail, and he killed her and her two boys - [Narrator] And Mullin's
murderous mission was far from over. (suspenseful music) (suspenseful music) In 1973, Herbert Mullin had been arrested for multiple murders he claimed he'd committed
to save California from a cataclysmic earthquake. Several days after Mullin's arrest, sheriff's detective, Terry Medina, was called to another terrible
scene in the redwoods forest. (peaceful music)
(birds chirping) - This area is in Henry Cowell State Park, but it's not in the part of
the park that people go to. You know, where there's the picnic table and a place to put up your tent. This is a remote part of the
park not used for that purpose. It's just a mountain area. I haven't been here since
we were at the crime scene. (melancholy music) - There's no question about it. Very unusual. We haven't had anything like this in Santa Cruz County before and I hope to God, we never
had anything like this again. I think people are
definitely a little uptight. They don't know exactly what we have running loose around here and they're very concerned. - [Narrator] In a makeshift shelter, four teenage campers
had been found murdered, each coldly dispatched
by a bullet to the head. (melancholy music) But Herbert Mullin was in custody so the killer of the boys was a mystery. - By the time we can make the assessment, it were starting to get dark. The bodies were not gonna be removed. Somebody had to stay there all night long. I was one of the people that
had to stay there overnight. And that was the most eerie
crime scene I'd ever done. It was, you know, cops never wanna admit that they get afraid, but I'll tell you not
knowing who the suspect is, not knowing if the suspect
is gonna come back. Everybody is gone from this
mountain except for us two, and the deceased, I'd say we were afraid. (melancholy music) - [Narrator] Autopsies would later reveal that the boys' bodies
had been there a week and the bullets that
had killed them belonged to Herbert William Mullin. He had killed them before his arrest. Their choice of campsite
had cost them their lives. - [Herbert] One of my favorite pastimes, I enjoyed the outdoors,
walking in the redwoods and exploring the mountainous regions. (melancholy music) - He had violated some rules
and been kicked off property and when he saw them doing
it in violation of the rules, he just didn't think that
they should be there either. He wants people to be
punished for infractions. That's not at all surprising in someone with paranoid schizophrenia - [Narrator] Mullin claimed the teenagers had told him telepathically that they were willing sacrifices. He'd entered the tent and opened fire. (melancholy music) - They were basically trapped. God, I don't know what would
have gone through their mind. (melancholy music) - [Narrator] Mullin
found a rifle at the camp and it was that weapon that he used on the 13th of February, 1973 to shoot Fred Perez in his yard, his 13th and final victim. But although the shooting of Perez had led to Mullin's capture, it did little to explain why
the former all-American kid had turned into a ruthless serial killer. In his investigations into Mullin's life, Harold Cartwright had
discovered that by 1971, the boy once voted most likely to succeed was living in cheap hotels in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. - You have to understand, during the 70s, the
Tenderloin of San Francisco was a pretty rundown. You know, parts of it were really bad and there were drug addicts and winos and it was a pretty seedy place. - [Narrator] Here, the pacifist and devotee of Eastern religions
had a surprising obsession. (suspenseful music)
(gloves thudding) - When Herb was living in San Francisco, he got into boxing and I located the gym and I remember the
trainer's name was Vick. The way Vick described him as strange, but he liked the kid because
he had a real strong will. He would spar with people who, you know, much better boxers and
take a pretty good beating but he would keep right
on and keep coming back. - He described him as
having a lot of guts. - [Herbert] I don't think that I had a conscious intention to engage in that much boxing, every day
for four or five days a week for, what, six months. - Herb was really focused whenever you were there
telling him what to do and coaching him all the time. But if you turned your back on
him for a couple of minutes, when you turned around, he
would be standing in the corner of the ring and he would
be talking to himself like he was carrying on a
conversation with another party. - [Herbert] I wanted to open myself to become a successful citizen. Then, somewhere in my subconscious, I focused on my father and he
had told me he had done boxing and so forth during his formative years. And so possibly I engaged
in that violent activity because of my desire to be more like him in terms of the success story of a normal, natural person in America. - It's not unusual to search for something that will make you better. Whatever that better is, it's very painful to be out
of sorts to that degree. And the psychological pain is something that many schizophrenics will
talk about at some point, that they can't stand
the pain that they're in. (eerie music) - [Narrator] In the Tenderloin, Cartwright located one
of the decrepit hotels where Mullin had lived - I located one landlady. She had some boxes in her basement that he had left when he moved and they were filled with
Herb's crazy writings and drawings and hundreds of pages that really didn't make any sense at all. - One of the symptoms of
certain types of schizophrenia or other kinds of learning
disorders is hypergraphia, where a person just writes and writes. Sometimes they'll write
all over the walls, all over their bodies. They'll keep journals, they'll write endless
letters to the president. It's not that they need
to put things in writing for any particular readers, it's just a compulsive recording of details, details, details. - He composed great heaps of literature which was essentially
undecipherable while I was there. - [Narrator] These
seemingly senseless writings would contain hidden codes that provided a terrifying glimpse of Herbert Mullin's future intent. - There was a lotta material
about the 12 apostles, plus one, clearly implying that he was the 13th disciple of God. (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Mullin was
beginning to develop his theories for how he would save California
from natural disaster. - He comes across a death date that's very significant. It's Albert Einstein's and Albert Einstein died on
his birth date, April 18th, which also coincides with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. (suspenseful music) - Nobody can say what percentage
of schizophrenics have it, but it's very common. A magical belief about
certain numbers occurs as one of their delusions. - So in the mind of a delusional person, what he sees is Einstein died to protect the people who
were born on April 18th and those people now had a mission to protect everybody else. So he's gonna do something heroic. He gets very involved in
looking at all the numbers of death rates all over the place, and then looking at natural disasters and seeing how, well, look here now, death rates go down and we have a hurricane or an earthquake. So is the earth trying
to balance itself out? He's got to think of
a way to murder people to bring the death rate up
to stave off the earthquake. - [Narrator] Herbert Mullin would choose the 13th day of October, 1972 to begin the devastating
four-month killing spree that would claim the lives
of 13 innocent people. His final victim, again, slain
on the 13th of the month. (water whooshing) But were Mullins murders
really driven by delusions? And would his insanity mean
he could escape punishment for his crimes? (dramatic music) (dramatic music) In 1973, the trial of Herbert Mullin would in turn shock baffle
and repulse the jury and test their concept of the
term insanity to the limit. That he was guilty of
murder was in little doubt, but whether he was
legally responsible was. - When these horrible crimes occur, I think we're sort of
conditioned to think, he must be crazy. That sets the stage for a battle over whether they are
therefor legally insane. - The state of mind is really
what this case turned out to be all about. (suspenseful music) - Well, this is the courtroom
where the trial occurred. It was Judge Cranach's courtroom. On this side is where
the defense team sat. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] From the
moment Mullin had met his court-appointed attorney, his behavior had been bizarre. - Herbert Mullin said he didn't want me because I didn't look
sufficiently like Richard Nixon. This is not exactly at the
height of Nixon's popularity. It was apparent that he
was digging us a bedbug. - [Narrator] As the trial
progressed, any lingering doubts that Mullin had been the perpetrator of all the crimes soon vanished. - Mr. Mullin normally sat in this chair. He would interrupt the
proceedings from time to time. He would get very excited and say something to his attorneys when somebody was describing
how the location of a body or how many stab wounds there
were, so on and so forth. When somebody's doing that, they're obviously
incriminating themselves. - [Narrator] Although it was clear to all that Mullin was mentally ill, was he insane enough to
avoid full responsibility for the crimes? - Even a diagnosis of
severe mental illness is not the equivalent of legal insanity. Legal insanity is who should
be held morally responsible. In most of the jurisdictions, it's based on the M'Naghten
rule, which comes from England. - Part of the M'Naghten rule is that if you're doing something and you don't know it's wrong, that there's an excusable homicide there. Well, he didn't know what
he was doing was wrong that I could see. He thought he was doing the right thing. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] Against all expectations, Mullin made it clear
that he wanted to speak - Mr. Mullin did testify,
which is very unusual. He came up, he didn't sit down. He was like this, and he basically gave us all a lecture. (peaceful music) - [Narrator] On the stand, Mullin claimed his family,
friends, and neighbors had all conspired to drive him to murder, a belief he still holds. - [Herbert] I have tried over the years, even during the trial,
I've tried to explain that I felt my family
and the people in charge of my upbringing were sort of playing a killjoy, sadistic game
on my life, on my mind. I think my family and my neighbors, they knew that I was
committing the crimes. (suspenseful music) - [Narrator] All those
involved with the investigation of Mullin's crimes dismiss his claims as the delusions of a madman. - I've seen so many cases
where it's so easy to blame, you know, parents for
things that go wrong. If either parent knew
exactly what Herb was doing, they would have turned him in. I'm positive of that in my heart. - You know, once a schizophrenic,
always has schizophrenic. His parents were wonderful people, and the fact that he might think something is strictly a part of his mental illness. - The thing about
someone who's paranoid is that they truly believe that there is a conspiracy against them. You can show this individual proof that what they're thinking is not right and then you become part of
the paranoid pseudo-community. - [Narrator] But would
Mullin's madness mean he would escape punishment for his crimes? - The defense in this
trial, I've got to tell you, they did a great job. I started to think, whoa,
are we gonna win this case? They said, if you're
Herbert William Mullin, two plus two equals five and everything that
derives from that is wrong. - He had a premise from which he operated and that premise was wacky. And, as a result, whatever
he did after that, he assumed, I think, that he was doing what
he was supposed to do, he was called upon to do. And being a perfectly good citizen, he went about his duties when his duties included, killing people. (melancholy music) - [Narrator] After three
days of deliberation, the jury returned their verdict. Hebert William Mullin
was judged to be sane at the time of his crimes and convicted of two counts
of first-degree murder and eight of second-degree murder. Some would write Herbert Mullin
off as just another madman, but is there more to this
killer than meets the eye? - There are a lot of
paranoid schizophrenics that don't kill people. You know, why did this happen to him? - So what made Herbert Mullin different? Was he born to kill? - Obviously the seeds were there. Some of the killings that he committed, it seemed as if he was using revenge. Killing some of the people that he felt had caused his problems. The marijuana, people defiling nature by camping in the woods. So you have to say, was it
done because of real psychosis or was he using it to justify murders? - It was not a false claim
that he was psychotic. It's a false claim to imply that it was because of a preexisting
paranoid schizophrenia that he took up the
gun, the knife, and bat to kill all these people. That belief system that
he had doesn't show that he was unaware that
society considered this wrong and that he was violating
the criminal law. - If you go into any psychiatric hospital, you'll see somebody who's there and say, why are you here? Well, I heard voices
telling me to kill myself. Well, why didn't you kill yourself? I didn't wanna kill myself so I told somebody and they
put me in the hospital. It's very, very rare that somebody obeys
command hallucinations. - A person who is born
with schizophrenia dormant and it does become full-blown
illness is born to be ill, but not to kill. - [Narrator] Herbert Mullin, however, continues to argue that
his crimes were the result of nurture rather than nature. (suspenseful music)
(birds chirping) - [Herbert] I told the
state of California, the court system, the psychiatrist, they should give credence
to this contention of mine that I'm not 100% the guilty one in the commission of the crimes. They should give a little leniency and maybe exonerate and
vindicate me a little bit. That's one of my hopes, you know? I'm looking for a sponsor
who will assist me in approaching the court system so that I might be able to
achieve a parole or a pardon or release from prison. (suspenseful music) - But mental illness, mental torment, that people deal with, I think you have to
have some sympathy for. But the story of the victims
doesn't really get told enough - For the investigator
that spent months delving into the life and mind of Herbert Mullin, the answer to the question of
whether he should be released is a very simple one. (suspenseful music) - Think of all of the people's
lives that he just destroyed. I mean, not even, not
just the ones he killed. I think he was crazy as hell. You know, Herb Mullin is, was, will always be a paranoid schizophrenic. And, you know, heaven forbid that he would ever be
released from prison. (suspenseful music)
