Herbert William Mullin (April 18, 1947 – August 18, 2022) was an American serial killer who killed 13 people in California in the early 1970s. He confessed to the killings, which he claimed prevented earthquakes. In 1973, after a trial to determine whether he was insane or culpable, he was convicted of two murders in the first-degree and nine in the second-degree, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his imprisonment, he was denied parole eight times. In a terrible coincidence for the people of the greater Santa Cruz region, Mullin and Edmund Kemper overlapped in their 1972 to 1973 murder sprees, adding confusion to the police investigations and ending with both being arrested, within a few weeks of each other, after the deaths of 21 people. Early life, education, and mental health issues Herbert William Mullin was born on April 18, 1947, in Salinas, California. His father was reportedly stern but not abusive. Not long before Mullin's fifth birthday, the family had moved to San Francisco. Mullin had numerous friends at school and was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" when he was 16 by his classmates at San Lorenzo Valley High School. He experienced difficulty in life at this time, largely due to paranoid schizophrenic disorder. Shortly after graduating from San Lorenzo Valley High School, one of Mullin's friends, Dean Richardson, was killed in a car accident the summer after graduation in June 1965, and Mullin was devastated. He built "shrines" to Dean in his room and became obsessed with reincarnation. In 1969, Mullin was admitted to Mendocino State Hospital. Over the next few years, he entered various mental hospitals, but was discharged after spells as being no harm to himself or others. In total, he had been committed to five mental hospitals. By the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, accelerated by his usage of LSD and marijuana. Murder spree By 1972, Mullin was 25 and had moved back in with his parents in Felton, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. His birthday, April 18, was the anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which he thought was very significant. Mullin believed that the Vietnam War had produced enough American deaths to forestall earthquakes as a blood sacrifice to nature, but that with the war winding down by late 1972 (from an American perspective) he would need to start killing people in