Herbert W. Mullin, who confessed to killing 13 people in the Santa Cruz area, died Thursday at a prison health care facility in Stockton.
He was 75 and died of “natural causes,” said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Mullin was one of three serial killers whose crimes led to Santa Cruz’s reputation as the nation’s ‘murder capital’ in the 1970s and early 1980s.
In a four-month spree starting in October 1972, Mullin beat, stabbed or shot to death 12 people in Santa Cruz County and one in Los Gatos. The victims — most apparently chosen at random — included a priest in a church confessional, a 4-year-old boy and a hitchhiking Cabrillo College student. (Click here for a map and more details of the crimes.)
Mullin was tried and convicted of 10 of the murders and confessed to an 11th and was sentenced to multiple life sentences. At the time, California did not have a death penalty. He spent most of his incarceration at the Mule Creek prison, near Ione.
Mullin was denied parole last year.
The two other infamous killers of Santa Cruz’s “murder capital” days remain in California prisons.
The crimes of Edmund Kemper, “the Co-Ed Killer,” overlapped with those of Mullin. Upon being released in 1969 from a mental hospital where he had been sent after murdering his grandparents at age 15, Kemper moved to the Santa Cruz area. From May 1972 to April 1973, he killed eight people: six high school or college students, then his mother and a friend of hers.
After the last two, he drove to Colorado, where he confessed and was taken into custody. He was tried and sentenced to multiple life sentences. Now 73, he is incarcerated at the prison medical facility in Vacaville.
David Carpenter, “the Trailside Killer,” is believed to have killed 10 people from 1979 to 1981 in the Bay Area. He was convicted of two murders in Santa Cruz County and five in Marin County. He was sentenced to death and, now 92, remains on Death Row in San Quentin prison.