Who Am I?
- As a child, I was bright and well adjusted. I was an altar boy and a good student. I was brought up in John Steinbeck country: Salinas, California.
- Just after graduating from high school, my best friend was killed in an automobile accident. I was emotionally devastated and this event may have triggered the mental deterioration that was to come.
- By my early twenties, schizophrenia had begun to manifest itself. Further aggravating my mental condition with the use of LSD and other drugs, I became a walking time bomb.
- My increasingly bizarre behavior included echopraxia (mimicking another person’s exact movements), burning my penis with a cigarette, and responding out loud to telepathic messages I was receiving.
- I had been in and out of mental institutions, but on that final release, I began my carnage. After the fact, California Governor Ronald Reagan called my release a “psychiatric mistake.”
- Among my thirteen victims was a homeless man I beat to death with a baseball bat, a Catholic priest I stabbed to death in a confessional, and a young mother and her two children whom I shot.
- Not only did I hear voices in my head commanding me to kill, I also heard the voices of my victims telling me they were ready to be sacrificed.
- In my psychotic state, I believed that in committing these murders, I was preventing a cataclysmic earthquake and tidal wave from destroying California.
- After my arrest, and in jail awaiting my trial, I was in adjoining cells with another California serial murderer, Ed Kemper. A mutual dislike kept us taunting each other the whole time.
- Although my attorneys presented a defense of not guilty by reason of insanity, the jury found me guilty of both first- and second-degree murder, and I was sentenced to life imprisonment. I will be eligible for parole in 2025.
Answer: I am Herbert Mullin.