A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and rang the Santa Cruz police department to confess. In custody,
Kemper confessed to six horrific sex murders, all with a strong necrophiliac element. In 1963, at
the age of fourteen, Kemper had murdered his grandfather and grandmother, with whom he was
living, and spent five years in mental hospitals. In 1972, he picked up two female hitchhikers,
threatened them with a gun, and murdered them both; he later dissected the bodies, cutting off the
heads. Kemper’s usual method was to take the bodies back to his mother’s house - she worked in a
hospital - and rape and dissect them there; he particularly enjoyed having sex with a headless body.
The bodies were later dumped over cliffs or left in remote mountain areas. Kemper was sentenced
to life imprisonment.
Another psychopathic mass killer, Herb Mullin, was operating in California at the same time as
Kemper. As a teenager, Mullin had been voted by his class ‘most likely to succeed’, but by the time
he was twenty-one - in 1969 - he was showing signs of mental abnormality. In October 1972,
driving along a mountain highway, Mullin passed an old tramp, and stopped to ask the man to take
a look at the engine; as the man bent over, Mullin killed him with a baseball bat, leaving the corpse
by the roadside. Two weeks later he picked up a pretty college student, stabbed her with a hunting
knife, and tore out her intestines. In November 1972 he went into a church and stabbed the priest to
death. On 25 January 1973, he committed five murders in one night, killing a friend and his wife,
then murdering a woman and her two children who lived in a nearby log cabin. In the Santa Cruz
State Park he killed four teenage boys in a tent with a revolver. On 13 February 1973, he was
driving to his parents’ home when a voice in his head told him to stop and kill an old man who was
working in his front garden. A neighbour heard the shot, and rang the police, who picked up Mullin
within a few blocks. At his trial, Mullin explained that he was convinced that murders averted
natural disasters - such as another San Francisco earthquake. But he was found to be sane and
sentenced to life imprisonment.
In May 1974, a burglar named Paul John Knowles came out of prison in Florida and flew to San
Francisco to join a woman who had become his ‘pen pal’ in prison, and who had agreed to marry
him. At close quarters, she found him rather frightening and, after four days, told him she had
changed her mind. That night, according to Knowles’s later confession, he went on the streets of
San Francisco and killed three people at random. After that, he flew back to Jacksonville, Florida,
and went on a rampage of murder and rape that lasted four months and claimed nineteen lives. In
Jacksonville he suffocated a woman in the course of a burglary; when two small girls, aged seven
and eleven, recognised him, he forced them into his car and killed them both, leaving their bodies
in a swamp. He broke into a house in Atlantic Beach and strangled a forty-nine-year-old woman,
then murdered and raped a female hitchhiker and strangled another woman in front of her threeyear-old
son. Then, driving around the country in a stolen car, he continued to commit murders and
rapes at random. In Miami, he called on his lawyer and made a tape confessing in detail to fourteen
murders (as well as the three in San Francisco), then drove on again. An attractive female journalist
named Sandy Fawkes met Knowles in Atlanta, and spent several days with him without suspecting
that he was a mass murderer; he made no attempt to harm her. He was finally arrested after a police
chase in which he took two hostages and executed them both. The day after his capture, he was
killed by an FBI agent when on his way to a maximum security jail when he - allegedly - tried to
grab the sheriffs gun.
In April 1974, two blacks, Dale Pierre, twenty, and his friend William Andrews, robbed a Hi-Fi
store in Ogden, Utah. The assistants, twenty-year-old Stan Walker and nineteen-year-old Michelle
Ansley, were tied up. Cortney Naisbitt, a sixteen-year-old youth, walked into the shop and was tied