Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 416: Herbert Mullin Part I - Blow Grass

Episode Date: July 11, 2020

On the first of a two part series on the man himself, we cover schizophrenic serial killer Herb Mullin, who murdered thirteen people in Santa Cruz, CA in the 1970s in order to prevent California from dropping into the ocean.

Sometimes it would just be so liberating to let yourself just go off the cliff of insanity and just let's see, because you know, when you start to see the door kind of like open and like imagine my brain, I imagine my brain is like a sort of like, I want to say a ranch house, right? And there's a couple of doors we don't open, right? In our home, we have the home that is my mind. There's a family rule. There's a couple of doors we don't open.

Some of them though sound like there's like there's like fun kind of carnival noises coming out of it. And you're like, I just kind of want to see what's back there. Normally the mommy of my brain is like, Hey, let's think about this. We got bills to pay. We got stuff to do. The daddy of my brain is just like, I don't give a shit anymore. I want to see what's got.

This is my house. I should be able to see what's behind every door in my house and then you just the liberation of what it would be like to open all those doors and just see what it's like to just go like. Absolutely. Well, Henry, I think that you're right about one thing. Having a extreme mental disorder does make you go crazy. I don't know if it liberates you.

It seems like it's its own form of prison. Apparently. Yeah. I know. It's a bummer. It's kind of makes me upset. Yeah. It's a big bummer.

No, it's a gigantic bummer. And then you hit the nail on the head and I commend you for it. Welcome to the last podcast of the left, everyone. I am Ben staring at Marcus, as well as Henry Zabrowski, the person who wants to go crazy. But Henry, I got good news for you. You're already nuts. I know this. I know this.

I've been told by my family. I've been told by medical health professionals that I am as what they described. How many therapists have you gone through now? Again, these are people that you pay to speak with and some of them just the money isn't even enough to talk to you. You say gone through. I say grew too big for the problems grew too big for them to handle. And they didn't have the strength to realize the entire situation.

Right. And I, yeah, I mean, three of them, yeah, but I didn't wear them out. You know that, you know, Tony Soprano was a killer. I know he's kind of a fictional character, but he's real though. There's real Tony Sopranos out there. They have sex with their therapists and you managed to just make them so traumatized they need to go to therapy. I guess that's the circle of mental health financial.

That's what it is. I am helping them pay it forward back into the psychological health industry, like making them have to hire better therapists for themselves. I think that's absolutely wonderful. I have been described as our subject, Herbert Mullen has been described as nutty as a tree full of fish by many people. All right. Well, today's episode, we've gotten some comments, I want more blood.

Where are the guts? Well, this episode is going to be full. I think it's just coming from LJ Kissel. And that honestly really concerns me. Little Jerry Seinfeld, of course, the dog I'm taking care of. We had no power in the house. The entire city block went out last night. Jerry freaked out and for some reason he said, to be comfortable, I'm going to be a scarf

around Ben's neck and not let him sleep, which is very, very fun. So today's subject is a fella extremely under the radar. We are going to get into some ookey, spooky, goopy stuff. It's going to be bloody, just disgusting things that hopefully you're all very happy to hear about. I'm so scared, sir, please leave me alone, sir. We're talking about Herbert Mullen. Of course, Herbert is my grandfather's name.

And if I ever have a child, I'm going to name him Herbert because in high school he can be Big Herb. Give me that green leaf. Herbert Mullen was a mass murdering serial killer who terrorized Santa Cruz, California for four months in the early 70s, murdering 13 people of wildly varying backgrounds and ages in a frenzy that could be compared to the slasher killers of fiction. I would compare him to a Jason Voorhees, to a Joe Spinell from Maniac. Yeah.

He's old school, very, very dangerous, highly unhinged. But there's there's kind of an added special sauce to Herbert Mullen, which is why we've included him in our Summer of Strange series. Because this guy is, I mean, I'm just going to go out and say he really thought outside of the box. I love that. I mean, you know, that's how we got the gordita so it can be used for good. But Herbert Mullen did not kill for sexual gratification like most killers do.

Instead, Mullen killed 13 people because he claimed that the voices in his head commanded him to do so in order to prevent a larger, more heinous catastrophe. He's a true missionary killer. He really did believe he had a mission. He was trying to save all of California. And instead of like uprooting the pedophile community that is deeply embedded in show business, what he instead did was just murder a bunch of people. Well, Henry, it's interesting or Marcus, it's interesting you say he didn't kill for

sexual gratification. It makes me think he took one of those E.D. pills, perhaps Roman, which is the spot for the show. And he had a boner for like four hours and the only way to get rid of it was to murder someone. We'll find out. So what's known as pre-epism. No kidding.

Pre-epism. We were talking about this before the show and how it's not a good thing and how it actually makes your wiener hurt after a while, which is the opposite of what we're trying to do here. I never want my dick to hurt. No, absolutely not. With a ferocity that rivaled Richard Chase and a schizophrenic missionary zeal that far overtook that of Joseph Callinger, Mullen murdered because he believed he'd been made

privy to one of the biggest secrets of the universe. It was his belief that the only thing keeping the earth from being torn apart by constant and deadly natural disaster was murder. No. Murder. Okay, again, skeptics hat. What if he's right? Are you seriously do want to believe that maybe he had to do this?

We're going to get into this because there was a couple of like, there's a couple of moments here where a herb is like, you see, you see, like it does come up. So that's amazing Marcus. So you said he was more schizophrenic than Callinger and Callinger had a make believe friend named Charlie, which really that he was the craziest person we've covered until this point. What do you think? It's not that he was crazier than Callinger.

It's that he believed in his purpose more than Callinger. He's like Callinger if Callinger was highly motivated. And by killing the citizens of Santa Cruz, Herb Mullen believed that he was saving the whole of California from a devastating earthquake of biblical proportions. And I'm actually, I'm also privy to a huge secret and this is big and I want to tell people this right now. You can learn this right now. I got told this by a toaster in my in my you have a toaster in your oven.

In my kitchen. No, it's just a bigger, more expensive toaster. The other big secret is going to make sure you wash your graphic teas inside out and dry them on the line because if not, they shrink and a lot of times because now they're doing the narrow cuts to be fashionable and making them super long, but it just makes you look like somebody like me, just makes you look like the State Puff Marshmallow Man when your body is just spray painted black. I completely understand with you.

I don't know why the words fit like a tent or not more common in t-shirt stales because I wanted to fit like a freaking tent. Well the whole earthquake thing, that was Herb's story. Hmm. Now there's no doubt that Herb Mullen was deeply schizophrenic, but he, like all serial killers, murdered and kept murdering because he was satisfied with the end result. Look, Herbie, he likes it. He likes it.

You know what it is too? He truly was, unlike the Yorkshire Ripper who made up on the fly his like voices of God told me what to do. He had full on audio visual hallucinations where he saw this shit and heard voices outside of for his own head. He heard them like they were talking in a room that basically told him to do this shit and he really believed him. He was scared and upset and in pain and the only thing that relieved it was murder.

Now again, isn't that just, just I know it's gross, but it's just a form of self-medication. Well you know what's so interesting is that I always get blamed for being a contrarian, and if this man had a little bit more of a contrarian nature, when all of these voices were like kill, kill, he'd be like well what's the point of that and then maybe some lives could have been saved. You could be a devil's advocate. What if I don't kill, you know, this would be a nice time for him to have been a devil's advocate.

Are you saying that Herb Mullen should have well actuallyed the fucking voices in his head? Well Marcus, can you actually just annoy the voices to the point where they stop? No. That possibly doesn't work like that. No. Absolutely not. Okay.

Well the thing is that the vast majority of Schizophrenics are not dangerous and they don't act on the commands given to them by their delusions. In fact, most Schizophrenics spend their lives in a state of horrific pain and anguish that comes from fighting those hallucinations. Humble brag Marcus, humble brag by Mr. Parks. I'm not Schizophrenic. I was actually going to make the, what is that, I was actually going to make the kind of delineation here is that Schizophrenics hear voices like someone is standing next

to them and talking. That's how real it sounds to them. Someone like me, it's only, I know it's just me. I know it's only my own voices telling me that the fucking strangers can read my mind everywhere outside of the subway car because for some reason the subway car protects my fucking brainwaves from being read. I know that's me telling me that. Schizophrenics think that someone else is telling them that.

I'm texting Carolina right now to get the net. I just need her to get the net as fast as possible. I feel for now what if we just, if I text GTN to anybody within our community, just know this, know that we need the net. The subway delusion was many years ago. I'm over it. I got passed it. Great.

When the voices began telling Herbert Mullen to kill, he gave relatively little resistance. He leaned in. Yeah. Instead of getting treatment, he found justifications, sometimes arguing with his hallucinations until they gave him a victim that he was comfortable killing. But it's really strange about how he was truly, truly sick. Like Joseph Kalinger, very, very sick, highly delusional in a lot of pain. But it is interesting that he still had the wherewithal, as we'll see, to plan and execute

fairly complicated murders and then evidence eradication deep within his own psychosis. Because in his mind, he didn't have the missionary zeal where he thought that he was invulnerable to being caught. It was sort of the opposite. He felt that he was a vigilante for God, where he is going to be doing these actions. And he has to make sure to not be caught, because if not, he is just desperately afraid of the earth cracking open underneath Los Angeles and swallowing it whole, which actually sounds like an improvement.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But part of what makes the Herbert Mullen story special is not why he killed, but rather the environment in which he was killing. At the same time, and in the same town that Herb killed 13 people, Bumble Butt Ed Kemper was also active. Yeah.

And they would end up being roommates in jail. They literally would be, they were put side by side to each other, which we'll cover next episode. But Santa Cruz was jacked up during this time period. And Santa Cruz, of course, is one of the best vacation places to go in the country. Now, apparently back then, it wasn't so safe. Can you imagine being a celly to Bumble Butt Kemper? Where do you even go?

You would just constantly have to be like, Ed, can you, can you move your butt somehow? We'll cover all that next week. Just the dumps that Ed Kemper must have taken as a six foot seven man myself. Because the thing is, Kissel, you're a six foot seven man, but you don't have a big old waggling butt. No. You have a weird kind of almost narrow butt. And I imagine your poops actually probably come out like more like splatters.

They do. More like sharks. They absolutely do. They come out as gigantic, splattering, destructive beasts. Okay, best friends. Peanut buttery. We have to talk about each other's stools because Marcus is, they don't come out at all.

I tell you what today, I took a solid dump that looked, and I am not, I'm not Josh around here. It looked just like a pair of dicken balls. I had two little lumps and one big long one in the middle. And I was so happy. Wow. And I was like, maybe this really is becoming a fun demic. Isn't that a great, you shout out a cock, the Henry Zabrowski story.

Well, by the time Mullen began his spree in Santa Cruz, Ed Kemper had already killed and decapitated three coeds in the same town in recent months. And when more body showed up, investigators had no idea how many murderers they had or why they were murdering so many people. There were no leads at all in either case. And these killings were coming on the heels of a brutal family annihilation that had occurred in Santa Cruz at the beginning of the decade. Jesus.

And Santa Cruz was not a high crime rate town. It's not like it was, there was awful shit popping off all over. There were just these awful, brutal, zero killings and mass murders just happening. Just popping up. This was like the sleepiest little town. Right. It was creepy and you learn far too much about it. If you read the die song by Donald Lund, if you get, we'll get it, we'll cover it, but

it's just because it constantly talks about Santa Cruz. Every true crime book that came out in that mid eighties always starts with a biographical topographical discussion of the town that all of the crimes happen that is entirely unnecessary. It's so true. Scoring shit on the face of the planet and you're just like, get to, I'm reading a book about serial killer. I don't want to know about the natural tributaries that made Santa Cruz an ideal shipping destination

for both legitimate and pirate sources in the 1860s. I don't care. Now to be, I don't care how long it took the trains to get to Santa Cruz. Well to be fair, I didn't have to suffer through all of that, but I do understand why that makes the story that much more horrific. It's any town USA. It's a beautiful place when you hear about violence in places that are maybe a little bit more, like when you hear about violence in Philadelphia, like, like calendar, it doesn't

have the same gut punch. Then when you hear about it in a place where it's like families are vacationing, everything is nice. And it's like, but there's two killers on the loose. And believe it or not, one has a huge ass. You have Don Knotts as a police officer legitimately going, well, I can't believe what I'm saying in here. And he's used to like jaywalkers and like town drunks.

And then he finds a decapitated woman's head that's just been raped by a six foot seven beast man. And they are just all of this just open guts and breasts being locked back and forth and just Don Knotts going, well, I gotta tell the sheriff about this just shattered with PTSD for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, the biggest crime before was some fat kid in town named Elbert, who used to suck all the jelly out of the jelly donuts with a straw and they finally arrested him. And then they're like, and now we got people fucking corpses.

This is where it begins. This is what's called a hippie movement. Well, concerning the crime that sort of kicked all this off, on October 19th, 1970, another schizophrenic named John Lindley Frazier broke into the home of optometrist Victor Oda and tied up the doctor along with his family and his secretary. Once they were restrained, Frazier shot them one by one and dumped the bodies in the backyard swimming pool before setting the house on fire. This is one of my this is one of my true nightmares.

He was casing the house for they say weeks. He'd lived in a shack. He was a normal dude that left his wife and family. He put together a ramshackle shack at the base of this person's like land wherever he was living. Watched them broke went into the house broke into the house when no one was home, waited till each person came home, tied him up, shot him in the head, and then file this. I mean, it's the worst nightmare on the face of the planet.

And as a way of explaining it, he left a note under the windshield of Dr. Oda's Rolls-Royce which read as follows. Halloween 1970. Today World War three will begin as brought to you by the people of the free universe. From this day forward, anyone and or everyone or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the free universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone

who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die or mankind will stop. Night of wands, night of cops, night of pentacles, night of swords. Whoa! But didn't the guy just kill a bunch of people aren't they natural? I suppose, I suppose that argument could be made. I don't know exactly why he decided that the Odas were destroying the environment or if this was something that he was just doing to bring attention to his cause.

But on the other hand, he was a schizophrenic so not everything that he did made a lot of sense. Oh. Yeah, I think that everybody looked like Toucan Sam to him and he was just killing people. He just, he said he had a whole army. Get a lot of plants. Right. Now naturally, the actions of John Frazier, Ed Kemper and Herbert Mullen, it all begs

the question as to what exactly was in the water in the early 70s in Santa Cruz. But perhaps a better question is not what was happening in Santa Cruz, but rather what was happening in America. See, it's sort of insane to think that a man like Herbert Mullen who killed 13 people in four months would be one of the lesser known killers of the 70s. Now it could be that stories of schizophrenia are difficult to relate to and they make people uncomfortable because after all, part of why people love serial killer stories, at least in my opinion, is because they're trying to relate to the killers in an attempt to understand

them. And most people can't relate to a schizophrenic. And nowadays, what we can see is that I think at this time period, schizophrenia was much maligned. They kind of naturally assumed you would become a dangerous person if you had it. Right. But nowadays, we know that that is not the same. Having schizophrenia does not make you dangerous, it doesn't make you, but it's weird that it

took this dark turn especially during this time period where more and more people that were suffering from mental illness were just going fucking dark because I got schizophrenics on the street. Sure. You could be schizophrenic, you could fucking run a CVS and be schizophrenic. We don't know because a lot of times, I'm just hoping someone has a delusion that's just like, you should go to college, you should become an optometrist. That's all I want to hear is just one person with an encouraging schizophrenia hallucination.

Well, I know, you know, I know a lot about wrestling, I know a lot about politics, but I don't really know a lot about mental health. Is it possible to just turn the voices into your own whack pack and have fun with it? So one voice, he knows how to fart on command and it's amazing, that's great. Can you turn them into like fun loving characters? And then you're the Howard Stern or do they just tell you, do they have personalities that are so baked in that you can't change them around to make them fart? You cannot control them in any way whatsoever.

Think about how hard Mark David Chapman had to negotiate with the little people in his mind about his budget. That's true. Okay, I got it. I think a bigger reason is that there were so many serial killers throughout the seventies and eighties that there wasn't enough oxygen in the room to extensively cover every single one. And as far as why there were so many serial killers then, and conversely, why there aren't

anywhere near as many now, I think it's time we return to the lead theory. Get the lead out. Whoa, get the lead out. Every Friday from four to six, because we're only allowed to play the same seven songs because Clear Channel ruined radio. Get the lead out. Get the lead out. And actually get the lead out of the schools in New York and in Los Angeles.

If you could get the lead out of the paint and the public housing, that would also be great. Yeah, get the lead out of the pipes in Flint, Michigan. And I'm about to go into exactly why we all need to do that as fast as we humanly fucking can. Now, we've talked about the lead theory before, but I think the Herbert Mullen case and particularly Santa Cruz in the early seventies bears another look at this hypothesis, particularly because there seems to be no other explanation as to why this happened.

Now, the hypothesis behind the lead theory is that a high exposure to lead degrades the brains of children during their development in ways that increase aggression and reduce impulse control. And back in the fifties and sixties, Americans were exposed to insane amounts of lead through the ungodly amount of leaded gasoline that was being pumped into the atmosphere 24 hours a day, not to mention all the lead pipes delivering drinking water and lead paint covering every home inside and out. So this is a super interesting phenomenon, Marcus, because I didn't even realize unleaded

gasoline means that at some point there was leaded gasoline. I've never even put that together. Exactly. It's not just paint chips, it's lead was in the air. Yeah, everywhere, everyone, everywhere in America was breathing lead into their lungs at all times. And the more lead Americans were exposed to, the higher crime rose. In the eight years between 1964 and 1972, the murder rate in America shot up 85 percent

and the overall crime rate doubled. This trend continued to climb throughout the seventies and eighties and while most of the murders were one-offs, especially here in New York, those decades also produced a staggering number of serial killers. Let's do these that I was able to come up with just off the top of my head. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Richard Chase, Richard Ramirez, Dennis Rader, Jeffrey Dahmer, The Hillside Stranglers, Lawrence Bittaker, Ed Kemper, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, and Herbert Mullen.

That's off the top of my fucking head. And don't forget Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon. The murderers were everywhere. Yeah. Marcus, this has been such a wonderful day. Thank you so much for the, I love these breadsticks and the fact that the soup is unlimited, is wonderful. Right now I'm describing my third date with Carolina when we went into like what our

particular opinions on David Parker Ray were. Hey, I'm the waiter here at Olive Garden. So did you still want that soup? It's cold enough for you. You said that you only wanted it chilled, but you guys have had like two bowls and two total platters of breadsticks. So you guys are kind of freaking. More soup, please.

More soup and more breadsticks, whatever it is. But you want the soup cold still or because most of the time people have a hobby. Yes, please. Let it sit and then bring it. Yes, please. Yes. Okay. Marcus, now tell me again, when he cut off her breast, what did he do with them?

Oh, I just, I'm so excited. However, this trend of crime steadily rising between the 60s, the 70s and the 80s, it peaked in 1991 coincidentally the same year that Jeffrey Dahmer was captured. Not coincidentally, this drop came 20 years after we began reducing the lead content in gasoline. So basically a generation went past and then a new generation without as much lead in it. All generations. Was born.

The baby. Our generation. Yeah. Our generation is fine. The baby boomers. Fucked. All full of lead. They are all full of lead poisoning.

No. They all grew up in environments, a high lead environments. That's why now we're seeing the pictures of big, sweaty, red face screaming women screaming at people on the street, coming out of a Costco, maybe over 65 with those pictures of the back of their pickups where it's the, the big assault rifle, like the two big assault rifles and the three little assault rifles mimicking the pictures of a family and she's going, you don't tell me, you don't tell me just over and over again. You think that that might have something to do with lead poisoning?

Aggression is one thing that it causes. It causes short-sightedness. It causes very little impulse control. These are all things that I think describe certain people in our society. Yeah. It just, it describes the fun people in our society because those are, those make for a great weekend. I saw a video of a woman again about my mom's age having a full on third, three year old

baby tantrum. Like they were going, yeah, yeah, I got it, yeah, I got it, and I was like, I feel like there's some kind of gap here. There's something that needs to be addressed. Gap between that one and this one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's gap.

My grandfather's name was Herbert and my grandmother, Lillian, who I related to very well. She is now deceased, but she used to always say how she loved the smell of gasoline. Yes, she did have some anger issues, but that's because she was the only liberal in North Dakota and that'll make you go nuts. But I bonded with her over the smell of gasoline and I would huff it with her kind of outside of the quick trip. There's all types of families.

All types. Well, outside of a couple of small spikes here and there, the crime rate has continued to drop nationwide for decades. We are still going down. Now, some might say the correlation does not necessarily mean causation. And you might also say that the real solution in the 90s was increased policing and improved investigative tactics. Now, the investigative tools like Vicap and psychological profiling, they certainly contributed

to the drop in serial killers. But as far as all that increased policing bullshit goes, the lead theory applies right here in New York City. By the early 90s, New York City had been the murder capital of America for decades and the accepted narrative is that Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner Bill Bratton termed this city around through broken windows policing. Yay. Well, essentially broken windows policing is the theory that if you aggressively arrest,

prosecute and imprison people for even the smallest infractions, then larger crimes will cease. It's trickled out. It's trickled out policing. Yeah, like you and Russia and Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Yeah, it always works. It's great. And for years, people have believed that it worked because New York City is, after all,

one of the safest large cities in the entire world today. Problem with that assumption, though, is that the murder and violent crime rates in New York City began falling two years before Giuliani even took office and installed Bratton in 1994. Well, I still remember when I first moved back to New York in 2006 and I told my dad that we were performing in Times Square and I remember him saying, don't get stabbed by a hooker. Well, it's like, now it's owned by the Disney Channel.

Another argument is that this is just the end of the crack epidemic in New York City, and that's why crime fell. But that doesn't explain why crime and murder began to fall nationwide in the early 90s, or why much smaller, violent acts like schoolyard fistfights also greatly dropped at the same time. Nor does it explain why this is a trend worldwide that has been proved over and over again. Bands on leaded gasoline correlated to drops in murder rates in both Japan and Jamaica, 20 years after bands were instituted just as they did here.

And in a bit of good news, experts on the phenomena predict that the same thing will begin to happen in the Middle East this year because they finally banned leaded gasoline at the beginning of this century. Are they trying to, you literally, they basically blame ISIS on lead? Yes. Interesting. I mean, there's a lot of things that play there, and the lead actually doesn't help. Yes, I'm not, there's a lot of things.

I know it's a fucking massive Byzantine, thousands of years of history all wrapped up into one, but the lead is just what we're talking about. This theory even goes back to civilizations thousands of years old, some hypothesized that the fall of the Roman Empire coincided with the increase in the use of lead pipes in Roman plumbing, which resulted in a less intelligent, more aggressive population. They ramped up their use of violent sports as entertainment. Their society fell apart from the inside, like the whole thing just kind of fell apart and fell to barbarians.

So but who knows? But if you read books by like Angela Carter and stuff, certain barbarians idea of society could be very interesting. A little bit more cutthroat, a lot more lead. Yeah, of course, a lot more lead. Marcus, I do have to say though, I think you're not giving Ed Koch enough respect. How am I doing? How am I doing Ed Koch?

How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? He built a lot of apartments and things like that, which also was good, but then of course he did start gutting Times Square as well. But you know, there was some good stuff as well. I'm not saying that lead is the only reason why things got better, the only reason why things got bad.

I mean, there were of course other factors, but it accelerates it. That's what lead does, it accelerates things and it just makes it that much worse. Okay. In other words, lead poisoning just might be one of the secret keys to understanding just how much environmental factors affect humanity in ways both small and extraordinarily large and always will. Interesting. Now, I mean, as far as why mass shootings have replaced serial killings in the last two

decades, I mean, I think that maybe we should look at the rise of another society-wide brain warping force, namely the internet and specifically social media, but- What? That's, that's for far more intelligent people than me to explore. I think we should look at video games. It's video games. What are these kids doing? It's video games.

You know what I really think is doing? It's all that guitar music the kids like. It's guitar music, and there's guitar music in some of these video games. I just saw my son playing this one game where he plays guitar in a video game. It's called Rock Band. And when I saw that, the first thing, when I saw your son doing that, the first thing that we both did is that we took him out back. We removed every inch of his clothes, and we beat him with, we beat him with hangers.

Yeah, because it was a video game. Just look at video games. How much we hated guitars, and I hate electronic music. Recently a group of internet utopianists who said back in the 90s that the internet was going to change the world for the better, got together and said, I'm, we're sorry. We made a mistake. We did not need this. This was, this is bad.

The human brain can't handle the internet. We're still fucking, we're built for villages. Our brain is built for villages. We can't handle global connection. But that's for smarter people than me to decide. I don't know. I always felt that I was built for the stage. Yes, indeed.

But no matter what's happening now, Santa Cruz, California took a big old bite of the lead poisoning sandwich in the early 70s for some reason. And the results were John Lindley Frazier, Edmund Kemper, and especially Herbert Mullen. Our sources for this series are Deadly Voices by CL Sweeney and The Dye Song by Donald Lund and Jefferson Morgan. And while The Dye Song is good, it's classic mid 80s true crime, Deadly Voices seems to benefit more from the passage of time because it's much more recent. Yeah, it's got a lot more research in there and they got a born to kill in Herbert Mullen,

which is my favorite. It's a really fun one. And you know the book is from the mid 80s because in the middle there's a center fold of a chicken, a bikini right outside of a Corvette and she's walking that Corvette. And it's like, oh my God, what if that was my wife and then you look at your wife and you're like, that's not my wife. But if you look in the background, you see Herbert Mullen with a knife and he's just watching her behind one of the big squiggly dancing things that they have.

Oh yeah, that was new tech then. Now like schizophrenic serial killer Richard Chase, whom you can read more about extensively in our recent book, The Last Book on the Left, available wherever our books are sold. Herbert Mullen had no specific childhood trauma to speak up or at least as far as we know. In fact, Herbert Mullen was seemingly the all American boy with a father who was maybe a little too strict, but overall pretty normal for the times. And Mullen was actually voted most likely to succeed his senior year of high school. But if you fold over the page, it was actually folded over.

It was actually most likely to succeed in murdering 13 people. Oh yeah, you always want to take a look at the full sentence. Later though, when Herb was in the throes of his schizophrenia, he would claim that his parents were actively involved in, quote, retarding his social and sexual awareness, end quote, keeping the secrets of orgasms from Herb until he was 15. Because Herb believed that everyone else was enjoying orgasms starting at the age of six. The only person to have a full-froated, on-purpose orgasm at the age of six was John F. Kennedy. That's very true.

Okay, hold on a second. So he is upset that his parents did not go into great detail about what an orgasm is. That is all of our nightmare, is our parents sitting us down to be like, when mom says, when mom sounds like she's laughing in the bedroom, believe it or not, it's not laughter like a joke. It's laughter like I'm twiddling her being just right Benjamin. So sit down. It's like, what 15-year-old boy is like, mom never explained how her orgasms worked and

dad never told me how to snoot. Disgusting. You know when you go to the soda machine at the pharmacy, get some soda pop and you press the lever and all the big viscous brown liquid filled with bubbles just pours and pours and pours out. I do that. Well, it wasn't even that they didn't tell him about orgasms. It's that they didn't tell him how to have orgasms because when he was in the throes

of his schizophrenia, he thought that every first grader was just walking around having orgasms all the time. Oh God. Oh God. Well, maybe now, maybe sex education would have helped, but I also think that that man wants something that he doesn't actually know he doesn't want, which is a great detail about the human orgasm. I would feel very uncomfortable if an elementary school level sex ed class was telling everyone

how to pleasure the clip. I would feel there's a part of that that would really, I feel like it might be good to at least talk about the clitoris, but until you, I guess you've got to wait until you're 15. I don't know. I would say freshman year in college, you can take a class just on pleasure in the clip. In reality though, but the only thing that could be considered traumatizing was the fact that Herb's mother was an extremely religious Catholic, which certainly had a bearing on

Herb's acceptance of his own bisexuality. They reminded me quite a bit of like Tom Green's parents during the show. When he was pranking his parents, they are both well-meaning conservative people that every single time Herb rolled back in crazier than ever, they would just go, I just don't, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do with your Herb. And that's the only thing they could say while he's ranting about how his penis is filled with devils. And it's like, it is just, I just wish we could all sit down and have a Kool-Aid and

just talk about this normally. Yeah, it seems like his parents were not prepared to have a child like Mr. Herbert Mullen. Oh no. Now that bisexuality or Herb's fear of it might have something to do with what many believe was the cause of his first mental break. So while playing high school football, Herb became extremely close with a boy named Dean Richardson. Now this could have been a hobbit level friendship here.

I mean, hobbit level friendship includes two or three kisses a month. Every once in a while, not two. But it could also be that Herb was in love with Dean Richardson because the way Herbert Mullen reacted to Dean's untimely death was the same way one might react to the death of a lover. See, the summer after the two graduated high school in 1965, Dean flipped his car and was killed in the crash. This absolutely destroyed Mullen and the death combined with the struggles he was having

with his own sexuality triggered his schizophrenia. Right now, this is kind of like a fun, dark version of a dead man's curve story. You never hear the other side because sports, sports are a little gay, right? It's you're out there, you're soaping each other up, snapping the towels at each other, saying good game, spanking each other. Everybody's looked joking and joshingly in a way about the sides of everybody's penises, which means everybody's looking, everybody's scanning, all the huddles. The huddles are very sensual in a way.

I think you have a gross misunderstanding of the majority of sport, but yeah. I remember sport being just very European almost in a way where everybody sniffing each other's butts. I don't really understand what happens. It's very Roman, Henry. Yes, yes. Shower time was very revealing, let's say. Yes, but then you lose him.

You lose your closest tight end, right? You and him have been, I don't know what you're doing, playing hopscotch together. I don't know what you're doing in sports that makes you super close. I don't know if you guys are both like, you have like wink codes with each other and all that kind of shit. Then he flips his car and then you hear that, well, where is my baby? Don't go away from me, but then you're having a fucking full on Christian Stewart level meltdown inside of your apartment.

That's fucking sweet movie. That is. Yes. Sweet movie, sweet song. Do you think that without this, something else would have triggered his mental illness? I mean, or is this one of those things that was so catastrophic at such a young age where his brain was just like, I think we're close to connecting these two synapses. We're going to get there, oh shit, and they just sort of like went the other way.

I don't know. I mean, schizophrenia usually kicks in around this age. It kicks in late teens, early 20s, and I don't know enough about schizophrenia to really tell you if there is like that almost point where I'll tell you if it wants it. But I think schizophrenia, once it's there, something's going to bring it out. Something's going to make it happen. It's a chemical thing. So eventually the chemicals are going to eventually, whether it's big or small, something's going

to fuck it up. If it wouldn't happen when he was 18, it would have happened when he was 22. We should do a mental health merch movement called it's chemical thing. You wouldn't understand and make those shirts. The shirts that must be worn without pants, it's chemical thing. You wouldn't understand. You wouldn't get it, sorry. And then for some reason there's an arrow on the back of the shirt pointing to their

butt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't understand, would you? Well, at the same time that Herb schizophrenia kicked in, Mullen also said that he began to feel the first urges to kill. This also coincided with Herbert's lifelong habit of trying to find someone or something to blame for everything bad that's ever happened. In the case of Dean's death, Herb blamed his parents because they had refused to let the

two boys live together in a cabin in the summer after they graduated. And Herb believes that had they been living together, Dean would still be alive. So it's mom and dad's fault. I'm trying to have an Italian vacation with my best friend, mom and dad, and I tell you what, if you just let me, I would have kissed him too much for him to drive. You know what Italians do. I think they could have been fine. Instead of flipping his car, they could have been 69 and they could have had a good time.

I don't know if Dean was gay or not, but theoretically, if he may have been along with Herb, that could have been a cute ass couple. We will see that he is at least bisexual. This is a thing that he will struggle with. It's one of those we're in the very beginning is that he didn't know if that was like him going crazy, the feelings that he was having, but it's all, it just got all fucked up. I mean, they could have had a great organic soup restaurant, Dean and Herb's soups. It's a cute couple name.

It is a very cute couple name. This blame game would be a running theme in Herb's life, of course, blaming his parents for Dean's death, and his schizophrenic brain would eventually lead him to believe that his parents had also created his murderous urges through the power of telepathy. But either way, after Dean's death, the voices began, and Herb started building intricate shrines to his dead friend in his bedroom, composed pictures of Dean and trinkets relating to their friendship, all on the command of the voices. Look, I found one of his pubes.

I hope it is. You're going to want to put that next to the picture of him scoring that touchdown that he had. He was so proud of that. And his pubes. What I didn't do is I had this little kendall here, and I put his little fun little jacket on him. It looks just like him.

And then I could put the pub down, put a little moustache there. Well, tragic death also led to Herb breaking up with his high school sweetheart, Loretta, telling her that he was gay, had always known he was gay, and was just now coming to grips with it following the death of his closest friend. But despite his worsening mental state, everyone figured Herb was just going through a thing. Dean died, he's going through a thing, he'll come out the other end eventually. I've always said that when you lose a great friend, you turn gay for about six months, that's the eighth step in grief that we never talk about.

I was honestly, because I knew this, because after our good friend KB passed and then you sent me that picture of your erect penis with a fez on it, I knew that this was just a thing. That's right. The little known fact, yes, after Kevin Barnett passed away from Roundtable of Gentlemen, Eddie, Henry, Marcus and I had sex with each other and it was just to see what would happen. Just to see. Just yeah. Yeah.

I felt like a bunch of birds having sex with each other. Yeah. Yeah. It was just absolutely, absolutely wonderful. But honestly, think about how chill his parents are. He has come out. This is 1965. It's really, really intense.

They're trying to give room for his grief. But his grief came out in a way that they really were, they had, they weren't expecting this. No. They were not expecting this. For him to, he came out and then these intricate shrines he was building inside of his childhood home, like you go in and it looks like what you'd imagine, like if you were to have someone's set deck, a bedroom of a frigging, of somebody with schizophrenia, that's what it looked

like. It looked like, what's his name from Ace Ventura? Ah, Finkel Einhorn. Yeah. Einhorn is Finkel. Ray Finkel. It looked like his bedroom. Well after high school, Herb enrolled at Cabrio College.

There he ran into a friend of Deans named Jim Gianera, who would eventually become one of Herb's victims years later. Back in college though, Jim was just the guy who introduced Herb to weed. And after marijuana, Herb started doing acid, which is just about the worst drug a potentially violent schizophrenic could take. And it also happened to be Herb's favorite drug from then on. Ah dude, that's what I'm talking about, Big Herb coming in, smoking the weed, taking the acid.

That's the thing with the name like Herb. Now I understand he becomes a serial killer, but my kid, when I name him Herb, you gotta be cool, you gotta be cool, taking some acid every now and again, smoking that sweet Herb, Big Herb with the Herb, it's gonna be great. But if your kid is not cool, then his name is Herb forever and then it can be bad. And it would be fine had he not been schizophrenic. Yeah, that's the problem, it's not the small amount of acid. It was a gigantic amount of acid.

One of his friends said he did 10 hits in one sitting. He went over to a party, because Herb is my height of stout 5 foot 7, little man, tiny BDIs, mullet, fun kinda, kinda grapply, like he looks like, I don't know how to describe him, he looks like your sister's ex-husband, and he stood to this party, he took 5 tabs of acid and just ate it, and they said the way he sat, he contemplated and sat and thought about it like, I'm gonna need to take 5 more of these, and then he took the rest of it and then he just like folded into his mouth like it was a piece of fucking stick of chewing gum.

Right. And then he just played movies in the back of his islands. I mean, so far, no harm, no foul. The harm is to 13 people dead. No, I know I said so far, Marcus, I'm just saying up to this point he's just cool big Herb who wants to suck a ding-dong every now and again, he's a cool guy. Well during that his short time in college, Herb's personality began to change, after all the acid he was doing, and his interest gravitated towards Eastern religions and the

concept of reincarnation, which Herb thought was maybe a path to bringing Dean back to Earth in another form. Maybe Dean could come back as a little mouse, so I could carry him around in a bag all day, or maybe he could come back as like a really, really big mouse, so I could crawl up inside and I could live in there all day, or maybe he'd be like a koala. At the same time though, Herb also reached back out to his high school girlfriend Loretta, saying actually, yep, I'm bisexual, not gay, and he eventually proposed to her. Come on, let's do this, you and me, let's get married, alright, I got one foot in one

riverbed, I got the other foot in the other riverbed, in between my legs is a river of love, and all I want to do is be with you baby, I'm not that gay. She said yes, but only under the condition that he quit both weed and acid, because it was obviously very bad for him, it was very bad for him, it was visibly bad for him. I know the murders and stuff, but at this point he hasn't killed anyone, he's just a cool guy. At this point, it is very visibly bad for him, he is getting angrier, he is getting

more violent, he is getting more delusion, it is visibly bad for him. Yes, he's not bathing, he's totally out of control, literally completely out of control. The words that are used to describe him are things like unhinged, physically violent, he's unpredictable, is a lot, which is difficult in a marriage. Very difficult to deal with, and of course he didn't, and he doubled down, he smoked more weed and did more acid than ever, and eventually he did have his first homosexual experience and he broke up with Loretta, but she didn't really care, because as we said, he was very angry, very violent, very unpredictable, very unhinged.

Big herb! You know, there was a term in the die song that I can't handle, and they keep saying, all these hippies keep saying, yeah, herb would blow grass every once in a while, like they kept saying, blow and grass, which I've never heard before or since. It's awful. That's fucking bad. Man, I love it, dude. I'm saying that from now on.

Do you want to go blow grass? He just moved here. This is my buddy grass. This is a funny old joke that's called like, hey, do you ever blow bubbles as a kid? Yeah, so, yeah, you knew bubbles? Yeah, that's that story. Yeah. Herb's thought processes also began to become more erratic and abstract, as is evidenced

by this letter he sent to his parents following a marijuana arrest in April of 1968. Bill and Gene, hey, as I have mentioned in the past, someday I would meet the establishment head on. I was arrested on April 21st, yes. That day, the game started. The charges against me are camping by the SL River, possession of paraphernalia used for smoking a narcotic, and possession of a restricted dangerous drug without a prescription, yes. As I have tried to explain, I am a student of Eastern thought, but because I was baptized

the Roman Catholic, I have the gift of Christianity, right? Both these philosophies agree that all things of the body and sense in all states and activities of the mind are merely phenomena, temporary play things. Bill and Gene, my present imprisonment is in an eternal sense, self-induced, a necessary event in the body's wave. So you remember the ocean? Do you remember the ocean? Of course.

A wave is the ocean and the ocean is the wave. Your earthly son, Herb. I said the exact same thing to my parents after my freshman year of college. I am ready. I mean, you went through a dashiki phase, Henry. We all came back. After freshman year, all of our parents are like, why are we wasting money on this? This seems like thought control.

They're coming back all different and changed. Literally, I remember having a New Year's Eve where I was on so many mushrooms, I had burned my shirt in a bonfire, so I was shirtless freezing. I had my jeans on, no shirt, right? I didn't bring it back. I'm sure too high. I forgot, oh, I got caught in my fucking parents. I'm supposed to call my parents on New Year's Eve.

And then I'm pretty certain I said this exact speech that night. He was expanding his mind. Unfortunately, it seemed like he ended up tearing it, though. He did. Yeah. I mean, there's little hints here and there. It's like a wave is the ocean, the ocean is the wave, man. Just remember the ocean.

That makes sense. But it's little things like that day the game started, and he cap it, he put the game in all caps. I see. This is a real thing. Marvin Heemeyer of the Killdozer fame, he often talked about, he's like, I'm changing the playing field. He used to say that quite a bit where he'd say stuff like, they're playing tennis.

Me? I'm a bowler. And when a bowler comes to a tennis court, like just saying a weird shit, we're like, this is where there is no game because you would need some form of structure. There would be like teams and set up and there's like ads kind of baked in there and referees to keep you safe and equipment. So is this something where he can now separate reality? If it's just a game, it's not like people don't really matter.

Is that like sort of the psychological approach? It's kind of the other side of it. It's the game is becoming real. It's that he is starting to believe that, like, you know, that sorts of like fun thought experiments that me and Henry do as far as like magic goes, magical thinking, it wouldn't be cool if- You guys just come on a bunch of paper. We did for a while and hey, look at where we are now, buddy.

I wouldn't complain too much about it. You guys had to stop doing that because it was destroying everything. No, no, no. You should have seen the pile of come I showed to Spotify. But all that stuff, you know, that we talk about with, you know, even like with stuff like Jeff's a talking mongoose, he was starting to believe that all that shit was real. So after the marijuana arrest, Herb abruptly announced that he was moving to India to study yoga full time, but instead ended up at his sister's trailer with her and her husband

in Sebastopol, California. So while Herb had been just a little off before that, he, like, he was unpredictable on end, a little off, but you could deal with him. During this visit, he began to show signs of full-blown schizophrenia. One night during dinner, Herb began imitating his brother-in-law's every physical move exactly. Eating when he would eat, standing when he would stand, and moving when he would move. Stop copying me. Stop copying me.

Oh, stop copying me. Stop copying me. I rarely say this, but is it possible that improv could have saved this man's life? Is it possible that he could go close, could have just, yes, ended this man into sanity? Maybe. But this imitation went on for four hours straight, and at the end of it, Herb just sat and stared off into nothingness. Now, this behavior actually has a name.

It's called ecopraxia, the involuntary imitation of others, and it's a pretty good indicator of schizophrenia, although it can also indicate Tourette's syndrome. From Herb's perspective, he believed that his brother-in-law was telepathically telling him to do all of these things, and Herb was just trying to make him happy, only following orders. Now, is it possible to swing that into, like, just being like, give me a pack of smokes? There's, like, whisper in his ear to be like, go for some Gatorade and some beers right now and make him kind of, if you focus the energy, what I'm saying, could it work?

Could he be just a perfect servant? He knows the difference, like, he knows the difference between somebody talking and somebody speaking with him telepathically, because it does sound like somebody is just talking to him in a normal speaking voice, but he knows telepathically, he knows that his brother-in-law is not going to say, hey, go buy a pack of smokes, instead, it's very strange stuff. It's very strange, it's very scary, these are the things that cause people that have schizophrenia to live in total fear, because you believe you're reading into and symbolizing everything, you're creating, essentially, not drama, but story, to every minute of your

life kind of, everything takes a deeper, second meeting, so you're watching your brother, and you think that he's giving you knowing looks, you look directly at your brother's face and you hear a voice that says, copy me, do exactly as I'm doing and you'll be safe, and you are just going, all right, do it, and you don't understand why everybody else is so mad, because you think that you're doing something correct and that everybody else is in on it. I mean, honestly, he does sound like he's perma-tripping. Yeah, it is.

But based on this episode, Mullen was convinced to voluntarily commit himself to a state hospital in Mendocino. During this first stretch of six weeks, Herb spent most of his time talking about yoga, and in his words, listening to cosmic emanations for guidance. Insummation of Herb's condition, a doctor wrote, schizophrenic reaction, chronic undifferentiated type prognosis, poor. Unfortunately though, even though Mullen was prescribed anti-psychotics, he didn't agree with the diagnosis of schizophrenia, instead choosing to believe that he was on the verge

of discovering the yogic secrets of the universe while also believing that all of his problems could be blamed on drugs. It seems that the schizophrenia caused him to not believe that he had schizophrenia. Right, it's very interesting. So instead of getting badly needed treatment for schizophrenia, Herb checked himself out and went back to his sister's trailer and propositioned her for sex. Come on, fuck your brother, come on. What's going on, sis love?

What's happening here? And when she refused, he propositioned her husband. Can you imagine, they are in a trailer, all of a sudden he busts through the door and is like, let's fuck. And you're like, what are you doing? That has got to be horrifying. And naturally, after the sex proposition, Herb's sister didn't want him around anymore. Oh, rude.

Didn't work out, huh? No. So, Herb moved to Lake Tahoe with a friend and took a job washing dishes at a restaurant called Harvey's Wagon Wheel while still refusing medication. Oh my god, you can just imagine getting like the cleanest, this is the cleanest plate we have here at Harvey's Wagon Wheel just covered in human shit thumbprint. Predictably, Mullen was back living with his parents two months later. While there, Herb committed his first near-murderous act, although thankfully he was stopped before

he was able to hurt anyone. While hiking, Herb got into an altercation with a forest ranger because Herb was on protected land, wasn't supposed to be there. You should have done a better job protecting it because I'm in here, huh? You know, my buddy Johnny's bachelor party, we were in Minneapolis, we were camping, you're not supposed to drink in Minneapolis campgrounds, which is absolutely insane. We had a security officer, we nicknamed him Fat Squash because he was about my height and super fat.

And there's something about picking on park rangers that's so ingrained in the American psyche that I think it's really, it's the least powerful power position that there is. They have no real ability to actually enforce any of the rules or policies. What are you going to do? You're going to deputize a bunch of squirrels to come fucking arrest me, bro? I do know that we have at least one forest ranger who's a listener of the show and I could just imagine him at that moment going, oh, no, that's not true, you're powerful, you control the forest.

Well, the ranger repeatedly asked Herb what he was doing out there, but Herb refused to speak. I'm not speaking to you, sir, and yes, I'm just, I said those words, but I am not speaking to you, I will not speak to you, I'm going to remain silent, I'm not going to speak to you. You're definitely talking to me, what are you doing out here? I'm not going to speak to you, I don't speak, I never speak, I don't say words, I only believe in using my hands.

I can definitely hear you talking though, sir. Well I'm going to have to kill you. Well, that's what he tried doing. I mean, after the ranger is like, what the fuck are you doing? You can't be out here. The ranger saw Herb reach for a gigantic hunting knife and the ranger, thinking quick and known exactly where this scenario was headed, he subdued Mullin before he could grab it and Mullin was released without charges.

Okay. Now, Herb still believed at this point that all of his problems could be blamed on drugs and while hallucinogens certainly don't help schizophrenia, they were not the cause of his illness, but because of this belief, he opted for a drug treatment program instead of medication. I've got to go clean, I've got to be Herb sober, which means I can only do acid in the mornings and sometimes I have to do acid at night just so that I cannot sleep. Yeah, Herb sober, I get it, Herb sober October, it's perfect, but at least he is seeking help.

In other stories that we've talked with or talked about people with psychological issues, they don't necessarily seek help, at least he's trying, I guess. The way he does it though, it's not a vulnerability, it's almost kind of like a, fuck you, you don't think I can't fix my own fucking brain, I'll fix my brain, it's the easiest thing in the world. All you guys will tell me that I'm a lost cause and I'm kind of like, ugh, he's not going to do anything with his life because he's totally ridden with violence, schizophrenia, ugh, ugh, I'll tell you what I could do and he just thought that he could go to a drug

program and just nip it. So it was a weird aggressive move to rehab. Okay. And so without real treatment, Herb only got worse and began burning his own penis with cigarettes because he claimed his penis was not only the source of his homosexuality, but also where the voices in his head originated. But since burning his penis with cigarettes seemed to calm the voices, he said he enjoyed it.

Hey, you see, I'm one of the voices inside your head, Herb, I live near the top of your balls. You see, I'm not Bill Cosby, I just sound like Bill Cosby. I mean, I'm said couple, and I live down here near your balls with a semen's coke tub, so you need to stop burning me with a cigarette, so I'm said couple. You got to stop burning me with a cigarette to see it. I mean, we've all heard the call that's coming from within the house, but in this case the call is coming from within the cock.

Yeah. Very bizarre stuff. Also, while in the program, Herb reconnected with a couple of friends, and Herb believed that these men were a magician and a guru. But since this was the early 60s, both friends rolled with it. This is where improv is bad. Encouraging Herb's delusions and increasing his belief in the magical interconnectivity of the universe.

He keeps getting this, again, and like this will happen so many times over the next few years where he'll come to somebody with like, well, you're really a magician, aren't you? And the guy will go, yeah, yeah, it's better than being Lloyd the Auto guy. But after just a month in the drug treatment program, Herb drove to San Luis Obispo and spoke with the manager of a Goodwill where Herb had briefly worked a couple of years earlier. While there, Herb told his former boss all about the voices in his head and all about the penis burning that he'd been doing.

It's nice to catch up. Then Herb, for some reason thinking that all the penis burning talk would make his former manager horny, he made sexual advances which were roundly rejected. Hey, listen, hey, when we go back to my hotel room, I call it a hotel room, but it's a barn that I just found. You could see the little smiley face I put on there with a bunch of cigarette burns, huh? Come on.

Yeah. On your cock there, huh? Yeah, my penis. It's loaded with them. Come on. So you think that's supposed to attract me, a high-level manager at a Goodwill? Yeah, yeah, I do. Turns out it's your lucky day, my friend.

I love a human ashtray. Get over here. Herb then tried getting advice from a man he called his uncle, but the guy wasn't his uncle. He was some guy that Herb called uncle. Trying the same hugging and kissing technique, Herb was rejected again, and the so-called uncle, recognizing what was going on here, called the local sheriff, and they put Herb on a 72-hour hold.

If the song Love Potion Number 9 was real, this is what would happen. Yeah, but then the person would reciprocate, right? They would actually, they would have the love potion. No, it's, I believe you fall in love with everybody else. This is the actual meaning of the lyrics of Love Potion Number 9. Oh, but they don't fall in love with you. No, it's the stuff, it makes, it's horny juice. Well in the movie, they fall in love with each other, don't they?

It's just, I don't know, Kissel. I don't know. Okay. I took my troubles down to Madame Ruth. You know that gypsy with the gold cap tooth? He's got a pat. No, this song's nonsense. Yeah, it's nonsense.

I'm not getting deep into it. I was just a joke. It was a one-off joke. Marcus, I'm actually really past, I'm really happy you passed Henry's and I's Psychological Test because if you got deeper meaning from that song, you would need to change your medication. Well, lucky for the two of you, I'm in the process of doing that anyway. Yeah. Hanging on by a string, baby.

All of us, baby. After the hold expired, a female jogger saw Herb on the side of the road arguing with himself and exposing his penis to passersby, which got Herb another hold that he argued was unnecessary because he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. No, I'm just walking down, just saying, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Excuse me, sir. Have you seen my penis yet? A voice that sounds like Bill Cosby lives in there.

You see? I don't sound like Bill Cosby, I'm not even a lot. I can sound like anything, bark, bark, bark, I'm a dog. You see? Wow, that is a very talented penis you have there, sir. After that, Herb was finally committed again. His condition improved the first week after taking medication, but he soon backslid and began writing letters to politicians and public figures explaining his religious beliefs,

completely believing that they needed to hear all about him. We get a lot of these. Yeah. I mean, politicians are the people's servants. They deserve a politician should have to read one schizophrenic email a week. After seven weeks, though, Herb's father signed the release papers after much pressuring from Herb. This was, of course, with the strong disapproval of the staff, who wrote only that Mullen Schizophrenia

was, in a word, grave. Damn. Part of that prognosis came from the fact that the voices in Mullen's head were getting louder, and he was now believing that others were speaking to him telepathically in voices so clear he could not distinguish the hallucinations from reality. After that, Mullen attended a few group therapy sessions but still refused medication, opting instead to do yoga and take massive amounts of acid while wandering the forests of Santa Cruz.

Eventually, Herb met a man named Ed Lawrence at a cheap motel, and Ed brought Herb to the commune in Santa Cruz where Ed was living. Now Herb loved living there, loved the commune life, but the people at the commune didn't love Herb. If I'm the leader of this commune, I'm just going to tell Ed to tighten the screws a little bit on his recruitment tactics, you know, like not everyone you meet needs to come here. This isn't the flirty fishing we were looking for. But he said he'd suck all your dicks.

I got you. You guys said you wanted someone who would suck your dicks, right? I got you, Herb. Big Herb, as I call it. He'd suck all your dicks if you want. I never asked for anybody to suck everybody's dicks. I was trying to get somebody that can handle the septic issues, and we need a lawyer. We need some people with skills around here.

There's a lot of people here who just suck everybody's dicks. Well, Herb will suck everybody's dick. Yeah, just like that. Put them on the pile of people who suck everybody's dicks. Okay. Big Herb? Well, in one instance, Herb propositioned a Japanese woman living in the house with the possibility of having a biracial baby.

Oh, they love that. Oh, that's the best way to approach anyone. If you're a white person out there and you see any non-white person, just be like, you want a biracial baby with me? As a matter of fact, there's a biracial dating app. It's just absolutely powerful, and you have to do it. It's called Farmers Only. When this woman refused, Herb destroyed the house's fireplace with a hatchet.

Geez. It's starting to get more violent. Okay. Eventually, the commune got rid of Herb by having one of their members convince him to move to Maui with her, and one day after they arrived, she just left the island and went back to California. That is so brutal. They hate it so much that they just like, wow.

Come on. Let's move into Maui. That's what I do with my dogs when I don't want them to go outside, and I walk them to the kitchen and I pour some food. I'm like, we're going to hang out in the kitchen, and then I sprint to the front door so they don't run outside. All of these empty bags, empty shit, just put them like, oh, it's so hard to move across an ocean.

You say all this stuff and then get into Maui, they got the laze on, and she's just like, I got to go get some poi, actually. I'm going to go step out. It's like, all right, I'll see you soon, and then I'll start eating your pussy and see if I can make your clit a dick, huh? Bye. Bye. Bye.

Bye. But honestly, how passive aggressive was this commune? I think that's why communes failed, because they were passive aggressive. Couldn't they just be like, you got to go. You got to get out of here, as opposed to this almost cartoonish-like approach to getting him away from them? Honestly, I don't know. I don't know why they didn't just say please leave.

No, that's why most communes didn't make any, didn't work, because no one wanted to have any sort of confrontation in any way whatsoever. No one wanted to be the man. Yeah. Mm. Well, this move proved to be a harmful one for Herb, not because of the abandonment, but because Hawaii was where Herb was introduced to mess, which made the voices in his head that much louder.

I tell you what you see, I feel pretty excited. That's why I switched to the circuit-free put-and-pops to see. I am Ted Koppel. I am Ted Koppel, the serpent that lives in the center of the song. Wow, Ted Cockle. Well, eventually, his parents brought him back home, and he spent two stable weeks in Santa Cruz, but when his meds ran out, he returned to weed and acid, except now he was adding meth to the mix.

Oh, my goodness. Even so, Herb still got a job as a truck driver through, of all people, the manager of the Goodwill, who had been a party to the penis-burning conversation the year before. What do you mean, even still? He is on trucker steroids. He's on meth. He's on acid. On weed.

He's like getting shipments there days ahead of time. After that, Herb began dating a guy, and after a whole lot more LSD, shaved his head and spent most of his time wearing a big black sombrero and speaking exclusively in a Mexican accent. Hey, dogmeat. We all go through a homosexual, slow poke, Rodriguez face when we're young. I actually, this is fun. This is like, I wish this guy didn't kill anyone, and it would just be like a funny

guy you see when you're going through small towns as you travel across the country. We then moved to San Francisco to the infamous Tenderloin district. Now, the Tenderloin district still isn't a very fun place to visit. That's where we stayed the first time we did a show in San Francisco. Remember that hotel where there was just people screaming constantly outside the window 24 hours a day? What if I told you that the hotel that he stayed in was on the same exact block as the hotel that we stayed in?

They showed footage of the Tenderloin street that he was on in one of the documentaries I watched, and I saw the hotel that we stayed in where we heard that man scream like, I've never heard a person scream before. It was a place where our girlfriends could not go outside alone or they would be violently accosted. It was also a place that did not allow cars to park on the street because everyone was having sex behind them, and their answer was, no more cars. Which is San Francisco in a nutshell, not really solving the problem, but the coverage

is the problems. We're giving them too much coverage. But back in the 70s, the Tenderloin was truly a terrible and terrifying place to behold. To give you an idea of the types of people who felt comfortable in the Tenderloin, this was where Richard Ramirez both killed his first victim and where he returned to in the middle of his killing spree for a short vacation that also featured a couple of murders. Nat got on me on our honeymoon when I was working, because sometimes it's so hard you find yourself in the middle of a vacation saying to yourself, I need a vacation from

my vacation. I heard that. But while Herbert Mullen was in the Tenderloin, he was told by a friend that reincarnation was real, and telepathy was real too, except telepathy was not something that ordinary mortals could do. Man, this is his audience, these are his people. People hanging up and be like, oh, hell yeah, man, your telepath that's fucking cool, that's rare, dude.

My shit, I fuck garbage cans. We can hang out. They call me Oscar the trash can fucker. Oscar the trash can fucker, big herb here, I can tell what you're thinking, yeah, what is it? You want some weed? Yeah, I do. I'm also looking for a loose trash can.

And I can have sex with him. Oh yeah. Now, this claim that telepathy was not something that ordinary mortals could do, this was a revelation to her. To him, perceived telepathy was a part of his everyday life, because part of the vocal hallucinations he heard were supposedly telepathic messages from other people. So after hearing his friend's opinion that telepathy was a gift of the chosen few, herb began to believe that he was chosen by God to discover the hidden knowledge of humanity.

Well, think about how trippy that fucking is, right? You believe, kind of secretly, that you're telepathic. You've told some people, for the most part, you kind of walk around where they talk about in condensed chaos where the smugness of the wizard, like it's a problem with the wizard, the magician becomes the other because they believe that they're holding information that no one else is privy to, so they believe they're experiencing a higher level of reality than everyone else and they kind of become aloof and separate and feel that they are above. So he has this kind of first little inkling that he's the only person who's telepathic

or he has this telepathic ability. Then some dude randomly, just as crazy as him, says like, you're telepathic? That makes you the one. You're super special, which is just like the opposite of what he needed to hear. Right. Right. Well, Mullen was ruminating on that. He took another dishwashing job and began boxing in Golden Gloves competitions.

Yep. Dude, how scary would he be as an opponent, just really wally, just like swinging randomly? Five foot seven, Joe Dirt Hair, little wiry little guy, he had a tattoo on his underneath his belly button that said legalize LSD, all of like an old school Tupac Shakur style. And this is true, that it's completely true, and just him jumping into the hardest form of cardio. Yeah. Damn.

And from what former trainers said, he was great as long as you kept him focused. Right. But if you turned your back on him for more than a minute, you turn back around, find him in the corner of the ring, having a full conversation with a person who wasn't there. Seriously, Bill Cosby, I need to focus on my feet. Right. See, I am not Bill Cosby, who at this point in time is a beloved comedian, soon to be discovered to be a heinous criminal.

I am a voice that sounds vaguely like that so-called Bill Cosby. Bite his ear off, and I am Ted Copple. I mean, he could save a lot of money on trainers though. He's got Cosby and Copple in the corner. He doesn't need anyone there. Ring the bell. He'll stay focused for three minutes. Then he goes and talks to the corner, talks to his butt up cock, and then he goes back

out and starts winning more matches. That's fucking- so that's good psychological warfare against a fucking boxing opponent. Dude, can you imagine that? You just have to keep screaming at your own balls to stop being gay. And then you have to go back and fight. Time to fight again. Okay. Man, that would freak anyone out.

I mean, it was a bit of a tactic, and you know, he reportedly loved it and it kept him off the acid, but it all came crashing down in the middle of the match. Because see, being wildly schizophrenic, off medication, and very unpredictable, can sometimes interfere with boxing. During one match, he hit an opponent with a hard right hook and sent him to the ground. But instead of waiting for the count, Herb inexplicably jumped on top of the guy and started pummeling his opponent in the face over and over again until everyone else had to jump into the ring and pull him off.

This is a time- this is an example of a man who was born in the wrong time period. First of all, cis love is now a common thread on Pornhub or any porn site that you want to go to. Second of all, he's just a great UFC fighter trapped in a boxing world. If that was UFC, knock him out and then, of course, then Big John would have to pull him off at some point. But I think he could have been saved by modern technology, modern sports, and modern porn. Interesting theory.

I still say it's lead. Yeah, or lead. It might be the lead. Less lead, sure. Well, this naturally got him ejected from the league. And after this crushing disappointment, Herb started doing LSD once more and ended up back at his parents' house by early fall 1972. I bet you guys didn't expect to see me again.

Yeah. At this point, his parents were definitely afraid of him. And again, sweet old couple, truly sweet, did not, did not beat him. He had an absolutely normal love childhood and you have to bring him back in. He's now gotten weird ass hippy tattoos he's put on himself. He's looking more and more disheveled each time he shows up and you have to be like, oh, Herb, you want some toast? Meanwhile, he's just shadowboxing.

Shut up, Bill Cosby. It's time for breakfast. Oh, man. It was around this time that Herbert Mullen began seriously studying both numerology and its relation to specific events in history, especially events surrounding his own date of birth. First, Mullen discovered that the day of his birth was also the day of Einstein's death. Oh, shit.

Okay. So instead of thinking that he was Einstein reincarnated, Herb decided that Einstein had died to protect both him and all others born on April 18th from dying in the Vietnam War because Einstein had offered himself as a sacrifice. Then Mullen discovered that his birthday was also the date of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, in which anywhere from 700 to 3,000 people died. We don't really know. Well, that is quite a gap, though, I have to say.

It's 1906. 2,300 people? Okay. I mean, they don't really even know how many people live in fucking San Francisco. Okay. You know? And yeah, so it's no idea. We may be missing 300 years from the fucking calendar.

Yeah. It might be the year 1700 if we want to get into that shit. Sure. What is time? It's a human construct. That's what I say. This discovery coincided with reports from local scientists who were saying loudly and often that the big one was coming for California at any time.

They keep saying it. And of course, the big one was Louis Anderson. Wow. We're having fun. We're having fun now. Fucking get it. It's having fun. Ator de Farson baskets, I would say Louis Anderson is.

Life with Louis is the single greatest cartoon in the history of cartoons. I stand by it. Don't even come at me. Louis Anderson is an underrated comic genius. Don't come at me. Don't come at any one of us. Just leave us alone. And when Herbert Mullen discovered this whole earthquake thing, that's when the voices in

his head started making connections. Uh-oh. They told Herb that violent death, whether it be from war or murder, was pleasing to God. And if God was not satisfied with the amount of blood flowing on Earth, then God would send natural disasters like earthquakes to cause mass death all on his own. If only the Bible wasn't so full of that exact same philosophy. You know, it's not as if these are ideas he's just picking up out of the ether.

That is all of the Bible, except for the part where Adam and Eve kind of touch each other's genitals. Yeah, man. I mean, this is very Old Testament stuff. Now this is 1972, when the death count in the Vietnam War was slowly dropping. But if there were fewer deaths in Vietnam, then that meant that God was going to be unsatisfied very soon. Yeah.

Jesus. He's not fricking pinhead. What's going on here? This is an hellraiser. This is a scary version of God. Remember, Joseph Callinger had the same thing. Very scared of God, scared of the idea of, because it's the true, the term awesome in its actual meaning, where you're kind of in front of a force that you can't understand

and your body has a reaction to it, you're scared of this omnipotent eye in the sky that now you believe you're the only one that can see it properly. Right. And so, Herbert began to think that this earthquake that all the local scientists were talking about was sure to strike at any time and being a quote unquote chosen one meant that Herb thought that he could and should do something about it. Now first, Herb thought about committing suicide, but he decided that one life would not be enough to please God.

So Herbert Mullen decided that to save every person in California, he would have to kill a few people in Santa Cruz. I don't think he understood how many people were dying in Vietnam. If you want to make up for the losses of Vietnam casualties, he'd have to kill a frick of a lot more than 13 people. You're correct. You were very correct. Yeah.

And that also points towards the possibility that maybe this is just sort of a justification that he really wanted to kill people and this is his excuse. You don't think he was convinced that this was the truth though? I think it's kind of a havesies type situation. He was convinced it was the truth, but he also wanted to do it. You know when you have a visual hallucination on mushrooms or acid and your brain half completes the visual where it's like you don't normally see. When I trip balls, I don't normally see a full like cartoon vision of something.

I've never done that many drugs, but you kind of see things that remind you of something that then you kind of complete the story for yourself. Sure. I think these were threads that were got more organized as he started speaking to investigators later on. But this was like a force behind what he was doing. He was inspired by it immediately. Again, he's not like Yorkshire Ripper.

On some level, he thought that this was all entirely real. Okay. Yeah. I think that he was happy that it was real. But before Herb was to commit his first murder, he decided to pay his Aunt Bernice and Uncle Enos a series of visits. Uh-oh. It's weird when he said the invitation that just said, when he sent the invitation that

just said, let's have a fuck party, I'll be there at 11.30. It's not that far off. The first time he showed up to his aunt and uncle's place offering to explain yoga and then Uncle Enos asked him to leave when Herb started getting naked. No, no, no. Let me show you this. This is called the nude crazy nephew, look how far apart I can make my balls in my asshole, Uncle Enos.

Yeah. I can really stretch it. Few days after that, Herb showed up at Enos and Bernice's house again, walked in the door without knocking and sternly but calmly demanded that Uncle Enos flop out his testicles so Herb could see who's was bigger. Okay, listen, I want to just, I want to see him so I can set the record straight. I can take pictures of it and I'm going to put the results in my zine. Honestly, if this uncle was any kind of uncle at all, he would have been like, Bernice,

get the radio flyer, I'm about to drop this kid, these nuts, look at the size of these nuts. If you are an uncle out there and your nephew comes in and wants to do a nut competition, by uncle law, you have got to unzip, show the nuts and let him know your balls are bigger. Finally, Herb showed up outside Bernice and Enos's house with a detailed plan to get Bernice pregnant because Bernice and Enos had tried without success for years. He brought a chart, he had a chart and he's like, look, so Aunt Bernice, if you could

see, I've worked out when your periods are and I've worked out the certain days when you and uncle Enos need to have a sexual relation, so if you just invite me in for just a moment then I can explain this an entire thing to you in full detail and she just looked at him and said, you need to go, you need to get out of here, you just need to get out of here. They're so exhausted at that point. Oh yes. And the chart is really what gets you disinvited from lunch.

I mean, I understand. Sometimes we get invited out to lunch with an old friend and then all they want to do is talk about podcasts or something like that and it's like, I thought we were just going to have lunch. And now all of a sudden we have a full chart, we have, I'm looking at how many listeners you've had over a series of years, I love you, but why are we, man, I just wanted to hang out. Just wanted to talk about squats.

Now after all that, in September of 1972, just before the murder started, the Mullen family decided that it was probably a good idea to lock Herbert away in an asylum whether he wanted to go or not. After all the shit with Bernie's and you know, so like we got a fucking, we just got to lock him away. And he's been in and out. Everyone's terrified of him. We got to lock him away somewhere.

But this was just after the Republicans led by then governor Ronald Reagan gained control of California and as soon as Reagan got into office, he defunded all the state mental hospitals. Yeah. That's so smart. Yes. What a great idea. Actor who has no actual brain. And then when Reagan became president, he applied that nationwide.

What's that? Actors are shallow shells that only get fueled with information by huge wealthy donors. What? And Ronald Reagan was sort of like, again, I'll mention Ace Ventura again today where he opens the doors and all of the pets fly everywhere, but he did it with the violently insane. That's great. Ventura.

Yes. Satan. And then all of a sudden, I was going to say the Republican party is like the landlord and then Ventura is like this guy, but you know what, who cares? We've lost everyone. I've lost the whole thing. Well, for the Mullins, the only other option besides the state mental hospitals that Reagan had just closed, the only other option was a private hospital that cost a hundred dollars

a day, which is about six hundred dollars a day and today's money. It's almost like the entire thing was a massive scam to help corporate overlords benefit off the suffering of others. No way. No way. It's just going to increase the prison population by triple over Ronald Reagan's time, maybe, but then again, you got to think about the stock market, let's go public with the suffering of people, put money on top of money.

This is straight up too much truth and we're going to have to put you in a room. You have to go away. Well, the Mullins couldn't afford a fucking week of that, much less the months, if not years it would take to make Herb a functioning member of society and even if Herb never became a functioning member of society, there would have at least been a fucking room to lock him away in to prevent him from killing 13 people, but no, we don't need mental hospitals. Not to get too able against Top Hat here, but remember with Dukakis, they beat Dukakis in 88 by doing the Willie Horton ad where he just like circles out of prison because

you know, he did commit a crime and they had, they had their weekend away plan to try to integrate back into society, but literally they just didn't even have anything. They were just like, if you're crazy, good luck, have fun, Ronald Reagan, the blood is on his hands. I agree. I agree. And it's hard because we've said this on the show many times. I think that everyone should have a shot at being rehabbed and you, people need help.

Because you forcibly need help. We've all been in a spot where like, there are people that should have come and gotten me with nets at least a couple of times in my life, like honestly, but you know, there are certain stripe of people that unfortunately just kind of need to be put in a room and left in there. He would have been so much happier just like Ed Gein. He would have been living his best life if he was medicated and hanging out with other folks similar to him.

And since Reagan decided that mental hospitals were an unnecessary luxury, there was nowhere to put Herbert Mullen. Instead, he began a 13 person murder spree that terrorized Santa Cruz for four months. Leading up to the murders, Herb said that he began receiving telepathic messages from his uncle Enos to kill his father, but Herb didn't do it because he thought his father had overheard the telepathic conversation and told him to kill Enos instead. This happens in Dune. Interesting.

This happens in Dune. Also I did not realize in the hand washing area, aka the bathroom, I don't know why I called it that, the mirror has a Dune reference here in the LA studio that I did not realize that I put on my Instagram, but I found it to be quite powerful all about fear and how you let it pass through. Yes, fear is the mind killer. I didn't know it was a Dune reference and the never one in my comment section was like, hey, long nerd, it's a Dune reference and I was like, I didn't know that.

So it doesn't make me a nerd because it was unbeknownst to me. Nope. Gotcha. That's the mental equivalent of a bear trap. Gotcha. Well, Herb refused to kill either one of them, but he believed that his entire family was trying to make him kill crazy, but kill that guy, no kill that guy, kill him, no kill him. But since he refused to kill either his father or his uncle, the urge to kill was redirected

out into the world. And Mullen committed his first murder in October of 1972 on Friday the 13th. On that day, Herbert Mullen was driving his 1958 Chevy station wagon towards the famous Santa Cruz tourist attraction known as the Mystery Spot. Here, due to some gravitational anomaly that nobody can explain, tourists can stand at seemingly impossible angles without falling and in some cases are required to stand at impossible angles due to the mysterious gravitational forces. The theories as to what the spot are range from a UFO guidance system to a magma vortex

to something called dielectric biocosmic radiation. Oh, you can buy a system from that from Info Wars and it makes you not gay anymore. No kidding. The truth is nobody really knows why it does what it does. It's a gravitational anomaly. That's cool. While most people found the Mystery Spot to be a bit of discombobulating fun, this place actually made Mullen feel good because the voices in his head for some reason calmed

down when he was inside the gravitational anomaly. It's something about it's really it he's off kilter and then that place makes them balanced. Right set up again. But as Herb was driving to the Mystery Spot on that day, he passed a man described as a quote familiar local hobo in the Herb Mullen episode of the British Born to Kill documentary series. Yeah, Whitey.

Whitey. Whitey's a fun guy. He was a fun guy. Everybody knew him. I love a good hobo. Yeah. This man was named Lawrence White and he was just one of the estimated 17,000 homeless people who lived in lean twos and small encampments in the woods surrounding Santa Cruz at this

time. Because remember, a hobo is someone who doesn't have a home who's looking for work. Yeah. It's a working homeless person. Yeah, that's exactly. So after passing Lawrence, the voices in Herbert's head began to argue with one another as to whether or not the old man should be killed. Should this man be the first victim?

But then a new voice appeared, which Herb took to be the voice of the potential victim speaking telepathically. Supposedly, the old man identified himself as the biblical Jonah from the story of Jonah and the whale. Specifically, the message said, quote, Pick me up and throw me over the boat. Kill me so that others will be saved. Herb obeyed. He pulled over ahead of Lawrence White and opened his hood to give the impression that

he was having car trouble. Sure enough, Lawrence, oh, Whitey, offered to help once he came upon Herb's car. But as Lawrence bent over to take a look at the engine, Mullin took a baseball bat out of his car and smashed Lawrence over the head. Once Lawrence was on the ground, Mullin beat him to death with the baseball bat. This is what I find interesting is that he created a roundabout way to, as we talk about, like he normalized this and he's beginning his escalation and he put himself in the position where murder was the only way that he could get out of whatever situation that he was

dealing with. He put himself there. And then it's weird that he actually made a coherent plan to kill someone where he said, like, I will look like a stranded motorist and then I'll be able to sneak kill someone. And it's just weird how his brain popped up a really well-thought-out murder plan immediately. It was so brutal. Is it fair to say that he just, like Molly Shannon in the movie Superstar, jumped in the deep end?

It seems like he is just 13 murders in four months. Did he ever have a chill-out period? No. So once he hit the ground running, he just never stops sprinting. Once it starts... He's trying to save the earth. Yeah. There's no time to cool down.

After killing him, Herb wiped all the blood and brain from the bat on Lawrence's clothing, closed the hood of his car, and calmly drove away. When White was found the next day, or that afternoon, depending on the source, but he said no leads whatsoever. It's just another violent death. Well we know it was a baseball player for sure. So let's go to the baseball diamonds and let's interview every single person that we know that looks at a bat like they want to kill somebody with it.

Wait a second. I think I found this little piece of jeweler. This little coral nugget. Yeah? If I've changed, should I check every one of their World Series baseball players' rings and see who's missing? Then I will find out who the killer is. But in a move that tells you that Mullen knew he was doing was wrong, he sanded all the

blood stains off of his bat that afternoon, then casually walked into his parents house for lunch. But on the other hand, he could also say that Herbert Mullen hid the evidence for his crimes because he knew that sight at large wouldn't understand the mission. And if he was caught, then the mission was over and California would drop into the ocean. Okay. Either way though, Mullen said that the murder made him feel good. So he had no reason to stop.

Uh oh. Three days later, he said he was driving on Soquel Boulevard when an old man on a street corner supposedly communicated another telepathic message. The message said, quote, Hey, I want you to kill somebody. So Herb went home to think about it, and while he was ruminating the request, he began to read a biography about the sculptor Michelangelo. In this biography, the writer went in depth on the fact that Michelangelo dissected cadavers specifically so he could learn the form of the human body for his art, which is partly

true and partly why people say Michelangelo is one of the greatest sculptors of the human form who ever existed. Right. Herb's mother had actually given Herb the book hoping to inspire him to use art as an emotional outlet. He thought he'd focus on the art. Yeah. Like all the nice statues.

All the paintings. Yeah. His mom was trying so hard. Yeah. All it did was give Mullen ideas on how to combine his so-called sacrifices with what he came to call serious art. He is such a Batman villain. He's become, this is Joker.

This is the Joker scene in the museum. Yeah. Wow. So on October 24th, Herbert Mullen decided to put this fantasy into practice. On that day, while driving on the same spot where Mullen had supposedly received his last message to kill, he saw a 24-year-old Mary Guilfoyle hitchhiking. She was on her way to Cabrio College for a job interview and the second Mullen saw her, he claimed that a voice in his head said that she was the next to die and Mullen agreed.

There's something about him cruising and looking and then having these moments, again, out of a horror film from the 80s where you see someone walking and you're highly agitated. You're in the middle of what is an extended schizophrenic episode and you look and she sort of makes eye contact with you, a young girl walking down the street makes eye contact with you and then you have this moment of like dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum, where you hear a voice being like, I want you to kill me to save the city. And you believe that this is fucking real. Right.

Damn. One of the big features of schizophrenia is making connections where no connections exist. And for him, he was driving, this was on, it's not Saracwil Boulevard, Saracwil is a medication for mental illness. Soquel Boulevard, he was driving on Soquel Boulevard and this was the same place where the old man had supposedly sent him the message, hey, I want you to kill somebody. You know, a few days, I think like two weeks earlier, something like that. So with him, the connection is made, the girl's there and that's how she dies.

Isn't there, what's the horror movie that's kind of like, is it Jacob's Ladder? The one where the father is kind of a schizophrenic but then it turns out he's correct. Frailty. Frailty, yes. You just ruined the ending. You just ruined the ending but yes, it is a great film. No, that's not the movie has been out for 25 years. Soquel can't see every single fucking movie that ever comes out, you don't need to spoil

every single movie that you see. I'm not spoiling the freaking movie, if our audience has not seen Frailty, it's 25 years old. I haven't seen Frailty. It's been something that Caroline's like, hey, we need to see Frailty, it's great, it's really cool. We should watch one day. Well, I'll tell you how it ends, they go to an amusement park and they build a zoo.

Great. They build a zoo. Honestly, you should see Frailty. You should really see Frailty. I don't really want to anymore. Well, no. No! No!

No! Unbelievable. This was an extraordinarily bad time to be hitchhiking in Santa Cruz because Ed Kemper had already abducted and brutally murdered several girls on this exact same stretch of road in the preceding months. There's already a serial killer on the loose in Santa Cruz. They're all out there. This is the movie I Saw the Devil.

Yes. You've seen I Saw the Devil? Yes. Where there's like a group of serial killers just hanging out, just being friends and shit. Great movie. But just like Kemper, Mullen appeared to be harmless, so Mary took the chance. After Mullen picked her up and drove her to a secluded spot that he claimed was a shortcut, he parked the car.

Then after a brief struggle, he pulled out a hunting knife and stabbed Mary Guilfoyle in the heart and back multiple times until she bled to death. He then dragged her corpse about 125 yards away into a small, utterly secluded clearing. Here's a small gold star warning for this little patch of the episode just so you know. Taking the hunting knife, Mullen sliced open her abdomen and imitating the story of Michelangelo's studies, Mullen began a crude dissection. First he pulled apart the muscle tissue with his bare hands, exposing the organs underneath. He then pulled out the stomach, intestines, liver, and kidney.

He didn't remove the lungs, but he did reach inside the chest cavity to see what they felt like. Finally, he took the intestines and hung them from nearby tree branches in his own pathetic attempt at art. Leaving no mind to what he was leaving behind, Mullen then simply got in his car and drove away, leaving the horribly macabre scene to be found four months later by a hiker. Okay, my question to you guys, if he believes he's saving the earth by killing these people, what's with the theatrics?

That's a good question. Why does he have to do this? That's a good question. I mean, seriously, like, why wouldn't he, it's like, okay, if you're dead, you're dead. Why do you have to do this presentation? It's a good question. Let's say there is such a thing as the collective unconscious, and there are things that have been experienced by humankind since the very beginning of us, of our civilization, like

since we started farming and putting together an organizing religions, right? The Mayans believed that the suffering is what provided the juiciest manna, especially in a sacrifice to God, on some level, right, maybe you could even say there is some form of connection to an ultimate intelligence that has this sort of belief system inside of it, which is this is me prostrating and attempting to impress God with my commitment to sparkle motion, right? I am here, I am committing to this murder in a flagrant and intense way to create the most impact where God will maybe offer a little bit more time to keep destroying Los Angeles

before the great finger comes down and wipes Los Angeles off the map. That, I mean, it's, I think part of it is, yes, the schizophrenic impulses are telling him to do these things, and he is acting on these schizophrenic impulses. But I also think he's doing the intestine drapery and some of his other, how we commit some of his other murders later on. He's doing it because he likes it. You know? It seems like it.

Yeah. Yeah. He's doing it because he likes it. He is doing the, daddy, would you like some sausage? Right. Daddy, would you like some sausages? You know, like it is fast. Freddie got favored.

Yeah. So we're in agreement, so we're in agreement that this is if Tom Green was a serial killer, he would be Herb Mullen. Yes. Yes. Yes. We love Tom Green. Not a serial killer.

We all love Tom Green. Not a serial killer. We all love Tom Green. My mom is on the Swedish. The Swedish. It's for our generation. That is what we've been building up to for the entire episode, is that he is Tom Green. I love it.

And from there, Mullen's crimes only got more horrific for altogether different reasons, all of which will be covered on part two coming next week. Oh, right. So Herb Mullen, an under, I don't want to say the term underappreciated, an undercovered serial killer, I think is safe to say, fascinating guys, good, interesting find. And if you are or know anyone that is suffering from mental health, I think it is safe to say treatment is the best option. And yes, our country has had a failed history of treating the mentally ill, but there are

resources. So please take care of yourselves and take care of each other because good Lord, when it goes unchecked, we're seeing what can happen. But also don't think that all people with schizophrenia and all people with mental illness are fucking potential Herbert Mullins. That's not true. They're not. They're really not.

This is just what happens when you're both very sick and an asshole. Yeah, and an asshole. All right, everyone. Thank you all so much for listening. What we got here, we got a new fan art shirt that is coming up. It's on sale last podcast merch dot com. This week's this month's shirt was designed by Alexandra Runyon. It's the hellish rebuke that I fucking I love it.

Her IG is at a layout, which is spelled a l a y a l to you should check out her stuff and her website is Alexandra Runyon and the Runyon is spelled R U N N I O N dot com. Very talented artist, very absolutely. It's a hellish rebuke shirt. It is absolutely awesome. Also, if you are on Patreon, we want to tell you about discord discord. It's basically just a chance for you to basically just kind of text with us. Each one of us is going to be doing this.

What do you think? Like once a month or so? Yeah. And I did it last, well, it was last week or two weeks ago. We spent about 45 minutes just chit-chatting. So if you are on our Patreon, make sure you join our discord and enjoy everything else that we provide on that, which is the interviews from Henry and I. Henry eats a bunch of jello.

I believe what is it? Putty. Good put. It's a bunch. I'm sorry. I forgot about it. Good put. Jackie made me do an episode where that she attempt to steal good put with the show

called You Gotta Be Soupin' Me, which was the same exact show as good put. And so I brought her on to do You Gotta Be Soupin' Me. And then hopefully, I believe this week I'll be doing episode with my beautiful wife, Natalie Jane. And you guys can all hear just how thrilled she is to be stuck in the house with me. Absolutely. And of course, when you go to laspodcastmerch.com, you can get all of our merch. We have some new merch coming.

We just had a chance to take a look at it. Super badass stuff. And again, thank you so much for submitting your fan art. We're going to be having some prints made up of some fan art. And please tag me on Instagram or take all of us at BenKissleOne, LPO on the left. On Instagram, we love to share your art. And if you have any arts or crafts that involve us or the show, we would love to promote that as well.

You can tag us so I can put that on the on the Instagram and try to help out as many folks as possible during these difficult times. And of course, we're still getting messages regarding the tour in August. We are just like you. We are waiting to hear the exact information. So thank you so much for your patience on that. And just know that we want to be we want to be with you as badly as possible. We want to be on tour.

I want to go on tour. And of course, we want to be safe as well. So we will as soon as we get that information finalized, we will let you know what's going on with the tour. And again, thank you so much for your patience. And you know, we get a lot of messages and I am with you. Every time I see one of those like a year and a half ago, we were hanging out with the boys.

A tear comes to my eye and all right, I wish I was with you again. I was looking at all the pictures from Australia. Oh, my God. I got so sad. I got so very sad. But we shall be together again. We will be together again. We will be together again.

And that's why again, side stories, we're talking about it. We're making it a fundemic. It's fun to be inside. It's fun to be inside. Keep on supporting all the shows. Well, you're inside whatever you're doing. You can listen to last podcast network, page seven, everything, gossipy, all the entertainment news, top politics, whatever you want to learn about music.

If there's some bands you want to listen to, Marcus will always let you know what to listen to on a Spotify playlist and also, of course, no dogs in space. What are you covering now, Marcus, with no dogs? We are about to start a two part series on the cramps. Cool. I love the cramps. I love that. The Mydoll of Bands.

They are not the Mydoll of Bands. They are spooky. And of course, Wisbru for all your nerd culture stuff. In our show Side Work, check out Side Work, our new show about the restaurant industry. It is by Andrew Wallace and Brook Van Poplin. I think you really love it. I love those ladies. They're super funny.

Check it out. Absolutely. Kind of fun wrestling. You guys know where to find everything. And thank you so much for the support that we've gotten through for all the shows on the network. Thank you so much. And is there anything else, guys?

Or are we good? I think we're good. Ladies just told me to plug Last Podcast on the left. Live. Yes, you can get our live. I was like, well, we are on Last Podcast, but so listen to Last Podcast on the left. Last Podcast on the left. Live as well.

So yes. LastPodcastLive.com. Yes. There it is. All right, everyone. Hail yourselves. Hail Satan. No gain.

Magustylations, everyone. Hail me. And I think I should be hailed for not murdering a bunch of people just because I think that God is speaking to me, and I think that I should be thanked for that. You want to be thanked for not murdering people, Henry? Yes. That's not something to be thanked for. That's something to be assumed that you're not going to kill everyone.

I feel like the bar's real low these days. Well, in that case, thank you, Henry, for not killing anyone. I accept. We appreciate it. You're welcome. We appreciate it. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors.

You can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.