us year, and she gave Mullin their Santa Cruz address. Kathy closed the door and heard the stranger drive away. Within the hour he was back. In the interval, he had shot and killed Jim Gianera, 2S, and his wife, Joan, 21, at their home. Now he shot and killed Kathy Francis and her two young sons. No words were exchanged, but the telepathic messages had assured Herb that the victims knew they had to die and had accepted their fate.An intensive investigation of these five killings was undertaken; within a week a long list of possible suspects was compiled by the Santa Cruz police and district attorney's office. Most of the suspects were people thought to have been involved in drug dealing with Jim Gianera or Bob Francis, Kathy's husband. Bob himself was considered a suspect initially, and I interviewed him at the request of the district attorney's office. He was able to establish that he was out of town on the day of the killings and provided me with the names of all conceivable "enemies" he could think of. Herbert Mullin was not on the list of suspects. A witness who lived down the hill from the Francis cabin reported to the police that he had seen a 1958 Chevrolet station wagon with a male driver heading up the hill the morning of the killings. He remembered the car because he used to have one like it, but he didn't recognize the driver and was not certain he could identify him if he saw him again.Herb was beginning to have new thoughts about the source of the voices that seemed in control of him. Although they sounded like his father, perhaps they were from the devil. On January 30,1973, he went to a Lutheran Church in Santa Cruz and talked to the pastor about the Lutheran faith. A few days later he returned to the church and sat in on a Bible group. Other members of the group recalled that he made them distinctly uncomfortable. His only remark during the meeting was, "Satan gets into people and makes them do things they don't want to....
