kill, he explained, because “a minor natural disaster will prevent a major natural disaster.” To prevent a major earthquake from striking California, a few people had to die. Because Mullin understood this, it became his mission to carry out those executions, and the victims themselves had telepathically given their blessing, inviting Mullin to murder them. Einstein understood—he had sacrificed himself on an earlier April 18 so that Herbert Mullin might live in order to save California from disaster. The fact that “the big one” hadn’t happened was proof of the success of his efforts.
Mullin was found mentally ill, but sane enough—in the legal sense of sanity, able to distinguish right from wrong—to stand trial. He was charged with ten murders—White, Guilfoyle, and Tomei had not yet been connected to him—and found guilty of premeditated murder in the cases of Jim Gianera and Kathy Francis and her children, and second-degree murder in the more impulsive killings of the others. Sentenced to life in prison, he won’t be eligible for parole until 2025. He remains incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.
WILLIAM HEIRENS and Herbert Mullin didn’t look like murderers. In “Natural Born Killer” (108), we’re introduced to Vincent Perotta, a killer who not only looks like one but who has made it a career as well as a hobby by becoming a Mob hit man. Perotta, the BAU team discovers, has killed more than a hundred people, and he sometimes resorts to extreme overkill. He started hunting at a young age and showed extreme aggression with no fear or remorse. At one point, a homeless man found small-time mobster Freddy Condor’s head in a Dumpster; the rest of Freddy turned up in other garbage bins close by. Perotta was captured after one of his murders drew too much attention to his Mob bosses.
If the fictional Perotta were compared to real-life Mafia hit man Roy DeMeo, Perotta would be a piker.
Exact figures are hard to come by, for obvious reasons, but DeMeo is suspected of between seventy-five and two hundred murders. A Neapolitan rather than a Sicilian, he grew up around mobsters in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, in the early 1940s, and he worked his way into their good graces. He was close to a Gambino family associate named Nino Gaggi, and with Gaggi’s sponsorship eventually became a made man (someone officially inducted into the Mafia). As a young man he was violent, aggressive, and strong.
Working for the Gambino family, DeMeo put together his own crew, specializing in auto theft and drug trafficking (an activity of which Mob boss Carlo Gambino disapproved). At age thirty-two, DeMeo did his first hit, a simple execution: several bullets to the head, the body left in an alley.
DeMeo realized that some bodies shouldn’t be found, so he developed a method to dispose of them that rivaled Henry Ford’s advances in the mass production of automobiles. DeMeo owned a bar called the Gemini Lounge; it had an adjoining apartment, and the bathtub sometimes came in handy. Because his crew performed their grisly tasks there (sometimes referring to the place as the Horror Hotel), their technique became known as the Gemini Method.
When they had a victim whom they needed to disappear, he would be shot in the head. Immediately, another member of the crew would wrap a towel around the head to stanch the flow of blood. Someone else would stab the victim numerous times in the heart in order to make sure the victim was dead and stop his heart from pumping. He would be put in the bathtub, or hanged over it, so that the blood would drain into a controlled location and be easily washed away. The drained body was then beheaded, cut into pieces (DeMeo, once a butcher’s apprentice, knew about chopping meat), wrapped in garbage bags, and tossed.
The first time DeMeo’s butchers tried this method, they made a couple of mistakes. One of the crew put the victim’s head through a compacting machine, an
Mullin was found mentally ill, but sane enough—in the legal sense of sanity, able to distinguish right from wrong—to stand trial. He was charged with ten murders—White, Guilfoyle, and Tomei had not yet been connected to him—and found guilty of premeditated murder in the cases of Jim Gianera and Kathy Francis and her children, and second-degree murder in the more impulsive killings of the others. Sentenced to life in prison, he won’t be eligible for parole until 2025. He remains incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.
WILLIAM HEIRENS and Herbert Mullin didn’t look like murderers. In “Natural Born Killer” (108), we’re introduced to Vincent Perotta, a killer who not only looks like one but who has made it a career as well as a hobby by becoming a Mob hit man. Perotta, the BAU team discovers, has killed more than a hundred people, and he sometimes resorts to extreme overkill. He started hunting at a young age and showed extreme aggression with no fear or remorse. At one point, a homeless man found small-time mobster Freddy Condor’s head in a Dumpster; the rest of Freddy turned up in other garbage bins close by. Perotta was captured after one of his murders drew too much attention to his Mob bosses.
If the fictional Perotta were compared to real-life Mafia hit man Roy DeMeo, Perotta would be a piker.
Exact figures are hard to come by, for obvious reasons, but DeMeo is suspected of between seventy-five and two hundred murders. A Neapolitan rather than a Sicilian, he grew up around mobsters in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, in the early 1940s, and he worked his way into their good graces. He was close to a Gambino family associate named Nino Gaggi, and with Gaggi’s sponsorship eventually became a made man (someone officially inducted into the Mafia). As a young man he was violent, aggressive, and strong.
Working for the Gambino family, DeMeo put together his own crew, specializing in auto theft and drug trafficking (an activity of which Mob boss Carlo Gambino disapproved). At age thirty-two, DeMeo did his first hit, a simple execution: several bullets to the head, the body left in an alley.
DeMeo realized that some bodies shouldn’t be found, so he developed a method to dispose of them that rivaled Henry Ford’s advances in the mass production of automobiles. DeMeo owned a bar called the Gemini Lounge; it had an adjoining apartment, and the bathtub sometimes came in handy. Because his crew performed their grisly tasks there (sometimes referring to the place as the Horror Hotel), their technique became known as the Gemini Method.
When they had a victim whom they needed to disappear, he would be shot in the head. Immediately, another member of the crew would wrap a towel around the head to stanch the flow of blood. Someone else would stab the victim numerous times in the heart in order to make sure the victim was dead and stop his heart from pumping. He would be put in the bathtub, or hanged over it, so that the blood would drain into a controlled location and be easily washed away. The drained body was then beheaded, cut into pieces (DeMeo, once a butcher’s apprentice, knew about chopping meat), wrapped in garbage bags, and tossed.
The first time DeMeo’s butchers tried this method, they made a couple of mistakes. One of the crew put the victim’s head through a compacting machine, an
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