Herbert Mullin was born in 1949 in Santa Cruz, California, and by most accounts grew up in a stable and nurturing, but perhaps too strict, Roman Catcholic household. The first indication of some kind of instability in Mullin cropped up at age sixteen, when a friend of his was killed in a road accident. Between ages eighteen and twenty-four, Mullin`s life was punctuated by a series of hospitalizations in psychiatric facilities, relieved by periods of normalcy. Once, he appeared at a boxing gym in San Francisco wearing a sombrero and carrying a Bible and proved himself to be a ferocious boxer.
Still deeply linked to his Catholic faith, Mullin went to a church to seek help from a priest. Mullin recalls that he told the priest that his father had been telepathically ordering him to sacrifice people. In Mullin`s recollection of the conversation, the priest asked him,
"Herbert, do you read the Bible?"
"Yes."
"The commandments, where it says to honor thy father and mother?"
"Yes."
"Then you know how important it is to do as your father says."
"Yes."
"I think it is so important that I want to volunteer to be your next sacrifice," the priest said, according to Mullin.
Mullin beat the priest, kicked him, and stabbed him six times in the chest and back, leaving him to die in the confessional booth.