No Warning in the Fog: Herbert Mullin, Thirteen Lost Lives, and Santa Cruz County That Couldn't See Pattern

Santa Cruz County, 1972.The roads through the redwoods still felt safe. Young people hitchhiked. Teenagers camped beneath the trees. Families opened their doors. A priest sat waiting in the confessional. An elderly man worked outside his home.Then people began dying.Over four months, Herbert Mullin killed thirteen people whose ages, backgrounds and circumstances were so different that their deaths initially appeared to belong to separate stories.A fifty-five-year-old man beside a road.Twenty-four-year-old student Mary Guilfoyle, whose family searched for months without knowing what had happened to her.Father Henri Tomei inside his church.A married couple.A mother and two children.Four young men beneath the redwoods.And finally Fred Perez, shot in broad daylight outside his own home.No Warning in the Fog tells the Herbert Mullin case from a different direction.Rather than allowing the killer and his bizarre earthquake delusions to dominate the story, this deeply researched narrative true-crime account returns attention to the people whose lives were interrupted, the families left searching for answers, the investigators attempting to connect apparently unrelated crimes, and the California mental-health system that had encountered Mullin before the murders began.It examines the uncomfortable questions that followed.What warning signs had actually been visible?Why were the murders so difficult to connect?Where did severe mental illness end and criminal responsibility begin?And how did thirteen separate lives become overshadowed by the name of the man who killed them?Atmospheric, compassionate and unsensational, No Warning in the Fog is a victim-centred account of one of California's darkest periods-and of the people who deserve to be remembered for far more than the circumstances of their deaths.