Harvest of Bad Seeds

During the past eight months, Northern California has been terrorized by a wave of mass murders and rapes. In Santa Cruz, a succession of coeds from the University of California campus and nearby Cabrillo College disappeared. They were found weeks or months later, decapitated. In all, seemingly random murders took the lives of 19 people around Santa Cruz, including a priest who was stabbed to death in his confessional booth. In the Nob Hill area of San Francisco, a number of Oriental women were assaulted, raped and cut up with knives. One was murdered; another barely survived 22 wounds.

The first break came in February, when Santa Cruz police arrested Herbert Mullin, 25, a slender, former mental patient, who is accused of killing ten of the Santa Cruz victims. Last week police in California and Colorado caught up with two other men, one believed to be the Nob Hill rapist and the other the butcher of Santa Cruz's coeds.

On Good Friday, John Phillip Bunyard, 27, a handsome truck driver from Nob Hill, kidnaped a 19-year-old girl from the parking lot of a casino in Stateline, Nev., raped her and tied her to a tree. Hours later, police caught up with Bunyard driving the victim's car, but he escaped. There ensued a two-day, 500-mile chase back and forth across California. During that odyssey, Bunyard raped one more woman, shot two others, kidnaped several families and escaped twice more from the police. He was finally captured in the foothills of Mariposa, but not before he had been shot in the arms, legs and stomach.

With his bail set at $ 1,000,000, Bunyard has so far been charged with only two counts of murder, two counts of assault on police officers and two counts of kidnaping. But a collection of knives found in his Nob Hill apartment, plus a positive identification by one of the area's Oriental rape victims, has led police to believe that they have finally found the Nob Hill rapist.

At about the time Bunyard was on his rampage, a 6-ft. 9-in., 278-lb. giant named Edmund Emil Kemper III was having one of his frequent fights with his mother, an administrative assistant at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He ended it by hitting her on the head with a hammer and cutting off her head and right hand. He strangled her friend, another college employee, and stuffed the bodies into separate bedroom closets in his mother's Santa Cruz home. Then Kemper, 24, climbed into his car and drove east until he reached Pueblo, Colo., where he placed a call to the Santa Cruz sheriff's office, confessing the crimes. He also is accused of the rape-murder-mutilations of seven girls who had disappeared over the past year, including a Fresno State coed whose head had been found on a deserted mountainside in August 1972 and a college girl whose skull the police unearthed in the backyard of Kemper's mother's home after the son showed them where to dig.

Both Kemper and Bunyard had histories of severe mental disorder. At the age of 15, Kemper killed both of his grandparents after deciding he did not want to visit with them any longer. He then called his mother to tell her what he had done and calmly waited for the police --a grisly rehearsal of last week's murder and confession. After treatment in several mental hospitals, he was released by the California Youth Authority, though it is still not clear why.

An unwanted child who was kicked out of kindergarten for being "incorrigible," Bunyard also came under the California Youth Authority early in life, but he graduated to more severe correctional institutions. That he should never have been released was once strongly implied by Bunyard himself. In 1967, as he walked out of the San Mateo honor camp, he told an officer: "I don't want to go out there. I feel like a puppy that you're putting on the freeway. I don't think I can make it out there." Eventually the puppy turned into a monster. Found in his apartment last week was a sketch pad on which Bunyard had drawn pictures of a man with an animal head cutting up human bodies.

The psychopathic sprees of Kemper and Bunyard seem to pose a sharp rebuke to the state's correctional facilities. Opponents of Governor Ronald Reagan pointed out that he had sharply cut back funds for the state's mental institutions upon taking office. One of the few remaining such facilities in Northern California is scheduled to close down in 1975--and President Nixon is planning to phase out all federal money for the local mental health clinics that were to take the place of those hospitals. As Stanford University Psychiatrist Donald Lunde put it: "There is no place for these people to go."

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