Before the Headline - Every victim had a life before they became a headline.
The Fog Looked Away - Surviving the Herbert Mullin Murders
by Frank Coulter
Santa Cruz had always known fog. It softened the coastline, blurred the redwood roads, and made danger feel distant until it was already standing close enough to touch. In 1972 and 1973, as Herbert Mullin moved through Santa Cruz County and nearby communities, the signs of escalating instability kept being absorbed into the era’s background noise: counterculture drift, spiritual language, ecological dread, and the small-town habit of explaining away what felt uncomfortable. Then Lawrence White was dead. Then Mary Guilfoyle. Then Father Henri Tomei. Then whole households and boys in the woods and a man in his yard.The Fog Looked Away tells the Herbert Mullin case as a survivor-centered true crime narrative: not a catalogue of the killer’s delusions, but an immersive account of how families, neighbors, police, doctors, and a coastal community learned too late that what they had dismissed as harmless strangeness had become lethal. The central dramatic question is: How did a town full of people who sensed something was wrong keep losing sight of the truth until the survivors were left to live with what everyone had missed?
She crossed an ocean to escape a country that had never wanted her alive. What is the true price of being promised, at last, a home? Della Mae Whitfield came to Peoples Temple the way thousands of Black Americans did in the 1970s — drawn by a white preacher who put Black faces in the front pews, fed the hungry, housed the old, and called integration a sacrament. She gave the movement her savings, her name, her children, and her certainty about what was real, believing each surrender bought her closer to a promised land in the Guyanese jungle. By the time she understood that the paradise was a cage and the family a hostage, the loudspeakers never went silent and the rehearsals for death had a name. What They Called Freedom follows one woman from the welcome that was genuine to the morning that took nearly everyone she loved — and asks what survives of a self that was taught surrender was liberation. It is the story the country flattened into a cruel punchline, restored to the people who actually died: overwhelmingly Black, overwhelmingly women and children, betrayed first by a nation and then by the man who promised to save them from it.