Show Notes
In the early 1970s, after the horrific murders of the Ohta family, and with hacked limbs and headless torsos washing up on the shores of the famous Santa Cruz boardwalk, there was no denying that more than one serial killer was on the loose in the city. Facts of the mass murderer John Linley Frazier are revealed as spirit medium Jennifer Lyn tells of growing up in a city gripped in panic and fear, and her awareness the demonic energies from the town’s bloody past now to be unleashed.
More from Sacred + Profane: Origins
In the season finale, we trace the evil paths leading serial killers Herbert Mullin and Big Ed Kemper to a last frenzy of brutal and atrocious acts that sealed their fate and prompted their arrests. Spirit medium Jennifer Lyn gives new perspective to Kemper’s vision of “the devil’s face” that was one more excuse for his senseless slayings, decapitations, and degradations for which even his mother became a victim. Jennifer describes the supernatural encounters with her kidnapper, and the revelations that defined her own path and purpose.
The emotional and harrowing story of one woman's survival from a serial killer's kidnapping in the 1970's in the same part of Santa Cruz that continued to harbor two notorious serial killers. Santa Cruz continued to be the Murder Capital of the World of the world and demonic copycat criminals were stalking residents of this seaside town and Jennifer Lyn shares her story.
After 1972’s body count in Santa Cruz stood at six victims of two serial killers, in the new year of 1973, the communities of Santa Cruz hoped for an end to a terrifying murder spree. But it was just the start of the bloodiest months in the city’s history as Herbert Mullin and Ed Kemper would claim fifteen more victims in a manic rampage between January and April. We detail the convergence of extreme violence, obsessions, killer frenzies, and God-complexes in a trail of increasingly bizarre incidents that baffled police who struggled with a total lack of motive, evidence, and suspects. And considering the city’s ominous history of odd cults such as the “Holy City” and deep mountain enclaves turned into killing fields, we see a convergence of vengeful influences that defied the desperate attempts to connect or make sense of what appeared to be terrifyingly random.
As Herbert Mullin (“The Prophet” claiming his killings prevented earthquakes), and Ed Kemper (who earned the moniker “The Butcher” or the “Co-Ed Butcher”) continue their serial killing sprees, this reign of terror marks a dark and fearful time in Santa Cruz. By the end of 1972, Kemper and Mullin had the blood of three victims each on their hands, committed in a city haunted by a history of explainable and unexplainable tragedies which are illuminated from a supernatural perspective. And spirit medium Jennifer Lyn begins tells for the first time in public of her ordeal as a 7-year-old child kidnapped by a killer.
As John Linley Frazier is put on trial for the mass murder of five victims, details about the killings emerge that show a callous and methodically cruel intent that horrified the jury. The childhood traumas and accumulating anger and hate of the serial killers Mullin and Kemper are shown to reach a boiling point that would terrorize the city less than two years later. Jennifer Lyn describes her first encounter with demonic energies at age eleven. Even as Frazier is convicted and sent to San Quentin death row, seen and unseen forces are gearing up to claim “blood sacrifices”.