Murders that Made us, The: How Vigilantes, Hoodlums, Mob Bosses, Serial Killers, and Cult Leaders Built the San Francisco - Softcover

Calhoun, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770415491 ISBN 13: 9781770415492

Publisher: Ecw Press, 2021

Synopsis

In The Murders That Made Us, the story of the San Francisco Bay Area unfolds through its most violent and depraved acts. From the city's earliest days, where vigilantes hung perps from buildings and newspaper publishers shot it out on Market Street, to the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the Zodiac Killer, crime has made the people of San Francisco who they are. Murder and mayhem are intertwined with the city's art, music, and politics. The Great 1906 Earthquake that burned down the old Barbary Coast shook a city that was already teetering on the brink of a massive prostitution scandal. The Summer of Love ended with a pair of ghastly acid dealer slayings that made the Haight too violent for even Charles Manson. The '70s ground to a halt with San Francisco pastor Jim Jones forcing his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch in Guyana, and the assassination of gay icon Harvey Milk. With each tale of true crime, The Murders That Made Us will take you from the violence that began in the original Gold Rush into the brutal displacement of todays techie ruination.

About this title

About the Author

Bob Calhoun is a San Francisco Bay Area author, journalist, and former punk wrestler and peepshow emcee. Since 2015, he has recounted his city's most gruesome and lurid events in his regular SF Weekly column, "Yesterday's Crimes." His punk wrestling memoir, Beer, Blood & Cornmeal (ECW Press), is a national bestseller.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Satan Saves ZodiacRobert Salem designed fashionable lamps out of his converted firehouse at 745 Stevenson Street near San Francisco’s Civic Center. His hurricane-style light fixtures were sold in specialty shops throughout the world and a few of his designs were even displayed in museums as high art. Salem had friends who worked at the nearby Franciscan Hotel, and he told them they could stop by his place anytime. The hotel workers grew worried when they hadn't seen the middle-aged artist in several days, so they went to Salem's live-work space on Sunday, on April 19, 1970 to make sure he was okay. They noticed a rank odor coming from his apartment, so they broke down the door. Trails of dried blood led throughout what the Chronicle described as “an expensively-decorated hippie-style pad” with Japanese tatami mats on the floors and tree branches climbing up the walls. They found Salem’s mutilated body on one of mats. He had been stabbed several times with a very sharp knife, and his throat cut from ear-to-ear in a botched attempt at decapitation. Frustrated from not being able to sever the head from the body, the killer cut off Salem’s ear and took it with him. Investigators never found the ear. Before the killer left the apartment, he took a shower to wash off the blood, and cranked the heater up to 90° to exacerbate the putrescence. On the wall of the flat, he scrawled the words “Satan saves Zodiac” in his victim's blood with "a weird cross-like design” next to it that turned out to be an Egyptian ankh. Homicide Inspector Gus Coreris was hesitant to say that Salem’s murder was the work of the Zodiac Killer, who had been terrorizing the greater Bay Area since gunning down Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday in Benicia on Dec. 20, 1968. “Probably the person we are after wanted us to think it was the Zodiac,” Inspector Coreris said with a bit of caution.It had been nearly six months since the Zodiac’s last known murder. On Oct. 11, 1969, the killer hailed Paul Stein’s cab on the corner of Mason and Geary Streets. He rode it to Washington and Cherry Streets in Presidio Heights, where he shot Stein in the back of the head with a 9mm automatic. Two days later, the Zodiac sent a bloody swatch of Stein’s shirt to the San Francisco Chronicle to needle reporters and police. Zodiac was the grandfather of all trolls. On April 20, 1970, the same day that the Chronicle ran its first story on the Salem murder, the Zodiac Killer dropped a letter to the paper into a corner mailbox in San Francisco. This was his first letter since he sent a note with yet another cipher to attorney Melvin Belli on Dec. 20, 1969. “I have killed ten people to date,” Zodiac boasted in the new letter at a time when only five of his victims had been confirmed (then and now). The serial killer didn’t take credit for the Salem murder or even mention it, but he dangled the possibility that he could have been responsible. Zodiac closes the letter with a sinister postscript on the bottom of a page showing a hand-drawn diagram of a bomb.“I hope you have fun trying to fygure (sic) out who I killed,” he taunts."Zodiac = 10. SFPD = 0."

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecw Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770415491
• ISBN 13: 9781770415492
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264