San Quentin State Prison (SQ) is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Earle Leonard Nelson, also known in the media as the Gorilla Man, the Gorilla Killer, and the Dark Strangler, was an American serial killer, rapist, and necrophile, who is considered the first known serial sex murderer of the twentieth century. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, by his devoutly Pentecostal grandmother, Nelson exhibited bizarre behavior as a child, which was compounded by head injuries he sustained in a bicycling accident at age 10. After committing various minor offenses in early adulthood, he was institutionalized in Napa for a time.
Herbert William Mullin was an American serial killer who killed 13 people in California in the early 1970s. He confessed to the killings, which he claimed prevented earthquakes. In 1973, after a trial to determine whether he was legally insane or culpable, he was convicted of two murders in the first-degree and nine in the second-degree, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his imprisonment, he was denied parole eight times.
The Golden Dragon massacre was a gang-related mass shooting that took place on September 4, 1977, inside the Golden Dragon Restaurant at 822 Washington Street in Chinatown, San Francisco, California, United States. The five perpetrators, members of the Joe Boys, a Chinese youth gang, were attempting to kill leaders of the Wah Ching, a rival Chinatown gang. The attack left five people dead and 11 others injured, none of whom were gang members. Seven perpetrators were later convicted and sentenced in connection with the murders. The massacre led to the establishment of the San Francisco Police Department's Asian Gang Task Force, credited with ending gang-related violence in Chinatown by 1983. The restaurant itself closed in 2006.
Chester Dewayne Turner is an American serial killer and sex offender who was sentenced to death for sexually assaulting and murdering fourteen women in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1998.
Phillip Carl Jablonski was an American serial killer convicted of killing five women in California and Utah between 1978 and 1991.
James Clifford Carson and Susan Barnes Carson are American serial killers convicted for three murders between 1981 and 1983 in Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rodney James Alcala was an American serial killer and sex offender who was sentenced to death in California for five murders committed between 1977 and 1979, receiving an additional sentence of 25 years to life after pleading guilty to two further homicides committed in New York State in 1971 and 1977. While he has been conclusively linked to eight murders, Alcala's true number of victims remains unknown and could be much higher – authorities believe the actual number is as high as 130.
Karl Francis Werner was an American serial killer who was active in Santa Clara County in Northern California. He was convicted of the murder of three teenage girls during his period of activity from 1969 to 1971.
John Linley Frazier, also known as The Killer Prophet, was an American mass murderer who killed five people in Santa Cruz County, California, the first of three men who would go on killing sprees in Santa Cruz County in the 1970s, the others being Herbert Mullin and Edmund Kemper.
Alfredo Rolando Prieto was a Salvadoran-American serial killer. After being initially convicted for a single murder, he would later be connected to eight other murders committed in Virginia and California between May 1988 and September 1990 via DNA profiling. Sentenced to death in both states, Prieto was executed by lethal injection in Virginia in 2015.
John Arthur Getreu was an American serial killer who was convicted of one murder during 1963 in West Germany and convicted of two more that took place in 1973 and 1974 in the United States. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the latter murders, and died at the California Health Care Facility while serving his sentence. He was identified through genetic genealogy by CeCe Moore in 2018.
Adolph Theodore Laudenberg, known as The Santa Strangler, was an American serial killer who murdered three women in the San Pedro neighborhood of Los Angeles and one in San Francisco during the 1970s, and is the prime suspect for another two similar murders. Despite telling two daughters-in-law, decades apart, that he had committed four murders, he was only arrested in 2002, after DNA evidence connected him to the crimes. He was convicted of one murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.
Philip Joseph Hughes Jr. known as The East Bay Strangler, is an American convicted serial killer. He killed at least three young women in Contra Costa County throughout the 1970s with the help of his ex-wife, Suzanne Perrin.
Terry Childs was an American serial killer serving several life sentences for the murders of at least five people in Nevada and California spanning from 1979 to 1985. While his true victim count is unknown, Childs himself claimed at one point to have killed 12 victims, and that he had been pressured into confessing after seeing the ghosts of the people he had killed.
Ray Dell Sims is an American serial killer who is responsible for the murders of at least five girls in Fresno, California from 1974 to 1977. Originally convicted of a single murder, he was linked to the later killings via DNA in 2001, and has since been convicted of one more and is currently serving two life terms.
Horace Van Vaultz Jr. is an American serial killer.
James Richard Curry was an American serial killer and rapist who killed between four and five people in California and Nevada from 1982 to 1983. A few days after his arrest, Curry hanged himself in his cell. He is best remembered for being posthumously identified as the killer of the Sheep Flats Jane Doe, who was identified alongside him as Mary Silvani.
