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The killings were only the latest in a grisly series of six mass murders that have taken the lives of 64 people in California during the past four years. The day after Gretzler and Steelman were arrested, Edmund Emil Kemper III, who stands 6 ft. 9 in. and weighs 280 Ibs., was sentenced to life imprisonment for his most recent murders. When he was 15, Kemper killed his grandparents but later was released from a California state mental hospital, whereupon he began murdering a series of student hitchhikers. He ended by killing his mother Kemper decapitated seven of his eight victims, including his mother.
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Last week California was also the scene of a bizarre single murder. Oakland's highly regarded school superintendent, Marcus A. Foster, 50, was ambushed in a parking lot and killed by a hail of fire that included bullets loaded with cyanide. Cut down with him was Robert Blackburn, his deputy, who was expected to live.
Responsibility for executing Foster's "death warrant" was claimed by the "Symbionese Liberation Army," a group unknown to the FBI or experts on local radical groups. In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the organization objected to "fascist" policies supported by Foster, the first black to have headed the public schools in a major California city, that schools were giving police information about Oakland students—a claim that authorities denied.