It was fair and warmer in Los Angeles. Not that people were thinking about the weather. They were too busy reading the headline story in the Times and listening to the early newscasts. And, warm as it was, a collective shudder swept across the city. Memories began to stir. There had been a strangler in Boston, cold-blooded murderers on the prairie, a rampaging rifleman on a tower in Texas, a psychotic slayer in Phoenix, a killer of migrant workers who filled more than two dozen shallow graves dotting the California farmlands. Somewhere around the Bay Area a slayboy turned homicides into an ego-trip, as he boasted of his tally of victims in letters to the newspapers which he signed with the nom de doom of Zodiac. And right here in fair and warmer Los Angeles, people were remembering the Manson family. All men are brothers—but which brother is named Cain? An unfair question, perhaps, and an unfair comparison.
