By October 1972, the voices were telling Herbert Mullin to kill. He became convinced that he had been chosen by Albert Einstein to go out and murder people as a way of preventing a cataclysmic earthquake. He described his mission as “singing the die song.” He explained it to a psychiatrist:

“You see, the thing is, people get together, say, in the White House. People like to sing the die song, you know, people like to sing the die song. If I am president of my class when I graduate from high school, I can tell two, possibly three young male Homo sapiens to die. I can sing that song to them and they’ll have to kill themselves or be killed—an automobile accident, a knifing, a gunshot wound. You ask me why this is? And I say, well they have to do that in order to protect the ground from an earthquake, because all of the people in the community had been dying all year long, and my class, we have to chip in so to speak to the darkness, we have to die also. And people would rather sing the die song than murder.”