Word: deathly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Urban killing is as old as cities; today, the accounts of street crime have grown so familiar that death has lost its sting. In a book that should prove this year's Helter Skelter, Crime Writer Clark Howard restores to this now routine event a primal horror. His pounding narrative meticulously describes the so-called Zebra killings of 1973-74, when 23 white San Franciscans were murdered or maimed by a group of Black Muslim extremists. In the retelling, the cold jargon of police files leaps starkly to life...
Upon their release, the trio are invited to a meeting in a warehouse loft. There an itinerant upper-echelon Muslim urges them to start executing whites in order to achieve the elevated status of Death Angel, a role that confers a kind of perverse respectability. Each of the neophytes must kill nine men, five women or four children. Murdering the young earns more points because the act requires more "heart." On the eve of the killing spree the loft becomes a staging arena for a combination of horseplay and unfocused hatred: " 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' The chant...
...piece. The remains are trussed up like a frozen turkey and thrown into the sea. Their new-found religion forbids the recruits to rob or rape their victims, but that scarcely deters them. One of them removes a blood-specked ring from a woman he has hacked to death and gives it to a friend for his new bride...
...basis of his testimony, as well as that of surviving victims, four killers - Jesse Cooks, Larry Green, Manuel Moore, J.C. Simon - are sentenced to life imprisonment, though Howard states that other Death Angels have murdered an estimated 270 white men, women and children in California and few have been apprehended. The four prisoners have subsequently shown no sign of repentance and in prison they have been troublemakers. Yet they are up for parole...
...called the Cultural Revolution, but the decade-long upheaval that ended in 1976 with Mao Tse-tung's death was a time of sorrow and hardship for China's scholars. Roughneck Red Guards took over classroom and campus; universities were shut down. Academic standards sank to scandalously low levels. Eminent teachers and scientists were sent off to the countryside for "re-education," to work as farm hands and laborers. Science came virtually to a standstill...