Bio

Steven Craig Hurd was born on September 9, 1949. A barbiturate addict, by age 20 he had organized a small satanic cult in Orange County, California, recruiting three teenage boys and a 31-year-old woman as followers. The group lived a transient existence, at times sleeping in highway culverts and scavenging garbage for food. According to later accounts, the group progressed from ritualistic chanting and the killing of small animals to seeking out a greater "kick" in the form of human sacrifice.

Murder Story

On June 2, 1970, Hurd and his followers confronted 20-year-old Jerry Wayne Carlin, a newlywed gas station attendant, during his overnight shift at a Santa Ana gas station. Hurd and 16-year-old follower Arthur "Craig" Hulse (nicknamed "Moose") forced Carlin into the station's restroom, where they hacked him to death with a Boy Scout hatchet. Hulse reportedly licked blood from the hatchet afterward, according to Hurd's own later account.

The following day, June 3, 1970, the group — which by this point included two teenage boys and 31-year-old Melanie Daniels, a waitress with a boyfriend incarcerated at San Quentin — hijacked a station wagon driven by Florence Nancy Brown, 31, a mother of five, as she exited Interstate 5 at Sand Canyon Boulevard. They forced her into an orange grove near what is now the U.C. Irvine campus, where she begged for her life and asked if she was going to die. Hurd stabbed her more than 20 times, killing her; her right arm was also severed after death, and her heart and lungs were removed as part of a ritual sacrifice.

The group's stated destination after the killing was San Francisco, Hurd reportedly hoped to meet a "chief devil" there, while Daniels intended to visit her incarcerated boyfriend at San Quentin, though she was turned away at the prison gate by guards. Afterward, the group drove Brown's stolen station wagon back south, abandoning and burning it in Los Gatos, before splitting up to hitchhike separately back to Orange County.

Several days after the murder, Hurd returned alone to the shallow grave where Brown's body had been buried near El Cariso, along the Ortega Highway. He dug up her body, removed her heart, burned part of it, and ate the rest, later telling psychiatrists it "tasted like chicken." He reportedly arranged ashes and paper into a "star of death" around the heart as part of the ritual. Brown's remains were ultimately discovered by hikers on June 17, 1970; a responding sheriff's officer told reporters at the time, "We have some kind of nut on our hands."

Hurd and his four accomplices were arrested around the beginning of July 1970, roughly three weeks after the killings, following a tip. His co-defendants included Arthur "Craig" Hulse, 16; Herman Taylor, 17; Christopher "Gypsy" Gibboney; and Melanie Daniels, 31.

Herman Taylor turned state's evidence in exchange for having his charges reduced to two counts of accessory to murder, receiving a one-year sentence dating from his original arrest. Melanie Daniels pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the murders and was sentenced in September 1970 to two consecutive one-to-five-year prison terms; the prosecutor in her case argued that "if there ever has been a case where consecutive sentences were warranted, this is it." Christopher Gibboney sought to be processed as a juvenile but was ordered to stand trial as an adult for Brown's murder. Arthur "Craig" Hulse was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder, along with a separate charge of accessory in Brown's killing, and began serving his sentence on March 31, 1971; a Court of Appeal-ordered sanity hearing in June 1973 again found he had been legally sane at the time of the killings. Hulse remained in prison for decades afterward, repeatedly denied parole.

Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, publicly distanced his organization from Hurd's cult, dismissing the devil-worshippers of that era as "kooks and creeps who are out of their minds on drugs."

Hurd was initially declared mentally unfit for trial and spent five years confined at Atascadero State Mental Hospital. He was eventually brought to trial in Orange County beginning in May 1975; a jury of six men and six women deliberated for two days before finding him guilty on both counts of first-degree murder in mid-June 1975. Confessions and other statements Hurd had made in 1970 were ruled admissible as evidence at trial. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms, with parole possible after seven years — the death penalty was not available in California for crimes committed at the time of the killings.

Beginning in 1981, the Orange County District Attorney's Office successfully opposed Hurd's parole bid seven separate times. In a 2002 letter opposing parole, Deputy District Attorney Doug Woodsmall wrote that Hurd's crimes were "carried out in an especially heinous, atrocious, cruel and callous manner" and that his "total depravity" made him unsuitable for release "now or in the future." Deputy District Attorney Ted Burnett appeared in person at Mule Creek State Prison that same year to oppose Hurd's release, telling reporters, "The man's a monster, and he should stay in prison forever."

Steven Craig Hurd died at a hospital near Mule Creek State Prison in Amador County, California, on May 28, 2005, from a brain hemorrhage, at age 55. His death went unreported for more than five years — Orange County prosecutors were never formally notified, and California's Department of Corrections issued no press release. When Orange County Register reporters learned of his death in 2010, several people connected to the case, including the judge and defense attorney who had handled his 1975 trial, said they had been unaware he had died. Jim Carlin, the older brother of victim Jerry Wayne Carlin, expressed relief that Hurd had never been released, saying, "People are not born evil but sometimes embrace it because they think it gives them power or notoriety."