Lest We Forget: Codename Zebra, the Anti-White Murders of the “Death Angels”

170 days of racial terrorism struck the White residents of San Francisco from October 20, 1973 until April 16, 1974. Known as the Zebra murders or Zebra killings, four Black men—Jessie Lee Cooks, Larry Craig Green, Manuel Moore, and J.C.X. Simon murdered 15 Whites. 13 victims were shot to death, while the killers hacked the other two to death with machetes. Other victims suffered paralyzing bullet wounds, rape, and robbery, plus one survivor managed to cling to life despite being repeatedly hit in the head and left for dead after suffering several deep slashes to his face. The killers sometimes took trophies, including Polaroid pictures of their victims. The motivation for these murders was the same in every case: the killers viewed their White victims as “devils” to be eradicated to make up for the history of African slavery and oppression.

Mystery writer Clark Howard’s history of the case, The Zebra Killings (1979) , exposes some unsettling facts about the Zebra killers. Larry Green, nicknamed Yellow in Howard’s account, “came from a decent home and was a high-school basketball star” [1]. While Jessie Lee Cooks fit the archetypal mold of the career criminal, Simon, called Skullcap, rose above an impoverished background in Texas (where he developed pinworms because of his habit of spreading fecal matter on his face) and became a married father with a good job in a grocery supply warehouse. However, despite never experiencing racial oppression himself, Simon joined the Nation of Islam in 1970 as a devoted believer in Black supremacy [2]. Another member of the killer gang, Anthony Harris, aka Judo, became a member of Nation of Islam despite having a White wife.

True to his first calling of fiction writing, Howard’s The Zebra Killings is full of dramatic recreations, made-up dialogue, and supposition. For instance, one of the characters, Vandyke, is a composite character based on anti-White street preachers and Black Muslims in the National of Islam. Howard portrays Vandyke as the man most responsible for the radicalization of the Zebra killers. Again, no such man existed. On top of that, Vandyke’s relationship with the Nation of Islam, and therefore the relationship between the Zebra killers and the NOI, is uncertain [3]. Despite these flaws, The Zebra Killings is a well-written work. You just have to take it with a massive dollop of salt.

Religion, specifically the Nation of Islam, radicalized these men, both in prison and on the streets. NOI leaders pumped their heads full of nonsense about how slave masters cut Black babies out of wombs to use them as hog feed. NOI “ministers” also told their flocks that the religions of Christianity and Judaism were created by Whites in order to destroy “superior” Black men and their culture. Cooks, Green, Moore, Simon, and Harris proved to be enthusiastic students of the teachings of the NOI. Vandyke dazzled the men with stories about the so-called “Death Angels.” NOI called men Death Angels if they killed nine White men, five White women, and four White children [4]. The Death Angels scattered throughout California killed as many as 135 White men, 75 White women, and 60 White children [5].

The first known murder carried out by the Zebra killers occurred on October 20, 1973. On that day, Cooks, Green, and Harris kidnapped Richard and Quita Hague while the married couple enjoyed an evening walk along Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. The group sexually assaulted Quita in the back of their van. They forced Richard to watch. Then, after reaching some train tracks outside of the city, the group beat and slashed Richard with a wrench and hacked him with a machete. He somehow managed to survive. As for Quita, detectives later struggled to determine which of her “countless wounds might have been fatal.” All told, she suffered stab wounds to her head and neck. She also suffered cuts to her throat that came close to decapitation, plus a series of hacking-like wounds to her spine [6].

A week later, Cooks shot and killed college student Frances Rose, 28, as she tried to get to class on the University of California’s Extension School campus on Laguna Street. 53-year-old Jordanian immigrant Sammy Erakat, the owner of Erakat’s Grocery near the Civic Center, greeted shooter Simon as a fellow Muslim before Simon shot him to death in the store’s bathroom. Artist Paul Dancik, 26, took three bullets to the chest as he used a payphone. Two days after this murder, Art Agnos, the man who would later serve San Francisco as mayor from 1988 until 1992, walked out of a meeting in the majority Black neighborhood of Portrero Hill only to be shot in the back. That same night (December 13, 1973), 31-year-old Marietta DiGirolamo walked three blocks from her apartment at 651 Scott Street to Divisadero. Simon got out of a Black Cadillac and shot DiGirolamo to death. The fact that the victim had a Black boyfriend did not save her [7]. The last to die in 1973 included 81-year-old Ilario Bertuccio (shot to death while walking home from his shift at the 7-Up bottling plant), 19-year-old Neal Moynihan (shot to death while shopping at the Civic Center), 50-year-old Mildred Holser (shot to death while waiting for a bus), and an unidentified homeless man whose remains were not found until February 10, 1974.

This final victim, called John Doe No. 169 by the San Francisco Police Department, experienced the full savagery of the Black Muslim murderers. The unidentified White man suffered prolonged torture. The killers then decapitated him. His hands and feet were removed postmortem, plus the killers cut his torso from hipbone to hipbone [8].

In response to the rash of murders, the SFPD created a special task force codenamed “Zebra” after their use of the “Z” radio frequency (in the phonetic alphabet used by the SFPD in 1973, “zebra” denoted the letter Z). Detectives Gus Coreris and John Fotinos led the task force. Howard’s account presents Coreris as gruff and Fotinos as more humane. Both proved to be dogged investigators who saw the racial implications of the murders early on. Mayor Joseph Alioto, a San Francisco native and a representative of the city’s blue-collar Democrats, took an active role in the investigation. Alioto’s tenure as mayor coincided with some of the worst crimes in the Bay Area’s history. The Zodiac Killer and the Symbionese Liberation Army occurred under his watch. Mayor Alioto tried to crack down on the Zebra killers by instituting a stop-and-frisk policy that targeted young Black men between the ages of 20 and 30 for random questionings by police. The policy proved controversial. Black Panthers leader Bobby Seale called the policy “a vicious and racist action” that threatened the lives of all Black men in the Bay Area [9]. Liberals in the city protested. Reverend Cecil Williams of the Glide Church, a Black pastor, pointed out publicly that White men had not been stopped at random during the hunt for the Zodiac Killer. Ultimately, Judge Alphonso Zirpoli struck the policy down a week after its implementation.

More Zebra murders appeared in the winter of 1974. Black reporter Chauncey Bailey of the San Francisco Sun Reporter would later tie the second round of Zebra murders to the police shooting of Larry “3X” Crosby on January 25, 1974. Crosby and other members of the NOI were stopped by Berkeley, California police officers as they sold fish door-to-door. Crosby fought the officers and even disarmed one before pistol-whipping him. The other officers opened fire on Crosby, striking him in the back and thereby paralyzing him for life [10]. (Crosby still denounces the shooting to this day.) The shooting of Crosby led to a protest at the city’s Mosque No. 26, which Zebra killers Simon, Cooks, Moore, Green and Harris attended. Bailey was the first to connect the Crosby shooting with the string of murders carried out by the Zebras on January 28, 1974. On that day, 32-year-old Tana Smith, 69-year-old Vincent Wollin, 84-year-old John Bambic, and 45-year-old were all shot to death. 23-year-old Roxanne McMillan survived her shooting on the 100 block of Edinburg Street, but was left paralyzed.

In a sick twist of fate, Bailey, who did much to uncover the full extent of the Zebra crimes, would himself fall victim to Zebra wannabes in 2007. On July 12th of that year, Devaundre (some sources spell it Devaughndre) Broussard admitted to Bailey that he and other members of the Your Black Muslim Bakery murdered White restaurant worker Michael Wills in Oakland after the group’s leader, 25-year-old Yusuf Bey IV, hyped his men up with tales about the Zebra murders [11]. 19-year-old Broussard would later shoot Bailey to death with a Mossberg shotgun as the reporter left a McDonald’s. The execution came because of Bailey’s investigation into the Your Black Muslim Bakery’s welfare fraud, as well as its 2006 bankruptcy and allegations of sexual abuse [12].

As for the Zebra murders, they came to an end in April 1974. In that month alone, the murderers gunned down 19-year-old Thomas Rainwater, a Salvation Army cadet, and 23-year-old Nelson T. Shields IV, the son of a DuPont executive. Harris, after seeing a composite sketch of himself, decided to turn his fellow “Death Angels” in. The city’s $30,000 reward money also helped to sway Harris’s mind [13]. The trial of Zebra killers Cooks, Green, Moore, and Simon would be one of the longest and most expensive in California’s history. All four were convicted in 1976 for multiple murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Simon died at age 69 at San Quentin Prison in 2015. The 75-year-old Moore died in 2017 while serving time at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. As for Cooks, he has admitted his role in the murders (Moore maintained his innocence until his death). Simon told a parole board in 2007 that his conviction constituted a “legal lynching” [14] and died unrepentant. Green, on the other hand, admitted to a parole board last year that he indeed hated Whites as “devils” in the 1970s, but now believes in the equality of all races [15].

The horrific story of San Francisco’s Zebra killers is far from over. The murderous group were not alone in their hatred of Whites during the 1970s. Mark Essex used a Rugger .44-caliber carbine and .38-caliber pistol to murder nine White people in New Orleans between December 31, 1972 and January 7, 1973. Later monsters include the Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, Frederick Demond of Kansas City, and Micah X. Johnson, the former Army Reservist who used a Saiga AK-74 rifle to ambush Dallas police officers and kill five of them during a Black Lives Matter march in that city. Indeed, BLM can be considered the heirs of the Zebras. They have a similar thirst for blood, as BLM-adjacent terrorists like Johnson and Gavin Eugene Long coexist alongside the criminal underclass of rioters who have been destroying America’s cities since May.

Like the Zebras and the NOI, BLM believes in Black supremacy and keeps its members agitated by spewing hatred towards Whites, including harebrained ideas about how Whites have always hated and mistreated blacks. Such rhetoric has already inspired or likely inspired several murders of White innocents this year: the murder of 5-year-old Cannon Hinnant by 25-year-old neighbor Darius Sessoms; the murder of young mother Jessica Doty Whitaker in Indianapolis on July 5th for the crime of saying “all lives matter”; the August 25th stabbing of an AutoZone employee by 19-year-old Jayvon Hatchett, who was inspired to kill a White man by watching hours of police brutality videos (Hatchett subsequently murdered his White cellmate Eddie Nelson, Jr.); and last month’s shooting at Louisville’s Bungalow Joe’s restaurant that killed 26-year-old Toreon Jermaine Hudson, 48-year-old William Scott Smallwood, and 24-year-old Steven Matthew Head. The killer, 33-year-old Michael E. Rhynes Jr., was apprehended by police wearing a “Justice for Breonna” t-shirt, thus indicating that the murders were done in the name of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman with direct ties to illegal guns and drugs who was shot by Louisville police officers on March 13, 2020 following a firefight possibly involving both Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.

The NOI, the Zebras, and BLM all exist because of anti-White hatred engineered by consistent lying. Black supremacists lie about Whites—their history, their accomplishments, etc. Black supremacists are also allowed to lie because the media covers for them while chasing after White supremacist phantoms. The infernal marriage between the liberal media and Black supremacists is built upon one lie after the other. Because of this, innocent Whites and other non-Black Americans will continue to be sacrificed to appease liberal White guilt and the Black desire for endless revenge. This is no hyperbole; as researcher Anthony Walsh uncovered in 2005, 90 of the 413 serial killers who were active between 1945 and 2004 were Black, indicating that Blacks were overrepresented in the ranks of serial killers by a factor of about 2. As far back as the 1980s, the FBI has known that Black killers are more likely to target non-Black victims than vice versa. Add to this mixture the high Black criminality in general, and you have truly toxic mix.

It is surprising that there have not been more Zebra-like murders in American history.

[1]: Clark Howard, The Zebra Killings (London: New English, 1981): 77.

[2]: Howard, Zebra Killings, 84-85.

[3]: C.F. Robinson, “The San Francisco Zebra Killings,” Counter-Currents, Oct. 27, 2016.

[4]: Peter Vronsky, Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (New York: Berkley Books, 2004): 157.

[5]: Vrosnky, Serial Killers, 158.

[6]: Prentice Earl Sanders and Ben Cohen, The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness and Civil Rights (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006): Kindle edition.

[7]: Howard, Zebra Killings, 127.

[9]: Howard, Zebra Killings, 185.

[10]: Nate Gartrell, “Last two living ‘Zebra’ killers denied parole; tied to massive California murder spree targeting Whites at random,” Mercury News, Jan. 28, 2020.  <https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/28/last-two-living-zebra-killers-denied-parole-tied-to-massive-california-murder-spree-targeting-Whites-at-random/>

[11]: Ibid.

[12]: Ibid.

[13]: Lee Romney, “Two convicted of murder in shooting of Oakland journalist,” Los Angeles Times, Jun. 10, 2011.

[14]: “Zebra Murders: Remembering Fear That Gripped San Francisco 40 Years Later,” KPIX CBS, Nov. 6, 2014. <https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/11/06/remembering-the-zebra-killings-40-years-later-racially-motivated/>.

[15]: Gartrell, “Last two living ‘Zebra’ killers denied parole.”