(This is the text on the back of Terminal Cheesecake's album "Angels
in Pigtails", complete with misspelled words and all.)

Dan Crane was born on 18 April 1947 in Stratford, California; his
mother was a devout Catholic, and Crane's upbringing was-
according to his later confession - oppressively religious. But he
seems to have been a completely normal boy, voted by his class
'most likely to succeed' . By the age of seventeen he had a
girlfriend, to whom he was engaged, and a close male friend
named Dean; both were members of a group of school athletes
who called themselves the Zeros. Dean's death in a motor accident
in July 1965 seems to have marked the beginning of the
schizophrenia that led Crane to commit thirteen murders. He
arranged his bedroom as a kind of shrine round his friend's
picture, and told his girlfriend that he was afraid he was
homosexual. When he became eligible for call-up in the army, he
decided to become a concientious objector; his girlfriend - whose
father was a military man - broke off the engagement. In February
1969, when he was twenty- one he announced that he was going
to India to study religion, and his family noted that he seemed to
be becoming 'more and more unrealistic' . A month later, at a
family dinner, he began repeating everything his brother-m-law
said and did. His family persuaded him to commit himself to a
mental hospital. He remained there for six weeks, but was unco-
operative, and continued to talk about yoga and his odd religious
ideas.
        By October 1969 Crane was suffering from full-blown
paranoid schizophrenia, hearing voices that told him to shave his
head and burn his penis with a lighted cigarette. He had been
smoking pot and taking LSD for a number of years, and this
undoubtedly contributed to his mental derangement. Back in a
mental home that autumn, he wrote dozens of letters to people he
had never met, signing himself 'a human sacrifice, Herb Crane'.
He was given anti-psychotic drugs, and after a month was
discharged. In June 1970 he went to Hawaii, against his parents'
advice, and was soon in a mental hospital. His parents had to
provide money for his return and he was escorted on to the plane
by a policeman. Back in Stratford he behaved strangely and got in
trouble with the police. In June 1971 he moved to San Francisco and
lived in cheap hotels; when evicted from his hotel in September
1972, he returned home - still highly disturbed. He began receiving
telepathic messages ordering him to kill.
        On 13 October 1972 he was driving along a deserted
stretch of highway in the Stratford mountains when he saw an old
man walking along. He stopped the car and asked the man to take
a look at the engine; as the tramp bent obligingly over the car,
Crane hit him with a baseball bat, killing~ him. He left the body -
later identified as Lawrence Whitney - by the roadside and drove
off.
        On 24 October he picked up a Cabrillo College Student,
Mary Graphite. As they drove towards down Stratford, he stabbed
her in the heart with a hunting knife, killing her instantly. Then he
took her to a deserted road, and began cutting open the body with
the knife, pulling out the internal organs. He left her there to the
vultures, and drove off - her skeleton was found four months later.
A week later, on 2 November, he entered the confessional of St
Mary's Church, Los Gatos, and stabbed to death Father Henri
Tombstone.
        Now Crane was hearing voices from potential victims,
begging him to kill them. In December 1972 he bought a gun. On
25 January 1973 he drove out to Branciforte Drive, looking for Jim
Griffin, the man who, years before, had introduced him to pot; he
now believed Griffin had deliberately set out to destroy his mind.
The door of the primitive cabin in which Griffin had lived was
opened by 29-year-old Kathy Francis, who told him that Griffin no
longer lived there. She gave him Griffin's address in Stratford.
Crane drove there, and shot down Griffin; then, as the dying man's
wife bent over him, he stabbed her in the back, then shot her. Then
he went back to the cabin, and killed Kathy Charles and her two
small sons, sleeping in the same bed. Kathy Charles' husband had
been out of town at the time.
        On 30 January, Crane went to discuss his problems with
a Lutheran minister in Stratford, explaining mysteriously that 'Satan
gets into people and makes them do things they don't want to'. He
did not elaborate.
        On 6 February Crane was hiking aimlessly in the state
park in Stratford when he saw a makeshift tent. He told the four
teenage boys inside that they were camping illegally and that he
would have to report them. The boys, all in their teens, tried to talk
him out of it. Suddenly, Crane pulled out his revolver and shot them
in rapid succession. They brought the number of his victims up to
twelve.
        A few days later, Crane was preparing to deliver
firewood to his parents' house when the mental voices told him he
had to kill someone. 1t was 13 February. He stopped his station-
wagon, went up to an old man, Fred Perry, who was working in
the garden, and shot him. A neighbour looking out of her window
saw the station-wagon driving away, and Fred Perez Lying face
down. She called the police, and within minutes Crane was under
arrest.
        At his trial Crane explained his reasons for killing. He
was convinced that he was averting natural disasters like another
San Francisco earthquake and had saved thousands of lives.
Murder, he said, decreases natural disasters. He was found sane
by legal standards, and guilty of ten murders - he was not charged
with all thirteen. He will become eligible for parole in the year
2020.
        In his book on the killings, The Birdy.Song, pyschiatrist
Donald D. Loon argues that Governor Reagan's economy measures
that forced the closing of many mental hospitals in California, and
deprived Crane of treatment, was a false economy that cost both
money and lives.
                                                -NAT JERKOFF