The Zebra Killings by Clark Howard

At the end of Day One Hundred Seventy-nine, there were twenty-three victims:

QUITA HAGUE, hacked to death
RICHARD HAGUE, his face butchered
ELLEN LINDER, raped, ravaged, threatened with death
FRANCES ROSE, her face blown apart by close-range gunshots
SALEEM ERAKAT, tied up and executed
PAUL DANCIK, shot down at a public telephone
ARTHUR AGNOS, surviving after his insides were ripped up by bullets
MARIETTA DIGIROLAMO, thrown into a doorway and shot to death
ILARIO BERTUCCIO, killed while walking home from work
ANGELA ROSELLI, surviving with nerve damage in her back
NEAL MOYNIHAN, shot down while taking a teddy bear to his little sister
MILDRED HOSLER, shot down while walking toward her bus stop
JOHN DOE # 169, kidnapped, tortured, butchered, decapitated
TANA SMITH, murdered on her way to buy blouse material
VINCENT WOLLIN, murdered on his sixty-ninth birthday 
JOHN BAMBIC, murdered while rummaging in a trash bin
JANE HOLLY, murdered in a public Laundromat
ROXANNE MCMILLIAN, surviving but paralysed from the waist down
THOMAS RAINWATER, shot down on the street as he walked to a market
LINDA STORY, surviving with nerve damage in her back
WARD ANDERSON, surviving but in serious condition after being shot down at a city bus stop
TERRY WHITE, also surviving, also in serious condition, after being shot down at the same city bus stop
And NELSON SHIELDS IV, shot three times in the back as he was straightening out the cargo deck of his station wagon

Hair-raising, blood-chilling, this terrifying true story of the random street killings that sent waves of panic through San Francisco in 1975 ranks with Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood as a masterpiece of true-crime writing.

They were called the Zebra murders -- a reign of terror that held San Francisco in its grip for 179 days. Here is the true story of five Black Muslims who randomly selected twenty-three white victims -- men, women and children -- for kidnap, rape, robbery, mutilation and murder.

Striving to become Death Angels for their God, they set a goal: to sacrifice nine 'blue-eyed devils' each. How they almost succeeded is the story of this brutally honest, sensational and compelling book.

Using every resource open to the research journalist -- surviving victims, relatives, witnesses, records, reports, even the convicted men, and the informer who risked a nightmare death to put a stop to the killings -- Clark Howard has probed as deeply into the minds of murderers as anyone is ever likely to go. He shows us frenzied men, performing grisly murders in the name of a fanatical religion preaching white hatred. And, in crime writing at its finest, he details the exhaustive police work by Detective Gus Coreris   and John Fotimos as they struggle against time and odds to track down the killers and trace the gun that will lead to conviction.

The Zebra Killings is an important book with implications that go beyond its particular events. Howard, whose non-fiction story of an Alcatraz riot, Six Against the Rock, was highly acclaimed, establishes himself here as one of the leading true-crime writers in the world today.