The beheading in Moore, Okla., last month brought it all back.
She wasn’t a raving beauty, just a friendly, freckle-faced girl with a warm grin and a presence that was unforgettable. She would make you feel good the second she walked into a room. She had a great sense of humor. She was a terrific reporter. She was the sweetest girl I ever met.
When she worked at the Colorado Daily in the mid-1960s we knew her as Quita Perelli-Minetti. The girl whose byline barely fit on a single line of type and whose first name was routinely mispronounced. “Quita like a banana,” she used to say with a grin.
Her family owned a winery in California.
I think half the boys in the news room had a crush on her. I know I did, but I never asked her out; she had a boyfriend. The lucky guy was named Rich Hague. He was studying mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. They were made for each other.
Quita and Rich got married, and Rich landed a job with Utah International Company, a big construction and mining company. The job eventually took them to San Francisco.
They rented an apartment near Telegraph Hill. Quita got a job with the Industrial City Press, a newspaper in South San Francisco. The year was 1973.
On the evening of Oct. 20, they decided to take an after-dinner walk.
That’s when they met the Death Angels.
The Death Angels were a racist murder cult, which had been spawned by followers of the Black Muslim movement. It had adherents in a number of California cities. The San Francisco group consisted of several men employed by or associated with a moving, storage and used furniture business named Black Self-Help. They held their meetings in a large loft above the business. They would ultimately kill at least 14 people and attack eight others during a reign of terror that became known as the Zebra murders (after the code name for a police radio channel).
On the night of Oct. 20, 1973 three members of the group were cruising San Francisco streets in a white Dodge van looking for white people to kill. Their names were Jessie Lee Cooks, Larry Craig Green and Anthony Cornelius Harris. The van belonged to Green.
At 6 p.m. they tried to kidnap three children from a residential neighborhood. Fortunately, the kids managed to break free and run away.
Cooks and Green (Harris claimed he was an unwilling accomplice) were particularly interested in children and women, because killing children and women would make it easier for them to “earn their wings.”
This is how crime writer Clark Howard described the process of “earning their wings” in his 1979 book Zebra: The True Account of 179 Days of Terror in San Francisco: “Death Angel wings were awarded to each man who killed four white children, five white women, or nine white men.
“Upon completion of the required quota, a new member’s photograph was taken and a pair of black wings were drawn extending from the neck. The photo was mounted on a board along with pictures of other successful candidates, and the board was displayed on an easel at the loft meetings. At that time, there were 15 accredited Death Angels in California. To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children — or enough of a combination thereof to give each of them his required four, five, or nine credits… All the known suspects in the killings had been associated with the Black Muslim movement.”
Quita and Rich took their walk at 9:30 p.m. They were walking west on the south side of Chestnut Street, the street on which they lived, when they encountered Cooks, Green and Harris. The three had parked Green’s van on the North side of the street. Cooks and Green then positioned themselves on opposite sides of the sidewalk on the south side of the street. When Quita and Rich tried to walk between them, they grabbed Rich and pointed a gun at him. Rich told Quita to run, but Cooks put the gun at Rich’s head and said he would kill him if she didn’t stop. She did.
Quita and Rich were both pushed into the van and forced to lie on the floor. As Green drove away, Cooks tied their hands and then beat Rich unconscious with a club.
Green drove to a dark industrial area near some railroad tracks and parked. He grabbed Quita by the hair and pulled her out of the van. He also grabbed a machete he had in the van. He dragged Quita about 20 feet from the van, threw her to the ground and repeatedly hacked into her throat with the machete.
When he stopped, her head was almost completely severed from her body.
Then Cooks pulled the unconscious Rich from the van, took the machete from Green and repeatedly slashed Rich’s head and neck. Eventually he decided Rich was dead and the killers drove off.
Amazingly, Rich wasn’t dead.
Although badly mutilated, he managed to stagger to a street with his hands still tied, where a couple out for a drive spotted him and took him to a police station. Quita’s murder was the first of the 14 Zebra killings in San Francisco. The crime wave didn’t stop until Harris ratted out Cooks and Green along with several other members of the cult.
After a year-long trial, Green, Cooks and two others involved in subsequent Death Angel killings were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
As of now they’re still in prison, but eligible for parole.
Harris went free; he received immunity in exchange for his testimony. Rich also testified at the trial.
Opponents of the death penalty sometimes argue that life in prison is a worse penalty than execution. They say it is living death. Good.
Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com
