he laid out a huge collection of speculative intelligence, claiming that more than eighty killings across the state going back to 1971 could be linked to Zebra, and implying that those responsible for all the crimes might be tied to the Nation of Islam.' '.determined to calm the fear and put a stop to the killings, Joseph Alioto held a press conference to lay out what he believed he knew about Zebra. Exactly how many victims there were is still disputed.įrom the book ' Zebra: The True Account of 179 Days of Terror in San Francisco,' by Clark Howard: What is not well known, however, is that the spree began much earlier, when police started noticing that there were many unsolved crimes with the same MO: one or more well-dressed and groomed black men attacking whites without any apparent motive. To get to heaven they had to kill a certain number of whites-women and children counting for more than men-before they could earn their 'wings.' They also seemed to have been led by charismatic leaders who came out from the main NOI headquarters mosque in Chicago. It turned out the killers were a cult-the ' Death Angels'-operating within the Nation of Islam(aka NOI, aka Black Muslims) mosque in San Francisco, involving about eight men. Specifically, Zebra refers to a series of about 20 black-on-white attacks that occurred in San Francisco from October 1973 to April 1974, leaving 15 killed and 8 wounded.

Zebra by Clark Howard