The Zebra Murders

G. Valmont Thomas narrates this account of a series of racially motivated murders in San Francisco between 1973 and 1974. Thomas offers an intelligent reading and is completely convincing as Sanders, the first African-American chief of police in the SFPD. This was the time of the Zodiac killer, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and the Symbionese Liberation Army--who infamously kidnapped Patty Hearst. It was also the time when 15 white people were randomly murdered by black assailants in the city. Thomas's performance is faithful to Sanders and Cohen's account, which alleges rampant racism in the SFPD and outlines the ongoing struggle to give African-American policemen equal rights while recounting the disturbing killings that pushed San Francisco to the edge of a race war. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

August 14, 2006
This look at a largely forgotten reign of terror in San Francisco in 1973 and 1974 is an interesting if superficial true police procedural. Sanders, the SFPD's first African-American chief of police, was one of the lead detectives on the case code-named the Zebra Murders, involving a group of African-American men who, apparently racially motivated, were targeting whites in vicious random acts of violence that claimed 15 lives. The book reads less like an objective assessment of these events than a memoir of Sanders's experiences with the investigation and his role in a civil lawsuit against the SFPD to combat rampant racial discrimination. Oddly, about halfway in, the authors break the linear narrative with information derived only at the case's end, rather than lay out the police work and discoveries as they happened. The efforts to compare the police tactics with post-9/11 targeting of Muslims will strike most readers as labored despite Sanders's insistence that the killings were acts of political terror, not mere serial killings. Nonetheless, this serves as a useful introduction to the case.