For a period of 179 days, between October 1973 and April 1974, white residents of San Francisco were terrorized by a series of random, racially-motivated attacks that claimed 15 lives, leaving another eight victims wounded or raped. By January 1974, authorities knew with fair certainty that the killers were members of a Black Muslim splinter group, the "Death Angels," that required the murder of "blue-eyed devils" as a form of initiation. By their very nature -- and the form of the police response -- the so-called Zebra murders heightened racial tension by the bay and left a legacy of doubt that time has failed to dissipate. The first known "Zebra" victims were Richard and Quita Hague, abducted by blacks in a van as they walked down the street on October 19, 1973. Richard Hague was hacked about the head and face with a machete, stunned and left for dead, before the "Angels" raped his wife and finished her with the machete, leaving her nearly decapitated. By some miracle, Richard would survive. Three days later, gunman Jessie Lee Cooks abducted a young white woman, holding her captive for two hours while he raped her repeatedly and forced her to provide oral sex. Arrested on this and other charges prior to the conclusion of the Zebra case, Cooks -- a psychopathic ex-convict -- would plead guilty to one count of murder in return for dismissal of other counts. By the time the case broke in 1974, he was already serving his sentence. On October 29, 28-year-old Frances Rose was shot and killed by a black man who tried to invade her moving car on a San Francisco street. A month later, on November 25, 53-year-old Saleem Erakat was tied up and shot, execution-style, in his small grocery store. Paul Dancik died on December 11, shot three times in the chest while walking to a corner phone booth. Two days later, 35-year-old Arthur Agnos was wounded and Marietta Di Girolamo killed in separate, random shooting incidents. The use of a similar -- or identical -- weapon in each of the crimes suggested one trigger man, or a group of killers sharing lethal hardware. Things went from bad to worse near Christmas. On December 20, 81year-old Ilario Bertuccio was killed while walking home from work, and Angela Roselli was wounded three times as she left a Christmas party. Neal Moynihan, 19, and 50-year-old Mildred Hosler died six minutes apart on December 22, cut down in random attacks. On December 23, a gathering of Death Angels tortured and dismembered an unknown transient in their San Francisco loft, dumping his mangled remains on a beach where they were found next morning. (Never identified, he is listed in homicide files as "John Doe #169" for 1973.) The killers celebrated New Years with a freewheeling rampage on January 28, killing four persons and wounding a fifth in the space of two hours. The dead included 32-year-old Tana Smith, shot down on her way to a fabric store; Vincent Wollin, killed on his sixty-ninth birthday; 54-year-old John Bambic, shot repeatedly at point-blank range; and 45-year-old Jane Holly, fatally wounded by a gunman who approached her on the street. Survivor Roxanne McMillan, age 23, recalled that her assailant smiled and said "Hi" before he opened fire. On April 1, 19-year-old Thomas Rainwater and 21-year-old Linda Story were gunned down while walking to a neighborhood store; Rainwater was killed outright, while Story survived with permanent nerve damage. Two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, Ward Anderson and Terry White were wounded by black gunmen at a San Francisco bus stop. The last victim, Nelson Shields, was shot three times in the back and killed on April 16, 1974. Police response to the Zebra murders was almost as controversial as the crimes themselves. A policy of stopping blacks at random o the street and frisking them for weapons led to cries of racism and civil rights violations, while producing no viable suspects. The case was broken in late April, when gunman Anthony Cornelius Harris surrendered voluntarily and made a full confession to police. Turning state's evidence , he named eight "Zebra" killers aside from himself, and seven of the suspects were picked up in raids on May 1. (Jessie Cooks was already in prison.) Four of the suspects were ultimately freed for lack of solid evidence, and they remain at large today. Indicted for the Zebra crimes were Jessie Cooks, J.C. Simon, Larry Craig Green, and Manuel Leonard Moore. Harris, Moore, and Cooks had met while serving time in San Quentin on various felony charges, and they had joined the Black Muslim movement while still behind bars. The Zebra trial set a new record for California legal proceedings, lasting from March 3, 1975 to March 9, 1979. Three of the four defense attorneys were provided and paid by the Nation of Islam, in a demonstration of solidarity with the accused murderers. At the end of the marathon proceedings, jurors took barely 18 hours to convict all defendants on all counts, and the four gunmen were sentenced to life imprisonment. As for the Death Angels, their existence has never been publicly acknowledged by American law enforcement, and the results of confidential investigations into the cult remain classified. According to author Clark Howard, there were 15 "accredited" Death Angels -- those who had earned their "wings" by killing a specified number of whites -- in California during 1973. None of them were swept up in the Zebra dragnet, which bagged only prospective members, still short of their tally for final qualification. They, and their brethren of the "church," are presumably still at large. Still hunting.