How ironic: the town was founded by two missionaries who wanted to get away from the ultra-liberal heathen lifestyles of nearby San Francisco.....and wound up decades later making City By The Bay conservative in comparison! Yup, as the narrator says here, Berkeley was the "hippie hotbed" by the late '60s. It still is, in many respects.
This ultra-liberal university-community (which it hates to be called but the university does run the city, and has for quite awhile) was shocked out of its "peace-and-love" haze of pot smoke in the late '80s and early '90s when a Hispanic man, active in the city's Waterfront Commission," brutally hacked one person to death after coming close to killing two other people. The latter was husband-and-wife Robert and Barbara Mishell. Robert, a research scientist working at Cal-Berkeley, survived okay until his death just several weeks ago (April 5th) and his wife - to this day - still hasn't been able, literally, to speak. Zambrano was getting threatening calls from someone about his adultery and thought it was the professor and his wife.
After the usual City Confidential profile of the area, in which CC shows us many of the wackos that make up this town, particularly on Telegraph Avenue were "misfits and outcasts" proliferate, which is what happened when the University's influence mushroomed in the mid '60s and thereafter. Berkeley citizens pride themselves on their diversity and "accepting ways," so they were more than happy to see an Hispanic man, Enrique Zambrano, make good. Unfortunately, this man - and every race has them - turned out to be a psychopath murderer.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mishell remembers waking up and finding the back of his head all bloody. He then discovered his wife lying in a pool of blood in another room. The last thing Mishell remembered was Zambrano, who he had hired to work on the patio next to the family swimming pool, had visited him that night.
To condense the story, Zambrano was a real hothead. His violent outbursts after becoming a commissioner of the Waterfront Commission were getting attention. If he didn't have a level- headed friend named Luis Reyna, who knows if he wouldn't have punched people out at the meetings.
Anyway, the really interesting part of this story is what happens after Reyna hears about the professor and his wife being beaten senseless. He knows his friend did it. Two months later, he goes to the cops and Zambrano is arrested. A short time after, a Liberal judge named Julie Croger, reduces Zambrano's bail from one million dollars to $150,000 which the killer has raised. Now, he's out on bail, and poor Mr. Reyna is panicking, fearing for his life.
As it turned out, Reyna had good reasons to feel that way. The poor man was not only killed but chopped into pieces. Zambrano then fled the country and wasn't arrested again until over a year later when he was tracked down, thanks to the TV program "America's Most Wanted."
The program details what happened in this bizarre set of circumstances, and then the results of the trial and how all of them has made even ultra-tolerant Berkeley a little less trusting of people.
This ultra-liberal university-community (which it hates to be called but the university does run the city, and has for quite awhile) was shocked out of its "peace-and-love" haze of pot smoke in the late '80s and early '90s when a Hispanic man, active in the city's Waterfront Commission," brutally hacked one person to death after coming close to killing two other people. The latter was husband-and-wife Robert and Barbara Mishell. Robert, a research scientist working at Cal-Berkeley, survived okay until his death just several weeks ago (April 5th) and his wife - to this day - still hasn't been able, literally, to speak. Zambrano was getting threatening calls from someone about his adultery and thought it was the professor and his wife.
After the usual City Confidential profile of the area, in which CC shows us many of the wackos that make up this town, particularly on Telegraph Avenue were "misfits and outcasts" proliferate, which is what happened when the University's influence mushroomed in the mid '60s and thereafter. Berkeley citizens pride themselves on their diversity and "accepting ways," so they were more than happy to see an Hispanic man, Enrique Zambrano, make good. Unfortunately, this man - and every race has them - turned out to be a psychopath murderer.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mishell remembers waking up and finding the back of his head all bloody. He then discovered his wife lying in a pool of blood in another room. The last thing Mishell remembered was Zambrano, who he had hired to work on the patio next to the family swimming pool, had visited him that night.
To condense the story, Zambrano was a real hothead. His violent outbursts after becoming a commissioner of the Waterfront Commission were getting attention. If he didn't have a level- headed friend named Luis Reyna, who knows if he wouldn't have punched people out at the meetings.
Anyway, the really interesting part of this story is what happens after Reyna hears about the professor and his wife being beaten senseless. He knows his friend did it. Two months later, he goes to the cops and Zambrano is arrested. A short time after, a Liberal judge named Julie Croger, reduces Zambrano's bail from one million dollars to $150,000 which the killer has raised. Now, he's out on bail, and poor Mr. Reyna is panicking, fearing for his life.
As it turned out, Reyna had good reasons to feel that way. The poor man was not only killed but chopped into pieces. Zambrano then fled the country and wasn't arrested again until over a year later when he was tracked down, thanks to the TV program "America's Most Wanted."
The program details what happened in this bizarre set of circumstances, and then the results of the trial and how all of them has made even ultra-tolerant Berkeley a little less trusting of people.