On July 13, 1970, California Highway Patrol officers received reports of a hit-and-run accident at Big Sur. Three persons had been injured in one car, while two long-haired males sped away in another, fleeing the scene of the crash. Patrolmen found two longhairs walking down a nearby road and noted similarities in the descriptions. Under questioning, one suspect readily confessed involvement in the accident, startling police as he added, "I have a problem. I'm a cannibal ."

To prove the point, Stan Baker turned his pockets out and palmed a human finger bone -- removed, he said, from his most recent victim in Montana. Baker's sidekick, Harry Allen Stroup, was also carrying a bony digit, and the pair were taken into custody on suspicion of homicide. Investigators in Montana found the mutilated remains of victim James Schlosser in the Yellowstone River, his heart and several fingers missing from the scene.

The case was grim enough, but Baker was not finished talking, yet. According to his statement, he had been recruited by Satanic cultists from a college campus in his home state of Wyoming. An alleged member of the homicidal "Four Pi movement," Baker had sworn allegiance to the cult's master -- known to intimates as the "Grand Chingon" -- and he had committed other slayings on the cult's behalf. There had been human sacrifices, he reported, in the Santa Ana Mountains, south of Los Angeles. Displaying supposed cult tattoos, Baker also confessed participation in the April 20, 1970 murder of Robert Salem, a 40-year-old lighting designer in San Francisco. Salem had been stabbed 27 times and nearly decapitated, his left ear severed and carried away in a crime that Baker attributed to orders from the Grand Chingon. Slogans painted on the walls in Salem's blood -- including "Zodiac" and "Satan Saves" -- were meant to stir up panic in an atmosphere already tense from revelations in the Manson murder trial.

Baker, 22, and his 20-year-old companion were returned to Montana on July 20. Convicted of murder, both were sentenced to prison, where Baker continued his efforts on behalf of the cult. Authorities report that he actively solicited other inmates to join a Satanic coven, and full moons seemed to bring out the worst in Stanley, causing him to howl like an animal. He sometimes threatened prison guards, and was relieved of homemade weapons on eleven separate occasions, but administrators still saw fit to let him travel through the prison system, teaching transactional analysis to other inmates. Harry Stroup discharged his sentence and was released in 1979; Stanley Baker was paroled to his native Wyoming six years later, requesting that his present whereabouts remain confidential.

(See also: "Four Pi Movement" , Manson, Charles ; "Son of Sam" )