Exceptional Depravity: Dan Who Likes Dark and Double Murder in Davis, California

by Lloyd Billingsley

A crime Stephen King could not inventDavis, California, April 14, 2013.Bluegrass musician Oliver “Chip” Northup fails to show for a memorial service. That was not like the 87-year-old lead singer for the Putah Creek Crawdads, a popular northern California folk group. Chip also fails to show for a gig in Woodland that evening. He does not answer his phone.His stepdaughter grows worried and drives to the house. Nobody answers the door. A window screen had been cut, so the call goes out to the police. They find two deceased individuals, Northup and his wife Claudia Maupin, 76, stabbed, mutilated and murdered in a way that showed “exceptional depravity.” The home had not been robbed. The killer left no clues. The police have no motive, and no suspects. The killer is a high-school student, only 15 at the time of the crime. His website proclaims “Too Many Humans” and he believes serial killers can help fix the overpopulation problem. And as his girlfriend said, “he liked to torture.” He tortured and mutilated Chip and Claudia then talked up the murders to his friends. That gets him arrested and for five hours he gives police details of the crime. “I stabbed the hell out of them,” he said. It “felt right” and gave him “pure happiness.” He pleads not guilty, then changes his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity. By any means necessary, this killer wants to get away with double murder. An expert witness testifies that the killer’s medications put him in a dream-like dissociative state. So he was not in control of his actions, and therefore not guilty. The victims’ families and friends, already horrified and suffering, begin to Will this killer get away with it? If readers want to exercise their right to know, there’s one place to find out. This crime took place just down the freeway from author and investigative journalist Lloyd Billingsley. He visits the crime scene. He digs into the records. He talks to relatives of the victims. He attends every day of the trial, where he finds that police may have understated the horror of this crime, something Stephen King could not invent.Exceptional Dan Who Likes Dark and Double Murder in Davis, California explains how it all happened, why it happened, and what it means. Readers might even learn what they should do about it. First Lock and load on this powerful new book.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 13, 2014

Reviews

[Valerity (Val) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've already read a couple of other books since I finished this one, but I recall enjoying it quite well.

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book told the tale of this crime over and over and over again in almost every chapter! Very repetitive and very blatant grammatical errors! Who proofreads these things???? So disappointed. Aggravating and frustrating read for sure.

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the true story of a murder, investigation and trial. Oliver Northup and Claudia Maupin were people I knew. Northup was a member of a band called The Putah Creek Crawdads, whom I interviewed when I did a story on the group. His wife was in a play that I covered and reviewed (to my surprise, I am mentioned and quoted in the book). Both were lovely people who were massacred while they slept in their beds, killed by over 120 stab wounds (>60 each) and evisceration. They were killed by a 15 year old kid who just wanted to see what it was like to kill someone and who admitted to feeling so excited by the murder that he was planning to kill someone else with a baseball bat, to repeat the high. The author of this book has covered the crime and the trial in almost excruciating detail. Not the sort of book I would normally read, but this was in my own back yard, sort of. Tragic story all around. And if you want to know the nuts and bolts of a trial whose outcome hinges on whether or not the admitted murderer was sane, this is an interesting perspective.

[Cristopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A page turning, true-crime story about a double murder in a bucolic northern California university town.