Transcript: 2. The Scorecard Killer (Randy Kraft) | USA

This is The Evidence Locker.

Our cases have been researched using open source and archive materials. It deals with true crimes and real people. Each episode is produced with the utmost respect to the victims, their families and loved ones. 

Warning: This episode contains details of some of the most heinous, sadistic crimes ever committed against young men aged 13 to 35 in Southern California in the 1970’s. Listener discretion is advised.

On Saturday night, May 14th, 1983, two California Highway patrol officers on the Interstate 5 Freeway in Orange County noticed a Toyota Celica swerving and driving erratically. On the suspicion that the driver was drunk, they signalled him to pull over. The driver didn’t react immediately, taking a couple of minutes before he pulled over.

As the driver got out of the car, a bottle of Moosehead Lager fell onto the tarmac and smashed. Officer Sterling also noticed that the man’s jeans were unbuttoned and made him do a sobriety test, which he failed.

At this point Sterling’s partner, sergeant Howard, moved his attention to the man in the passenger seat. He was unconscious and partially covered with a jacket. In an attempt to wake the passenger, Howard shook his arm and noticed his low body temperature. On moving the jacket, the sergeant saw the man’s trousers were pulled down in a way to expose his genitals. He also had strangulation marks on his neck and his hands were bound with a shoelace. He was dead. 

This suspected DUI situation had turned into a crime scene and all eyes were on the apparent inebriated, 38-year-old driver who identified himself as Randy Steven Kraft.

The deceased passenger in Kraft’s car was identified as Terry Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine based at El Toro Air Base in Orange County. He was last known to be hitchhiking to a bunkmates’ house party in Santa Ana about. But Terry never did show up. 

Paramedics tried their best to revive his lifeless body, tried everything they possibly could, but it was too late. He was pronounced dead at the Saddleback Community hospital less than an hour after his arrival.

His cause of death was determined to be ligature strangulation. He was strangled with his own belt, which officers later found on the backseat of Kraft’s Toyota Celica. 

Who was this man they had in custody? Everyone in local law enforcement was thinking it, but they needed proof they had to dig deeper. The murder victim in the car bore signs of torture, similar to countless young male corpses found littered of all over Southern California over the past decade. Was Randy Kraft the man police have been looking for?

Randolph Steven Kraft was born on March 19, 1945 in Long Beach California. His parents, Opal and Harold Kraft, moved to Southern California from Wyoming around the time of the outbreak of World War II. 

His father was a proud man, who was employed as a production worker at Douglas Aircraft. Kraft’s mom, Opal, worked as a sewing machine operator at a local garment factory. She also ran the school canteen and doted on her only son. He was the youngest of four children and attention from this mother and sisters overcompensated for the lack of relationship he had with his dad, who was distant and uninvolved. 

Kraft was quite incident-prone as a young child. When he was only one, he broke his collarbone, after falling from a couch. When he was two, he fell down large concrete stairs and was knocked unconscious, with the hospital confirming that there was no permanent damage.

Shortly after this incident, his parents bought and old Women’s Army Corps dormitory in Midway City (Orange County) and converted it into a three-bedroom home. This was the home he grew up in and the one his parents still owned at the time of his capture. 

His mother and sisters were very active in the Presbyterian church. Kraft spent his Sundays at church attending bible study classes taught by his sister, Kay.

He excelled at school and by the time he went to Junior High, he was placed in the advanced curriculum. He played the saxophone in the school band, played tennis and loved politics. Kraft was a loud and proud Republican who also joined the Westminster World Affairs Club when he reached High School. He seemed as balanced and normal as any kid his age, albeit a bit nerdier and politically opinionated.

In his high school years, all his sisters had left home and both his parents were working, so Kraft had a lot of freedom and space. He had a job as a fry chef at Dwight’s on Huntington Beach and he drove around in a Ford Mercury. With some money in his pocket and a means of getting around, the world was his oyster. 

At the age of 18 and became known as ‘Crafty Randy’ because of his good looks and magnetic charm. He began discretely cruising gay bars.

On a full scholarship, he attended Claremont Men’s College and majored in Economics. He attended pro-Vietnam war demonstrations and joined the ROTC (or Reserve Officers Training Corps). His tidy look and good manners landed him a summer job as a fry cook at Disneyland. He was a smiling, hard-working guy and enjoyed his summer at Disney.

When he was his second year of college, his part-time job aligned more with his lifestyle. He was bartending at a gay bar called The Mug in Garden Grove. Rumours were doing the rounds around campus that Kraft was into sadomasochism with men, and it was implied that wide-eyed young freshmen should avoid his advances. He was known to travel to Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach in search of casual sex.

Kraft who was always a passionate Republican, turned 180 degrees and swapped his conservative political views and became an ardent follower of left-wing politics. He even campaigned on the Robert Kennedy election in 1967. During this time, he was a hippie and his look became more in tune with that lifestyle: long hair and a spotty goatee, which in the opinion of some of his classmates, made him look somewhat evil. He no longer looked like the clean-cut Randy from the Disney days.  

Over time, Kraft became more comfortable with living as an openly gay person, but he had not come out to his family yet. The stress of coming out, the impending graduation and his cruising lifestyle all contributed to severe stress. He had recurring headaches and stomach problems, to which his family doctor prescribed tranquilisers and pain medicine. He also took Valium on a regular basis, often washing them down with beer. 

He loved to gamble and hustled people he played cards with. With this gambling, drinking, hustling lifestyle he took eight additional months to complete his degree: A Bachelor of Arts in Economics.

At the age of 23 he joined the Air Force and once again became the clean-cut Randy Kraft. He was based at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California and supervised painting of test planes. When they ran out of planes to be painted, he was tasked with painting houses on the base. A hard-working Kraft quickly advanced to the rank of Airman First Class.

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s ushered in a new era of acceptance – albeit not by everyone – of sex outside traditional, heterosexual or monogamous relationships. The movement celebrated sexuality and eroticism as being a normal part of life. Heterosexuals became more open about sex outside of marriage. And more and more gay people felt comfortable coming out and living and loving freely. 

Kraft could not cope with living a lie any longer and he confessed to his parents that he was gay. His father was enraged, but his mother – although shocked – supported him. He still attended family gatherings and was never ostracised, but Kraft’s relationship with his family would never be the same. 

More and more people were coming out in the Laguna Beach area, living openly as gay couples and Randy realised he could live like that too. He didn’t want to live a secret double life anymore but being gay in the military was not allowed. Department of Defence Regulations issued in 1949, clearly stated:

"Homosexual personnel, irrespective of sex, should not be permitted to serve in any branch of the Armed Forces in any capacity, and prompt separation of known homosexuals from the Armed Forces is mandatory."

If a service member was found to be gay, but had not engaged in homosexual acts, they would receive General discharge from the military. However, if a gay person committed a homosexual act – caught with their pant down, one might say – their discharge would be Dishonourable.

Despite efforts by activist such as Tom Dooly and Harvey Milk, the military still had a long way to go in acknowledging equal rights for gay service members. In 1969, Randy Kraft was buckling under the pressure of being found out as a closet-gay man. He decided to come clean and told his superiors that he was gay. 

Kraft was dismissed on ‘medical grounds’ on July 26, 1969. Seeing that there was no evidence of him having engaged in homosexual acts, his discharge was classified General. But for someone with Kraft’s military record and the fact that he came out to his superiors first, he felt that he should have received an Honourable discharge. 

Without Honourable discharge, he would be excluded from veterans benefits like health care and tuition support. It would also raise concerns in future employment opportunities, so Kraft appealed this decision, but the Air Force refused to budge. 

Kraft had to rethink his career and returned to Long Beach where he drove a forklift for a while. Southern California in the 1970’s was a progressive, happy place with the beach as the centre stage. People surfed, went to roller skating rinks, girls wore bikinis and US Troops were being withdrawn from war-torn Vietnam. The Nixon administration shocked the nation with the Watergate scandal, but life in Long Beach was still as sweet as could be.

In 1971, he decided to follow in his older sister Kay’s footsteps and become a teacher. He enrolled at Long Beach State University. It is here where he met Jeff Graves, a fellow student from Minnesota. Jeff Graves was openly gay and everything but monogamous. In their time together, Graves introduced Kraft to bondage, drug-enhanced sex and threesomes. 

They became an item and moved in together in the upmarket area of Belmont Shore. But their relationship wasn’t exclusive and there was a lot of freedom to cruise or to have one-night stands. Due to their different personalities, their relationship was volatile. They often argued which ended in shouting matches. Often Kraft would leave in anger and drove around, driving from highway to highway: through Torrance or around Huntington Beach and even west along San Bernardino. He would drive around all night. Like he did on the night of May 14th, 1983, more than a decade later, when he was pulled over by California Highway Patrol officers Howard and Sterling, with the body of a dead marine in his car.  

Kraft’s deceased passenger, Marine Terry Lee Gambrel’s autopsy revealed an excessive amount of alcohol and anti-anxiety medication in his blood, it would have left him confused, drowsy and uncoordinated. On his body were similar signs of torture to many other victims that had been found strewn along California’s Freeways over the preceding years. A theory exists that Kraft was in the process of mutilating Terry’s body as he was driving, which caused the car to sway, which in turn drew the California Highway Patrol Officer’s attention to him and ultimately led to his arrest. 

Deputy Sheriff Jim Sidebotham of Orange County Sheriff’s Department was informed of Kraft’s arrest. His Department was one of many agencies, hunting for the killer responsible for the deaths of countless young men in Southern California over the span of a decade. Bodies of dozens of young men were found next to the Freeway with similar wounds to that of Terry Gambrel’s inflicted on them.

Despite its beaches and boardwalks, there was also a dark side to Southern California in the 1970’s: it wasn’t all roller skates and ice creams – it was a killing field. It was a dangerous time to be a young man living in or travelling around the area. In 1973 police didn’t have a solid suspect and appealed to the public for help. A notice was published in the Long Beach newspaper, the Independent Press-Telegram, which read: 

A $2,000 reward is offered for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer of five young men in the Southland area since last Dec. 26. The bodies, most of them sexually mutilated and one dismembered and decapitated, have been found in Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach and in the Los Angeles harbor area, but investigators are convinced the murders all were committed by the same person. 

Dead bodies were turning up every other day. Some were shot, some were strangled. The only thing they had in common was the fact that they were young, and they were male. Some were homosexual or bisexual, but a few were heterosexual. Many were marines, which was curious, seeing as some bodies found also hinted at the fact that the killer was ex-military: two victims' bodies had tissue paper residue on their noses, conforming to a known military procedure to prevent bodies from purging after death.

Marines out on weekends socializing would hitch-hike back to base, they were accessible and easy prey once they accepted a ride from the devil.

The grim reality was that there were more than one serial killer operating in Southern California at the same time. Police had known this for quite a while, the murderers’ signatures were simply too different for the murders to have been committed by one person. The body count was also very high, in some cases more than one body was found on the same day. 

A man by the name of Patrick Kearney turned himself in to police in 1978, after being on the run for weeks. He was responsible for the murders of no less than 28 young men. Kearney’s killing spree kicked off in 1968, which means he was out there, killing innocent young men for a decade. Kearney had quite a specific MO, which he stuck to throughout his reign of mayhem. He would pick up hitchhikers in his Volkswagen Beetle, then pull out his gun and pointed it to their heads, then shoot them without much ceremony, drive to an isolated spot to engage in necrophilia before discarding their naked bodies next to the freeway.

Later on, in Kearney’s killing career, he invited unsuspecting young men to his home where he would again shoot them, have post-mortem sex, wash their bodies before dismemberment and load them into into trash bags. His evil work is also referred to as the “Trash Bag Murders”. 

When he was caught, the public hoped that the killings would stop. But police knew that his MO simply didn’t correspond with some of the other bodies that they found. Kearney did not torture his victims while they were still alive, which was the case with so many of the other bodies that we discarded next to Southern California Freeways.

Wayne Dukette was a bartender at The Stables, a gay bar in Sunset Beach, where was last seen alive September 20th, 1971. His body was found two weeks later on the Ortega Highway. Due to the state of decomposition, police could not find many clues as to who had killed Wayne. The official cause of death was ruled to be acute alcohol poisoning. Chances were that this was self-inflicted and Wayne Dukette’s murder almost went unnoticed. 

Then it happened again, one year later. A 20-year-old Marine named Edward Daniel    – or Eddie – was last seen leaving the Barracks at Camp Pendleton on Christmas Eve in 1972. His body was later found beside the 405 Freeway in Seal Beach on Boxing Day. Abrasions showed that Eddie Moore was pushed from a moving vehicle. His wrists and ankles had been bound and an autopsy revealed that he was beaten in the face with a blunt object before he was strangled. 

Eddie Moore was a kind person, somewhat of a lost soul who had both male and female lovers at times. He would befriend people easily and just as easily hustle anyone for a free breakfast or lunch. But he wasn’t aggressive, and the manner of his death had investigators baffled. 

The autopsy also found numerous bite marks all over his body and a sock had been forced into his rectum. To police, it seemed that the murder had to be personal – a jealous gay lover perhaps, but they could not find any motive why anyone in Eddie’s life would want to harm him. 

The Independent Press Telegram in Long Beach reported in 1975 that police were investigating 11 unsolved murders, linked to the same murderer. If only they had the hindsight from Kraft’s arrest in 1983, they would have known the victim tally at the time the article was written in 1975 was closer to 15. 

This article reports the killing of Eddie Moore as the first in a series of similar murders. Shortly thereafter, was 20-year old Ronnie Wiebe was found murdered on July 30th, 1973 beside an onramp to the 405 Freeway, very close to where Eddie Moore’s body was found. Injuries on his ankles and wrists show that he had been bound and suspended before his death. Like Eddie Moore, he appeared to have been either pushed from a moving vehicle or carried to his final resting spot by more than one person. The concerning part was that Ronnie Wiebe was definitely not homosexual, which broke the mould of what investigators thought they were looking for. Up to this point, they believed that most of these murders were gay bondage adventures gone wrong. But not with Ronnie, he was divorced and had a girlfriend on the side. This widened the possible victim pool to any young man hitchhiking or crossing paths with the murderer or murderers.

23-year-old bisexual art student Vincent Cruz Mestas was found in the San Bernardino Mountains on Dec 29th of the same year. Inserted into his rectum, was a sock. His hands were severed and never found. Plastic sandwich bags were wrapped around the stubs on his arms.

‍

Malcolm Little, a young truck driver was found with similar signs of torture in the summer of 1974. Roger Dickerson’s body was found less than three weeks later, riddled with bite marks. A couple of weeks later, San Pedro waiter, Thomas Lee was also found tortured and murdered after a night of bar crawling gay nightclubs in Long Beach.

19-year old James Reeves was a known homosexual who was last seen at his church, doing the dishes after a Thanksgiving dinner. His car was found abandoned in Belmont Shore and a couple of days later his body turned up, discarded next to a freeway.

John Leras, a 17-year-old high school student was abducted on his way to a roller skate rink in Long Beach. His body was found at Sunset Beach with a foreign object in his anus. 

A further three unidentified victims that had suffered a similar fate. They did not have much in common, other than being white and most of them were last seen either hitchhiking or having car trouble. The Independent Press Telegram quotes Long Beach detective Hurlbirt saying: “(The killer) will kill again.” These words would come back to haunt everyone involved in the investigation. 

If Kraft had read this article, one can speculate that he saw it as a challenge. The next murder he committed was by far his most heinous and horrific. On the night of his disappearance, Mark Hall was out, celebrating the start of a new year, one which he would never live to see. It was New Year’s Eve 1975 and he was partying with his friends. The group was used to partying and getting high or drunk, but this particular night, Hall was extremely drunk. He passed out on a friend’s sofa in Westminster. Shortly after midnight his friends noticed that he was gone, but they were quite drunk themselves, and so didn’t raise alarm. Mark Hall never returned.

An off-duty Santa Ana police officer was out with friends riding dune buggies in the Saddleback Mountains on January 3rd. When they reached a remote part of Santiago Canyon, they found Mark’s severely tortured body. 

The cause of death was asphyxia from leaves and dirt lodged deep into the back of his throat. Hall had been sodomised, emasculated and his severed genitals were then inserted into his rectum. He had burn marks from a car lighter all over his body, most cruelly on his eyes. The pathologist could not even determine the colour of his eyes. Mark had been alive through most of the ordeal.

Police hoped that the Toyota Celica driven by Randy Kraft on the night of May 14th, 1983, could yield more answers and keep him behind bars.

Sergeant Jim Sidebotham took every precaution to approach this incident “to the book”. He obtained warrants before searching Kraft’s car and house. If Kraft was indeed responsible for all the murders haunting young men in Southern California, he couldn’t take any chances of bodging the investigation.

In searching the car, forensics experts started to get a clearer understanding of its owner. Firstly, despite the clean-cut look of sandy hair and sun-tanned skin of its owner, the car wasn’t very tidy: foliage, empty beer cans and papers were strewn all over. The passenger seat was stained with blood, but Kraft’s victim that night, Terry Gambrel, had no open wounds. Another profusely bleeding body or bodies must have been transported in this car at some point.

The first piece of concrete evidence that Kraft might be their man was found under the driver’s floor mat: an envelope containing 47 Polaroid photos of men on gold upholstered couch, looking like they were either passed out or dead.

The search intensified as the forensic team opened the trunk of Kraft’s Celica. A page in a notebook had hand-written phrases and words, in two columns. It looked like codes with random place names, numbers or initials: “Wilmington”, “Skates”, “Marine Head BP”… In total, there were 61 cryptic phrases or words on the list.

Police knew the list was significant. It looked like it was a list of Kraft’s victims. The list was soon dubbed: The Scorecard, which gave Kraft his nickname: The Scorecard Killer. 

Although Kraft claimed the Scorecard was merely a list of his friends’ nicknames – a guest list for a party he planned on having, the police knew there was more to it. The list became a sort of index for investigators to follow up on. 

Police used the list to compare the entries against unsolved murders in California with similar traits. The first definitive link was an entry that simply said EDM. They turned to the unsolved case from back in 1972, of a marine with the initials EDM: Edward Daniel Moore. They knew they had to keep going. And with some entries like “2-in-1 Hitch” alluded to the fact that there were more than one victim per murder. If the list was in fact an inventory of murders, they were looking to link no less than 63 murders to Kraft.

Police started building their case against him. It didn’t take them long to find evidence of Kraft’s previous brushes with the law. 

The first time he was cited, was in 1966 when he was 21 years old, arrested and charged with lewd conduct. He was suspected of cruising for male prostitutes after propositioning an undercover cop near the Huntington Beach pier. But this was his first offence, so the case was dropped.

In 1971 police searched his Belmont Shore apartment after a 13-year old boy accused Kraft of drugging him and assaulting him. The boy admitted to being in Kraft’s apartment by his own choice and taking drugs and alcohol voluntarily. The boy was warned to be more careful in future and Kraft wasn’t charged with anything.

So, with renewed interest in Kraft, 13 years later, investigators tracked down the boy, Joey Fancher. At this point, 26-year old Fancher revealed to investigators the exact circumstances that lead to his brutal rape by Kraft in 1971.

It was broad daylight when Kraft met 13-year old Joey Fancher at Huntington Beach in March 1970. Joey told him that he had run away from home that day. It was Joey who approached the cool looking man with sandy hair and asked him for a cigarette. Kraft heard Joey’s story and offered him a place to stay. He asked Joey if he had ever had sex with a woman and Joey told him that he hadn’t. He asked how Joey felt about losing his virginity. Young Joey was stoked… Not only was his new friend offering him cigarettes and a place to stay, he was going to get laid too. Without hesitation, Joey jumped on the back of Kraft’s motorbike and went to Kraft’s Belmont Shore apartment. 

Once inside, the smooth and friendly Kraft offered Joey some weed, and they listened to music. When Kraft left the room, Joey called his sister to tell her that he had run away from home, in case nobody noticed.

When Kraft returned to the room, he gave Joey four red capsules. This turned out to be Seconal – also known as Reds – a powerful sedative with hypnotic effects. Joey washed the capsules down with some beer. When he told Kraft that he felt no different than before, Kraft gave him four more. The reaction was almost immediate: Joey became drowsy and blacked out. When he came to, Kraft presented him with black and white photographs of men engaging in various sexual activities. One of the men on the photos was without a doubt Kraft himself.

Kraft then proceeded to molest and then sodomise a drugged-but-conscious 13-year old Joey Fancher. Unable to move or speak, Joey was completely at the mercy of Kraft’s beastly ritual. When Kraft was done, he simply left Joey in the apartment and went off to work.

Joey managed to escape and went to a nearby bar, where he called for an ambulance. In hospital, the 13-year-old needed his stomach pumped due to the high volume of drugs in his system. The doctor told him that if he had taken only two more of those red tablets, he would have died. Perhaps that was what Kraft had hoped for.

Joey told police that Kraft beat him, but he just wanted police to go back with him to collect his new shoes. He was fearful about the trouble he’d get into with his parents.

The police took Joey and his parents to Kraft’s apartment. They questioned Jeff Graves who identified himself as Kraft’s roommate. He allowed the police to look around but said that Kraft would never do as suggested to a kid. Neighbourhood kids came around their place all the time, nothing sinister ever took place.

In looking around the apartment, they found homosexual pornography and other paraphernalia suggesting that Kraft was gay. They also found drugs: an empty Skippy peanut butter jar filled with Benzedrine and another one with Seconal. 

Joey admitted to taking the drugs voluntarily, and the fact that he had run away from home did not make his case any stronger. Under the strict gaze of his mother and stepfather, Joey never stated that he was raped, only drugged and beaten. 

The police officers realised there wasn’t much of a case. Although Kraft provided drugs to a minor, the minor chooses to be in that situation: he was a runaway who was all too keen to get drunk and high. Also, they had searched his apartment without a warrant, which would have infuriated any DA.

Joey went home, where he received a licking for cutting school and embarrassing his family by taking drugs and hanging out with a gay man. Joey Fancher never did tell his parents about the rape and nothing was ever mentioned about the incident again.

Four years after this incident, in 1975, Kraft appeared on police’s radar again when he was pointed out as the last man to have seen the decapitated teenager, Keith Crotwell alive. On 29 March, Keith and his friend Kent May were lured into Kraft’s black and white Mustang in a parking lot in Long Beach. They were given beer laced with Valium and Kent later described being in a catatonic state after having the beer and then passing out in the backseat of the car. They drove around Belmont Shore and Seal Beach on an aimless mission. 

Friends of the two teenagers witnessed an unconscious Kent May being pushed out of the Mustang in the same parking lot where they were picked up earlier. Keith was in the passenger seat and appeared to be sleeping, slumped against the driver, who sped off before Keith’s friends could get too close to the car.  

Two months later Keith’s skull washed up near a jetty close to Long Beach Marina, the remainder of his body was found six months later in a Laguna Hills culvert. 

Keith’s friends who witnessed his encounter with Kraft, took the number plate of the black and white Mustang and the police were able to track down Kraft at his Belmont Shore apartment. 

Kraft’s story was that he had gone for a drive with Keith Crotwell, but that the car got stuck in the mud. This was about 3:30/4am. He had walked to a Bob’s Big Boy hamburger joint, about a mile down the road, to get help, while Keith was to stay with his car. He called his partner, Jeff Graves to come and help. In an interview with police, Kraft admitted that Graves was more than just a roommate; they were in a relationship. That is why he didn’t mention to Graves that he had picked up a young man, as Graves could have been jealous. 

While waiting for Graves, Kraft spotted a couple with a pick-up truck and asked them to help him and they went to where he had left the car. When he returned to the car, Keith was gone. Kraft’s boyfriend, Graves corroborated Kraft’s story, confirming that Kraft had called him and told him about his car being stuck on that day. 

The police wanted to press charges, but the district attorney felt there was not enough evidence. Besides that, Keith Crotwell’s cause of death was ruled to be accidental drowning. No charges were laid against Kraft.

Investigators tracked down Kent May after Kraft’s arrest in 1983 and he picked Kraft’s photo out of a line up and confirmed that he was the man who had given Keith Crotwell and himself a ride back in 1975. Investigators knew they were on the right track, they just needed to keep on digging.

Also, in 1975, Kraft was fined $125 for lewd conduct after two officers encountered him at a known gay cruising spot. This and the police questioning about Keith Crotwell brought tension between Kraft and Graves, who went their separate ways soon after. 

This is when a young man called Jeff Seelig walked into Kraft’s life. He was ten years younger than Kraft and they met at a party. The flamboyant and fun-loving Seelig worked as an apprentice baker and the pair quickly became inseparable.

Kraft introduced Seelig to cruising, and especially looking for threesomes with marines. In this time Kraft started working as a data processing expert with Lear Siegler Industries, who is a specialises in a wide range of products including aerospace-technology.

He earned an annual salary of about $30 000, which in 1980 was a very good income. Together with Jeff’s salary from Grandma’s Sugar Plums, their combined income was around $50 000. Way more than the average household income in California at the time. Kraft traded his old Mustang for a Toyota Celica and it appeared as though life couldn’t get any better. 

Jeff and Randy lived a life of domestic bliss. They had regular card games nights – Kraft loved playing bridge and he loved winning. He wasn’t a big drinker. By not drinking, he realised, he had the competitive edge: it’s easier to keep a clear head when all you opponents are chasing down Harvey Wallbangers and beers.

With his charm and intelligence, he was climbing the ladder to career success at a good speed. His job took him all over the country: to Oregon and Michigan. 

In this time Kraft and Seelig bought a house together in Long Beach. Kraft appeared to be a ‘normal’ guy. Kraft loved his dog, Max, and it was important to him that his partner, Jeff and his dog lived in harmony too.

From the outside in, it did not look like Kraft was one of the country’s most    serial killers. While he was playing bridge and making a home, young men were still being brutalised. In fact, between 1976-1978 there was a lull in his killing spree, and this was probably due to his relationship with Seelig. It would almost be a whole year before police believed he struck again.

In December 1976, 19-year old Paul Fuchs was last seen at Ripples, the best known gay bar in Belmont Shore. When his parents wanted to file a missing person’s case, police couldn’t do much. Paul was 19 and probably just needed to get away from his parents. But his parents knew something wasn’t right. It wasn’t like Paul to leave without saying anything. No-one would ever see Paul again – to this day his body was never found, but in 1983, with Kraft’s scorecard in hand, they believe that Young Paul (as his family called him) met Randy Kraft that fatal December night of 1976. 

Throughout the summer and fall of 1978, the bodies of another five young men would land on the coroner’s table. Scott Hughes Richard Keith, Keith Klingbeil, Richard Crosby and Michael Interbieten were all found beside the freeways crossing through Southern California. All of them had been drugged and strangled, most of them had car cigarette lighter burns on their bodies. When Keith Klingbeil was discovered, lying on one of the Northbound lanes on the I5 near Mission Viejo, he was still alive. But there was too much Tylenol and alcohol in his system and he passed away before police could reach the scene.  

In 1980 the body count spiked once again, but this time, victims were younger – between 12 and 19 years old. When police saw the change in murder method they realised that there was yet another killer operating in the area. He would kidnap his victims, rape them, then shoot them before dumping their bodies next to the freeway. 

Fortunately, within the year, police arrested William Bonin. Bonin, who sometimes had accomplices, was convicted of 14 murders and sentenced to death by lethal injection. Bonin is known as the Freeway Killer, a title sometimes shared by both Randy Kraft and necrophiliac serial killer Patrick Kearney. 

Police however had their own name when referring to Kraft. He was the killer who drugged, tortured and burn victims with a car cigarette lighter. He was called the Southern California Strangler. The term ‘Serial Killer’ was not commonly used before the 1980’s, but this killer embodied the worst serial killer anyone could imagine. Police called him a “mass killer”, already knowing they were dealing with a new breed of perpetrator with an insatiable lust for murder.

During 1982 things between Kraft and Jeff Seelig weren’t working out. Their age difference, different levels of education and incompatibility started taking its toll. They went to a counsellor, who noted that Kraft was more than anxious. She noted autonomic hyperactivity, which would result in physiological symptoms like sweating, palpitations and dry mouth.

Seelig walked away from the relationship and Kraft’s life was in a downward spiral. A spiral that would end up with his arrest on the night of Terry Gambrel’s murder in 1983. The case against him was getting stronger and stronger as police began looking deeper and deeper into his life.

After the break-up with Seelig mid-1982, bodies of young men were turning up, sometimes more than one a day. A very young 14-year Raymond Davis was out looking for his dog when he was last seen alive, his decaying body was found in    Park with his hands knotted behind his back, like another young man called Michael O’Fallon, was found two years prior. A simple three-letter entry on Kraft’s Scorecard read “Dog”. Police believed that young Raymond ran into the devil when he was looking for his dog.

Police realised that when Kraft was out on the prowl, no man was safe. When they realised that he had travelled interstate for work, they reached out to other law enforcement agencies to see if they had any unsolved cases, with a killer using the same methods of torture as Kraft. And suddenly, more matches were made to the Scorecard.

An entry that read “PORTLAND HEAD” was linked to the body of Brian Whitcher who was dumped from a moving vehicle after being asphyxiated and tortured. Anthony Silviera made his way onto the list as “PORTLAND RESERVE”. At the time of Silviera’s murder, Kraft was in Portland on a business trip. Kraft is known to have left the Portland area to visit friends in Seattle. During this visit, Kraft wore a military jacket inscribed with the name “Silviera”.

Police were also able to solve one of the 2-for-1 entries on the list. Dennis Alt and Christopher Shoenborn were found on the 9th of December 1982 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The two victims were cousins who attended a seminar with Kraft when he was in Michigan. Kraft followed the same callous method as usual, drugging his victims before torturing and murdering them. But this time a ballpoint pen was entered into Schoenborn’s urethra prior to his murder. The pain must have been excruciating. On the Scorecard the entry is GR2, which police concluded is short for: GRAND-RAPIDS-TWO.

Law enforcement were confident that the man they had in custody was the right guy. Despite his clean-cut demeanour and intelligence, a monster was lurking beneath.

Kraft’s ex-boyfriend from the early 70’s, Jeff Graves was suspected to have been Kraft’s accomplice. Some victims were thrown out of a vehicle travelling at a speed of about 50mph (or 80kmh), which would be problematic to execute alone while driving. When the body of 17-year old John Leras was found on Sunset Beach in 1974, drag marks on the beach showed that two people had carried his body into the water. When Graves was questioned after Kraft’s arrest he said to police: "I'm really not going to pay for it, you know.” But Jeff Graves died of AIDS in July of 1987 before police could investigate him further. 

It took prosecution five years to build the case against Kraft, the evidence against Randy Kraft was overwhelming. The trial commenced in November 1988 and lasted for 13 months. With more than a thousand pieces of evidence and over 150 witnesses traversing through the courtroom, Randy Kraft’s trial cost the US tax payers $10 Million, making it the most expensive trial in Orange County history.

Kraft pleaded not guilty to the murder of 16 young men he was charged with. Although Kraft was only tried for 16 of the murders, police and law enforcement believed that he was responsible for close to 50 additional killings. But they charged him with the cases that had the strongest evidence against him to ensure that he never walks out of jail a free man. 

Kraft’s defence couldn’t dispute the mountains of evidence against Kraft. The only strategy they could take was to point the finger at someone else. They tried to pin the 16 murders to Patrick Kearney and William Bonin, but it was a feeble defence to say the least. So, Defence found a witness who told the court about his encounter with a man called Jon McMellen. 

McMellen was a family man who came to police’s attention during the investigation of one of Kraft’s victims, Donnie Crisel. Despite appearances of being a family man, McMellen was gay and unbeknownst to his wife cruised gay bars and offered young marines rides in the hope of the encounter leading to sex.

The marine who testified, said that McMellen had offered him a ride, then took him to his home, offering him some weed. When the witness was sufficiently high, McMellen made his move, prompting him to have sex. The marine managed to run away before McMellen’s aggression turned into action.

Investigators did investigate McMellen, but he seemed to be nothing more than a somewhat perverted closet case – not a killer. Incidentally one week after Kraft’s arrest in 1983, the pressure of McMellen’s double life pushed him to commit suicide. 

In 1989, the State rested its case against Randy Kraft. It was time for the jury to deliberate and it took them and excruciating 11 days to reach a verdict. In the end they found him guilty on all charges and recommended the Death Penalty. 

The case against Randy Kraft was simply too strong: he was caught with a murdered marine in his car. Items linking him to many victims were found at his house and fibres on other victims’ bodies, traced back to Kraft’s home. His Scorecard was not the definitive evidence, but it was a crucial clue to guide investigators in understanding the scale of his murderous crime spree. 

At Kraft’s sentencing hearing, Judge Donald McCartin said: 

“If anyone ever deserved the death penalty, he had it coming”

Kraft maintained his innocence and responded by saying: 

“I would like to say that I have not murdered anyone, and I believe a full review of the record will show that.”

Today, Kraft’s appeals are exhausted, and the state of California upheld his execution sentence on August 11, 2000. Still on Death Row in San Quentin today, Kraft professes his innocence. 

Ironically, he was incarcerated with William Bonin, the Freeway Killer, before his execution. Awaiting their imminent demise, the two often sat around the same table, playing bridge, each one competing to outsmart the other.

This was The Evidence Locker. Thanks for listening!

If you’d like to read up more about this case, have a look at the resources used for this episode in the show notes. You might also find the book “Angel of Darkness” by Dennis McDougall to be interesting. He gives a very detailed insight into the life of Kraft and gives faces and stories to many of Kraft’s victims.

©2018 Evidence Locker Podcast

All rights reserved. This podcast or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a podcast review.

‍