Mark Billingham:           It was fairly clear to investigators early on that this piece of paper with this random collection of place names, numbers, and initials was very important, was crucial to the investigation, but they couldn’t work out what it was.

Nathan C.:                    Investigators wonder if this list could lead to more victims.

Jimmy White:                That was kind of the word I heard I think more than anything else. It was a list. It was a list of descriptions, sometimes locations, you know, descriptions of either people or places, but it certainly seemed to be important.

Nathan C.:                    If their hunch is right and it is a list of victims, they’ve stumbled upon one of the most prolific serial killers in history. There are over 60 entries on the list.

Nathan C.:                    Police in Southern California have pulled over a swerving vehicle. The driver is Randy Kraft. His passenger, Marine Terry Lee Gambrel, is dead. They believe Kraft killed him. As investigators dig in, they question whether this victim could be one of many. They begin to wonder if Kraft has contributed to the 100 or more bodies found across California freeways over the past 10 years.

Jimmy White:                Bodies were found, for the most part, along the side of the road. Sometimes they were nude, sometimes they were clothed. These cases were mounting and occurring more and more frequently.

Nathan C.:                    Many of the victims are young men. Many have been plied with drugs and alcohol, and several have been found with foreign objects inserted into their rectums. On that May evening in 1983, Sergeant Howard wonders, as he discovers a Toyota with a dead body in the passenger seat, if he has found the killer his force has been looking for.

Michael Howard:          … and realized that this might be that serial killer. I thought it was very fortunate that we were on patrol and just happened to be in the right spot at the right time.

Nathan C.:                    A sheet of paper that looks like a list has already been found in the trunk of the car. As forensics continue to pick apart the Toyota, they find several other items which arouse their suspicions.

Jimmy White:                When I picked up the floor mat on the driver’s side, there was this envelope underneath it.

Nathan C.:                    In a brown envelope, White finds a gruesome collection of 47 photographs. One is of a man reclining on a gold sofa. He appears to be dead.

Mark Billingham:           They found Polaroids of kind of, of victims or what could be victims.

Nathan C.:                    And the discoveries get worse. The passenger seat is soaked with blood, but Gambrel, the dead passenger, appears to have no open wounds. The blood can’t be his. It suggests the car’s been used to carry someone else badly injured or dead. The police believe the driver of the car has killed before and they are now even more convinced that the list found in the trunk is a list of victims.

Nathan C.:                    Police need to find out more about the driver of the car, Randy Kraft. Whilst they try to pick apart his background other investigators analyze the list to see if they can match any of California’s unsolved murders with any of the seemingly random words.

Mark Billingham:           It was obvious to investigators very early on that this, this so called scorecard, what became known as the scorecard, was a very important piece of evidence, but it was incredibly hard to decipher. It was just a random collection of place names, of initials, of numbers, but they kept working it, they kept looking at it, and eventually they were able to crack a couple of them.

Nathan C.:                    It was to be painstaking work. Police needed to go back to the early 70s and forensically examine cases of bodies dumped by the freeways to see if they could make any connections. The first success is entry number three on the scorecard, EDM. Police link it to a body discovered over 10 years earlier in 1972.

Mark Billingham:           They cracked one entry on it, which was simply the letters EDM, and finally they were able to link that to a missing marine called Edward Daniel Moore, and at that point I think that was when the investigators really knew what it was they were looking at.

Nathan C.:                    The police know of at least 10 more marines that have been murdered or gone missing over the years. They try and match them to other chilling references to marines on the list. Marine Down, Navy White, Marine Head BP, Marine Carsan.

Nathan C.:                    Julie Haney was a cold case investigator for the NCIS.

Julie Haney:                  … marines would have been out on weekends. They would have been going to bars. They would have been drinking. They would have been socializing and maybe available to him out late at night, and also hitchhiking. Hitchhiking was big in the 1970s here in Southern California. They would make great victims.

Nathan C.:                    Marine Roger Dickerson, 18, was last seen alive at at bar in San Clemente in 1974. His dead body is discovered a few days later. Jim White was the forensics expert for Orange County Sheriff’s at the time.

Jimmy White:                Dickerson, he was found in South Laguna. He was body dumped. I went to that crime scene where the body was found.

Nathan C.:                    Police believe Dickerson is MC Laguna on the scorecard. He has been sodomized and strangled. There are bite marks on Dickerson’s genitals and left nipple. Many of the bodies found over the years have been mutilated in a similar way.

Julie Haney:                  Most of victims were bitten, and in my experience a bite mark is a very primal sexual act.

Nathan C.:                    With Kraft in custody and his list in hand, police are able to connect the crimes, but at the time they seemed slow to respond.

Mark Billingham:           Had the victims of these crimes been, you know, young white women, there would have been rather a greater will to find these killers quicker, but they were all young men who indulged in a lifestyle, even then was still very marginalized.

Nathan C.:                    But now police have a suspect in custody. Investigators delve deep to try to understand just who is this mystery man and what could have driven Randy Kraft to kill.

Nathan C.:                    Police are convinced Randy Kraft is responsible for a series of brutal unsolved murders over the past 10 years. In a bid to understand why, they pick apart his childhood.

David Holmes:              Randy Kraft’s childhood was fairly uneventful. His father was extremely distant, but his mother was doting. This kind of distant father, it leads to people that kind of achieve a lot. They tend to strive for attention. They’re very much pushed and supported and felt secure by the mother, but unfortunately this is also the background of many serial killers.

Nathan C.:                    There is little for the police to go on. The first hint of anything unusual is when Kraft is 21. There are unconfirmed reports that he was arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct after propositioning an undercover cop, but because it’s his first arrest, he is let off. Two years later he joins the U.S. Air Force. He is bright and does well. He is given advanced security clearance and rises quickly through the ranks.

David Holmes:              He was a hardworking workaholic, obsessively driving individual, and probably achieved more than his fellow aircraftmen, and he did not have much problem in achieving in the eyes of his superiors within the Air Force.

Nathan C.:                    But it’s here that he begins to show signs of homosexual tendencies.

David Holmes:              Just over a year after he joined the Air Force Randy Kraft as it were blew his cover as a gay person within the Air Force. He walked into his superior’s office and basically came out in front of them. It was an escape route with dignity from the military and with a certain amount of credibility and his own achievement intact.

Nathan C.:                    Kraft takes a job at the Boy Shed, a gay bar on Sunset Beach, and starts living an openly gay lifestyle.

John Garcia:                  I met him back in the 60s. We used to work together at this club in Sunset Beach. We were both bartenders.

Nathan C.:                    John Garcia first met Randy Kraft when they both worked at the Boy Shed in 1962. Garcia later went on to open Ripples, Southern California’s first gay bar.

John Garcia:                  I knew him as a customer here. His boyfriend at the time worked for me here at Ripples so Randy would come in and at times wait for him.

Nathan C.:                    Kraft maintains normal gay relationships, but at some point his killing spree begins.

David Holmes:              It is possible that was he was wreaking some kind of strange revenge for having to sort of be in a repressed state for over a year within the military, and this could have been him fighting back.

Nathan C.:                    The police study the first entry on the scorecard. 5th of October 1971 South Orange County police discover a man’s naked decomposing body beside Ortega Freeway. The body is identified as Wayne Dukette, a bartender from Huntington Beach.

Mark Billingham:           Dukette’s body was found a couple of weeks after he’d gone missing in a very bad state of decomposition so it was very difficult to establish cause of death and accurate time of death, but the police, local law enforcement very much under pressure to sort of close the case, to come up with a cause of death, so they put it down to alcohol intoxication.

Nathan C.:                    Dukette worked at a gay bar called Stable.

Mark Billingham:           Stables was the first entry on that scorecard which is why police believe he was Kraft’s first victim.

Nathan C.:                    Over the next 10 years, Kraft picks up and invites a series of young men back to his flat. He drugs them and has sex with them. Some he goes on to murder, then takes their photo. It’s these images that are found in Kraft’s car.

David Holmes:              Randy Kraft kept photographs of victims in various postures. This would seem like you’re actually walking around with evidence on you.

Nathan C.:                    But Holmes understands why a person as driven and obsessive as Kraft might do this.

David Holmes:              He possibly couldn’t really help this because he is obsessive. He couldn’t really let go of all the images, the experiences, and it, in some ways it maintains his obsessive control of the victims. To be able to look through the list, to be able to thumb through photographs, to remember them, to revisit those experiences and relive them.

Nathan C.:                    As the years go by, more names are added to Kraft’s list. Bodies found by the police show more and more extreme forms of mutilation.

Julie Haney:                  Most of Randy Kraft’s victims he tortured before he killed them. He kept them alive for a number of days and sexually tortured them.

Mark Billingham:           Genitals would be hacked off. They would have things inserted into the rectums of his victims. I mean, it was quite astonishingly shocking and brutal.

Nathan C.:                    And the level of torture continues to get worse.

Mark Billingham:           The things that Kraft did to one victim in particular, Mark Hall, really are perhaps the most shocking details of any murder I’ve ever come across.

Nathan C.:                    On the 3rd of January 1976, the body of Mark Hall, last seen at a party in San Juan Capistrano, is found.

Mark Billingham:           First of all, he cut Mark Hall’s eyelids off, cut them off or burned them off. Again, one can only speculate that that is because he wanted his victim to watch what was being done to him which is horrific enough, but then the list of things he did to him, quite disgusting.

Nathan C.:                    Several parts of his body have been burnt with a car cigarette lighter.

Mark Billingham:           He inserted the swizzle stick into his penis and then inserted his penis into his anus. You can’t imagine that degree of horror or suffering and Kraft was able to do that.

Nathan C.:                    On the scorecard, he is forever immortalized as New Years Eve. Throughout 1978, more bodies are found on the freeway. Some have been castrated.

David Holmes:              There are elements that some professionals would identify as a kind of feminization of this male body. Kraft emasculated these individuals, almost trying to, you know, cajole it or treat it as if it was female.

Nathan C.:                    And the deaths keep coming. In total, police believe they have found links to over 40 unsolved murders on the scorecard.

David Holmes:              He never really considered that he’d get caught, so why would it be a problem having these lists well hidden and very well coded? Because some of these items you would have to know where he killed someone, who it was he killed, and be able to kind of cryptically understand how those two could be brought together within one word or at least the place within one word, so they were kind of meaningful to him and far less meaningful to the people trying to decode them.

Nathan C.:                    But chillingly, the police came across Kraft twice. The first time 13 years earlier before he’d killed a single victim. March 1970, before California drivers start coming across dead bodies on the side of the freeway, a young runaway, Joey Fancher, encounters a man on Huntington Beach pier. The man offers him a cigarette and persuades young Joey to come back to his apartment.

Mark Billingham:           He shows him pornographic pictures, straight sex, gay sex, he gives him Diazepam, beer. Fancher describes being basically completely out of it, completely aware of what was going on, completely able to sort of think and feel and know what was happening to him, but being unable to do anything about it. Kraft violently rapes him. Then, while Fancher is lying there bleeding and vomiting and in a terrible state, Kraft just goes off to work and leaves him there, telling him that if he tells anybody or does anything, he will kill him.

Nathan C.:                    Despite being drugged, dazed, and having been brutally raped, Joey somehow manages to escape. He stumbles out of the house and goes to the police. In his panic to get out, Joey leaves his shoes in Kraft’s apartment. Fearing his mum’s anger, he asks the police to go back with him to get his shoes, but what Joey doesn’t tell police proves critical.

Mark Billingham:           So, the police go in and they find what’s clearly a slightly odd scene. There are pornographic pictures knocking about, there’s empty bottles of drugs or whatever, but Fancher never mentions that he’s actually been raped. He tells them it’s all about getting his shoes back, and as it turns out, the police never had a warrant to go in there. So, however odd they found the place, however much evidence they would have found, it was actually inadmissible anyway because they never had a warrant and the rape never came out until trial.

Nathan C.:                    Vonda Pelto was the councilor in the LA County Men’s Jail and an expert on California serial killers.

Vonda Pelto:                 This is so typical of young boys in particular. When they’re made a punk, or been raped, they’re very embarrassed about this, and they don’t want to tell anybody because of the embarrassment.

Nathan C.:                    But Joey does point out his attacker on a photo in the apartment to the police and he knows his name. The man that abducted Joey is Randy Kraft. With police unaware a crime has been committed, they take no action. Kraft is free to begin his killing spree.

Nathan C.:                    Five years later, Kraft is a fully fledged killer. After 14 entries have been made on his scorecard, he has another close shave with the police in 1975. After a night out at the gay bar, Ripples, he comes across four teenage boys in the parking lot.

Mark Billingham:           He gets talking to them. He says, “Hey, I’ve got some beer in the car,” you know, “let’s have a party.” Two of them, Keith Crotwell and Kent May, get into the car with him, get into his Mustang, and off they go. He immediately breaks out the beer. He immediately breaks out the Valium, and they’re, you know, chucking these tablets down.

Vonda Pelto:                 After he had given each of the boys Diazepam and beer to get them semi-conscious, he decided to go back to the bar and drop one of the boys off.

Nathan C.:                    Kent May is bundled out of the car drugged and unconscious. Keith Crotwell remains in the car.

Mark Billingham:           And the next thing May remembers is kind of waking up the next morning, and it’s only when his two friends who were still in the parking lot, who saw him get dropped off, they tell him what happens, that he pieces it together, which is that Kraft has driven back to the parking lot, dropped him off, kind of ejected him from the car, driven away with Crotwell who is never seen again.

Nathan C.:                    But Crotwell is seen again. His severed head is found a month later. But the police get a lead. The car Crotwell and May climb into is a distinctive Mustang. Police link it to Randy Kraft. When questioned, Kraft provides an alibi. He was with his lover. Police take no further action.

Mark Billingham:           One of the entries on the scorecard just says parking lot, which, you know, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to imagine that that’s the, that’s the entry for the murder of Keith Crotwell.

Nathan C.:                    According to Haney, Kraft seems to be able to kill at will.

Julie Haney:                  Police were not onto him at all. They had no idea who he was on that day. He was not on any reports. He was not on any. He was not a suspect. He was out there killing with reckless disregard. They were not even close to catching him.

Nathan C.:                    To friends and family, Kraft just seems like a normal man.

Vonda Pelto:                 That’s a misnomer that oftentimes people think that serial killers are crazy or stupid. That’s the way the public gets fooled, and it’s very common for neighbors to say, “Oh my God. He, my neighbor did that?” And typically they have a hard time believing it because the person is so friendly.

Nathan C.:                    But behind the façade, Kraft is on a killing spree completely unnoticed.

David Holmes:              Mostly serial killers do not have two heads and something stamped across their forehead. They don’t look like serial killers. The brighter individuals actually don’t stick their head above the parapet very much at all.

Nathan C.:                    Kraft is leading a deadly double life, but it’s about to come to an end.

Nathan C.:                    After his arrest, the police are able to connect Kraft to over 40 murders through a scorecard found in the trunk of his car, but there’s at least one victim who’s not on the list. Terry Lee Gambrel is hitching his way to a party. Unfortunately for the young marine, Randy Kraft is on the prowl.

Mark Billingham:           Marines were kind of his ideal of American manhood, you know, they were kind of what he wanted to be, what he couldn’t quite be. I mean, he sort of tried to be that as a young man and then actually had to acknowledge his own sexuality. There are these ideal American men with their muscles and their buzz cuts and they’re what turn him on, they’re what he wants to be, and ultimately they’re what he wants to kill.

Nathan C.:                    He can’t be them, but with drugs and alcohol, he can control them.

Mark Billingham:           The two key words that sum up Randy Kraft for me are control and denial. The killings were extremely controlled, extremely brutal. I mean, perhaps the most brutal series of killings that there have ever been.

Nathan C.:                    On this particular night, Randy Kraft makes a fatal mistake. He’s pulled over by a traffic cop for driving erratically. They find Gambrel’s dead body in the passenger seat.

Julie Haney:                  And some of the detectives that were working the case said, “One day he’s going to get pulled over on a routine traffic stop and that’s going to break the case wide open,” and that’s exactly what happened.

Nathan C.:                    Police believe Kraft could have been attacking Gambrel as he was driving. It might explain why he was swerving across the road.

Michael Howard:          I noticed on the driver’s seat there was a folding knife, which would have been basically under Randy Kraft’s right thigh. He made have been doing something to the body at that time or preparing to do something to the body at that time.

Nathan C.:                    But straight away, Officer Howard realized the important of the arrest.

Michael Howard:          The ligature marks made me think that this might be that killer. I did call back to Officer Sterling, “Make sure he is buckled in tightly with that seatbelt, because this may be the person who’s been dumping bodies on the freeway.”

Nathan C.:                    If the body wasn’t enough, the car was packed with other evidence.

Mark Billingham:           For somebody as intelligent as Kraft and with as much kind of animalistic cunning as Kraft, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that in keeping things like photographs of his victims hanging around he kind of made a stupid mistake, but actually, although in retrospect it was a mistake, it’s a way for somebody like Kraft to keep the buzz going, to maintain the kind of, the erotic sort of animalistic thrill. In his case the photos that he was able to keep looking at, keep on enjoying, ultimately they were part of his undoing.

Nathan C.:                    26th of September 1988 in a courtroom in Orange County, one of the longest and most expensive cases in California history is about to begin. The suspect, Randy Kraft, is thought to have killed anything up to 100 people. Police have good reason to believe they can tie him to over 40 murders, but without enough evidence to take him to court for all of them, he is tried on just 16 counts of murder, one count of sodomy, and one of emasculation.

David Holmes:              He has a kind of narcissistic psychopathic trait which says that he feels that he’s actually above the law. He, within the courtroom, he actually thought this was no more than a load of ants running round him ready to be trodden on.

Nathan C.:                    But the case against him is strong. Forensics have picked apart his car and alongside the scorecard and photos, have found yet more evidence that ties him to unsolved murders. One such murder, a body that was found in January 1983. Jimmy White was the forensics officer at the time.

Jimmy White:                I had been called to look at a body that had been found off the freeway in Seal Beach. The body turned out to be, the deceased was named Eric Church.

Nathan C.:                    Eric Church was discovered wearing maroon socks.

Jimmy White:                I should be able to find fibers from those socks, and I did. In the right front floorboards there were little balls of maroon fibers that matched the socks from Eric Church.

Nathan C.:                    It’s proof that Eric Church had been in Kraft’s car. Other fibers from victims were found in Kraft’s home, and hair similar to Kraft’s was found on the body of at least on victim. As details are read out of each murder, some in the courtroom say Randy Kraft smiles as if reliving each murder is giving him pleasure all over again.

David Holmes:              Randy Kraft’s indifference to the court procedure, and his kind of, really he never looked really like a guilty furtive individual. He looked quite smiley, confident, but he didn’t seem to realize the import of what was happening. In his own mind it was impossible for him to be found guilty, and then if found guilty would be impossible for him ever to actually suffer his sentence.

Nathan C.:                    After deliberating for 11 days, on the 12th of May 1989 the jury find him guilty of 16 counts of murder in the first degree.

Randy Kraft:                  Briefly I would like to say that I have not murdered anyone and I believe any reasonable review of the record will show that. That’s all I have to say.

Nathan C.:                    Despite the verdict, Kraft gives nothing away, leaving California police with a long list of cold cases. In 2012 Special Agent Julie Haney was charged with re-investigating some of the cases involving marines.

Julie Haney:                  I was contacted by the Long Beach Police Department in California. They have a cold case unit, and they contacted me and asked me for my help in identifying a John Doe.

Nathan C.:                    The body was found in 1974 near the I-605. It had a distinctive military haircut and a tattoo associated with the marines. So, Haney went through the records of military personnel who went missing around the same time, and came up with the name of Oral Stuart.

Julie Haney:                  And then we found the parents of Oral Stuart and showed them some photographs and they immediately identified Oral Stuart as the John Doe.

Nathan C.:                    With the body identified, Haney now wanted to find out who killed Stuart. She reviewed the Kraft killings and found striking similarities to Stuart’s injuries.

Julie Haney:                  I knew that Oral Stuart was found naked, was bludgeoned and strangled to death, that he had a bite mark on his neck. Those were all the things that Randy Kraft had done to a number of his victims.

Nathan C.:                    In an attempt to find out more details, she visited Kraft in prison.

Julie Haney:                  We sat two feet from each other at the table there. He’s very evil little man, he’s about five feet eight, gray, really short gray hair, black eyes, and just a really, really cold evil little person.

Nathan C.:                    Kraft refuses to cooperate. There was still at least 22 unidentified entries on the scorecard. Haney picked through the words to see if she could make a link to Oral Stuart.

Julie Haney:                  I knew there were 67 names on that scorecard, and I knew that there was a, one of the, one of the, one of the names on there was Iowa. So, and I knew that Oral Stuart was from Iowa so those were the factors that led me to believe that Randy Kraft had killed Oral Stuart.

Nathan C.:                    Miraculously, nearly 40 years after the murder, another link is made to the scorecard.

Julie Haney:                  He had no empathy for Oral Stuart whatsoever. He was angry that I was even trying to get him to show some kind of humanity. I have never met somebody prior Randy Kraft that literally has no soul.

Mark Billingham:           He is still denying what he did. He cannot relinquish that control, you know, the moment he says it to anybody, the moment he mentions it to a cellmate, the moment he says it in open court, the moment he says it to a journalist or whatever, that control has been relinquished and he can never ever do that. You know, it’s the way he gets through life. He’s too deny what he has done and to try and control his environment.

Julie Haney:                  All the families that are out there of all the unsolved cases that are linked to Randy Kraft, he has done nothing to try to help to clear those up. When the case is unsolved and someone’s been murdered the pain never goes away, especially for the parents, so the families to this day of Randy Kraft’s victims are suffering. After all these years, they’re still suffering.

Nathan C.:                    Today, Randy Kraft sits on death row. He continues to profess his innocence and still refuses to give any details to family members looking for answers on their missing sons.

Julie Haney:                  He killed because he liked it. He killed because he enjoyed it, and because if he didn’t enjoy it, if he had any kind of a soul, any kind of compassion, he would have said, “Look, fellows, you got me. I’m going to be convicted. I’m going to tell you what I did and I’m going to try to do something right for once.”

Nathan C.:                    His trial, conviction, and imprisonment has so far cost over $10 million. Having exhausted his state appeals, he now plans to appeal at the federal level.

Julie Haney:                  He would have kept killing, if he were not caught in 1983, he’d be killing today. That’s how much he enjoyed it.

Speaker 10:                  When a devoted mum failed to collect her kids from school, something had to be very wrong, and it was. Brand new A Town and Country Murder Sunday at 9:00. After the breaks, CI investigates men who murder, and John Wayne Gacy.