Читать книгу The World's Most Bizarre Murders - James Marrison - Страница 12

Mild-mannered computer programmer by day, murder junkie by night. Meet Randy Kraft, one of America’s most prolific serial killers.

In his cell in San Quentin, Randy Kraft enjoys watching Desperate Housewives and listening to music, especially to Elton John, The Carpenters and Stevie Wonder. He hasn’t had the chance to do it for quite a while but he used to enjoy being on the beach with friends too, roasting hot dogs as the sun went down beyond the Pacific Ocean.

Now he spends his time playing bridge, working out, reading and writing and would describe himself as a giving and sharing person. You can write to him if you like, as Randy is looking for a pen-friend, or maybe you might like to send him a book, or even a CD. They are quite difficult to get hold of on Death Row.

He has been there since 30 November 1989 after he was charged and convicted of 16 counts of murder and sentenced to death. Kraft fiercely defends his innocence to this day. But, when he was pulled over for suspected drink driving on 14 May 1983, police found a dead marine slumped in the front seat of his car. They also found 47 pictures of naked men (many of whom were dead) under the car mat, blood on the cushion in the front seat and in the boot of his car a coded piece of paper listing all his kills.

At his home, which he shared with his lover Jeff Seelig, police also found a whole stash of souvenirs that could be directly traced to many of his victims and more photos of dead men, some of them taken in Kraft’s own living room. It turned out that he had been driving around California with corpses for almost 12 years.

At the time of his arrest, Kraft was a successful computer programmer with a well-paying job in the corporate computer services department at Lear Seigler. At his trial, co-workers described him as ‘pleasant’, ‘reserved’ and ‘friendly’. Friends and family recalled how attentive he was to their problems – his niece described him as a shoulder to cry on – while others remembered shared holidays and pleasant evening meals with Kraft and his boyfriend in their home. The general consensus was one of utter disbelief that the affable, gentle Kraft, a successful employee dedicated to his work, could also be one of America’s most sadistic serial killers.

But that’s exactly what he was. From 1971 to May 1983, Kraft roamed the streets in his car, picked up hitchhikers and men in gay bars, drugged them, raped them, strangled them with their own shoelaces or belts and then mutilated their dead bodies. In many instances, he sliced off their genitals or spent the night dismembering the bodies entirely.

When he was finished with the bodies, Kraft left them in different cities and counties in the state by dumping them from a moving car along California’s labyrinthine highway system. Matters were made worse by the fact that Californian police were also contending with two other suspected ‘freeway killers’ operating in the same area and at the same time. Deranged Vietnam vet William Bonin was busy raping young boys, strangling them or caving in their skulls with a tyre iron and leaving their bodies at the side of the road. Also active at this time was Patrick Kearney, who shot his victims in the back of the head, engaged in sex with the corpses and then dismembered the bodies with a hacksaw. Once he had finished with the bodies he put the remains in bin bags and dumped them along the side of the Californian highways.

Ken Goddard was chief criminalist and supervisor of the Scientific Investigation Bureau at the Huntington Beach Police Department at the time Kraft’s victims first started to show up. Later, he attended Kraft’s trial, appearing as an expert witness. He still has vivid memories of the murderer to this day. ‘I remember Kraft thumbing avidly through one of the photo “albums” we’d put together showing all of the located bodies or parts,’ he told me. ‘I was sitting on the witnesses’ stand at the time, waiting for court to resume, and I remember him suddenly looking up at me and the funny, oddly familiar look on his face. It took me a few minutes to realise where I’d seen that look before. It was when I was out on patrol with a San Bernardino Sheriff’s deputy driving around behind a 7/11 and happened upon a couple of young boys reading some kind of porno magazines. In retrospect, I’m sure that for him that album represented the ultimate in porn mags, especially given that the “scenes” were his own creation.’

Goddard had learned much earlier in his CSI career to disconnect his emotions from the crime scenes. As such, he says the sight of the dead and maimed bodies were more of a frustration to him than a ‘horror’ because of the lack of any evidence that might have helped the authorities focus on a specific suspect. ‘Normally, during the CSI process, you tend to get a pretty vivid sense of what the victim went through by figuratively putting yourself “in the skins” of the victims and suspects as you work your way through the scene… But the lack of “place of attack” evidence with the Kraft bodies made it very difficult to imagine the sequence of events, other than the obvious fact that the victims were probably tortured in addition to being tied down and raped… but it got a lot worse in terms of the body parts, and a growing awareness of what the victims were going through.’

The first ‘Kraft body’ was found in the middle of a back road in Huntington Beach. ‘When the patrol officers turned the body over, they discovered the crotch of his pants was bloody… and that his penis and gonads had been cut off with something sharp,’ Goddard revealed. ‘We examined the body carefully at the morgue for trace evidence, but only observed what appeared to be ligature bruises or handcuff bruises on the wrists… The only significant bit of evidence turned out to be the anal swabs taken by the pathologist and turned over to me for analysis.

‘The swabs screened positive for seminal fluids and I was able to locate intact sperm in the swabs. So we knew the killing was part of a sexual assault, but not much more than that. There were other bodies too. I remember being at a morgue and seeing severed body parts such as arms and legs that they were trying to match to torsos, all in varying states of decay.’

It wasn’t hard for Kraft to sweet-talk men into his car. Unlike many serial killers, he did not suffer the usual nightmarish childhood of constant abuse and poverty, nor was he a hated misfit. Softly spoken and socially adept, he seemed to have got on well with just about everyone.

Randy Kraft was born in Long Beach, California, the youngest of four children and the only boy. When he was three, his family moved to nearby Orange County; his father worked in the machine shop in nearby Douglas Aircraft and had built the family home on the cheap out of surplus supplies from a nearby military base. Sitting by the side of the highway, it still resembled a barracks with small rooms and it was impossible to see outside unless you stood right by the window and peered over the sill. The young Randy Kraft had to stand on a chair to see outside.

Kraft did well at school and almost skipped a year because of his high grades. Although flat-footed, he also did well at sports, playing on the varsity tennis team and regularly going bowling with his father. He played the tenor sax, took part in debates and was liked by fellow students and teachers, many of whom were later called upon as character witnesses at his trial. The family weren’t rich but they weren’t poor either, and there was enough money for the occasional holiday and weekend outing.

There was even enough to send Kraft to college. Again he did well and was elected president of a fraternity; among other tasks, he arranged fundraisers for charities. As the Vietnam War loomed, Kraft enlisted in the air force rather than getting drafted into the army, starting his training on 14 June 1968. He was sent to Texas, where he excelled again, becoming platoon leader and earning the American Spirit of Honor medal as an ‘outstanding example to comrades in arms’.

But his auspicious military beginnings had a rather muted end. The air force saw Kraft as someone who was not likely to make a career in the military, due to his education and high IQ, and decided that the extra money used to train him would be wasted. As a result, he wound up as a painter, painting crossroads and on base barracks near his home and back in Orange County.

Kraft had a degree in economics, but, instead of pursuing a steady and lucrative career after leaving the military, he chose to work as a bartender in a succession of gay bars in California. At night he would head mostly to Ripples, previously known as Slithery House, or he spent night after night driving in his Toyota Celica looking for kicks along the Californian highways. Later, when he left the state for his work as a computer programmer, the body count in his new locality inevitably rose. During his trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Kraft had committed eight additional murders in Oregon and Michigan.

After he had committed a murder, Kraft would note the details of his crime down in code. Written in two columns on a sheet of notebook paper, the final list bore 61 cryptic entries in Kraft’s meticulous hand. Police believed that each entry on the list referred to one of his victims, earning him the name of the ‘scorecard killer’. Four of the entries included the number ‘2’, which according to the prosecution referred to a double hit. So, ‘2 IN 1 BEACH’, the prosecution argued, referred to both Rodger DeVaul and Geoffrey Nelson. Police believed that Kraft met both men on the beach (after leaving his bridge group) and he rendered them helpless with beer spiked with a cocktail of prescription drugs. He cut off Nelson’s penis and scrotum, possibly while he was still alive, strangled him and then threw him out of his car. DeVaul suffered a similar fate. Kraft plied him with so many pills and so much booze that he would have been in a mild coma while he was being strangled. Kraft then started taking snapshots of his corpse. Police found photographs underneath the floor mat of Kraft’s car that showed a dead DeVaul in various poses including one of him holding his own penis.

Another item on the list was ‘jail out’, a reference to Roland Young. Young had been put in jail for public drunkenness and on his release was hitching his way home when Kraft picked him up. In a change from his usual method, this time Kraft stabbed Young four times in the chest and removed one testicle. As with DeVaul, Young had imbibed a large amount of alcohol and drugs, and would have been comatose as he was being killed.

Kraft was an adept murderer; he was only ever seen by witnesses once, and that was very early on in his killing spree. In March 1975, Kraft struck up a conversation with Keith Crotwell and Kent May in a parking lot in Long Beach. They agreed to come with him to his new car, a white Mustang, where he offered them pills and beer. May almost immediately passed out and the last thing he remembered was Kraft driving off with both of them still in the car. Kraft then returned to the parking lot and threw May out.

Two of their friends, who had come out looking for them, saw Kraft throwing May out of his car and then speeding off with Crotwell in the front passenger seat unconscious. Two months later, two young boys discovered Crotwell’s skull floating near a marina. In October, other children found what was left of him wrapped in a rug in a large pipe. In court, the prosecutor argued to the jury that ‘PARKING LOT’ on the defendant’s list referred to Crotwell’s murder.

Kraft continued to get away unpunished and the atrocities of his crimes worsened. On 3 January 1976, an off-duty policeman found the body of Mark Hall in the sand dunes in the area of Saddleback Mountain. This time Kraft had surpassed himself. The cause of Hall’s death was found to be a combination of suffocation and acute alcohol intoxication. Kraft had removed Hall’s genitals and filled his mouth and throat with dirt so that he choked. A print unearthed on a broken beer bottle near the scene of the crime was Kraft’s. Hall had last been seen alive on 31 December; Kraft had written on his list ‘NEW YEARS EVE’.

According to author Dennis McDougal, who wrote the bestselling book Angel of Darkness about Kraft, the killer may well have also had an accomplice: a seriously disturbed drifter. He certainly confessed to McDougal that he had been involved in some of Kraft’s most heinous crimes. Kraft wasn’t a strong man physically and it would have been tough to move those bodies by himself; what’s more, McDougal says, Kraft didn’t have access to a photo lab, nor did he know how to develop photos. It was also claimed that Kraft only listed his more memorable kills and hinted that the final tally could well have been as much as a hundred. McDougal further speculated that Kraft might have practised his drink-spiking technique by drugging an ex-girlfriend. In an article published in Long Beach magazine, she told McDougal that she would sometimes have a beer while Kraft drove and would wake up with a splitting headache and no recollection of what had happened.

Kraft’s body count is up there with some of America’s most infamous killers, yet, strangely, he doesn’t enjoy their celebrity status. He absolutely refuses to acknowledge any guilt and offers no glimpses whatsoever into the darker side of his nature. I talked to a long-term pen-pal of Kraft. Like many people who have got to know him over the years, she still finds it hard at times to believe that he is a killer.

‘Randy,’ she told me, ‘is intelligent, well read, has an excellent general knowledge, and is extremely literate; his letters are a pleasure to read. He is polite, considerate and respectful. He is also charming, but in a gentle, understated kind of way, and there’s a sweetness and warmth too in Randy that makes him very likeable, which causes you to start to think that maybe he really did not commit those dreadful crimes, and you want so much to believe that he didn’t. But I see too, at times, a certain tendency towards having high expectations, perhaps even a demand for perfection, but rather in himself, than in others.

‘I do believe, though, that, in many ways, Randy lives in a romanticised world, where families are perfect, loving, supportive and nurturing, almost like the early TV family sitcoms with the strong, morally upright, but caring father, the devoted domesticated mother and the happy, doted-upon younger children and fun-loving teenagers. Perhaps Randy’s own family was like this, but I think that it is more likely that this is how he wants to remember his past, rather than the way it actually was.’

This idealised version of events is reflected in Kraft’s childhood memoirs, recently posted up on his website, which is sponsored by an anti-death-penalty organisation. Kraft earnestly paints a picture of the all-American family and – ludicrously – comes across rather like a modern-day version of John Boy from The Waltons. It makes for tough reading. There is a whole story about the time his sister couldn’t cook pie crust properly and another gripping tale about going to the local shop and buying chicken feed (literally). There is also one story about whether he should buy a Christian Endeavours tie clip for himself or if he should save his hard-earned quarters and buy a nice new white Bible for his mom. Apparently, as a child Kraft was a paragon of virtue and most of his memoirs are littered with expressions such as ‘Neat O’ and ‘Oh Boy’ and even sometimes ‘Gee Thanks!’

In those memoirs, Kraft also gives his own explanation for the scorecard hit list that earned him his nickname. He says that the words on the list were related to his computer-programming job and that the police had cut and pasted the list to make him take the blame for 65 unsolved crimes.

The memoirs jump abruptly to a day in 1983, when Kraft remembers sitting out on the sun deck with a cold beer with his dog, Max. It was actually Friday, 13 May, and his last day as a free man. Kraft remembers that a sudden chill and feeling of impending doom descended on him and writes that he knew things wouldn’t be the same afterwards. Hours later he would kill again, but for the last time. At last the 12-year-long murder binge was drawing to a close.

His last victim was Terry Gambrel, a 25-year-old marine. Kraft was pulled over for suspected drink driving by the California Highway Patrol when they spotted someone in the front seat. Kraft claimed that he was a hitchhiker. According to court records, one of the officers ‘observed that Gambrel’s trousers were unbuttoned and pulled down between his waist and his knees so that his penis and testicles were supported by the crotch of the pants. The crotch area was wet. There were indentations on Gambrel’s wrists similar to those a wide rubber band would make.’

According to the autopsy, Gambrel’s death resulted from asphyxia due to ligature strangulation. Again, according to court transcripts, ‘The ligature consisted of a strap that had been tightened around Gambrel’s neck. There were also ligature marks on both of Gambrel’s wrists. Petechial haemorrhages in the neck organs indicated the killer had repeatedly tightened and loosened the ligature.”

Gambrel was 25 years old and engaged to be married. It is believed that he was hitchhiking his way to a party when he was picked up by Kraft.

It took five years before Kraft was sent to court. The trial lasted 13 months and cost the American taxpayer $10 million, making it one of the longest and most expensive trials in the history of the American judiciary system. Throughout the trial, Kraft maintained his innocence and even served as co-counsellor. After both sides had argued their case, the jury decided on the death penalty – a decision that was upheld by the judge – and Kraft was sentenced to die in the gas chamber in San Quentin on 29 November 1989. Referring to Kraft’s crimes, Judge A McCartin summed up: ‘I can’t imagine doing these things in scientific experiments on a dead person, much less to someone alive.’

But, incredible as it may seem, the bodies keep on showing up. As recently as 2006, the remains of a 17-year-old marine, James Cox, thought to have gone AWOL on 30 September 1974, were found buried by the side of the road and identified thanks to DNA testing. Authorities think that he could well be another Kraft victim.

Meanwhile, Kraft, who shows not the slightest remorse for his crimes, fights against his sentence and for his life. According to his appeal, there were 20 serious errors in his trial and he maintains the search warrants obtained for a search of his car, office and home after he was pulled over for drink driving were illegal. He also contends that he should have been allowed a separate trial for each murder. But his call for a mistrial hinges mainly around the death list. He argues that the list ‘lacked value’ because any connection between the entries on the list and particular victims was ‘speculative’. Kraft also holds the view that any relevancy of the list is outweighed by its prejudicial impact and should have been omitted as inadmissible hearsay.

His latest appeal was unanimously rejected by the Californian Supreme Court in 2000 on all counts. For most families wanting closure, it was good news, but it is unlikely that Kraft will go to the gas chamber any time soon. He has already been on Death Row for 19 years and is likely to remain there for a good while yet. Kraft plans to appeal yet again to the federal courts, a process that will in all likelihood tie up the process for years and years to come.