Randy Kraft

• 1. A Binder Full of Codes

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  Among the things investigators found after Randy Kraft's arrest was a ring binder. Inside it was a hand-written list of 61 terms and phrases, neatly printed. Some entries were a single word. One read Dog. Another read Deodorant. A third read Stable.

  Nothing about the list explained itself, and nothing about the man who wrote it did either. Kraft, an American serial killer born in 1945, would become known as the Scorecard Killer. Detectives spent years matching his words to real victims, and some entries are still unmatched.

  This documentary asks how a bright, politically ambitious student from Orange County came to keep such a list. It asks how he moved between bars, freeways and business trips for more than a decade before anyone stopped him. And it asks whether he acted alone.

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• 2. Before the Murders

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  Randy Steven Kraft was born in Long Beach, California, on the 19th of March 1945. He was the fourth child and only son of Opal Lee and Harold Herbert Kraft. His father had come west from Wyoming just weeks after the United States entered World War II. Harold found work as a production operative at Douglas Aircraft, and his wife and three daughters joined him.

  Money was tight. Opal worked as a seamstress in a Westminster garment factory and later as a school cook. She still made time for her children. Harold, by contrast, rarely joined family gatherings and was later described as distanced from them. Randy was doted on by his mother and three older sisters, and he was known to be accident-prone.

  In 1948 the family moved to Midway City, in neighboring Orange County. Their new home on Beach Boulevard was a small wood-frame dormitory built for the Women's Army Corps, which Harold converted into a three-bedroom house. The family joined the Westminster First Presbyterian Church, where Opal rose to chair the deacons committee. Teachers and classmates at Midway City Elementary noticed Randy's intelligence, and by 1957 he was placed in accelerated classes at 17th Street Junior High School.

  By his teens, Kraft was a staunch Republican who dreamed of becoming a United States senator. Soon after starting at Westminster High School, he and two close friends founded the Westminster World Affairs Club. He earned A grades, played varsity tennis and occasionally dated girls. Some classmates and teachers later said they had suspected he was gay. Kraft himself later said he had known since high school but kept it secret. On the 13th of June 1963 he graduated tenth in a class of 390.

  That fall he enrolled at Claremont Men's College to study economics. He joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps, attended rallies supporting the Vietnam War, and in 1964 campaigned for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Years later he said these actions only imitated his parents' politics, and he described his second year there as the time he dropped the "last gasp" of his conservatism. That same year he began his first known relationship with a man.

  He also took a job tending bar at a Garden Grove cocktail lounge that served a gay clientele. During his college years he brought a succession of male friends home to meet his family. His parents and sisters did not at first grasp what that meant.

  In 1966 Kraft was arrested in Huntington Beach and charged with lewd conduct after propositioning an undercover police officer. He had no previous record, so no charges were filed. The next year his politics reversed. He registered as a Democrat in 1967 and campaigned tirelessly for Robert F. Kennedy, earning a personal letter of thanks from the senator.

  His studies suffered. Drinking, drugs and all-night poker games left him failing to graduate in June 1967, and a repeated econometrics class postponed his degree by eight months. He finally graduated in February 1968.

  Four months after graduating, Kraft joined the United States Air Force. After basic training in Texas he was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California, where he supervised the painting of test planes. He rose to Airman First Class, and in that same year he told his family he was gay. In a letter to a friend, he said his father flew into a rage, while his mother was more understanding, if somewhat disapproving. The family ultimately accepted him, though his siblings noticed him pulling away.

  On the 26th of July 1969 Kraft told his superiors. He received a general discharge after only 13 months of service, officially listed as medical. He hired an attorney to challenge the grounds, but the Air Force refused to change them. He moved back into his parents' home and worked as a bartender.

  In March 1970, Kraft met a 13-year-old runaway named Joseph Alvin Fancher at Huntington Beach. He invited the boy to his Belmont Shore apartment with promises of a place to live. There the boy was drugged, beaten and repeatedly sexually assaulted. Hours later he escaped when Kraft left for work, and a passer-by alarmed at his condition called an ambulance. Doctors pumped his stomach.

  At the hospital Fancher told police about the drugs and the beating. Out of shame, and fearing no one would believe him, he said nothing about the assault. Police searched the apartment with the cooperation of Kraft's roommate. Because Fancher admitted taking the pills willingly, and because the officers had no warrant, no charges were filed.

  In 1971 Kraft took a job as a forklift driver in Huntington Beach and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, to study education. There he met Jeffrey Paul Graves, a fellow teaching student from Minnesota who was four years younger. The two began a relationship.

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• 3. Bodies Beside the Freeway

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  On the 5th of October 1971, police found the nude body of 30-year-old Wayne Joseph Dukette near the Ortega Highway. Dukette had tended bar at a gay bar called The Stable in nearby Sunset Beach and had last been seen alive on the 20th of September. Decomposition had erased any sign of foul play, and the cause of death was listed as acute alcohol poisoning. The first line of Kraft's scorecard reads Stable, which led investigators to conclude that Dukette was his first victim.

  Between 1971 and 1983, Kraft is believed to have killed 67 people. All were male, between 14 and 30 years old, and most were in their late teens to mid-twenties. Many were United States Marines. Most of their bodies held high levels of alcohol and tranquilizers, which suggests they were unconscious when they were abused and killed.

  Kraft typically lured young men into his vehicle with the offer of a lift or a drink. They were bound, tortured and sexually abused, then usually killed by strangulation, asphyxiation or blows from a blunt object. Some died from lethal doses of pharmaceuticals, and at least one was stabbed. Photographs found at his home indicate that several victims were taken there before they died.

  His victims were usually left beside or near freeways in southern California, which earned him the nickname the Freeway Killer. Most of the killings took place in California. Some happened in Oregon, and two more in Michigan in December 1982.

  One early victim was Edward Daniel Moore, a 20-year-old Marine last seen leaving the barracks at Camp Pendleton on Christmas Eve 1972. His body was found beside the 405 Freeway in Seal Beach two days later. Marks on it showed he had been pushed from a moving vehicle.

  On the 24th of January 1975, homicide investigators from several southern California jurisdictions met in Orange County. By then fourteen victims had been linked to one unknown killer, their bodies scattered across four counties over three years. All were white males with similar physical characteristics. An FBI profile was read aloud, describing a methodical, organized lust killer of above-average intelligence who showed an indifference to the "interests and welfare of society."

  Some detectives suspected more than one man, and at least one with military training. Two victims had paper tissue residue in their nostrils, a trick the military uses to stop a body from purging after death. Socks found inserted in victims were thought to serve the same purpose during the drive to the disposal site. Even so, the investigators had no solid suspect.

  Later that year, two teenagers who noticed a distinctive car in Long Beach would hand police their first real lead.

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• 4. The Black-and-White Mustang

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  On the evening of the 29th of March 1975, Kraft lured two youths, Keith Crotwell and Kent May, from a Long Beach parking lot into his Ford Mustang. He gave them beer and Valium and drove aimlessly around Belmont Shore and Seal Beach. May later remembered feeling catatonic before he passed out.

  Back at the parking lot, two friends of the youths watched a black-and-white Mustang pull in. The driver leaned across, opened the passenger door and pushed the unconscious May onto the pavement. As the car sped away, the friends saw Crotwell slumped against the driver's shoulder.

  Crotwell's skull was found on a jetty near the Long Beach Marina on the 8th of May. The rest of his body turned up six months later. The two friends suspected the killer drank in a Belmont Shore gay bar, so they searched their neighborhood for the Mustang. They found it less than a mile from home and wrote down the license plate. Police traced it to Randy Kraft.

  Long Beach police questioned Kraft on the 19th of May 1975. At first he denied ever meeting either youth. Called to the station for more questioning, he admitted that on or about the 29th of March he had persuaded two youths to drink and take Valium with him as he drove.

  Kraft said he returned May to the parking lot, then drove Crotwell to a side road near the El Toro offramp, where his car stuck on an embankment. He claimed he walked alone to a gas station to call a tow truck. When he returned, he said, Crotwell was gone. His roommate confirmed that Kraft had phoned that day to say his car was stuck on an embankment.

  Detectives were not convinced, and the following week two of them tried to file homicide charges. The Los Angeles District Attorney's Office declined. It cited the coroner's conclusion, drawn from the skull alone, that Crotwell had accidentally drowned.

  Perhaps because he had been questioned, and because of turmoil in his personal life that summer, Kraft is not known to have killed again until the 31st of December 1975. That day he abducted 22-year-old Mark Hall in San Juan Capistrano. Prosecutors later called Hall's death "the worst" of all Kraft's known murders. The autopsy showed Hall had been alive through much of what was done to him, and he died of asphyxiation.

  By 1976 Kraft's relationship with Graves had ended. He soon began seeing a 19-year-old apprentice baker named Jeff Seelig, and the two moved to Laguna Hills. Neither man favored monogamy, but both considered the relationship permanent. Seelig later said they often picked up hitchhikers and invited willing ones home for a threesome. He insisted Kraft had never been violent toward him.

  Investigators believe this relationship contributed to a lull in the killings. Kraft is not known to have killed again until the 10th of December 1976. The victim, 19-year-old Paul Joseph Fuchs, was last seen outside a Long Beach gay bar called Ripples. His body has never been found, yet his name appears clearly on the scorecard.

  Then came sixteen months of quiet. On the 3rd of January 1978, investigators gathered again, and by now they knew they were chasing more than one killer. The previous July, police had arrested Patrick Kearney, who confessed to murdering 28 boys and young men. He had dissected many of them and left them in trash bags beside southern California freeways.

  Kearney shot his victims and never tortured them, so his method differed sharply from Kraft's. Investigators were certain a separate killer was still at large. They were right.

  On the 16th of April 1978, Kraft abducted Scott Michael Hughes, an 18-year-old Marine. Hughes was found beside a freeway on-ramp in Anaheim, fully clothed except for his shoelaces. Over the following months, more young men turned up beside roads and ramps from San Diego to San Bernardino.

  Roland Gerald Young, 23, was found near a San Diego freeway on the 11th of June. Eight days later came the body of Richard Allen Keith, a 20-year-old Marine. Keith Arthur Klingbeil, a 23-year-old hitchhiker, was still alive when found beside Interstate 5 on the 6th of July, but he died soon after reaching Mission Community Hospital. Michael Joseph Inderbieten, 21, was found on an I-605 on-ramp on the 18th of November.

  In 1980, police arrested William Bonin and four accomplices for yet another series known as the Freeway Murders. His method of disposal looked much like Kraft's. But Bonin never drugged his victims, and most were between 12 and 19 years old, younger than Kraft's. Kraft's own work would soon take him north, to Oregon.

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• 5. Business Trips

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  In the summer of 1980, Kraft traveled to Oregon on an extended business trip and lived in a town near Portland. On the 17th of July, he killed Michael Sean O'Fallon, a 17-year-old from Denver who was hitchhiking across the United States and Canada before starting college. O'Fallon had been given alcohol and Valium before he was strangled. His body was left ten miles south of Salem.

  The following day, Kraft is believed to have killed Larry Eugene Parks, a 30-year-old Vietnam veteran. Parks was found beside a freeway shoulder in Woodburn, clothed but missing his belt and shoelaces. Both men appear on the scorecard with entries that begin with the word Portland. O'Fallon's camera, inscribed with his mother's initials, was later found in Kraft's garage.

  One month after Kraft returned to California, the bound body of Robert Wyatt Loggins, a 19-year-old Marine, was found in a trash bag near the El Toro Marine air base. Loggins had last been seen alive on the 23rd of August, intoxicated, near the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators later found nine photographs of him, with negatives, in Kraft's possession. They show him in Kraft's living room, always with his eyes closed. No one knows whether he was alive when they were taken.

  In April 1981, Kraft's employers again sent him to Oregon. On the 10th of April, 17-year-old Michael Cluck was found beside Interstate 5 near Goshen. He had been hitchhiking from Kent, Washington, toward Bakersfield, California, and was killed by repeated blows to the head. On the day Cluck's body was found, Kraft visited a Lane County hospital for treatment of a bruised foot.

  The most tightly packed stretch came late in 1982. Brian Whitcher, 26, was dumped from a moving vehicle alongside Interstate 5 near Wilsonville, Oregon. On the 3rd of December, a 29-year-old carpenter named Anthony Jose Silveira disappeared while hitchhiking toward Medford. His body was found two weeks later. Kraft was again in Oregon on business, and the trip ended the day Silveira vanished.

  On the 4th of December, Kraft drove from Portland to Seattle to visit friends. There he was seen wearing a military jacket inscribed with the name Silveira. The next day he flew to Grand Rapids, Michigan, on another business trip.

  Two days after arriving, Kraft met cousins Dennis Alt, 24, and Christopher Schoenborn, 20, at a seminar in the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel. Someone saw him talking with them in the reception area shortly before midnight. Their bodies were found on the 9th of December in an open field near the hotel. Both had been given alcohol and Valium, and their bodies had been arranged in sexually suggestive positions. Kraft left a set of Schoenborn's keys, and Silveira's jacket, at the hotel.

  On the 8th of December, Kraft traveled from Michigan to Portland. Within twenty-four hours he had killed Lance Taggs, a 19-year-old hitchhiker traveling from Tigard to a relative's home in Los Angeles. Taggs was found the next day in Clackamas County, close to where Whitcher had been left two weeks earlier. A sock lodged in his windpipe had suffocated him.

  Oregon investigators noticed that bodies appeared there in bursts, always near mass transportation, always with alcohol or pharmaceuticals in the blood. They reasoned that the killer lived in another state and struck only when he was visiting on business. After the deaths of Silveira, Whitcher and Taggs, they sent details of the method to police in other states and asked for matches.

  The answer from southern California counties came swiftly. The pattern was identical to the unsolved killings there, and the six Oregon murders were linked to the California cases.

  Another victim of that autumn, 24-year-old Arne Mikeal Laine of Modesto, had vanished on the 1st of November 1982 while hitchhiking toward Orange County in search of work. His body would not be found until January 1984, on a hillside near the town of Ramona.

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• 6. A Routine Traffic Stop

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  At 1:10 a.m. on the 14th of May 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers watched a Toyota Celica drift erratically along Interstate 5 in Mission Viejo. The driver made an illegal lane change, and the officers, suspecting drunk driving, signaled him to stop. He slowed, stepped out and poured the contents of a beer bottle onto the pavement.

  Officer Michael Sterling met the man at the front of the patrol car. The driver gave his name as Randy Kraft, and his jeans were unbuttoned. Kraft failed a field sobriety test and was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

  Sterling's partner, Sgt. Michael Howard, walked up to the Celica. A young man sat slumped in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, partly covered by a jacket. Empty Moosehead beer bottles and an open bottle of prescription Lorazepam lay around his feet. When shaking his arm brought no response, Howard noticed the man's body was cold. He found no pulse and saw a ligature mark around the neck. The man's hands were bound with a shoelace.

  The dead man was later identified as Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine stationed at El Toro air base. He had been strangled.

  Kraft was held on the drunk-driving charge while detectives searched his car. On the rear seat they found a belt whose width matched the bruising on Gambrel's neck. They also found alcohol, tranquilizers, other prescription drugs and stimulants. The passenger seat and carpet were heavily bloodstained, though Gambrel had no open wounds. Forensic analysis of the upholstery confirmed the blood was human.

  Under the carpet lay an envelope of more than 50 photographs of young men in pornographic poses. Many of the subjects looked asleep or dead. In the trunk was the ring binder.

  A search of Kraft's home turned up clothing and belongings of many young men murdered over the previous decade. Fibers from a rug matched those found on Scott Hughes. The living room couch matched the one in the photographs from the car. A roll of film showed Eric Herbert Church, a 21-year-old hitchhiker killed in January 1983, and Rodger James DeVaul Jr., a 20-year-old killed the following month, sitting in Kraft's car. In one image, a ligature mark is plainly visible on DeVaul's neck.

  On the 16th of May 1983, Kraft was formally charged with Gambrel's murder. By September, investigators had interviewed over 700 witnesses and gathered more than 250 physical exhibits pointing to his guilt in fifteen further killings. Those had taken place between December 1972 and February 1983. On the 8th of September 1983, he was charged with those fifteen murders, along with two counts of sodomy and one of emasculation.

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• 7. Reading the Scorecard

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  The entry EDM stands for the initials of Edward Daniel Moore. Investigators found that many of the list's entries worked this way, naming a victim by initials or first name. Vince M pointed to Vincent Cruz Mestas, a 23-year-old art student whose body was found in the San Bernardino Mountains on the 29th of December 1973.

  Other entries recorded what was done to a victim or where he was last seen. Marine Head BP is believed to mean Mark Alan Marsh, a 19-year-old Marine found decapitated near the Templin Highway on the 18th of February 1980. He had last been seen hitchhiking toward Buena Park. Some entries simply named a dumping ground. Golden Sails marks 21-year-old Craig Jonaitis, whose body was left in the parking lot of the Golden Sails Hotel in Long Beach on the 17th of January 1975.

  The entries Dog and Deodorant belong to Echo Park. On the 29th of July 1982, residents complained of a foul odor drifting from the Hollywood Freeway, and a Cal Trans employee found two bodies beside the Rampart Boulevard offramp. One was 14-year-old Raymond Davis of Pittsburg, California, last seen on the 17th of June searching for his missing dog. Forty feet away lay Robert Avila Jr., 16, who had been a heavy user of deodorant.

  Westminster Date is believed to mean Jeffrey Sayre, a 15-year-old from Santa Ana last seen at a bus stop in Westminster on the 24th of November 1979. He was returning from a date with his girlfriend, and the stop was near the home of Kraft's parents.

  Two entries share a puzzle. Keith Anthony Jackson, a 21-year-old tourist from Manchester, England, was found behind a Union 76 gas station in Long Beach on the 29th of August 1979. The scorecard reads either England or 76, so the entry may point to him by nationality or by location.

  The list also signals at least four double murders. GR2 stands for Alt and Schoenborn, last seen in Grand Rapids. The phrase 2 in 1 Beach refers to Geoffrey Nelson and Rodger DeVaul. Two others, 2 in 1 Hitch and 2 in 1 MV to PL, have never been tied to any double murder or disappearance.

  Two victims for whom Kraft was convicted, Church and Gambrel, do not clearly appear. Church may be listed under an entry that investigators cannot recognize. Gambrel may be missing simply because Kraft was arrested while disposing of the body. Counting double entries, the scorecard names at least 65 and possibly 67 victims.

  By 1988, investigators had tied 43 of the entries to identified or unnamed young men murdered in the twelve years before the arrest. That left eighteen entries pointing to twenty unidentified or undiscovered victims. Later work narrowed the gap. Three entries listed at trial as unconnected to any unsolved murder, Navy White, Iowa and Hari Kari, have since been linked to four victims found in 1974 and 1975.

  Navy White is believed to mean James Sean Cox, a blond 17-year-old apprentice medic stationed at Mather Air Force Base. He was last seen on the 29th of September 1974 hitchhiking near Interstate 5, wearing his white Navy uniform. His body was found weeks later in Rancho Santa Fe. Hari Kari may refer to David Michael Sandt, a 30-year-old found stabbed in the stomach in Long Beach on the 13th of January 1975, kneeling with his arms extended in a pose reminiscent of the Japanese ritual of hara-kiri.

  The entry Iowa could mean either of two young men. One is Oral Alfred Stuart Jr., an 18-year-old Marine born in Iowa. The other is Michael Ray Schlicht, a 17-year-old from Cedar Rapids. Stuart's body went unidentified until March 2012, and Schlicht's until November 2023.

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• 8. Verdict and Doubt

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  Kraft's trial began on the 26th of September 1988 in Orange County, before Judge Donald A. McCartin. Almost 160 witnesses testified for the prosecution, and over 1,000 exhibits were entered. They included bloodstains, hair and fibers from his Long Beach home and car, and fingerprints on glass shards recovered from the Hall murder scene. Prosecutors also showed the photographs and negatives hidden in his car, the belt used on Gambrel, a buck knife and prescription drugs. Work records, travel records and gasoline receipts placed him where victims had been taken or left.

  His defense rested on alibis and alternate suspects. His attorneys called much of the evidence circumstantial and portrayed Kraft as an articulate, hardworking, upstanding member of the community. They did not dispute that the sixteen men were murdered. They argued instead that these were "victims of someone, but not Randy Kraft." They noted that investigators had once attributed several of the sixteen to Kearney or Bonin and claimed there was "no concrete evidence" against their client.

  The trial lasted thirteen months and became the most expensive in Orange County history. Closing arguments began on the 29th of April 1989 and ran three days. The sequestered jury deliberated for eleven days. On the 12th of May 1989, they found Kraft guilty of sixteen counts of murder, one count of sodomy and one count of emasculation.

  The same jury reconvened on the 5th of June to decide his penalty, and that phase lasted until August. Prosecutors introduced evidence of additional killings in Oregon and Michigan for which Kraft had not been tried in Orange County. The defense called those assertions "highly speculative." It also presented a PET scan that it said showed abnormalities in Kraft's frontal lobes, limiting his control of emotion and impulse.

  The prosecution answered the jury directly: "There is nothing wrong with Mr. Kraft's mind other than that he likes killing for sexual satisfaction." It added that the difficulty his family and friends had believing him capable of murder only showed "what a good salesman he is." On the 11th of August 1989, the jury returned a verdict of death. Judge McCartin formally sentenced Kraft to death on the 29th of November and sent him to San Quentin. The California Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence on the 9th of August 2000.

  Many people have long doubted that one man did it all. Prosecutors themselves believed circumstantial and DNA evidence could be explained only by an accomplice. They argued Kraft would have struggled to move corpses weighing 200 pounds. Marks and debris at several scenes showed bodies were thrown from vehicles traveling at more than 50 miles per hour, which a lone driver could hardly do unnoticed.

  At Sunset Beach in 1975, footprints in the sand near John Leras's body showed two people had carried him to the water. Semen on Eric Church's body did not match Kraft's blood type, yet Church appeared in photographs taken in Kraft's car and his Norelco electric razor was in Kraft's house. Someone had to develop the film of the victims, but no photo developer ever reported Kraft's images, and he had no darkroom skills or equipment. Privately, members of the prosecution admitted they had left several murders uncharged because the facts pointed to more than one perpetrator.

  Prosecutors suspected Jeffrey Graves, who had lived with Kraft between 1971 and 1976. Graves had verified part of Kraft's alibi in the Crotwell case in 1975. After Kraft's arrest in 1983, investigators asked him about it again, and he answered: "I'm really not going to pay for it, you know." Graves died of AIDS on the 27th of July 1987, aged 38, when police were preparing to question him further.

  In January 2000, journalist Dennis McDougal, who wrote the 1991 book Angel of Darkness about Kraft, published interviews with a small-time criminal named Bob Jackson. Jackson claimed he had joined Kraft in killing two hitchhikers, one in Wyoming in 1975 and another in Colorado in 1976. Authorities in both states could not corroborate this. Jackson also said the scorecard held only the "more memorable" murders and that the true toll was closer to 100. Detectives persuaded him to enter a mental institution, but no charges followed for lack of direct evidence.

  Kraft himself sued McDougal and the book's publisher in 1993 for $62 million, claiming the book smeared his good name. The California Supreme Court dismissed the suit in June 1994.

  As of 2026, Kraft remains at the California Institution for Men in San Bernardino County, still denying every killing. The question of who, if anyone, stood beside him has never been answered in a courtroom.

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