Man Accused of 37 Murders : Trail of Slain Young Men: ‘Investigator’s Nightmare’

It began with a routine traffic stop.

At 1:10 a.m. on May 14, 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers pulled over a brown Toyota Celica that had been weaving on the San Diego Freeway in Mission Viejo. Behind the wheel was Randy Steven Kraft; next to him was a Marine in his mid-20s, apparently asleep.

Within minutes, after a rough shake failed to rouse the Marine and the patrolmen could find no pulse, the officers suspected they had a homicide on their hands. A jacket covered the victim’s lap, and his pants had been pulled down to his knees.

Within hours, investigators searching the car had found color photographs of several other young men. Many were nude; they appeared to be dead. Within a day, Kraft had been linked to four other homicides in Southern California, six in Oregon and two in Michigan.

Before their investigation was over, Orange County prosecutors would conclude that Kraft, a studious Long Beach computer consultant, was one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history--a killer who drugged, sexually molested and strangled young men, mostly hitchhikers, and often mutilated their bodies.

Kraft’s neighbors and childhood friends were stunned by his arrest and the sordid revelations that followed. To them, it seemed impossible that the bright former high school tennis player and Claremont Men’s College graduate could have committed the crimes for which he is scheduled to be tried in July.

“You know those guys who always carried a slide rule with them everywhere, the bright guys? Randy was one of them,” said Santa Ana lawyer Clarence E. Haynes, who was in Kraft’s 1963 graduating class at Westminster High School.

Kraft’s closest neighbor, Penny Dewees, said she and others who lived nearby “were all just astounded. It wasn’t the Randy Kraft I knew.”

Nonetheless, Kraft stands accused in Orange County Superior Court of 37 murders. He faces 16 first-degree murder charges, and prosecutors intend to prove during the penalty phase of his trial that he is guilty of 21 others. No one has ever been accused in court of that many serial murders.

Kraft, who will be 42 this month, remains in isolation in the Orange County Jail, without bail. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The complicated, tortuous investigation that led Orange County prosecutors to file charges against Kraft--and, citing an alleged “death list” found in his car, to maintain that he may have killed more than 60 young men in all--unfolded with little of the sensation that has surrounded other serial murder cases. There was none of the public hysteria that accompanied the Night Stalker case or the Atlanta child murders, for Kraft was not at large as investigators worked quietly and meticulously to link him to one unsolved murder after another.

Little Public Attention

As a result, the magnitude of Kraft’s alleged crimes has received little public attention. It is only now, through reviews of court transcripts and interviews with friends and acquaintances of Kraft and his alleged victims, that it becomes clear how authorities pieced the case together.

That job fell largely to James A. Sidebotham, the dean of murder investigations in Orange County. The lanky, 51-year-old senior homicide investigator in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who has called the Kraft case “an investigator’s nightmare,” was awakened at home at 3:45 on the morning of Kraft’s arrest. He was told only that Terry Lee Gambrel, an El Toro Marine Corps Air Station corporal, had been found dead in a drunk driver’s car. The driver had said Gambrel was a hitchhiker.

After viewing Gambrel’s body in the county morgue and learning that he had been strangled, Sidebotham walked the short distance to the county jail. Kraft, however, did not want to talk to the detective.

A search of Kraft’s car later in the day would produce two key items of evidence linking Kraft to other deaths and drawing the interest of authorities all over Southern California and in Oregon and Michigan. One was a packet of 47 color photographs of several young men, many of them nude and apparently lifeless.

The other was a notebook inside a briefcase in the car’s trunk. On the first page was a handwritten list of notations such as “Airplane Hill,” “Jail Out,” “New Year’s Eve,” “2 in 1 Hitch” and “Parking Lot.” Prosecutors contend that each of the more than 60 notations represents a young man Kraft killed.

“What we have here is a true score-card killer,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, the chief prosecutor in the Kraft case, said during a court hearing in November, 1983. “It’s my argument that Mr. Kraft made these notations in an attempt to refresh his memory to all of the different people he killed.”

Also found in the car were prescription vials with Kraft’s name on them. Several victims of unsolved murders in Southern California had been found with a drug called diazepam in their systems. One of the prescription vials in Kraft’s car was labeled Valium, a trade name for diazepam. Another was labeled propranolol, which also is a depressant that causes extreme drowsiness in large doses. Propranolol had been found in the victims of two other unsolved murders.

Orange County Sheriff’s Department criminalists--forensics experts who gather and interpret physical evidence in criminal cases--also discovered that the seat cushion on which Gambrel was found had been saturated with blood at one time. But Gambrel had not been bleeding.

Sidebotham was familiar with many unsolved murder cases and could see a pattern emerging: young male victims, drugs, overtones of sexual molestation. Authorities elsewhere were contacted and questioned about unsolved murders, and the photos found in Kraft’s car were viewed by people familiar with those cases.

Within hours, two of the young men in the photographs were identified. One was Eric Church, 20, of Hartford, Conn., whose body had been found four months earlier in Seal Beach. He had been hitchhiking across the country. The other was Rodger James DeVaul Jr., 20, of Buena Park.

DeVaul and a friend, Geoffrey Alan Nelson, 18, also of Buena Park, had been together when they were last seen alive. That was Feb. 12, 1983, four hours before Nelson was found dead in Garden Grove. DeVaul’s body was found in Los Angeles County the next day.

Teletype information from other law enforcement agencies showed that Kraft had been arrested on suspicion of lewd conduct in Huntington Beach in 1966 and again in June, 1975, in a beach restroom in Long Beach. The 1966 case was dismissed and no details are available, but the 1975 arrest, involving sexual activity with another man, led to a guilty plea, five days in jail and a $125 fine.

House Searched

A search of Kraft’s house, authorized by then-presiding Orange County Superior Court Judge Richard J. Beacom, was the investigators’ next step. Kraft had lived at the Roswell Avenue house in Long Beach with his roommate, Jeffrey Alan Seelig.

Seelig, a 25-year-old candy shop operator, had to wait outside the police barricade as Sidebotham led a parade of officials to the front door of the house: two criminalists, four sheriff’s detectives and investigators from Garden Grove, Seal Beach, Long Beach and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

As puzzled neighbors watched, they filed through the house until after midnight, hauling out a flower-patterned couch and dozens of other items.

Sidebotham later reported to Beacom that Robert Wyatt Loggins, a 19-year-old El Toro Marine found dead in 1980, had been identified in some of the photographs found in Kraft’s Toyota. The photos showed Loggins nude and lifeless on a couch--the same couch, Sidebotham said, that was taken from Kraft’s house. And, he said, bloodstains were found on the wall next to the couch.

In three searches of Kraft’s house and garage that week, items identified as belonging to three Oregon murder victims were found. Also found were two items identified as belonging to one of two Michigan men found dead Dec. 9, 1982, near Grand Rapids.

From June, 1980, until January, 1983, Kraft had worked for Lear-Siegler Inc., a Santa Monica-based aerospace firm that has offices in Oregon and Michigan. Lear-Siegler officials confirmed for police investigators that Kraft had been on business trips in both states at the times the murders occurred.

But it was the list found in Kraft’s car that really seemed to tie the many pieces together, prosecutors say now. Each time Kraft was linked to another unsolved murder, investigators would point to another cryptic entry on the list: Edward Daniel Moore, they said, was “EDM;” Robert Wyatt Loggins, a Marine with a tattoo who disappeared in Huntington Beach, was “MCHB Tattoo;” Rodger James DeVaul Jr. and Geoffrey Alan Nelson, who disappeared together, were “2 in 1 Hitch.” And on and on.

As the investigation unfolded, Kraft grew more and more anxious in his cell at Orange County Jail. He was displeased with the way his lawyers at that time were handling his case and frustrated by his inability to guide the seemingly endless legal process that had taken control of his destiny.

Finally, on Nov. 24, 1983, he sought an interview with The Times.

The interview occurred at the jail, with a glass partition separating Kraft from the reporter. He was brought in by a uniformed deputy after the reporter was seated. He spoke into a telephone receiver, saying he wanted to tell people he was not a mass murderer and flatly denying that he had killed anyone.

“I don’t belong here,” he said.

He admitted having contact with “one or two” of the people he is accused of murdering but said it was only a coincidence that they had been killed.

Asked about the handwritten list that prosecutors contend is a record of his victims, Kraft, who has refused subsequent requests for an interview, said the authorities were “stupid” for trying to link the list to any killings. He said it is “only a code list of some friends of my mate’s (Seelig) and mine.”

Portrayals in Press

He said there are 61 notations on it.

What seemed to bother Kraft most was the way he was being portrayed in court hearings and in newspaper accounts of those hearings. “My friends read in the newspapers that I’m some kind of Jekyll and Hyde, because my side of things hasn’t been presented,” he said.

Indeed, Kraft’s friends continue to be astonished by the accusations. Paul E. Whitson, a research chemist in Clearwater, Fla., who was one of Kraft’s best friends from childhood through college, said in a recent interview that relatives had sent him newspaper clippings from Orange County after the arrest.

“My reaction was disbelief,” he said, “and it is still disbelief today. I just knew there had to be a mistake, that it couldn’t possibly be true. I know one thing: The Randy Kraft I knew in high school and college could never have committed such crimes. If he is guilty, then he is not the same person I knew. Something had to change him.”

Interviews with numerous friends and acquaintances of Kraft produced similar responses. He was a gentle man, his friends maintain--a quiet, intelligent person and a pretty fair athlete, especially on the tennis court.

Stunned by News

“Randy would always help you with your homework,” said Kay Frazell, who lives in Harrisburg, Pa., and who said she had a crush on Kraft when they were junior high classmates. She said she and other classmates were stunned by the news of his arrest.

“Randy would be in the top five in our class I would never believe could be involved in something like this,” Frazell said.

Whitson was Kraft’s classmate in grade school in Midway City, in junior high at the 17th Street School in Westminster and at Westminster High School, where they were members of the first graduating class. He remembers Kraft’s Boy Scout days and his involvement in Students for Nixon during Richard M. Nixon’s presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy.

“We were called eggheads,” Whitson said, chuckling. “We were very much interested in learning. We enjoyed our classes, and we enjoyed long conversations about our schoolwork.”

After graduating from Claremont Men’s College with a degree in economics in 1967, Kraft spent a year in the Air Force and, according to sources, then received an honorable discharge under circumstances related to his homosexuality. After his discharge, he moved to Long Beach.

In Long Beach, Kraft lived an openly gay life style, but he apparently kept his sexual preferences to himself while on the job. Investigators learned from Kraft’s co-workers at Lear-Siegler that no one there seemed to think of him as gay.

All of his co-workers at Lear-Siegler had high praise for him, according to sheriff’s investigators, who quoted one woman as saying: “Randy was the kind of man I would want as a father for my children.”

Kraft’s name first surfaced in connection with a murder in 1975. Nineteen-year-old Keith Daven Crotwell disappeared March 29, 1975, and his severed head was found a little more than a month later near a jetty in Long Beach Harbor. But Long Beach police could not find the rest of the body.

Friends of Crotwell who saw him with Kraft the night he disappeared led police to Kraft’s house, and he admitted that he had driven Crotwell to Orange County. There, Kraft told Long Beach police, his car had broken down. He said he went for help, and when he returned, Crotwell was gone.

No Charges Filed

That is where the murder trail ended in 1975. Long Beach police asked prosecutors in the Long Beach office of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to file charges against Kraft, but they refused, saying there was not enough evidence against him.

It was not until 1983, after Kraft’s arrest, that Crotwell’s body was identified.

Orange County sheriff’s investigators discovered then, after weeks of researching old cases, that a headless body had been found in a remote area of Laguna Hills in October, 1975.

Three months after Kraft’s 1983 arrest, forensic anthropologist Judy M. Suchey examined what was left of that body and compared her findings with Crotwell’s medical records. She later testified that she was “extremely certain” the body was that of Crotwell.

It was the next month, in September, 1983, that prosecutors decided they had enough evidence for 16 murder charges. Six charges already had been filed, and 10 more were added.

Four months later, prosecutors filed written notice that they intended to prove during the penalty phase of Kraft’s trial, to ensure a death sentence, that he committed 20 other homicides. A 21st name was added Aug. 30, 1985.

Prosecutors say they have been ready for trial for months, but Kraft’s court-appointed defense lawyers say that, because of the number of killings and the fact that they are scattered across 12 years and three states, they still have a great deal of preparation ahead.

The trial, after several postponements, is set for July 6, but Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas has said there may be further delays.

“This case is unprecedented in California, if not the nation,” Cardenas said. “The paper work alone could fill a library.”

The Orange County district attorney’s office continues to maintain that prosecutors will prove Kraft killed at least 37 people, even though only 16 formal murder charges have been filed. Of the 21 victims in the prosecutors’ list of murders they intend to prove during the penalty phase of Kraft’s trial, six occurred in Oregon, two in Michigan, six in Orange County and seven others in Southern California.

Indicted in 2 Other States

Kraft, who also has been indicted in Oregon and Michigan, cannot be formally charged here with killings that occurred outside Orange County, and sources say investigations of the killings of the last six Orange County victims were completed too late to add formal charges without causing still further trial delays.

After his arrest, Kraft changed his voter registration to 550 N. Flower St. in Santa Ana, the address of the Orange County Jail, and sold his interest in the Roswell Avenue house in Long Beach to Seelig.

Seelig, who law enforcement officials say has not been implicated in any of the killings, said he and Kraft still are close friends.

“Randy was very good to people,” Seelig said in a recent interview. “I mean, nothing but the best.”

Seelig and Kraft, whose relationship began in 1976, bought the Roswell Avenue house together in about 1979. Seelig said they invested much of their energy in fixing it up so they could spend quiet evenings there with friends.

“Whether he did or did not do the things he’s accused of does not really matter to me,” Seelig said. “I’m still his friend. He was always good to me.”

Seelig refused to discuss anything about the evidence against Kraft. He would talk only about the support Kraft is receiving from family and friends. Seelig said Kraft’s parents and three sisters “are very supportive of Randy, total love.”

But Harold Kraft, the defendant’s father, said in a brief telephone interview before declining further comment that his son’s case has been extremely hard on his family.

Asked if he supports his son’s claim of innocence, the father said: “The jury will decide what the truth is.”

Randy Steven Kraft, a former Long Beach computer consultant, has been accused in Orange County Superior Court of killing 37 young men in three states over a 12-year period. Many of the slayings involved sexual abuse and mutilation; many of the victims apparently were drugged and some were strangled. Prosecutors have said Kraft kept a handwritten “death list,” recording his victims’ identities in code phrases. Sixteen formal murder charges have been filed, and prosecutors have filed written notice that they intend to prove during the penalty phase of Kraft’s trial that he killed 21 other men.

1--Edward Daniel Moore, 20, a Marine from Camp Pendleton, found strangled on Dec. 26, 1972, along the 7th Street on-ramp to the 605 Freeway in Seal Beach.

2--John Doe. Unidentified, sexually mutilated body found suffocated April 14, 1973, in remote part of Huntington Beach.

3--Ronnie G. Wiebe, 20, of Fullerton, an electrical company worker, found July 30, 1973, near the 7th Street on-ramp to the San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach. He had been sexually mutilated.

4--Keith Daven Crotwell, 19, of Long Beach was last seen leaving Belmont Shore with Kraft on March 29, 1975. His severed head was found in a Long Beach bay on May 8, 1975, and his skeletal remains were found in Laguna Hills in October, 1975, but were not identified until 1983.

5--Mark Howard Hall, 22, of Pocatello, Idaho, who was working in Santa Ana. His nude body was found on Jan. 3, 1976, in Silverado Canyon.

6--Scott Michael Hughes, 18, from Seattle, Wash., a Camp Pendleton Marine, found on April 16, 1978, on the eastbound Euclid Avenue on-ramp to the Riverside Freeway in Anaheim. He had been sexually mutilated.

7--Roland Gerald Young, 23, of Maywood, found on June 11, 1978, off Irvine Center Drive in Irvine. He had been sexually mutilated.

8--Richard Allen Keith, 20, from New Castle, Ind., a Camp Pendleton Marine, found strangled along the Moulton Parkway in Laguna Hills on June 19, 1978.

9--Keith Arthur Klingbeil, 23, of Chula Vista, a transient carnival worker, was found July 6, 1978, on the outside lane of the northbound San Diego Freeway, just south of La Paz Road. He had been sexually mutilated.

10--Michael Joseph Inderbeiten, 21, was found on Nov. 18, 1978, next to the on-ramp from the southbound San Diego Freeway to the northbound 605 Freeway in Seal Beach. He had been sexually mutilated and had burn marks.

11--Donald H. Crisel, 20, from Des Arc, Ark., an El Toro Marine, was found on the Irvine Center Drive on-ramp to the San Diego Freeway, on June 16, 1979. He had been burned on the nipple.

12--Robert Wyatt Loggins, 19, from Montclair, an El Toro Marine, was found on Sept. 3, 1980, at the end of a residential street in El Toro. His body was found in a trash bag, with clear plastic wrapped around him and a rope around his neck.

13--Eric Herbert Church, 20, of Hartford, Conn., was found strangled on the 7th Street on-ramp to the 605 Freeway on Jan. 27, 1983. His family said he had been hitchhiking around the country.

14 & 15--Rodger James DeVaul Jr., 20, and Geoffrey Alan Nelson, 18, both of Buena Park. DeVaul’s body was found sodomized with his throat cut next to Glendora Ridge Road near Mount Baldy on Feb. 13, 1983. Nelson’s nude body was found at the westbound Euclid Street entrance to the Garden Grove Freeway about dawn on Feb. 12. He had been sexually mutilated.

16--Terry Lee Gambrel, 25, from Crothersville, Ind., an El Toro Marine, was found in Mission Viejo on May 14, 1983, in a car with Kraft. He had marks on his neck and wrists.