Both Sides Relieved as Kraft Trial Begins

When Clayton A. Church of rural Coventry, Conn., testified at Randy Steven Kraft’s preliminary hearing, he thought a jury would decide soon whether Kraft had killed 16 young men, including Church’s son.

That was five years ago.

“This trial is like a cloud hanging over our heads,” Church said of his family. “We kept thinking it would finally happen. Then we’d wait till the next year, and the next.”

But for the victims’ families, and for Kraft and his own family, the waiting for the trial is over: the proceedings have finally begun in Santa Ana.

No case in California history has involved so many slayings. The trial has been delayed primarily because Kraft’s lawyers sought time to investigate the staggering number of deaths blamed on their client.

37 Slayings

Since Kraft’s arrest in 1983, Orange County prosecutors have accused him of 37 slayings. He must stand trial on only 16 of those. But prosecutors plan to use the other 21--including six in Oregon and two in Michigan--as evidence in seeking a death sentence.

Many of the victims, primarily between the ages of 18 and 25, had either been sexually assaulted or emasculated. In most cases, their nude or partially clad bodies were found dumped near freeways.

James G. Enright, the county’s chief homicide prosecutor, says the trial is expected to be the most expensive in county history.

Lawyers for Kraft, now 43, predict it will take at least a year just to put all 37 slayings before a jury.

The enormous task of finding those 12 jurors and at least eight alternates began last week.

300 Volunteers

Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin’s courtroom was packed Thursday and Friday with prospective jurors who answered just one question: Could they sit as jurors in a trial that could take a year or more?

Surprisingly, by Friday, a jury pool of more than 300 people had answered that they could sit that long, and the judge for the time being stopped bringing in others, a process that had been expected to involve many more hundreds. Lawyers will question the 300 or so individually starting Aug. 10. Testimony is expected to begin in early fall.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, Kraft’s chief prosecutor, said: “The victims’ families we’ve been in touch with are relieved the trial is finally here. We’re glad too. We’ve been ready a long time.”

Kraft’s attorneys also say they are ready.

But they are dismayed that Judge McCartin refused the motion they pushed the strongest, to separate the 16 charges into several different trials. Last week the 4th District Court of Appeal also rejected that idea. This week, they will make an 11th-hour appeal to the state Supreme Court.

“We want to get the trial started, but we are not happy with these circumstances,” said Kraft attorney C. Thomas McDonald. “There is no way for Randy to get a fair trial when one jury sees all these murders. The system is skewed against him.”

The legal issues of the case are a blur for Darwin and Lois Hall of Pocatello, Ida. Their only child, 22-year-old Mark Howard Hall, who came to Southern California with hopes of a music career, is one of the 16 men Kraft is charged with killing.

What they are concerned about is being present when prosecutor Brown introduces evidence related to their son’s death 12 years ago.

“We’re not looking forward to it, but we see it as our duty to our son,” Lois Hall said. “Someone should be there for him.”

Clayton Church and his wife, Florice, know that he must return to Orange County too.

Found in Kraft’s possession was an electric shaver that Clayton Church has identified as the one he gave Eric, shortly before the 21-year-old man was killed in early 1983. Because Church can recognize the wiring repair job he did on the shaver himself, he will be a key prosecution witness.

For the Churches, who have three other children, the primary question the past five years has been not how soon the trial would begin, or even whether Kraft is guilty.

“What really troubles us,” he wondered aloud, “is what kind of human being would do these terrible things to so many young men?”

McDonald says it wasn’t his client.

“Randy has said he is innocent, and that’s what we think the evidence will show,” McDonald said.

Prosecutors, though, say Kraft is one of the most cold and calculating killers the country has ever seen, a “souvenir hunter” who kept his victims’ possessions and posed the bodies for lewd photographs.

But until Kraft was arrested at 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, he was not a suspect in a single murder under investigation.

He was known simply as a 38-year-old computer consultant who lived a quiet, gay life style with a roommate in Long Beach. He was raised in the Westminster area by middle-class parents. He had a lot of friends in high school and college and was well-liked by co-workers.

The night of his arrest, Kraft was driving north on the San Diego Freeway in Mission Viejo when two California Highway Patrol officers noticed his Toyota Celica weaving across the lane.

After stopping him, they discovered the young man in the passenger seat next to Kraft was dead.

He was Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old El Toro Marine. He had been drugged and strangled with his own belt, his hands tied with his own shoelaces.

Their discovery led to what Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. James A. Sidebotham has called “an investigator’s nightmare.”

Court records show that color photographs of several nude young men--all apparently dead--were found under the floor mat of Kraft’s car. Three of them have since been included as victims in the charges against Kraft.

Also found in the car were bottles for Kraft’s own prescription diazepam pills (generally known as Valium). Diazepam was found in eight of the 16 men.

Clothing and other possessions tying Kraft to several victims were found in three separate searches of Kraft’s home and garage.

Fingerprints preserved by the Sheriff’s Department on shards of a broken beer bottle where Hall’s body was found seven years earlier were identified as Kraft’s.

A jacket belonging to an Oregon victim was found in the hallway on the same hotel floor where Kraft was staying in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the same time period when two farm boys at a horticulture convention there were found dead.

But the single most controversial piece of evidence was a list of more than 60 notations on a sheet of yellow paper found in the trunk of Kraft’s car. Prosecutors say it’s a death list, code words that Kraft wrote to keep a score card of his killings. Most of those notations have been sealed by court order.

Orange County investigators quickly discovered that while Kraft was completely unknown to them, Long Beach police knew him well.

Charges Sought

Eight years earlier--and before 12 of the deaths had occurred--Long Beach police had tried to persuade Los Angeles County prosecutors to charge Kraft with the slaying of 19-year-old Keith Daven Crotwell.

Crotwell’s head had washed ashore in Long Beach. Through Crotwell’s friends, the police discovered that Kraft was the last person known to see Crotwell alive.

When Los Angeles prosecutors refused to file charges against Kraft, saying they had insufficient evidence, the Crotwell case was finally set aside. Long Beach police never thought to mention Kraft’s name to other law enforcement authorities in the Southland.

It was only after Kraft’s arrest that prosecutors, through new research on their old, unsolved cases, discovered that a headless body found in a remote area of Laguna Hills in 1976 was Crotwell’s. The Crotwell slaying is now among the 16 murder charges.

If all of this looks like compelling evidence to prosecutors, Kraft’s three court-appointed attorneys publicly seem to be unimpressed. In court papers, they constantly refer to much of the evidence as weak or irrelevant. The fact that Kraft’s fingerprints are found at a murder scene does not make him a killer, Kraft attorney William J. Kopeny wrote the court in one legal brief.

‘Meaningless Speculation’

The idea that Kraft’s list is a score card of victims is scoffed at by the defense as “meaningless speculation.”

The mountain of paper work the Kraft attorneys have filed with the court make clear what many of their attacks on the prosecution’s case will be. What remains a closely guarded secret is what kind of defense they are planning.

Kraft attorney McDonald and James G. Merwin, co-counsel for Kraft, claim that it will be “an aggressive and affirmative defense.” But they refuse to reveal details.

Krafts’ elderly parents, who reportedly are in poor health, and other family members in Orange County are relieved that the trial is here, McDonald said, and fervently support Kraft.

The Halls of Idaho and the Churches of Connecticut say they are reserving judgment on Kraft until after his trial.

Some relatives of the victims, based on evidence made public so far, believe Kraft should have been sentenced to death long ago.

But one man has other strongly held sentiments.

He is Jerry Gambrel of Crothersville, Ind., a short-haul truck driver. His twin brother was the dead Marine found in Kraft’s car.

“If Mr. Kraft is convicted, I can only pray that he will be spared from the death penalty,” said the 30-year-old Gambrel, a deeply religious man. He added:

“If Mr. Kraft did these things, he needs help. I know that Terry would have felt the same way.”