After Delays, Frustration, Kraft Case Ready for Trial

The San Diego Freeway traffic was light at 1:10 a.m. on May 14, 1983, a chilly night with low clouds and no moon. California Highway Patrol Officers Michael Sterling and Michael Howard, northbound in Mission Viejo, spotted a Toyota Celica ahead of them weaving across the lane.

They stopped the driver, Randy Steven Kraft, for a routine field sobriety test.

From such inauspicious beginnings has unfolded one of the most spectacular murder cases in California history. A dead Marine was found in Kraft’s car. By daybreak, Kraft was linked to a dozen other unsolved murders in the county.

Kraft is now accused of 44 murders--unprecedented in California--in an 11-year crime spree that spread to four Southland counties and Oregon and Michigan.

“California has never seen anything like this case,” said Superior Court Judge Luis A. Cardenas, who is assigned to monitor and approve defense costs in the case. “It’s going to be the biggest--and most costly--trial ever held in the state.”

Now, more than five years after Kraft’s arrest, after dozens of delays and thousands of hours of defense preparation, testimony in Kraft’s multimillion-dollar trial on 16 murder charges finally gets under way Monday in Department 30 on the eighth floor of the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana.

Although Kraft, 43, a Long Beach computer consultant who was raised in Orange County, has been charged with only 16 of the murders, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, who is seeking a death verdict against him, will add 21 other murders if Kraft is convicted and the trial moves into a penalty phase. That makes 37 murders.

Another seven murders reportedly are included in sealed prosecution papers but were added too late to be included in this trial. Lawyers involved in the case have refused to discuss them.

Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin has warned the 10-woman, two-man jury and the alternate jurors that the trial could last up to a year. Prosecutor Brown has a witness list of nearly 300 people. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has collected so much evidence that lawyers in the case are using computers to keep track of it all.

Kraft’s three court-appointed attorneys have said they plan to put on “a substantial” number of witnesses of their own.

The total cost of the trial cannot be known until it is over, but Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James G. Enright has guessed it will be “in the millions and millions of dollars.”

The district attorney’s office has hired seven new people--lawyers, investigators and clerks--because of the Kraft case.

And the defense, paid by the county, “is spending enormous amounts of money on this case,” said Judge Cardenas, who has ordered all defense costs sealed until after the trial. “I have no doubt that it’s going to be the most expensive trial ever held in this state--and that includes some of the more notorious cases in Los Angeles County.”

Kraft, gaunt after five years of living at the Orange County Jail, claims he is innocent of all the murders.

“I don’t belong here,” Kraft said during a jail-house interview a few months after his arrest.

An honors student at Westminster High School in the early 1960s, Kraft was a self-employed computer consultant who worked out of his Roswell Avenue home in Long Beach.

To those who knew him, his life was filled with his work, long walks with his dog, and small dinners with his roommate and their friends in the gay community. Kraft’s attorneys made sure that jurors became aware during the selection process that their client is gay.

Since his arrest, little public attention has focused on Kraft’s life style or the evidence against him. The primary issue has been the numerous delays in bringing him to trial.

Kraft’s attorneys claim that more than a dozen delays were necessary for them to fully investigate, and prepare a defense against, all 37 murders.

“The prosecutors in this case knew it would take years and years to get to trial if they did not keep the case down to a reasonable, manageable number of murders,” said Kraft attorney C. Thomas McDonald. “But that was their decision, and, frankly, I think the public is wondering now why they did it.”

But Orange County Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks in the past had a blunt answer: “It is not the prosecutor who decides how many murders are in a case; it’s the defendant.”

Whether the Kraft case is the biggest in California becomes a technical issue. Other defendants have stood trial on more murder charges.

Juan Corona has been convicted of killing 25 itinerant farm workers near Yuba City in 1971. Patrick Wayne Kearney was convicted of 21 murders throughout Southern California in the 1970s. Both are serving life sentences.

But the Kraft case goes even beyond those. Prosecutors and defense attorneys say the 21 murders in the penalty phase are just as important to the case as the 16 murders in the charges. If the trial reaches a penalty phase, prosecutor Brown is expected to put on considerable evidence on each of those murders.

In many ways, the Kraft case is unprecedented in Orange County. For example:

- The Kraft case already has been to the 4th District Court of Appeal six times and the state Supreme Court twice before a single day of testimony in front of a jury.

- More than 10,000 pieces of evidence have been sifted through and categorized by each side. Documents in the case so far add up to more than 100,000 pages.

- Nearly 12,000 extra prospective jurors were summoned in July, to be on call if needed for the Kraft case.

- It took six months just to conduct the hearing on whether the evidence was gathered under proper search warrants. That’s longer than most murder trials in the county. Usually, those hearings take a few days in murder cases.

The case has gone on so long, Cardenas said last week, that Kraft’s three attorneys, asked for a cost-of-living increase for their “paralegals and others,” which Cardenas rejected. The attorneys, McDonald, James G. Merwin and William J. Kopeny, asked for $125 an hour. Cardenas agreed to $90 for in-court time.

“No murder defendant in this county has ever received finer legal representation than Mr. Kraft,” Cardenas said. “And if he is convicted, I can assure you it will definitely not be because his defense was not properly financed.”

Kraft attorney McDonald says the defense is ready for trial. If the number of men Kraft is accused of killing intimidates McDonald, he doesn’t show it.

“Randy is innocent, and we hope to show that to a jury,” McDonald has said repeatedly.

Yet Kraft’s attorneys go into testimony this week contending that the odds have been stacked against them by McCartin, the trial judge.

McCartin turned down the defense’s most crucial pretrial motion: a request that the case be divided into several trials. They claim jurors will be too awed by the sheer number of 16 murders to carefully evaluate the evidence.

“Each one of these murders, taken separately, is defensible,” McDonald said last week. “But it would take a superhuman effort for any juror not to be influenced by seeing that many murder charges against Randy.”

McDonald said that because the system is “skewed” against the defense, the trial will be “an uphill battle all the way.”

While Kraft’s attorneys have willingly discussed problems involved in bringing the case to trial, they have refused to give any details of their strategy.

Pictures of Victims How does Kraft explain what prosecutors claim is his list of his own victims? How does he explain having pictures of several of the victims, who are mostly nude and possibly dead in the photos? And why did he have in his Long Beach home and garage numerous items--clothing, sketch pads and a camera--belonging to several of the 37 men?

One question that fascinates most law-enforcement authorities involved in the case: How does Kraft explain having a dead Marine in his car at the time of his arrest?

CHP officers Sterling and Howard saw the Marine in the front passenger seat when they first stopped Kraft. But they assumed the man was only asleep.

The officers testified at pretrial hearings that Kraft told them the man was a hitchhiker he had picked up. It was not until after Kraft was handcuffed (Sterling said he failed a series of sobriety tests) that Howard tried to rouse the Marine.

Both officers have since testified that the Marine, identified as 25-year-old Terry Lee Gambrel, was already dead. He had been strangled with his own belt, his hands tied with one of his own shoelaces, prosecutors contend.

The senior homicide investigator for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, James A. Sidebotham, was called out of his bed at home within an hour after the arrest.

Because Gambrel was a Marine, and several murders of Marines in the county in recent years were still under investigation, Sidebotham said, “I was keeping an open mind” about the significance of Kraft’s arrest.

By morning, however, Sidebotham and other investigators told prosecutors they had linked Kraft to at least four other murders through photographs found in his car. By the end of the week, the investigation had spread to Oregon, where Kraft is accused of six murders, and Michigan, where he is under indictment for two more.

Howard, a sergeant at the time, is now a lieutenant. Sterling is on medical leave with a back problem. Their first testimony was exactly five years ago this week.

Brown acknowledges that he has long been eager for the trial to begin. He has been the prosecutor on the Kraft case from the morning of Kraft’s arrest. McDonald says Kraft is happy to get the case rolling, too.

“Randy has been ready from Day One,” McDonald said. “He has been waiting a long time for his side to be presented.”

Waiting for Testimony

One man is so eager to hear the testimony he has saved all his vacation time for the trial.

He is Rodger DeVaul Sr. of Westminster. His only son, Rodger Jr., 20, disappeared with a friend, Geoffrey Alan Nelson, on Feb. 12, 1983. Nelson’s body was found a few hours later; Rodger DeVaul Jr.’s body was found the next day.

Pictures of DeVaul’s son, wearing a jacket he had worn for the first time on the night he disappeared, were found in Kraft’s possession. Both Nelson and DeVaul are included in the 16 murder charges against Kraft.

DeVaul, more than any other parent involved in the case, loyally attended almost every pretrial hearing the first 3 1/2 years. Since then he has stayed away, partly out of disgust over the numerous delays.

But Monday, he will be there for the opening statements and first testimony.

DeVaul said that when he runs out of vacation time, he will go on unpaid leave if necessary, to be next to his wife and their two grown daughters at the trial.

“I know Monday is going to be emotional,” DeVaul said last week. “But I still don’t know how it’s going to hit me. All I know is I have to be there.”

KEY PLAYERS IN THE KRAFT CASE

The Trial Judge:

Donald A. McCartin

Superior Court Judge Appointed to the case in February when Judge James K. Turner bacame ill.

The Defense:

William J. Kopeny Former deputy public defender, presented the pretiral motions for Kraft’s defense. C. Thomas McDonald

Attorney

Former chief deputy public defender, now co-counsel for Kraft at trial. James G. Merwin, Attorney

The Prosecution Bryan F. Brown Deputy District Attorney Former California Prosecutor of the Year, in charge of the Kraft case since the arrest. Thomas M. Goethals Deputy District Attorney Veteran homicide prosecutor, now in charge of motions in Kraft case.