The State - News from Sept. 26, 1988

When California Highway Patrol officers stopped Randy Steven Kraft for a routine field sobriety test on the Santa Ana Freeway in 1983, the officers found a dead Marine in Kraft’s car. Kraft, 43, a Long Beach computer consultant, was eventually accused of the murders of 44 young men over an 11-year crime spree that spread to four Southland counties, Oregon and Michigan. More than five years after his arrest, testimony in Kraft’s trial on 16 murder charges will finally get under way today in the Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana. Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown, who is seeking a death verdict against Kraft, said he will add 21 other murders if Kraft is convicted and the trial moves into a penalty phase. 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.