‘I Like to Drink and Drive’ : Jury to Hear Kraft’s Account of Fatal Night

More than 13 years ago, Randy Steven Kraft sat in an office at the Long Beach Police Department describing the night he “really got into one of my driving fits” and went drinking, driving and carousing with two men he picked up.

“I like to drink and drive,” he told them.

But 2 weeks before that interview, the severed head of one of those men, 19-year-old Keith Daven Crotwell, had been found wedged between the rocks of a Long Beach jetty. How it got there, Kraft said, he didn’t know. Though police were convinced that Kraft had killed him, Kraft was never charged.

The transcript of that taped conversation only recently was made public and represents Kraft’s first account, in his own words, of what happened that night. His explanation will be introduced as evidence this week in what prosecutors call the biggest serial murder case in California’s history.

Kraft, 43, stands charged in Superior Court in Santa Ana with murdering not only Crotwell but 15 other young men. This week the jury will hear evidence in the death of Crotwell, evidence that prosecutors consider critical. It proves, they say, that Kraft liked to roam the freeways of Southern California with his victims, alcohol and drugs. Most of the victims were found with a combination of drugs and alcohol in their systems, and most of the bodies were dumped near freeways.

In the early morning hours of March 30, 1975, Kraft told police, he drove away from the Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool parking lot in Long Beach toward Orange County with young Crotwell. “We were just carousing and drinking and having fun. I told him I’d let him have his turn at the wheel . . . I mean, you know, sometimes I’m too generous, you know. But when you trust the dude, you know.”

Crotwell was never seen alive again. His friends combed the beachfront neighborhoods in Long Beach searching for the car they had seen Crotwell get into. One of them found it in front of Kraft’s apartment at Ocean Boulevard and Gaviota Street in Long Beach.

According to Crotwell’s friends, Kraft approached Crotwell and Kent May in the parking lot near the pool and asked them if they wanted to get high and go for a drive in his Mustang. May, who was 15 at the time, has since testified that he and Crotwell agreed after Kraft assured them that he was not gay.

“There were three of us, and I don’t like to draw attention to myself out in the parking lot. Like I said, I like to drink and drive,” Kraft told police.

Kraft said they drove around the Belmont Heights area.

“I think I just drove around, you know; turn here, there, whatever, you know. Whatever popped into my head.”

Kraft said May asked to return to the parking lot. “Perhaps he (May) just got tired of it, I don’t know. The guy (May), you know, he asked his buddy if he wanted to leave, you know. The other guy said no, he didn’t, you know. He’d just stay. So (Crotwell) and I took off, and went driving around some more, and this time really got into one of my driving fits.”

According to the transcript of the police interview, Kraft did not recall May and Crotwell by name but remembered the incident. May also testified that he passed out from the drugs Kraft gave him and that Crotwell had taken even more than he did. One of the friends told police that he saw the Mustang return to the parking lot after 3 a.m. and that the driver shoved May out and then drove off with Crotwell.

Kraft said he and Crotwell drove the San Diego Freeway to Orange County, where Crotwell took the wheel somewhere near what is now John Wayne Airport. Kraft said Crotwell exited at El Toro Road and then drove off onto a dirt road.

“I think I probably said something like, you know, enough is enough, you know, let’s get back on the road.”

Kraft said the car got stuck when they “high-centered” on an embankment when they turned to go back. He walked down the road toward “civilization” to get help, he said, and when he came back Crotwell was gone.

“I went back and like I said, the guy (Crotwell) was gone. . . . So I walked around looking, you know, looking for, you know, I didn’t see him anywhere. We were pretty drunk so, you know, it crossed my mind he may have passed out or, you know.”

One of the detectives asked Kraft if he had killed Crotwell.

Kraft: (Laughs) “No.”

“Did you in any way help dispose of his body?”

“No.”

“Do you know where he died?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea, anything that you two did together that night that may have resulted in his death?”

“I don’t think so.”

The Kraft interview occurred shortly after Crotwell’s skull was found wedged among the rocks of the 72nd Place Jetty in Long Beach on May 8, 1975.

Sources have said the Long Beach police urged prosecutors at the time to let them arrest Kraft on suspicion of murder. But officials of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said the evidence was insufficient.

Skeletal remains later identified as those of Crotwell were found in Laguna Hills on Oct. 19, 1975. If the Long Beach police heard about it, they never connected it to the skull found along the jetty. The Kraft investigation had died out by this time, and even the tape of his conversation with police was lost for a while.

One reason Crotwell is a key case to prosecutors is that the notation “Parking Lot” was on a list found in the trunk of Kraft’s car. Prosecutors say the list is Kraft’s own, handwritten score card of the people he killed. “Parking Lot,” they claim, stands for Crotwell.

Kraft attorney William J. Kopeny has called the list “speculative, hypothetical reasoning . . . the most dangerous type of reasoning upon which to predicate a capital prosecution.”

In a motion for dismissal denied by the court, Kopeny also argued that the prosecution hadn’t proved that Kraft was lying when he said Crotwell simply disappeared that night.