Jury Hears Tape of Kraft Discussing Being With Man Who Disappeared

Despite defense objections, jurors in the Randy Steven Kraft murder trial listened Thursday to a taped interview between Kraft and police concerning the death of a 19-year-old Long Beach man he reportedly was with the night the young man disappeared.

Kraft was interviewed by police a few days after the skull of Keith Daven Crotwell was found near the 72nd Place Jetty in Long Beach on May 8, 1975. While the police suspected Kraft was involved in Crotwell’s death, he was not arrested.

Kraft, 43, is on trial in Santa Ana, charged with 16 Orange County murders, including Crotwell’s. Kraft was arrested May 14, 1983, when a dead Marine, 25-year-old Terry Lee Gambrel, was found in his car alongside Interstate 5 in Mission Viejo. Except for Gambrel, Crotwell is the only of the victims linked to Kraft by eyewitnesses at the time of their disappearance.

In the taped interview, Kraft did not acknowledge Crotwell by name, but he did admit to police that he drove around with two young men he picked up at the Belmont Plaza parking lot in Long Beach on March 30, 1975. He also told police that he had dropped off one of them and then drove off with the second man down the San Diego Freeway to south Orange County. Kraft said the car got stuck and he went for help. When he got back, he said, the other man was gone.

Prosecutor witness Kent May testified Wednesday that he and Crotwell were the two young men who were with Kraft that night. May said that Kraft gave them drugs and that he eventually passed out.

What the jurors also heard this week was that Crotwell’s friends came within seconds of sparing him from whatever fate he met that night, whether from Kraft or someone else.

Randy Ditmar told jurors that he, Crotwell, May and another friend, Randy Cooper, had been drinking in the parking lot that night. When he and Cooper got back home in Cooper’s pickup truck after 3 a.m., they decided that they should return to the beach area to see if they could find Crotwell and May. Ditmar said that just as they arrived in the parking lot, they saw Kraft push May out of the car, then go back around to the driver’s seat. Crotwell, appearing passed out, was slumped over in the front passenger’s seat, Ditmar said.

“We shouted and tried to stop (Kraft), but he took off,” Ditmar said.

Defense attorney C. Thomas McDonald objected that Kraft’s interview with police had not been voluntary because he was a suspect at the time and should have been read his rights. But Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin ordered the tape played for the jury.

Long Beach police investigators finally went on to other cases after getting no new leads over several months in the Crotwell investigation.

What they did not know was that on Oct. 19, 1975, Crotwell’s skeletal remains were found in Laguna Hills, within a mile of where Kraft said he had driven that night. But the remains were not identified as Crotwell’s until 8 years later, after Kraft’s arrest led investigators to re-examine them.

Long Beach investigators either never learned about the remains found in Orange County or never thought to try to connect them to the Crotwell skull found 5 months earlier.

The forensic anthropologist who identified the remains as Crotwell’s, Dr. Judy Suchey, is scheduled to be the prosecution’s first witness on Monday.