Defendant’s Possible Testimony May Be Key Point in ‘Score Card’ Killings Trial

The prosecution calls Randy Steven Kraft a “score card killer,” a fiendish freeway roamer who murdered young male hitchhikers and added their names, handwritten in a type of code, to a list he kept on a yellow pad in the trunk of his car.

After 10 weeks of testimony by defense witnesses, the focus of Kraft’s Orange County Superior Court trial will finally turn to the defendant himself today.

After six years of being depicted as one of the worst serial killers in the nation’s history, will the gaunt, 44-year-old Long Beach computer consultant finally tell his own story in front of a jury?

Kraft’s lawyers know there is much left that needs to be explained.

“Of course there are things the jurors are wondering about,” said defense attorney C. Thomas McDonald. But whether to put him on the witness stand, the lawyer said, is “a difficult dilemma.”

Kraft was arrested May 14, 1983, after two California Highway Patrol officers stopped Kraft’s car, which was moving erratically, on the San Diego Freeway in Mission Viejo and found 25-year-old Marine Terry Lee Gambrel strangled in the front passenger seat. The victim was partly disrobed. The width of his belt, which was found in the back seat, matched the size of the red mark around his neck.

Kraft took a series of field sobriety tests without telling the officers anything, except that his passenger was a hitchhiker.

Since then Kraft has been formally charged with 16 Orange County murders. If he is convicted, prosecutors at his death penalty hearing may bring up as many as 29 others--including six deaths in Oregon and two in Michigan. No one else in the state’s history has ever been accused of so many serial killings.

Despite the number of murders involved, the trial has generated little media interest outside of Orange County.

In September, when the prosecution began its case, more than two dozen representatives of major newspapers, wire services, television and radio stations were on hand. But since then, coverage has dwindled to a trickle. On most days, the courtroom is more than 75% empty. Apparently, the public has found much of the testimony too gory or technical.

Part of the reason for the lack of interest may be that the victims’ deaths created no particular community stir. The killings were spread out over an 11-year period. Most of the victims were either Marines or transients. Their deaths gained significant media attention only in their hometowns, scattered throughout the country.

But media interest has picked up since Kraft’s attorneys announced that he would take the stand if the court would limit cross-examination. Judge Donald A. McCartin did not give the defense lawyers the assurances they had sought about cross-examination, which they have said might make them keep Kraft off the stand.

Scoring Some Points

Kraft attorney McDonald, saying “we’re scoring some real points in the courtroom,” has complained that the press has not focused enough on the strengths of his case.

One week McDonald proved through extensive research from a former Firestone Co. tire expert that a tire track across the shorts of one victim as he lay dead on a roadway could not have been made by Kraft’s car. In several of the 16 deaths, McDonald has put on witnesses--many of them from throughout the country--in an attempt to show that other parties were once suspects in their deaths, or that the police should have pursued other leads more strongly.

But the judge would not let defense lawyers present many of their theories to the jury. One was a defense suggestion that Freeway Killer William Bonin, who has been sentenced to death twice for a series of murders in Los Angeles and Orange counties, may have been responsible for several murders attributed to Kraft.

“Gentlemen, this is not even a close call,” McCartin once told the defense lawyers as they sought to introduce evidence about Bonin.

Kraft’s lawyers also recognize that their big problem may lie not with their own case, but with the impact from some of Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown’s evidence.

Even McCartin has said from the bench that he has never seen a case with such overwhelming circumstantial evidence.

“Nobody can explain how Terry Gambrel got in that car except Kraft himself,” said one law enforcement official.

Evidence in Pictures

Other evidence includes pictures of three of the victims found in Kraft’s car or house. Many of the pictures show the victims in lewd poses. Prosecutor Brown contends they were already dead, or in the throes of death, when the pictures were taken.

Was it coincidence that Kraft happened to have pictures of young men whose bodies were found dumped along freeways or roadways? If Kraft testified, could he explain those pictures?

Brown claims the 16 murders are linked together by their circumstances. Many victims were found with drugs in their system which matched drugs found in Kraft’s car. Many, including Gambrel, had their wrists bound with shoelaces. Many were sexually mutilated in ways similar to one victim linked indirectly to Kraft through the pictures found in the car. And all had one thing in common: The last time they were seen alive, they were known to be without transportation.

McDonald and James G. Merwin, another defense lawyer, believe they can successfully puncture holes in Brown’s theory that the deaths are linked through a web of evidence. But they almost wince at questions about Gambrel, or the pictures.

“I’m no dummy; I know that the pictures hurt,” McDonald said.

However, says McDonald, the pictures alone do not prove murder. And he worries about what he calls the “blending effect”--that the evidence involving a few victims might persuade jurors about Kraft’s guilt in all 16 cases.

Impact on Jurors

“That’s what’s so unfair about Randy having to face so many murders in one trial,” said Merwin, who had led the defense’s unsuccessful fight for separate trials on all the counts. “How can the jurors carefully weigh the evidence in each of these murders? Pretty soon it has to become just a blur to them.”

Sometimes the defense’s problems have been multiplied by their own witnesses. For example, in order to provide a partial alibi for Kraft in one murder, they had to place him at a bridge party just a few miles from where two victims were last seen alive. And the party ended just an hour or so before their disappearance.

In another death, the defense placed Kraft at work in Torrance on the night one victim, a Marine, was last seen leaving a girlfriend’s house in Carson. While the defense could document that Kraft was still at work at the time the victim reportedly left his girlfriend’s house, prosecutor Brown showed jurors how Kraft would probably have driven through Carson on his way home to Long Beach shortly after that.

The defense has gone to considerable lengths to present friends and work associates of Kraft who like him and admire his work in the computer field. But jurors have also seen large-screen color blow-ups of mutilated bodies found on roadways as Brown has presented his case.

“This jury has had to be subjected to some of the most graphic, reprehensible types of evidence a human can come across,” Brown told the court at one hearing last week.

‘Assertive Defense’

Now the defense lawyers say they want to put on “an assertive defense” by having Kraft take the witness stand. Their dilemma is this:

Kraft’s lawyers want him to testify about five of the 16 murders. But on 11 of them, they want him to stand by his constitutional right not to testify.

Last week, Judge McCartin refused the give the defense any guarantees. If Kraft testifies to some murders where circumstances can link them to the other 11, that could open the door for wide-ranging cross-examination by Brown, the judge warned.

The judge’s decision was a blow to the defense. But did it rule out Kraft’s testifying altogether? There is widespread disagreement among law enforcement officials.

“He has to testify; he has to explain the Marine in the car,” one official said. But another countered: “He can’t testify. He can’t let Brown ask him about the death list.”

The defense does not dispute that Kraft wrote the list--which has 61 entries. But his lawyers claim it is meaningless. Kraft himself, in an interview five years ago, said it was a coded list of friends of his and his roommate at the time, Jeff Selig.

Brown contends the entries on the list are compelling proof that it is Kraft’s own score card of his victims. The notation “Jail Out,” Brown claims, stands for a victim killed shortly after he was released from the Orange County Jail. “New Year’s Eve,” he claims, stands for a victim last seen at a New Year’s Eve party in San Juan Capistrano. “MC HB Tattoo,” he claims, stands for a Marine Corps private with heavily tattooed arms, last seen in Huntington Beach. His pictures were found in Kraft’s car.

The only person who knows for certain what each of the 61 notations on the list stands for is Kraft himself.