Kraft Defense Goes High-Tech in Attack on Commonality of Slayings

With some high-technology visual aids, an attorney for Randy Steven Kraft argued to jurors Tuesday that there were too many discrepancies in the 16 slayings his client is charged with to think that one person committed them all.

The case against Kraft, said defense attorney C. Thomas McDonald, “is a painting by a very clever prosecutor, to make these acts appear as if they were done by a single perpetrator.”

Kraft, 44, is on trial in Santa Ana, accused by prosecutors of killing more people than anyone else in California history. While he is charged with the murders of 16 young men in Orange County, prosecutors have linked him to 45 specific victims in Southern California, Oregon and Michigan.

Beyond that, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown contends, each entry on a list found in Kraft’s car stands for one of Kraft’s victims. It has 61 entries, with five of them--”2 in 1 Hitch” and “GR2,” for example--representing double victims, prosecutors say.

2 Victims Mutilated

Brown completed his closing arguments Tuesday morning by suggesting that the fact that two victims had been burned on the eyeballs and nipples with cigarette lighters makes it unlikely they were killed by different people.

“You’ve got the person here in court,” Brown told the jurors. Brown, who began his closing argument Monday, finished shortly after noon Tuesday.

After the lunch break, the courtroom lighting was dimmed and a 67-inch, self-contained rear-screen projector was placed before the jury.

Then McDonald, with the help of computer expert David Parkin, flashed on the screen blue and white moving graphs and pie charts McDonald said were designed to show the numerous dissimilarities in the 16 deaths.

McDonald and co-counsel James G. Merwin are expected to take all day today to complete their closing arguments. Brown is then scheduled to present his rebuttal argument Thursday morning.

Judge Donald A. McCartin warned jurors that on Thursday afternoon, after he has given them their instructions, he will sequester them at a hotel to begin deliberations. The judge has announced he will also permit them to deliberate on Saturday, rarely done in Orange County criminal cases.

The judge left the bench to find a seat in the corner to watch the defense’s computer graphics display. McDonald presented 10 displays intended to show discrepancies among the victims: the types of drugs and varying alcohol levels found in their systems, the causes of death, their personal features, where their bodies were found and how many were Marines.

“The prosecution would have you believe that all these victims died of ligature strangulation,” McDonald said. But his color graphic showed that seven died of ligature strangulation and nine died of other causes.

In his rebuttal, however, Brown is expected to show that in the nine other cases, most of them had some signs of injury to the neck or face.

Parkin, who represents a legal graphics support service in Mission Viejo, declined to say how much Tuesday’s presentation cost because all defense costs, which come from public funds, are sealed by court order.

Sits Near Jury

Kraft, a computer expert himself, was permitted to leave his seat and move closer to the jury so he could watch the presentation.

The 16 deaths vividly displayed on the screen occurred between 1972 and Kraft’s arrest on May 14, 1983.

In the older cases, where prosecutors have no physical evidence directly linking Kraft to the victims, Brown is relying on their commonality with murders for which he does have physical evidence. For example, most of those victims were found with a shoelace missing. Brown contends Kraft drugged his victims, then tied their wrists with their own shoelaces. In murders where he does have stronger evidence, shoelaces are missing too.

But in his closing argument Tuesday, McDonald contended that there were so many other discrepancies that nothing clearly points to Kraft leaving his “signature” on these victims.