Kraft Defense Asks Jury Not to Confuse Suspicion and Proof

Attorneys for Randy Steven Kraft told the jury Wednesday that they had a right to be suspicious of Kraft’s involvement in several of the 16 murders he is charged with committing. But they urged jurors not to confuse suspicion with proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

“If you put up enough different charges, you could come up with a scenario that could convict a Pope,” Kraft attorney James G. Merwin warned them.

The defense has so far spent 1 1/2 days on closing arguments at Kraft’s trial in Santa Ana, which is now in its ninth month. Some legal experts predict that it will be the most expensive criminal proceeding in the state’s history.

The defense is scheduled to complete closing arguments this morning, and will be followed by rebuttal arguments from the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bryan F. Brown. Lengthy jury instructions must be given, however, before jurors can begin deliberations.

Besides the 16 murders he is being tried for, Kraft, 44, a computer consultant from Long Beach, is accused by prosecutors of 29 other murders in three states. All the victims were young men, mostly between the ages of 18 and 25, whose sexually abused bodies often were found dumped by a freeway.

The trial had been delayed for nearly 5 years while the Kraft lawyers pleaded with the courts for more time to put together a defense against so many murder charges.

Kraft was arrested on May 14, 1983, when two California Highway Patrol officers who stopped him for a traffic violation in Mission Viejo found Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine, dead in the front passenger seat of his car.

The defense recognizes the compelling evidence against Kraft in the Gambrel death. But Kraft attorney C. Thomas McDonald pleaded with jurors not to convict him on all 16 deaths just because of Gambrel.

“It would be easy to look at Gambrel and say, well he must have killed all 16,” McDonald said Wednesday. He urged the jurors to judge each of the murders in the charges individually.

Kraft alternated between watching his attorneys intently and taking notes in his lavender-colored note pad. Two of his sisters and other Kraft family members sat in a group directly behind him. Some of them nodded approval when McDonald told jurors that the evidence showed Kraft to be a hard worker who was admired by co-workers and who had never been known to commit a violent act.

McDonald cited the weekend of Feb. 12 and 13, 1983, when Geoffrey Alan Nelson, 18, and Rodger James DeVaul, 20, were killed. They had last been seen walking together near Cypress College. When their bodies were found, Nelson had been emasculated and DeVaul had been sodomized.

Those two deaths are among the prosecution’s stronger cases, because photographs of DeVaul, with a ligature mark on his neck and one of his wrists bound, were found in Kraft’s house.