Woman Who Aided ‘Sunset Strip Slayer’ Dies in Prison at 61

The accomplice and girlfriend of a serial killer known as the “Sunset Strip Slayer” has died in prison, where she was serving a term of 52 years to life for two Los Angeles murders, corrections officials said Tuesday.

Carol Bundy, whose crime partner is on death row in San Quentin State Prison for killing six young women in 1980, died at 11:20 a.m. at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton said.

Bundy, 61, had been admitted to a hospital Dec. 3 and died of heart failure. She had been in and out of the hospital for five months, suffering from heart and respiratory problems, as well as diabetes, officials said.

A former vocational nurse, Bundy was the girlfriend of Douglas Daniel Clark, whose gruesome murders of women ranging in age from 15 to 24 included one in which he decapitated his victim and kept her head in his refrigerator.

Clark, a factory worker from Burbank, cruised the streets of Hollywood looking for prostitutes and runaways to pick up and kill. Testimony at his widely covered 1983 trial showed that Clark had an obsessive interest in necrophilia and had sex with some of his victims’ corpses before dumping them in the San Fernando Valley.

Sometimes, Bundy accompanied him on his murderous forays. She told police she had been “overwhelmed” by his dominance and charm and had fallen in love with him.

But ultimately, she turned Clark in, telling authorities that “a situation that started out as a fantasy ... just got badly out of control.”

In 1983, Bundy pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.

In one instance, she gave Clark a gun to kill a prostitute identified only as Jane Doe. Bundy also admitted murdering her onetime lover, Jack Murray, to keep him from going to police after she told him of Clark’s activities.