LITMIR.BIZ

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serial killers.

      In his cell in San Quentin, Randy Kraft enjoys watching Desperate Housewives and listening to music, especially to Elton John, The Carpenters and Stevie Wonder. He hasn’t had the chance to do it for quite a while but he used to enjoy being on the beach with friends too, roasting hot dogs as the sun went down beyond the Pacific Ocean.

      Now he spends his time playing bridge, working out, reading and writing and would describe himself as a giving and sharing person. You can write to him if you like, as Randy is looking for a pen-friend, or maybe you might like to send him a book, or even a CD. They are quite difficult to get hold of on Death Row.

      He has been there since 30 November 1989 after he was charged and convicted of 16 counts of murder and sentenced to death. Kraft fiercely defends his innocence to this day. But, when he was pulled over for suspected drink driving on 14 May 1983, police found a dead marine slumped in the front seat of his car. They also found 47 pictures of naked men (many of whom were dead) under the car mat, blood on the cushion in the front seat and in the boot of his car a coded piece of paper listing all his kills.

      At his home, which he shared with his lover Jeff Seelig, police also found a whole stash of souvenirs that could be directly traced to many of his victims and more photos of dead men, some of them taken in Kraft’s own living room. It turned out that he had been driving around California with corpses for almost 12 years.

      At the time of his arrest, Kraft was a successful computer programmer with a well-paying job in the corporate computer services department at Lear Seigler. At his trial, co-workers described him as ‘pleasant’, ‘reserved’ and ‘friendly’. Friends and family recalled how attentive he was to their problems – his niece described him as a shoulder to cry on – while others remembered shared holidays and pleasant evening meals with Kraft and his boyfriend in their home. The general consensus was one of utter disbelief that the affable, gentle Kraft, a successful employee dedicated to his work, could also be one of America’s most sadistic serial killers.

      But that’s exactly what he was. From 1971 to May 1983, Kraft roamed the streets in his car, picked up hitchhikers and men in gay bars, drugged them, raped them, strangled them with their own shoelaces or belts and then mutilated their dead bodies. In many instances, he sliced off their genitals or spent the night dismembering the bodies entirely.

      When he was finished with the bodies, Kraft left them in different cities and counties in the state by dumping them from a moving car along California’s labyrinthine highway system. Matters were made worse by the fact that Californian police were also contending with two other suspected ‘freeway killers’ operating in the same area and at the same time. Deranged Vietnam vet William Bonin was busy raping young boys, strangling them or caving in their skulls with a tyre iron and leaving their bodies at the side of the road. Also active at this time was Patrick Kearney, who shot his victims in the back of the head, engaged in sex with the corpses and then dismembered the bodies with a hacksaw. Once he had finished with the bodies he put the remains in bin bags and dumped them along the side of the Californian highways.

      Ken Goddard was chief criminalist and supervisor of the Scientific Investigation Bureau at the Huntington Beach Police Department at the time Kraft’s victims first started to show up. Later, he attended Kraft’s trial, appearing as an expert witness. He still has vivid memories of the murderer to this day. ‘I remember Kraft thumbing avidly through one of the photo “albums” we’d put together showing all of the located bodies or parts,’ he told me. ‘I was sitting on the witnesses’ stand at the time, waiting for court to resume, and I remember him suddenly looking up at me and the funny, oddly familiar look on his face. It took me a few minutes to realise where I’d seen that look before. It was when I was out on patrol with a San Bernardino Sheriff’s deputy driving around behind a 7/11 and happened upon a couple of young boys reading some kind of porno magazines. In retrospect, I’m sure that for him that album represented the ultimate in porn mags, especially given that the “scenes” were his own creation.’

      Goddard had learned much earlier in his CSI career to disconnect his emotions from the crime scenes. As such, he says the sight of the dead and maimed bodies were more of a frustration to him than a ‘horror’ because of the lack of any evidence that might have helped the authorities focus on a specific suspect. ‘Normally, during the CSI process, you tend to get a pretty vivid sense of what the victim went through by figuratively putting yourself “in the skins” of the victims and suspects as you work your way through the scene… But the lack of “place of attack” evidence with the Kraft bodies made it very difficult to imagine the sequence of events, other than the obvious fact that the victims were probably tortured in addition to being tied down and raped… but it got a lot worse in terms of the body parts, and a growing awareness of what the victims were going through.’

      The first ‘Kraft body’ was found in the middle of a back road in Huntington Beach. ‘When the patrol officers turned the body over, they discovered the crotch of his pants was bloody… and that his penis and gonads had been cut off with something sharp,’ Goddard revealed. ‘We examined the body carefully at the morgue for trace evidence, but only observed what appeared to be ligature bruises or handcuff bruises on the wrists… The only significant bit of evidence turned out to be the anal swabs taken by the pathologist and turned over to me for analysis.

      ‘The swabs screened positive for seminal fluids and I was able to locate intact sperm in the swabs. So we knew the killing was part of a sexual assault, but not much more than that. There were other bodies too. I remember being at a morgue and seeing severed body parts such as arms and legs that they were trying to match to torsos, all in varying states of decay.’

      It wasn’t hard for Kraft to sweet-talk men into his car. Unlike many serial killers, he did not suffer the usual nightmarish childhood of constant abuse and poverty, nor was he a hated misfit. Softly spoken and socially adept, he seemed to have got on well with just about everyone.

      Randy Kraft was born in Long Beach, California, the youngest of four children and the only boy. When he was three, his family moved to nearby Orange County; his father worked in the machine shop in nearby Douglas Aircraft and had built the family home on the cheap out of surplus supplies from a nearby military base. Sitting by the side of the highway, it still resembled a barracks with small rooms and it was impossible to see outside unless you stood right by the window and peered over the sill. The young Randy Kraft had to stand on a chair to see outside.

      Kraft did well at school and almost skipped a year because of his high grades. Although flat-footed, he also did well at sports, playing on the varsity tennis team and regularly going bowling with his father. He played the tenor sax, took part in debates and was liked by fellow students and teachers, many of whom were later called upon as character witnesses at his trial. The family weren’t rich but they weren’t poor either, and there was enough money for the occasional holiday and weekend outing.

      There was even enough to send Kraft to college. Again he did well and was elected president of a fraternity; among other tasks, he arranged fundraisers for charities. As the Vietnam War loomed, Kraft enlisted in the air force rather than getting drafted into the army, starting his training on 14 June 1968. He was sent to Texas, where he excelled again, becoming platoon leader and earning the American Spirit of Honor medal as an ‘outstanding example to comrades in arms’.

      But his auspicious military beginnings had a rather muted end. The air force saw Kraft as someone who was not likely to make a career in the military, due to his education and high IQ, and decided that the extra money used to train him would be wasted. As a result, he wound up as a painter, painting crossroads and on base barracks near his home and back in Orange County.

      Kraft had a degree in economics, but, instead of pursuing a steady and lucrative career after leaving the military, he chose to work as a bartender in a succession of gay bars in California. At night he would head mostly to Ripples, previously known as Slithery House, or he spent night after night driving in his Toyota Celica looking for kicks along the Californian highways. Later, when he left the state for his work as a computer programmer, the body count in his new locality inevitably rose. During his trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Kraft had committed

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