Dennis McDougal - Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree

Copyright 1991 by Dennis McDougal

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.,

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: May 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-56248-5

For Sharon and Amy,
the two most important women in my life

Though novelized to the extent that anecdotes and remembrances were incorporated into the text in chronological order, this story about the reign of terror, capture, and conviction of Americas worst serial killer remains as faithful as possible to the public record. Some scenes are reconstructed and a few names have been changed to preserve confidentiality, but the people, places, and events chronicled here are real. In most instances, actual quotes and first person accounts are taken directly from court transcripts, police reports, and public documents. Letters, newspaper accounts, and trial exhibitsincluding a pair of family photo and souvenir albums prepared by the defensethat are a permanent part of the nineteen-volume court record of the trial of Randy Kraft became the backbone of Angel of Darkness. In addition, dozens of interviews with friends, acquaintances, victims, neighbors, police officers, journalists, and attorneys were conducted in the course of researching Randy Krafts story. With the exception of a handful of letters exchanged with the author while Kraft was living on San Quentins Death Row, Kraft has maintained a total public silence since his conviction in 1989 on sixteen counts of the sixty-seven murders he is believed to have committed over a twelve-year period.

Kristi Heim is not only a fine researcher; she is a fine reporter who sat through months of trial, pored over mounds of documents, taped hours of interviews and testimony, and compiled hundreds of pages of notes in order to deliver the correct quote or the telling fact. Without her, there would be no book. Likewise, the photojournalists eye of Leo Hetzel, in and out of the courtroom, captured ideas as well as images. He is an artist who simply uses a camera instead of easel, paint, and brushes. Patient and encouraging, Rich Horgan is that rare editor with vision who cares equally for the writer and the reader. Alice Martell says she is my agent. She is not. A yenta, a yuppie, a guru, and a friend, perhaps, but not an agent. Agent is much too businesslike a term for an expectant mother who wants to know when the next chapter of the book will be in the mail while her labor pains are ten minutes apart. Likewise, Sharon McDougal is not just my wife, she is my best friend and my first line editor who kicks out the awful stuff before anyone in a position to have me fired ever gets a chance to see it. She keeps me going when nobody else can or will. Carl and Lola McDougal, my parents, are my first and still my most venerable fans. Likewise my sister, Colleen, encouraged me through tough times, and my brothers, Pat and Neal, have always been one phone call away. Thanks also to my editors and peers at the Los Angeles Times who sustained me and tolerated my time away from the paper, especially Bob Epstein, Lee Margulies, John Lindsay, Barbara Saltzman, and SCIII. Special thanks to Irv Letofsky who will always be, quite simply, the best editor I have ever worked for in my life. The courthouse reporters in Orange County and Los Angeles work hard, get it right, and are rarely shown the appreciation they deserve for keeping the public informed. I thank them all: Jerry Hicks of the Los Angeles Times; Larry Welborn, Patrick Kiger, and Greg Zoroya of the Orange County Register; Helen Guthrie Smith, Molly Burrell, Bob Zeller, Mary Neiswender, and Kristi Heim of the Long Beach Press-Telegram; Dave Lopez of KCBS-TV. Special thanks to Deborah Caulfield, Lorraine Hillman, Lloyd Thomas, Katie Sauceda, Wayne Rosso, Ray Richmond, Mark Gladstone, Bill Knoedelseder, Brian Zoccola, Dorothy Korber, Pat Broeske, Diane Goldner, the men and women of the Los Angeles Times Editorial Library, and Bill Cooks unsung staff in the basement of the Orange County Courthouse who went the extra mile in helping me in my research. To all those in law enforcement and both the prosecution and defense who gave of their time and resources in Orange County, Los Angeles, and Oregon to help me reconstruct the story of the worst and most baffling serial killer of our times, my thanks and gratitude. Their contributions, as well as the anonymous help given by former friends and acquaintances of Randy Kraft, were invaluable. Finally, thanks to those among Krafts scores of living victimsthe parents, sweethearts, siblings, and friends who were forced to bury a loved one years before his timewho swallowed their pain long enough to cooperate in the creation of this book. Hopefully, their candor may help prevent other sons, brothers, or husbands from trusting to demons in their haste to thumb a ride to the end of the road.

Looking down on southern California from above, the strands of freeway seem to pump from the heart of Los Angeles like contorted veins that twist and knot and stretch out to Santa Barbara in the north, San Bernardino in the east, and as far south as the Mexican border. Only to the west are the freeways missing, sutured off at the coastline so that automobiles dont spill into the brooding Pacific Ocean like so much lost blood.

At daybreak, the freeways brim with slow-moving vehicles, clotting into traffic jams from one end of the megalopolis to the other. At night, the strands glow red and white with the head- and taillights of a million cars oozing homeward.

The rest of the time the freeway system is an open roadan invitation to move unfettered through this dense, smoggy wonderland of subdivision after subdivision, as far as the eye can see.

Freeways define southern California and the premium that its residents place on mobility. For the price of an automobile and a drivers license, anybody can move from one neighborhood to the next in a matter of minutes. Those who cant afford a car or license can always stick out a thumb and hitchhike downtown, to the mall or the beach. If they dont mind who theyre riding with.

Strange things happen on southern California freeways. Things that happen elsewhere while people are usually stationary. People make love while theyre on the freeway. They cook, brush their teeth, do and re-do their mascara, dress and undress. Men shave. Women have babies at seventy miles per hour. Incantations and aerobics, fisticuffs and fellatio, midwifery and mayhem

Theyve all happened in the fast lane at one time or another on the matrix of cement thoroughfares that crisscross Los Angeles and environs and, usually, nobody pays much attention, until it involves murder.

During the 1970s and early 1980s, more than a hundred young hitchhikers caught rides on the streets and freeways of southern California and didnt live to tell about it. Some of them became nameless bodies, forever to be known as John Doe 16 or 229. Some have names but no bodies, their human remains never having been found. Some became headless torsos or disembodied heads, or worsethe living cadavers of amateur sado-surgeons who used liquor as anesthesia, fishing knives as scalpels, and ice picks for probes. Sometimes their body parts were stuffed in black plastic trash bags and left in the desert to rot. Sometimes they were tossed in restaurant garbage bins. Most of the time they were simply pitched from a moving car or van like empty Coke cans or used hamburger wrappers.

Law enforcement has always known that there are predators who troll the freeway onramps and beach highways for hitchhikers. The hunters range in perversity from harmless to heinous. Occasionally theyre just looking for money. Usually they are interested in quick, impersonal sex. And, sometimes, they want more.