Robert Keller - Twice As Deadly Volume 1: 16 Serial Killer Teams and Couples

At around midday on Thursday, June 12, 1980, a Caltrans employee was cleaning up trash along the Ventura Freeway when he came across a nude body, lying face down among the brush on an embankment. The man staggered back, then started hurriedly down the slope to alert his supervisor. Hed taken only a few steps when he spotted a second corpse, this one fully clothed but with eyes staring blankly skyward. A bullet hole perforated the girls forehead and there was fresh blood on her face which seemed to indicate that she had not been there long.

When Investigators arrived on the scene, they quickly confirmed that assessment. It looked like the two teenaged girls had been killed elsewhere, then dumped on the steeply sloping embankment. Neither of the victims was carrying ID and detectives assumed that theyd been hitchhikers or runaways. Either way, theyd accepted the wrong ride.

The bodies went to the morgue while detectives began working the police departments missing persons reports, hoping to find a clue to the victims identity. As it turned out, a couple of teenagers, of similar description, had been reported missing. The next day Friday the 13th Angelo Marano of Huntington Beach, California arrived to view the bodies. Within minutes, his worst fears were confirmed. The dead girls were his 15-year-old daughter, Gina, and his stepdaughter, Cynthia Chandler, aged 16. He and his wife had spent a frantic couple of days searching for them.

Autopsies were conducted and indicated that the girls had been dead for approximately twelve hours when theyd been found. Each had been shot with a small caliber pistol - Gina, twice in the head, Cynthia in the head and chest. One of the girls had been sodomized, and there were indications that the bodies had been sexually tampered with, most likely after death.

Evidence in the case was scant, and the police were far from confident of catching the perpetrator. Then, on Saturday, June 14, a detective at the Van Nuys PD fielded a call from a distraught woman, who claimed to know the identity of the killer. He was her lover, she said, and the two teenagers were not his first victims. Pressed for details, the caller hung up, leaving the detective convinced that the call was a hoax. It wasnt.

Eleven days later, on June 23, two more bodies turned up, shot in similar fashion. The first was Karen Jones, a 24-year-old prostitute. Shed been shot in the head with a small-caliber weapon and dumped behind the Burbank studios. The second was a somewhat more gruesome find.

At around 7:15 a.m., the headless body of a woman was discovered behind the Sizzler restaurant in Studio City. The victim was identified as Exxie Wilson, a 20-year-old prostitute whod recently moved to L.A. from Little Rock, Arkansas. She was a friend of Karen Jones, the murder victim found earlier. A search of the area failed to turn up the missing head, and there were no clues as to the identity of the killer, either. The police, however, were convinced that the perpetrator was the same man whod killed Gina Marano and Cynthia Chandler.

In the early hours of June 27, a man named Jonathan Caravello was parking his car in the alley behind his apartment building, when he struck something lying on the ground. As he got out of the vehicle, he spotted an ornate wooden box. Thinking that he might have found something valuable, he lifted the object and unlatched the clasp. The box felt weighty and had an odd smell to it. Caravello flipped the lid and shifted aside the layer of crushed velvet that lined the top. Then he let out a gasp and dropped his find. It contained a human head. Caravello ran for his apartment to call the police.

The head was soon identified as that of Exxie Wilson, and there was evidence that it had been stored in a freezer and recently washed. The medical examiner removed a .25 caliber bullet from the skull, which was matched to the weapon that had killed Karen Jones, Gina Marano, and Cynthia Chandler. Less than a year after the capture of the notorious Hillside Stranglers it appeared that L.A. had another serial killer on the loose.

And a fifth victim was soon added to the body count. On June 30, a group of friends walking a ravine in the San Fernando Valley, found the mummified remains of a woman. She was between 17 and 25, about 57 with reddish-blond hair. She been shot three times with a small caliber pistol and had been out in the open for approximately three weeks. That would make her the first in the series if ballistics linked her to the other four murder victims. It did. Shed been killed with the same weapon.

An identification of the victim came soon after. She was seventeen-year-old Marnette Comer, a prostitute who had last been seen alive on June 1. Unfortunately for Marnette, shed gotten into a car with the wrong person.

Serial killers usually target a specific kind of victim male or female; black or white; straight or gay so the next murder was not initially linked to the Sunset Strip Slayer, as the press was now calling him.

Jack Murray was a building superintendent and sometime country singer who performed at a local tavern called Little Nashville. On August 9, police were called to Murrays van, which had been left standing unattended at the curb for five days. People were complaining about the foul smell emanating from the vehicle. Inside, a gruesome find awaited officers. Murrays body was headless and, after nearly a week locked in the van, in the midst of a heat wave, it was blistered, blackened, and badly decomposed. Still, police were able to tell that hed been stabbed several times and that chunks of flesh had been hacked from his buttocks.

Aside from the beheading, and shell casings found at the scene, there was nothing to suggest any connection to the Sunset Strip murders. But there was a link, and this would be provided on August 11 when a manager at the Valley Medical Center in Van Nuys called the police. One of their employees, she said, had just confessed to murder.

Police rushed to the scene and were told that Carol Bundy, an overweight, 37-year-old nurse, had broken down and admitted to them that she and a man named Douglas Clark had carried out the Sunset Strip slayings. However, Bundy had fled the premises before police could get there.