He looked into the eyes of a one of the worst serial killers, and saw nothing. An interview with retried homicde Det. Dan Salcedo

Retired Homicide Detective Dan Salcedo talked to Behind the Badge about meeting Kraft and other cases in his career as homicide detective. 

The frail old man shuffled into the interview room. Shackled by the arms and legs he was escorted into the cell off the interview room. He was small, shrunken, much less than his listed 5-foot-10, 170 pounds. Gone was the hair, the 1980s mustache, and any trace of the smirk he occasionally flashed in court decades earlier.“It’s weird, when you look at him there’s nothing memorable,” said Dan Salcedo, a retired homicide detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who interviewed the notorious Randy Kraft in 2012. “He’s not the prototypical media version of what a killer looks like. If you put him in a room filled with people, he’s the last one you’d pick.”Monsters are rarely what you expect and this guy was a definition of the “banality of evil” description that has been applied to some of the worst serial killers and rapists in U.S. history. Banal, boring, and unoriginal, hardly the stuff of nightmares.


Randy Kraft was known as the Scorecard Killer. He committed the rape, torture, and murder of a minimum of sixteen young men between 1972 and 1983, the majority of whom he killed in California. Kraft is also believed to have committed the rape and murder of up to fifty-one other young men and boys.