The Sickening Thoughts of Randy Kraft - True Crime Documentary

The Sickening Thoughts of Randy Kraft -  True Crime Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
As a homosexual killer of young men. Randy Craft is
virtually unparalleled in the number of people he murdered.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Randy Craft was probably one of the most sadistic serial
killers I've ever encountered.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
He is charged with the murder of sixteen men and
is believed to have murdered over sixty men in a
period between nineteen seventy one and nineteen eighty three. In
an area of California south of Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Wherever Randy went when he traveled for business, young gay
men died in horrific ways.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Psychological criminologist and former FBI agent doctor Brionna Fox is
examining the red flags in his descent.

Speaker 4 (00:45):
My work isn't just academic. I've been in the field
and seen serial killers in action. I've tried to apply
my experience to work out just how these seemingly normal
people become the monsters they turned out to be.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Were there signs that he would descend into a spree
of killings and could police have caught the man known
as the Scorecard Killer earlier and brought an end to
his bloody reign of terror.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
I'm doctor Brianna Fox, and this is the scent of
a serial killer.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
Doctor Brianna Fox is examining the extraordinary case of Randy Kraft,
who over a decade and killed many young men.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
Alongside my fellow experts, I will be identified and investigating
the red flags and crafts descent into murder. Randy Kraft
was born in Long Beach, California, in March nineteen forty five.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Brandy Kraft grew up in Long Beach, California, which is
quite a lovely area. There are beaches there. It's a
suburb of Los Angeles. It seemed that he had a
pretty good home.

Speaker 5 (02:25):
Dad had a good job. Mom did a lot of
work at the school. She was very involved in the PTA,
was always there, and Randy apparently was, you know, an
inquisitive kid by all indications.

Speaker 6 (02:40):
At age one, he was taken to the hospital with
a broken collarbone. Soon after that broken collarbone, he fell
down a flight of stairs, and then soon after that
incident he was reported to have had a head injury.
Of course, it's a very thin line because we're looking
at what is no normal childhood behavior. Kids fall all

(03:02):
over the place, and for the most part, they are
resilient and their bodies recover very quickly. They're learning to walk,
they're learning to navigate their environment. But we have to
look at a rubric of what might indicate that something
else is going on. That series of injuries in today's
world would definitely be seen as a red flag for

(03:25):
some kind of child abuse. We would want to send
out Department of Child and Family Services to investigate what's
going on the home.

Speaker 7 (03:33):
He was one of four children.

Speaker 5 (03:35):
He was the only boy, and apparently from all indications,
he was doted on by his mother and his three sisters.

Speaker 7 (03:42):
His father not so much.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
The father worked a lot, he wasn't really in tune
with his only son, and in fact, he actually preferred
the girls in his family.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
It's possible that he was just that kind of guy.
Or it may be that he noted psychopathy and his
son very young, and that psychopathy simply turned him off
and he didn't like to be around him. Psychopathy usually
appears by five years of age. There's already something wrong
where that person. They have a rage toward everyone else.

(04:21):
They want to manipulate them, They lie to them. They
believe that they cannot succeed by being a good person,
so they very early on decide to play a different game.
Fathers tend to spot it early on. They know something's
wrong and they get frustrated, but mothers, the doting type
that mothers are, and sisters often just say, Oh, he's

(04:42):
just being a boy, that's just the way he is.

Speaker 6 (04:47):
He was living in a part of Orange County, a
city called Westminster. It's a small town but in a larger,
very conservative county within California.

Speaker 5 (05:02):
Very early on, you could tell that Randy was a
very smart kid, very inquisitive, and he got very good
grades in school and he excelled in elementary school.

Speaker 6 (05:16):
He was described by his childhood friends as being somewhere
to the right of Attila the Hunt. That's a very
telling statement. We're talking about using a metaphor for someone
that was a despot and killed thousands of people, and
this is being reported by people that knew him as
a child. So what was further revealed is that he

(05:37):
was very rigid in his belief system and that he
had a very quick.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Temper as a schoolboy. Randy had a close, almost obsessive
relationship with his mother. His relationship with his father was
very different.

Speaker 5 (05:54):
Mom was a real influence in Randy's life. They were
church going people. Mom was the main instigator in that,
and that she and the sisters took a great deal
of interest in Kraft when he was a young kid,
especially when he came to schoolwork, and Mom was very,
very active in the PTA, which you know played a
huge role, I'm sure in molding the craft as a

(06:14):
young student. As he got older, closer to the high
school age, middle school, high school age, he had a
little problem with authority and he would he would question
his teachers as to why he needed to do that.
In fact, there was one instance where he was he
asked a teacher, those rules don't apply to me.

Speaker 7 (06:33):
It didn't affect his grades because he got a very
good GPA.

Speaker 3 (06:39):
This is not uncommon when you have kids who are
quite bright. When they're smarter than most of their classmates,
their ability to get bored is pretty demonstrative, and when
kids get bored, they get in trouble.

Speaker 4 (06:57):
A lot of interest from his father could have in
a further need to stand out against his siblings in
an attempt to regain his father's attention. His intellect gave
him delusions of grandeur, which led to rule bending. He
tested boundaries with his teachers and nose in control to
see when he would receive punishment. There is no conclusive
proof that he was abused. I think the accidents would

(07:18):
have been caused by his increased risk taking behavior, reducing
his inhibitions, and the fear that other children would experience.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
At school, Randy was something of a model student.

Speaker 7 (07:34):
One name that.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
Was given to Kraft was Crafty Randy, and it was
because money of his friends or people he met thought
he was kind of slick. He was pretty good looking,
and he obviously, if they're calling him crafty, I'm thinking
he was pretty good at manipulating people. They sort of
liked him, but he had his way with what was
going on.

Speaker 6 (07:54):
Craft in his latter years of high school, became very
politically active, and he willing to share his political beliefs
with many of his friends.

Speaker 5 (08:04):
He graduated tenth in his high school class at Westminster
High School out of nearly four hundred, and he wound
up getting a scholarship to a school called Claremont College,
which is in the Pomona area. Those who know this
education system in California, Claremont is one of the tougher
schools to get into.

Speaker 6 (08:20):
He went to Claremont College, which is also known to
be a conservative institution, and he became very involved in
supporting the efforts of the Vietnam War.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
He comes into college essentially a staunch Republican conservative religious upbringing.

Speaker 6 (08:41):
One of the things that had brought him into Claremont
College was being part of a program called ROTC, which
is Reserved Officers Training, and basically that's a way to
get your school paid for and then you make a
commitment to the military afterwards. This really lent to his
support of the Vietnam War war and his support of
a conservative candidate for president.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
Randy Craft was once asked why he was a conservative,
and he said, oh, because that pleased my parents. Whether
he really cared about what his parents thought of him
is questionable, but a psychopath will always do something that
benefits him.

Speaker 1 (09:19):
Although craft schooling was being paid for by the military,
he got a job at a cocktail lounge.

Speaker 5 (09:26):
And about this time he got a job as a bartender,
and it turns out to be it's a gay bar.
And then people said that gradually they started seeing a
change in him. He wasn't quite so Republican, he wasn't
quite so conservative, and there were tendencies that he may
be gay because of who he started hanging out with

(09:48):
the place he worked at.

Speaker 6 (09:49):
It changed the way he appeared. He grew his hair out,
it changed his actions. He became more party driven and
going out to bars and clubs.

Speaker 3 (10:00):
His schoolwork suffers, his class attendance suffers. He gets more
into the drug scene.

Speaker 5 (10:06):
He starts to spend more and more time away from
his place where he was living in college, disappearing for
you know, days on end. His grades started to fall
and he became a different Randy Craft.

Speaker 2 (10:22):
A lot of the students said, watch out for that
Randy guy, because if you hook up with him, he's
kind of a sadist. He's kind of like likes to
pick up young men and do things to them that
are not so nice.

Speaker 5 (10:35):
The one thing he started doing when he would disappear,
he would have migraine, headaches and tremendous stomach problems. And
at this time we are told that he started taking
valuume like it was cough medicine or you know, like
a candy gobs and gobs of valuum to handle the
headaches and the stomach. Back in those days, couldn't come

(10:59):
out out of the closet. I mean, you were ostracized.
That was the context of the time far different. We're talking,
you know, fifty years ago, a much different era.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
In nineteen sixty six, Kraft had his first brush with
the law.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
There's an incident during his junior year at Claremont Men's
College where he solicits an undercover police officer for sex.
This was the only contact he really had from with
law enforcement.

Speaker 5 (11:29):
But because Craft's record was clean, he had no record whatsoever,
they didn't charge him.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Teenagers' beliefs and outlooks often evolve as they experience more
personal freedom attending university and being away from their family home.
His changing attitude could have opened up new ways and
ambitions in life. Brandy Craft has not yet exhibited any
red flags that would have been picked up by authorities.

(12:00):
Intellect allows him to articulate and manipulate others to get
what he wants.

Speaker 1 (12:06):
The following year, the changes in his personal life were
reflected in his political allegiance.

Speaker 8 (12:13):
At some point he made a switch. He flipped over
to being more on the left. Was a huge supporter
of Kennedy and actually campaigned for him, and was very
distraught when he was murdered.

Speaker 9 (12:28):
Here in Los Angeles. When he was assassinated.

Speaker 7 (12:31):
Remember he was on a scholarship.

Speaker 5 (12:33):
He was gambling, staying out all night, caboarding around with
friends and what have you, heavy drinking.

Speaker 7 (12:38):
The valume got worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 8 (12:41):
As a young adult, now in college, he is exploring
the gay scene. He's out of gay bars, and it's
probably around this time that he discovers the bdsmc bondage discipline,
sado masochism. Most people that belong to the BDSM scene

(13:04):
are not killers.

Speaker 9 (13:05):
They have rules that they operate by.

Speaker 8 (13:08):
It's a fantasy based activity among consenting adults.

Speaker 9 (13:14):
But those that have darker.

Speaker 8 (13:17):
Fantasies will often experiment within that community, and what they
find is that the fantasy is not enough, that the
idea of enacting out scenarios with consenting partners is unfulfilling, and.

Speaker 9 (13:33):
That they want more.

Speaker 8 (13:39):
And then these individuals that are not going to remain
within the BDSM community and its rules will escalate into
something different. They will morph into what's really going on
with them, which is they have violent fantasies. They want
non consensual sexual predatory behavior to inflict upon victims that

(14:06):
are non consenting. That's what really turns them on. They
are truly sadistic, and what turns them on, what sexually
arouses them, is the suffering, humiliation and degradation of other people.

Speaker 4 (14:27):
A massive red flag here is his transgression of the
consensual boundaries of BDSM when his partner's consent is invariably
violated by Randy's extreme behavior.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Because of his drug taking and partying, craft school work
falls so far behind that he needs to retake his
senior year.

Speaker 5 (14:46):
He then gets out of college and he has to
serve his time because he was in the ROTC program,
and so he enlisted for his active duty with the
Air Force. He winds up at March Air Force Base
here southern California in the Desert Lancaster area.

Speaker 6 (15:02):
One of the things that happened when he tested for
the military is his intellect was off the charts. He
was seen as a very intellectual individual, very gifted, and
he was granted security clearance of a high level. From
his entry point into the military.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Then he makes an unexpected choice.

Speaker 7 (15:23):
He let it be known that he was gay.

Speaker 6 (15:26):
That didn't work out so well because at that time
being gay in the military was absolutely not accepted. Now
what happened was he was discharged from the military for
medical reasons, so somebody might have been looking out for him.
He didn't get a dishonorable discharge. He got a medical discharge.
But this is where it seems that things took a

(15:47):
turn for him.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
After his discharge, Randy Kraft moved back into his parents' house.

Speaker 5 (15:55):
His parents don't know that he had been arrested for
proposition a police officer.

Speaker 7 (15:59):
They had no idea that. I don't think very very
many people knew that.

Speaker 6 (16:02):
He didn't go back to school. He started bartending more
and he really immersed himself in the party lifestyle, and
many of the people around him commented on his market
increase in alcohol use as well as amphetamines. As psychologists,
as mental health workers, we look at the predominance of

(16:23):
amphetamines in culture really as a scorge. It's problematic because,
more so than almost any other substance that is used recreationally,
it can cause market personality changes at a rapid pace,
especially for those that are heavy and chronic users.

Speaker 7 (16:44):
One of the things particularly that.

Speaker 6 (16:46):
Happens with the use of amphetamines is a lowering of inhibitions.
Especially the more that's used. People become more immune to pain,
They become more immune to sensation. They become more station
seeking as a result, and they can also really lose
any insight or good judgment as to how their behaviors

(17:08):
affect the world around them.

Speaker 1 (17:11):
Eventually, his family finds out about Craft's sexuality.

Speaker 3 (17:16):
When he's about twenty four years old. He decides to
tell his parents that he's gay, and of course this
does not go well with his father, who is really outraged,
can't believe that he would have a son who's gay.
His mother was, I think more accepting. She was disapproving,

(17:40):
and of course in her mind she's thinking, well, maybe
this is just a phase he's going through that, you know,
he can get through it.

Speaker 10 (17:48):
His sisters blamed it on the fact that he went
to an all men's college, and they seem to take
the path of we don't want to lose Randy, and
that's what happened. He stayed with the family, they stayed
in close contact, but it was at that point, according
to his sisters, that Randy himself started to drift and

(18:09):
started to lead a life that they had no idea
was going on.

Speaker 4 (18:20):
We've already learned about Craft's unusual and sometimes bizarre childhood.
The lack of interest shown to him by his father.
An overinvolvement in his life from his mother created a
need to stand out. His risk taking behaviors, which caused
accidents in childhood, have progressed into taking drugs and potentially
dangerous sexual encounters.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
What happens next was the beginning of a series of
events that would define Randy Craft as a deviant of
the most dangerous kind.

Speaker 6 (18:51):
His first victim was a thirteen year old boy that
he met on the beach.

Speaker 8 (18:58):
Craft used marijuana, pornography, and pills to try to manipulate
this young boy.

Speaker 6 (19:07):
When he got him back to his apartment, he stripped
the boy naked and rid him repeatedly.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
At some point, the boy got away and ran into
the street, and the citizens saw that and called the police.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
He actually contacts the police and reports Craft to them
for basically abducting him. He was embarrassed about the sexual assault,
so he didn't report it.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Police then make a terrible mistake.

Speaker 5 (19:37):
For whatever reason. The police at the time they entered
the house without the warrant.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
There was some evidence there that he was a sexual
predator that the police had found, but because they didn't
have a warrant, they couldn't do anything with it, and
the case was dropped.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
This close call seemed to givet a shock.

Speaker 8 (19:56):
When a victim escapes, as Craft experienced in nineteen with
this thirteen year old boy who fortunately escaped likely death,
a smart, organized serial killer like Randy Kraft is going
to regroup. He's going to be freaked out by it.
He's going to be watching to see if there's any
news reports. He's going to cool it off for a while,

(20:16):
and he's going to figure out what did I do wrong?
What do I need to do so that this doesn't
happen again.

Speaker 6 (20:22):
And if they're particularly intelligent, as in the case of Craft,
they use their intelligence to figure out a better way
to perpetrate these crimes, a better way to lure their
victims into these situations.

Speaker 8 (20:36):
And he adapted by transitioning from marijuana and pills to
more serious drugs like value in combination with alcohol, which
is going to really place the victim at significant chemical disadvantage.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
This was his first victim. It basically wetted his appetite
for the kinds of brutality that he was to engage it.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
Later on, in a contrasting choice, Kraft appears to try
to further his education and find a reliable job.

Speaker 5 (21:10):
Randy became a forklift driver and started going to Long
Beach State, I believe to get an education, and I
think he wanted to be an engineer.

Speaker 7 (21:20):
He meets a nineteen year old kid named Jeff Graves.

Speaker 5 (21:23):
Graves would later tell investigators that Kraft would have a
mysterious side to him, that he would take off and
leave and not tell Grey's where he went, and he'd
be gone for a day at a time, sometimes two
days at a time. He took a lot of value
and took other drugs as well, and would have a
tendency to kind of flare up and kind of lose
his control of his emotions. That's what was happening in

(21:45):
nineteen seventy one.

Speaker 10 (21:51):
On October fifth, nineteen seventy one, the nude body of
a thirty year old man by the name of Wayne
Duquette was found along what's called the Ortega Highway in
southern California. He had last been seen a few weeks earlier,
on September twentieth.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
This would become his first murder victim and actually the
first identification on his scorecard.

Speaker 10 (22:18):
Duquette was a bartender at a local bar called the stable,
which catered to gay patrons.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
He bound him up, he tortured him, he beat him,
and then he dumped his body on the side of
the road.

Speaker 10 (22:32):
His body was in a condition where they investigators couldn't
determine an exact cause of death. In fact, they ended
up ruling the cause of death for mister Duquette as
alcohol poisoning.

Speaker 3 (22:51):
His appetite for this destruction and torture and injury became
wronger and stronger, and you could see this chronologically as
more and more victims showed up as body dumps on
the freeways in southern California.

Speaker 10 (23:21):
The body count is starting to multiply. There are now
fourteen victims and four separate counties over the past three
years that investigators are trying to connect.

Speaker 3 (23:35):
Randy had a hallmark of these behaviors of blunt force,
trauma to the face, of burning, of cutting, strangulation, forcing
objects into the rectum or into the genitals. When the
law enforcement would find these victims on the roadways, it

(23:56):
became pretty clear which victims were so, although they didn't
know it was Randy Kraft.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
Kraft finds a new boyfriend and starts experimenting with multiple
sexual partners.

Speaker 5 (24:09):
In nineteen seventy six, Randy Kraft hooked up with a
guy named Jeff Selig and they became a couple. In fact,
they would go out together and they would pick up
hitchhikers and have a threesome.

Speaker 7 (24:21):
And Selig again.

Speaker 5 (24:22):
Said that there were times when Craft would disappear and
act strange, but as far as he knew, the only
time that they had that Craft had sex with anybody
else was when he was with Selig and they were
having their threesome.

Speaker 10 (24:38):
Craft and Selig end up moving in together in Laguna Hills,
and at this point Craft goes on a bit of
a halt in terms of his killing spree.

Speaker 6 (24:50):
The man he was seeing joined him in couples therapy.
They went to work on aspects of their relationship. The
therapists who later get gave up his notes for the
legal procedures, noted that Craft was highly tense, anxious, tightly wound,
and very concerned with his partner asserting any kind of

(25:11):
dominance over him. He also commented that Craft was hyper sexual,
had an insatiable sex drive that his partner could not
keep up with.

Speaker 10 (25:23):
Eventually, this timeout period would end by the end of
nineteen seventy six, and at that point Randy Craft started
in again.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Vanishing for periods of time would normally arouse suspicion, but
for a long time addict, a drug taking binge might
be expected by his partner at home, so this would
be less concerning. A monogamous relationship was not sufficient in
fulfilling his needs because it was not sufficiently thrill inducing.
Fourteen potential murders over a three year period is a

(25:58):
clear and rapid escalation, and the severity and frequency of
his offending he must have felt at this point that
he was able to get away with the violence and
control seeking behavior that he was beginning to find compulsive,
a dangerous combination. The lack of clear red flags and

(26:19):
Randy Craft's descent is fascinating, but this may be because
his relationship with his partner at that time was fulfilling
a lot of the needs that he later had to
act out on. When his relationship with former partner Jeff
Sealing breaks down, Kraft starts to murder again.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
By nineteen seventy five, Kraft is working as a computer
operator at Long Beach Airport. In March, he makes an error.

Speaker 5 (26:48):
The exact date was March twenty nine, nineteen seventy five,
a kid named Crotwell was last seen hitchhiking.

Speaker 3 (26:57):
Unfortunately for Randy he picks up Keith Crotwell, a nineteen
year old victim. But there are friends of this hitchhiker
in the area who basically see the car that their
friend gets into. And then approximately eight or nine days later,
Crotwell's head is found because Craft decapitated him.

Speaker 2 (27:26):
They reported the police what the car looked like, and
then they actually found the car and told the police
what car it was, and the police looked up the
registration lo and behold Randy Craft. Guess what Randy Craft said, Hey,
you know I was I did give the guy rye,
but he was a lie when I left him, and
that case never went forth.

Speaker 5 (27:47):
The district attorney said, I don't have enough evidence in
this case. I cannot file a murder charge against him,
and again skated.

Speaker 7 (27:54):
He skated through.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
That was not the only time Kraft escaped conviction.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
In nineteen seventy five, he also got picked up for
lute conduct and again escape without having to go to
jail or anything.

Speaker 10 (28:10):
Brandy Craft continues to kill wherever he goes. In fact,
he would travel for work to Michigan and Oregon, and
of course was in California picking up hitchhikers and drugging
and murdering them.

Speaker 6 (28:24):
Craft's mo for targeting his victims made a lot of
organizational sense. He chose his victims by luring hitchhikers into
his car.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
One thing you don't want to do is pick high
profile people that are going to start a massive police investigation,
and if you apply them with a lot of liquor
and alcohol, liquor and drugs, that starts making the police
think they kind of brought their own doom upon them.

Speaker 6 (28:54):
He had in southern California multiple opportunities to interact with
very young men who were looking to get from one
side of town to the other. So in combination with
offering them a ride to where they were going, Craft
would often ply his potential victims with drugs and alcohol.

Speaker 2 (29:16):
So they thought they were just getting a little happy
with a liquor, but all of a sudden they were
completely helpless because they had so much in their system.
They couldn't fight back. And by getting that kind of
control with them being helpless, he also suffered no injuries himself,
so he wouldn't show up someplace and have, you know,

(29:38):
cuts on his arms and bruises, and people would go,
what happened to you?

Speaker 6 (29:48):
In Craft's story, I think we see something really complex
because of the growing severity with which he treated his
victims' bodies after they had died. It wasn't just second
truly derived pleasure. It was about torture, about watching them die,
and then about really disrespecting their corpses.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Randy Kraft was probably one of the most sadistic serial
killers I've ever encountered. And oftentimes people when they think
of sadistic serial killers, they think of a male serial
killer sadistically torturing a female victim. We hear about that
all the time, but we don't realize many times that
a male serial killer can also sadistically torture a male victim.

(30:31):
And this is what he did. He did everything he
could to watch them suffer. He burned them, he cut them,
he emasculated them, He put objects in their in their
private parts, both their penis and in their in their rectum.
He just did anything he could to humiliate and harm
them and watch them suffer.

Speaker 8 (30:55):
These victims' final minutes were unimaginable in terms of the
level of suffering that they experienced. When you start talking
about ritualistic sadism, sexual sadism that is inflicted upon a
victim for pleasure to the offender, that's a cognitive process.

Speaker 9 (31:18):
It's not really an emotional one.

Speaker 8 (31:20):
They are inflicting a fantasy that operates in their head
that is very sexually arousing, So it's a fusing of
sex and violence.

Speaker 2 (31:35):
Craft got rid of the bodies in a number of ways,
but his most popular way was tossing them out of
the car onto the highway. He became known as the
highway serial killer at some point because so many bodies
are found by the highway. This should have been a
big clue to the law enforcement that there was a
serial killer at work. He also did dump some of
the bodies in national parks and at the beach, So

(31:55):
depending on where he was and I guess what his
needs were at the time, what was available to him
is what he did what A tremendous amount of them
ended up on the side of the highway.

Speaker 4 (32:10):
The Craft exploited his job to cross state lines to
dump his victims, knowing that law enforcement agencies were unlikely
to talk to each other, and that the amount of
victims he had taken would remain undetected. Decoding the scorecard
must have been shocking for law enforcement officials as they
finally get the truly gruesome picture of how many victims
he had taken.

Speaker 1 (32:32):
There appeared to be no end to Craft's insatiable appetite
for danger and murder. But even the most confident murderers
make mistakes.

Speaker 5 (32:42):
It was May fourteenth, nineteen eighty three, very early in
the morning. Randy Kraft was driving, and he was driving
erradically on the freeway not far from the Marine base
in Camp Pendleton, which is in the San Clement.

Speaker 8 (32:56):
Area, and the California Highway Patrol effect a traffic stop
and they pull him over for suspected drunk driving.

Speaker 6 (33:03):
When they were able to pull the car over, Craft
emerged from the car, apparently stumbling drunkenly, with his pants unzipped, unfastened,
and down around his waist.

Speaker 8 (33:15):
He is cool, calm and collected, comes out acts like
nothing big is going on.

Speaker 9 (33:20):
He thinks he's going to pass the field sobriety test.
He does not.

Speaker 5 (33:28):
There was a man sitting in the front seat, and
it appeared to one of the CHP officers that he
was asleep, and that he had, you know, sitting up
in the front seat, and he obviously had on a
marine uniform. And one of the officers kept looking and
looking and looking and realized that this marine was not

(33:49):
breathing and he was dead.

Speaker 6 (33:51):
On further investigation, the police discovered that, in fact, Terry
Gambrel was not unconscious but was actually deceased from wounds
inflicted on him by Craft.

Speaker 5 (34:01):
He had been strangled. There were ligature marks around his neck.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
They impound the car and they search the car, and
they also search Craft's apartment and they find lots of
incriminating evidence.

Speaker 6 (34:15):
Law enforcement found a trove of pornographic polaroids, many of
them depicting Craft in sexual situations with miners.

Speaker 8 (34:28):
Many serial killers, particularly the more organized, brighter ones that
are methodical like Randy Kraft, will maintain trophies. They'll collect trophies,
and they'll document their murders, often writing down in code
you know what they've done. Craft took trophies in the
form of these polaroids. He also, you know, collected possessions

(34:50):
of some of these victims. There are items of clothing
and so forth.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
They want that stuff because it reminds them of the
wonderful time they had. Parts of their victims' bodies or
their clothing or photos are their souvenirs. So once this
is over, they don't have to just forget about it.
They can actually, in their privacy of their own home,
enjoy the memory of what their wonderful event was.

Speaker 8 (35:14):
It's his way of memorializing these heinous acts he was
perpetrating on these men and these boys. He can look
at these polaroids, he can masturbate, you know, to those images,
and it's a way of continuing the sexual stimulation and
remembering it.

Speaker 9 (35:38):
Many will keep some form of record.

Speaker 8 (35:40):
Kraft had a notebook that he kept with codes in
it for his past murders, and it was hard for
investigators to glean from that notebook who was who, but
it was in fact a way of him documenting some
of his more favorite murders, if you will.

Speaker 5 (36:03):
That notepad, the infamous scorecard, if you will, was just
so eerie, and it had names, and it had dates,
and it had little references of what happened and what
he did. It was unbelievable that a human being could
act that way.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
They began to believe that he had maybe up to
sixty seven people that he had killed. But there was
this kind of funny situation where this one guy McDougall,
claimed that he was an accomplice and that sixty seven
was actually a low number. He said, if the kill
wasn't very thrilling, he just didn't write it down, you know,
he didn't note what he didn't think was very exciting. So,

(36:40):
in other words, it was a bad date, so why
record it?

Speaker 3 (36:48):
And as police went through these cases and the date
that was associated with them, they made a connection to
about forty six different homicide cases.

Speaker 8 (37:00):
The Orange County DA's office and respective agencies start to
come together because there are other murders that seem to
fit this pattern, particularly with what had happened to the victim,
and they are piecing it together.

Speaker 4 (37:22):
His brazen confidence when interacting with police, driving at an
intoxicated level with a victim in his front seat are
all escalations of his risk taking behavior, a true display
of arrogance.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
Now law enforcement must prepare for trial.

Speaker 5 (37:44):
I do know that they spoke to hundreds and hundreds
of witnesses.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
There were other victims in Oregon, there were victims that
they identified in Michigan because when they searched his property.
They found clothing and jewel and belts of men that
they eventually identified to a number of other victims, specifically

(38:08):
two victims that had been killed in Michigan. Wherever Randy
went when he traveled for business, young gay men died
in horrific ways.

Speaker 6 (38:25):
There's a little bit of a neurological kink and most
people's brains when it comes to collecting. Some people collect
benign things, some people collect things that aren't so good
for them. In the case of a prolific killer like Craft,
he is able to collect mementos from each one of
his kills and relive the pleasure that he obtained. Whatever

(38:46):
that pleasure was, maybe it was a sense of accomplishment
in getting away with it.

Speaker 7 (38:51):
So each time he.

Speaker 6 (38:52):
Goes into his garage, he's able to see an entire
panoply of everything that he's done.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
The scorecard listed that as sixty seven people did, but
there was more than twenty bodies that had never been found.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
In the long run, Randy Kraft was charged with sixteen murders.
Those are the murders that they had enough on him.
They did come up with quite a bit of physical
evidence and photo evidence to be able to charge him
with those. For a long time, people have been trying
to understand how a serial killer becomes a serial killer,

(39:31):
and they're trying to come up with physical reasons that
a person would do such horrific things. So they've done
brain scans to try to show that the brain is
different from a non serial killer.

Speaker 6 (39:44):
What they found in Craft's brain scan is that the
area of his brain that regulates rage anchor and temper
control completely abnormal. What's significant about this as we take
those brain scan results and we combine it with his
liberal use of methamphetamine and other substances, as well as

(40:06):
the possibility of traatic brain injury when he was a child,
and we immediately know this is a dangerous combination. Craft
maintained his innocence against the overwhelming evidence of his crimes.

Speaker 10 (40:25):
Randy Craft's defense team argued that he had nothing to
do with any of these murders. The state, on the
other hand, introduced one hundred and fifty seven separate witnesses
and over a thousand pieces of physical evidences. They built
their case.

Speaker 5 (40:41):
They had blood matching, they had fibers, they had pictures,
they had everything, and it all rolled into a huge case.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
On the eleventh of August nineteen eighty nine, received his verdict.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
Brandy Craft was convicted on sixteen counts of first murder
and sentenced to.

Speaker 7 (41:01):
Death now seventy five years old. Whether or not he'll
ever come.

Speaker 5 (41:08):
Forward and express the truth or what he did, or
his side of the story, if you will.

Speaker 7 (41:14):
That remains to be seen.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
What were the red flags in Craft's life that should
have been picked up, his warning signs of what was
to come.

Speaker 4 (41:25):
There were no red flags in craft slaves that would
have attracted the attention of law enforcements. He was smart
enough to always remain on the edge, but within the
boundaries of society.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
One thing that really bothered me was when they finally
put a task force together to find who this serial
killer was. They brought on a psychologist who came up
with this idea that the reason Randy Kraft did what
he did, the reason he bit his victims, was because
he didn't feel enough of a man and wanted to
make the victims into a woman so he would feel

(41:59):
powerful over them. I'm thinking, where do they come up
with these psychologists who say these ridiculous things, because that
is absolutely not what it was about.

Speaker 7 (42:07):
At all.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
He was a gay man. He picked his victims because
he liked having sex with gay men. It had nothing
to do with females at all.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
Could police have caught him earlier?

Speaker 4 (42:20):
Law enforcement did have opportunities to stop Craft, and each
time he got away with his crimes, his arrogance only increased,
resulting him in pushing his risk taking behavior even further.
It took law enforcement a long time to even identify
that there was a serial killer, despite the graphic nature
of the crimes and the similarities in victim type and
disposal sites which allowed him to continue for far longer

(42:42):
than he should have.

Speaker 7 (42:43):
Been able to.

Speaker 6 (42:46):
Judge mccartlin at the time Toldcraft, if you can give
these parents some relief, if you can give them some
information about the loss of their child, this could do
well in your sentencing. It didn't make any in MP
hacked on Craft. He steadfastly maintained he had nothing to
do with any of their disappearances.

Speaker 1 (43:09):
Would the red flags have brought Kraft to the attention
of authorities and would he have been caught earlier if
he was perpetrating his crimes now.

Speaker 4 (43:17):
It'd be far more rare to be missing for that
long and not be noticed for three reasons. First, it's
unusual to have hitchhikers anymore. Second, social media is far
more prevalent, and third CCTV use is a lot more widespread.
So for these reasons, we wouldn't see people missing that
long without being noticed. However, it's very possible that he

(43:39):
would have been able to take forensic countermeasures and adapt
his methods of killing to suit his needs. A scary thought.

Speaker 5 (43:47):
It's been fifty years since Randy Craft started as murder
spree nineteen seventy two, and yet it almost seems like
it's never gone away. I mean, they were so vicious,
so brutal. These poor victims were either hitch hiking or
just looking for a ride.

Speaker 7 (44:01):
Innocent kids, you know, they were not looking for trouble.

Speaker 5 (44:05):
And to have all of these young men brutally murdered tortured,
it's still I don't want to say it haunts me
to this day, but it's something that I think about
every once in a while.

Speaker 6 (44:16):
My first exposure to Randy Craft as a person happened
way before the Internet. I had moved out here to
Los Angeles in the late eighties, and I was enjoying
myself the bar scene, and there were pictures and warnings,
watch who's giving you your drink, Be careful who you
go home with. Make sure that people know where you're going,

(44:37):
because there's a killer on the loose.

Speaker 4 (44:47):
Randy Craft's high IQ meant that he never raised typical
red flags along his descent, so he was able to
continue to commit serial murder unchecked. The biggest red flag
should have been when he progressed outside this consensual BDSM,
but as a private access was never brought to law
enforcement's attention, so they were never aware of it. Randy

(45:08):
Craft was convicted of sixteen murders, but law enforcements suspect
the true numbers far higher. Without a confession, we will
never know