July 23, 2025 • 50 mins
In this gripping ReWired episode, Dani peels back the layers of Randy Steven Kraft’s chilling legacy as the Scorecard Killer. With a twisted ledger of cryptic notations and a pattern of meticulously targeted victims, Kraft wasn’t just killing—he was keeping score.
This isn’t about gore for gore’s sake. It’s about decoding power, control, and the dark psychology that drives a killer to turn murder into a methodical game.Dani challenges listeners to look beyond the headlines and into the structured chaos of Kraft’s mind. What does his scorecard truly reveal about the way he viewed his victims—and himself?
How did a man operating in plain sight elude justice while racking up one of the highest known body counts in California history? And what role did institutions, from the military to law enforcement, play in enabling his path of destruction?
With signature wit and razor-sharp analysis, Dani reimagines this case not just as a timeline of horror but as a study in behavioral obsession, symbolism, and system failure.
This is true crime, rewritten for those who want to understand the deeper why—not just the who, what, and when.Prepare for a deep psychological dive into the dangerous intersection of sadism, secrecy, and symbolism. By the end, you’ll never look at a simple list the same way again.
This isn’t about gore for gore’s sake. It’s about decoding power, control, and the dark psychology that drives a killer to turn murder into a methodical game.Dani challenges listeners to look beyond the headlines and into the structured chaos of Kraft’s mind. What does his scorecard truly reveal about the way he viewed his victims—and himself?
How did a man operating in plain sight elude justice while racking up one of the highest known body counts in California history? And what role did institutions, from the military to law enforcement, play in enabling his path of destruction?
With signature wit and razor-sharp analysis, Dani reimagines this case not just as a timeline of horror but as a study in behavioral obsession, symbolism, and system failure.
This is true crime, rewritten for those who want to understand the deeper why—not just the who, what, and when.Prepare for a deep psychological dive into the dangerous intersection of sadism, secrecy, and symbolism. By the end, you’ll never look at a simple list the same way again.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to the Guilty Files.
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files,
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome back listeners
to the Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the place where
(01:15):
fact meets fiction and where we're not afraid to ask
what if. I'm Danny, a former beat cop in Atlanta,
a double major in psychology and sociology, and someone who
spent far too many nights wondering what makes people tick
and what makes them snap? If you joined us earlier
this week on the Guilty Files Uncovered. You know Brian
(01:39):
took us deep into the horrific case of Randy Stephen Kraft,
the so called scorecard Killer, a man who lived two lives,
the affable, well educated computer consultant by day and a
sadistic serial predator by night. With a tally sheet of
cryptic notations, Craft likely murdered dozens of young men across
(02:01):
the West Coast, military personnel, hitchhikers, and drifters, many targeted
for their vulnerability, their queerness, and their invisibility. But today
we turn that file inside out. Today we ask what
happens when we let the imagination run wild, Still grounded
(02:21):
in what we know, but unshackled from what we can prove.
These are fictionalized dramatizations designed to entertain, provoke, and deepen
our understanding of the people, systems, and psychology behind these
real crimes. Will journey through nine acts, nine chilling what ifs,
(02:43):
each one grounded in the very real terror, Craft unleashed,
and each one asking what more we might learn or
what horrors might still be hiding in the cracks. So
buckle up, let's rewire the case file of Randy Stea.
Even before we dive headfirst into the fictional rabbit hole,
(03:04):
Let's take one last breath of reality. Here's what we know.
What we can prove about Randy stephen Craft. No speculation,
no hypotheticals, just the cold, ugly truth served straight. No chaser.
Randy Craft was a computer whiz with a college degree,
a soft spoken demeanor, and a terrifying double life. From
(03:28):
the outside, he was the kind of guy you'd trust
to fix your modem or politely chat with you in
a grocery store line. Inside, he was calculating sadistic methodical
Between the early nineteen seventies and his arrest in nineteen
eighty threeft is believed to have murdered as many as
sixty seven young men across California, Oregon and beyond. Let
(03:53):
me say that again for the people in the back.
Sixty seven. Though officially convicted for sixteen murders, the real number,
judging by the infamous scorecard found in his car, maybe
far far higher. His victims were mostly young men, military personnel, hitchhikers,
(04:15):
queer men, and runaways, the kind of individuals who slipped
through the cracks of our systems invisible to institutions disposable
in the eyes of authority. And that's not just tragic,
that's structural. Psychologically, Craft was a control freak who sexualized dominance, humiliation,
and death. He drugged victims with tranquilizers, tied them up,
(04:39):
tortured them, and often mutilated them post mortem. There were burns,
bite marks, missing testicles. He took souvenirs, and he dumped
bodies like discarded wrappers, off highways and canyons in plain sight.
And the kicker the police didn't catch him through some
genius detect of work. No CSI dramatics here, they got lucky.
(05:04):
He was pulled over for suspected DUI in nineteen eighty three.
And guess what was in the passenger seat. A dead marine,
still warm, tucked under a jacket like he'd fallen asleep
on the ride home. But Kraft had a ledger in
the car, a cryptic list with sixty five entries, each
one believed to correspond to a murder, nicknames, dates, inside references.
(05:30):
It became known as the Scorecard, and it's still giving
cold case investigators migraines to this day. Sociologically, this case
exposes the deep failures in how institutions handle missing persons,
especially when the missing are queer, transient, or military. The
(05:52):
lines of communication between jurisdictions were a mess. Priorities were
shaped by public image, not public sea safety, and predators
like Craft knew how to exploit every blind spot. Now,
as someone who's worked the streets, who's seen what gets
flagged and what gets filed under not our problem, I
(06:14):
can tell you this Craft was calculated. He used the
system's apathy as camouflage and it worked for over a decade.
So yeah, that's the reality, the bones of the story.
Everything we're about to unravel in the next nine acts
will take creative liberties, but it's rooted in this horrifying truth.
(06:37):
Craft was real, His victims were real, and the questions
we're about to ask they matter. Now let's go deeper.
What if one of Kraft's victims opened his eyes and
remembered everything? Welcome to Act one, the one who got away.
Let's start here, because every horror story is garrier when
(07:00):
someone lives to tell it. In this dramatized reimagining, we
meet Miguel, a young marine stationed out of Camp Pendleton, closeted,
conflicted and lonely. He wanders into a bar one Friday night,
looking not for trouble, but maybe for someone who sees him.
Enter Randy Craft, friendly, well dressed, You look like you
(07:25):
could use a drink, Miguel accepts, And here's where the
story fractures. Because the drink, it's laced. But Miguel, he's
stronger than expected. Maybe he hadn't eaten. Maybe his metabolism's
working overtime. Whatever the reason, the sedative doesn't knock him
out completely. We imagine a gut wrenching blur. Miguel paralyzed
(07:50):
in the passenger seat craft, humming along to the radio,
casually checking his rear view mirror. Miguel tries to speak,
but his tongue feels like rubber. Time slips, sound warps.
He passes out and wakes up in a drainage ditch
miles from the base. His ribs ache, his wrists are bruised,
(08:13):
his jenes are gone, but he's alive. Now here's where
we deepen the psychological terrain. Miguel can't remember everything. At first,
he doesn't want to. He tells no one. The shame,
the fear, the internalized homophobia. It's crushing but over the
(08:34):
next several weeks, fragments start returning, the smell of Craft's cologne,
the click of duct tape, the taste of vodka and
orange juice. He begins to draw, to write, to dissociate less,
until finally he sees the man's face in a dream
(08:55):
and he remembers the license plate. From a sociological perspective,
Miguel is every marginalized survivor silenced by stigma. He lives
in a system military, masculine heteronormative that doesn't just ignore him,
it conditions him to erase himself. Reporting the assault could
(09:15):
mean career suicide, ostracization, or worse. But what happens when
he does come forward? In our fictional take, he finds
one detective who listens, just one That detective burned out
and buried under unsolved files, pulls records. She starts connecting
the dots, similar injuries, same dumping grounds, overlapping timelines, and
(09:40):
with Miguel's partial plate number, she opens a case that
had gone cold a dozen times over. In real life,
we know this didn't happen, but maybe it could have.
Maybe someone like Miguel was out there, survived, remembered, and
stayed silent. Psychologically, this act speaks to the resilience of
(10:02):
memory and the strange cruel ways the brain protects us.
It also underscores the trauma gay men faced, not just
from predators, but from the silence demanded by institutions. Sociologically,
it's a lens into systemic erasure, how queerness, youth, and
(10:23):
vulnerability intersect in a way that makes victims easier to overlook.
And as a former officer myself, let me be real,
I saw too many cases dismissed because the victim didn't
fit the mold. This act, it's a gut punch reminder
of who gets believed and who gets buried. What if
(10:44):
the cryptic code Craft kept wasn't a puzzle but a
confession waiting to be unlocked. Welcome to act too. The
score that spoke. Now, let's talk about that infamous list,
the so called scorecard found tucked neatly in Craft's car.
That lined sheet of paper bore sixty five cryptic entries,
(11:07):
short phrases, weird abbreviations and nicknames that would make sense
to no one but the man who wrote them. It
looked like nonsense, but in this dramatized lens. It's more
than a log. It's a confession, a code, and it's
talking if we know how to listen. We imagine a young,
(11:30):
hungry linguist working for the LAPD as a civilian analyst,
fresh out of grad school, not yet hardened by bureaucracy.
She doesn't just see a list. She sees syntax, repetition, code, structure.
And when she pairs Craft's list with geographic data and
time stamps from cold case files, something wild emerges. EDM
(11:56):
wasn't just shorthand, it meant electro doosed Marine airplane hill,
not a nickname, but a physical location where a body
was dumped near a military flight path, twilight time of death,
or maybe where he watched the light leave their eyes.
The story takes on a new life. Each phrase begins
(12:18):
to map to a kill. The list isn't just record keeping,
its ritual, like a perverse form of journaling, and in
our fiction, the linguist builds a digital interface, cross referencing
phrases with case files, survivor statements, road maps, hospital records,
and she discovers there are more than sixty five. Psychologically,
(12:43):
this is vintage narcissism. Craft wasn't just killing. He was authoring, documenting.
He believed himself to be the smartest man in the room,
and this was his personal mythology. Sociologically, it's a striking
example of how predators exploit gaps in bureaucracy. The scorecard
(13:05):
wasn't even treated as serious evidence until much later. Why
because law enforcement wasn't ready to believe someone could be
that organized or that prolific. That was the blind spot
from a police procedural perspective. This act raises the question
why didn't we bring in coders, linguists, behavioral experts outside
(13:27):
the badge. The Craft case illustrates how hierarchical tunnel vision
can kill momentum. Sometimes the answers are there, but they're
written in a language the institution refuses to learn. And
for the true crime fan listening at home, this act
hits on something deeper, that insatiable hunger to decode, to
(13:51):
uncover the puzzle, to beat the killer at his own game.
What if we could have What if we still can
up next? What if Craft didn't act alone? What if
he wasn't the only monster in the car? Welcome to
Act three, The dark duo theory. Let's lean into a
(14:12):
theory that's been whispered in online forums and lingered between
the lines of case files, A theory that's as disturbing
as it is plausible. What if Randy Stephen Craft wasn't
acting alone. In our fictionalized reimagining, we introduce a second man.
We'll call him Greg. He's never been named, never caught,
(14:35):
never officially linked to the case. But he's there, lurking
just beyond the periphery, in the blurred outlines of survivor testimony,
in the time gaps between victims, in the patterns that
don't quite line up. Greg is the kind of man
you wouldn't remember even if you saw him twice. Average plane,
(15:00):
polite enough to keep suspicion low, dark enough to be
dangerous in just the right company.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
In this dramatized version, Greg meets Craft at a gay
bar in West Hollywood, a place where masks are worn
easily and secrets come cheap. They hit it off over drinks,
bond over politics, push boundaries, and eventually they feed each
other's worst instincts. Craft we know was calculated, meticulous, even
(15:37):
he liked order control sedatives. Greg not so much. In
our story, Greg's the chaotic one, loud, crude, impulsive. He
likes to watch the fear unfold. He's jealous of Craft's
obsession with keeping records, wants the adrenaline without the archives. Together,
(15:58):
they become something more than just killers. They're a ritual.
Greg distracts, Randy doses. Greg initiates the violence, Randy finishes it.
Two sides of the same psychopathy, and they're just careful
enough to keep Greg's fingerprints out of reach. From a
psychological standpoint, this kind of killer dynamic isn't far fetched.
(16:22):
We've seen it before. Charles Ang and Leonard Lake, the
toy box Killer and his accomplices, even Fred and Rosemary West.
These aren't just partners in crime. They're mirrors for one
another's depravity, amplifying and escalating behavior that might have remained
dormant in isolation. Think about this. Many serial predators harbor
(16:46):
violent fantasies long before they act, But when they find
someone who validates, even celebrates those fantasies, that's when fantasy
crosses into reality. Also touches on follower psychology, the phenomenon
where a more dominant personality draws in a weaker one
(17:08):
who lacks the internal inhibitors to say no. It's not
always a matter of persuasion. Sometimes the follower has the
same desires they've just been waiting for permission. From a
sociological angle, let's talk about invisibility. Greg is fictional, but
the type of person he represents isn't. Marginalized communities, especially
(17:31):
queer men, during the seventies and eighties, existed largely outside
the protections of society. Crimes in those communities were under reported,
under investigated, and under publicized. A second killer he could
have easily slipped through jurisdictional cracks, especially if he never
(17:51):
left a trail. And if you've worked the beat as
I have, you've seen what happens when departments don't share information.
Different precincts, different counties, different states, no unified system. One
guy gets flagged in Santa Ana, another in San Diego.
Nobody talks. Meanwhile, a predator like Craft or Greg, is
(18:15):
driving up and down the Five Freeway, turning men into
entries on a scorecard. Now imagine a witness, a lone survivor.
He tells police there were two of them, but he's drunk,
or he's homeless, or he's queer and afraid. That statement,
it goes in the file, but it doesn't go anywhere.
(18:37):
That's how Greg survives the headlines. That's how he becomes invisible.
And if he was real, if Greg existed, what if
he's still out there living in the suburbs coaching little
league following true crime reddit threads about Craft, wondering when
(18:57):
someone will put two and two together. Maybe this episode
is his wake up call. What if Craft recorded everything
and the tapes are still out there. This is act
for the lost tapes. We've all heard it before. If
these walls could talk. But what if, in Randy Kraft's case,
they didn't have to. What if Craft left behind his
(19:19):
own voice, his own twisted soundtrack, just waiting to be found.
In our dramatized version of events, we flash back to
the night of Craft's arrest. He's pulled over in Orange
County for suspected DUI. In the passenger seat is the
lifeless body of a young marine in the trunk, beer bottles, tranquilizers,
(19:42):
nylon rope, and the now infamous scorecard, but tucked under
the driver's seat, barely noticed by the responding officers is
a plastic grocery bag containing a small, unassuming keyfob, no markings,
no labels, just a number at on its side. Cut.
Two months later, an overworked property clerk doing inventory finds
(20:06):
the tag, traces it, and links it to a storage
unit rental on the outskirts of Long Beach. The contents
dust trash bags, molded boxes, and at the back, one
locked crate. Inside dozens of audio cassette tapes, carefully labeled
with Craft's neat calculated handwriting. Each tape begins the same way,
(20:30):
a calm, detached voice. This is Randy Stephen Kraft. The
subject is unconscious tonight. I'm testing something new. Then breathing,
muffled sounds, pleading a thud, silence, more silence, but then commentary,
(20:53):
Craft narrating his actions, not with remorse, with fascination. He
dissects e like a behavioral case study, talks about their
physical reactions, their fear thresholds, the effectiveness of different drugs.
This is more than a trophy collection. It's a manifesto,
a data set, an archive of horror. Now here's where
(21:17):
things twist. The detectives listening to these tapes begin to
realize something chilling. Some of the victims described were never
officially connected to Craft, some don't appear on the scorecard,
some were reported missing after his arrest. This fictional find
cracks open a horrifying possibility. Either Craft killed more than
(21:42):
we thought, or someone else kept recording after he was
locked up. From a psychological perspective, this act taps into
narcissism in its purest Formft isn't just reliving his crimes,
he's curating them. It's the killer as director. He wants
to be studied, remembered, understood on his terms. It's the
(22:06):
classic control fantasy, except this time he's controlling his legacy.
It also speaks to post defense behavior. Many serial killers
revisit their crime scenes or collect souvenirs. Craft he built
an audio shrine. Now let's talk sociology, specifically the devaluation
(22:27):
of marginalized voices. Many of Kraft's victims were queer, transient,
or estranged from family. This meant their disappearances often went unreported, or,
if reported, uninvestigated. The systems simply didn't value their lives
the same way. That's not just an oversight, that's a
systemic failure and Here's where I pull from my own
(22:49):
law enforcement experience. Storage units are gold mines. I've personally
cleared scenes where killers hid trophies in dropboxes, climate controlled lockers,
even crawl spaces beneath church property. These hidden caches often
go untouched for years because there's no warrant to search them,
(23:11):
or worse, because no one knows they exist. So imagine
the horror of an investigator realizing we missed this, that
while we were processing Craft's car, his voice was whispering
from a box twenty miles away. And let's not forget
the public. Once these tapes surface, the news media has
(23:32):
a field day. Excerpts are leaked, Activist groups demand transparency,
and families already grieving have to relive their loved one's
last moments through Crafts sick narration. It becomes a national scandal,
one that forces law enforcement to ask how many killers
(23:54):
leave behind something we've never found? And maybe the scariest
question of all, who's still out there listening? What if
Craft wasn't acting alone, but as part of a fringe
underground that believed murder could be ritualized or monetized. Welcome
to Act five Inside the Contract Cult. Let's open the
(24:16):
conspiracy file, shall we. In our fictional retelling, Randy Stephncraft
wasn't just a lone wolf with a twisted spreadsheet and
a soft spot for tranquilizers. What if he was a
cog in a much larger, far darker machine, a network
operating beneath the surface, one that thrived on anonymity, coded language,
(24:40):
and disposable victims. Let me introduce you to our dramatized creation,
the Contract Cult. They meet in basements, in back rooms
and password protected chat rooms of the early proto Internet. Businessmen,
military types, law enforcement, even all mail, all natory, all
(25:01):
addicted to power and pain. In this story, Craft is recruited,
not discovered. His calm demeanor, his analytical mind, his ability
to travel freely up and down the California coast. These
aren't just perks, their requirements. He becomes the group's documentarian,
the archivist, logging victims, methods, reactions, his infamous scorecard. It's
(25:28):
not personal, it's a report. At monthly gatherings. Members trade data, substances, techniques, yes,
even people. They wager on reaction times, on resistance, on
how far they can push someone before they break. It's
evil in spreadsheet form, and craft. He's top of the class.
One dramatized moment takes us inside a coastal mansion rental
(25:50):
near Big Sir, a hidden weekend retreat. Members arrive with
briefcases and aliases. A young man is brought in, unconscious
as he's passed between masked men. Craft sits in the corner,
taking notes, observing, perfecting. Now let's take a pause here,
(26:12):
because yeah, I know this sounds sensational. It is sensational.
But I've worked the streets. I've seen what privilege and
power can cover up, and trust me, there are entire
layers of society that protect predators, not because they don't
believe the victims, but because the predators are simply too connected.
(26:37):
This sociological lens isn't about blaming one group. It's about
examining how systems fail when people in power are allowed
to act without consequence, When being white, male, educated, or
wealthy creates an invisibility cloak. The psychological profile of someone
like Craft would fit in with a network like this,
(27:00):
clinical detachment, narcissistic manipulation, the thrill of secrecy for someone
like him, Hurting someone wasn't just about the kill it
was about the control and what's more powerful than hurting
someone while being watched and applauded. In this dramatization, Craft's
(27:21):
eventual arrest isn't a mistake. It's a sacrifice. The group
lets him fall to protect themselves. They scrub connections, they
reassign aliases, and just like that, the network continues faceless, silent,
and terrifyingly efficient. And here's the final twist of this act.
(27:42):
A journalist deep in the true crime podcast Boom of
the twenty twenties starts digging. She finds phrases in Craft's
scorecard that match phrases from cold cases in other states,
same drugs, same rope, same m o oh. She doesn't
just uncover a killer, she uncovers a system. So let's
(28:05):
take a breath. We've just stared into the void of
something bigger than one man. A web of power, silence,
and untraceable violence. The kind of story that forces you
to ask if monsters can organize, who's really pulling the strings.
But here's the thing about systems, whether they're cult like
(28:25):
criminal or criminal justice, they don't just fail in the shadows.
Sometimes the failure happens right out in the open on
paper with a signature, and that brings us to a
scenario that should terrify anyone who believes the law always
gets it right, because in this next act, the killer
(28:46):
we've been exploring, he almost walks free. Let's talk about
the paperwork nightmare that almost unleashed Randy Stephen Kraft back
into the world. Welcome to Act six, where we ask
the question, what if Craft came closer to getting out
than anyone realized. This is the parole that almost happened.
(29:09):
In real life, Randy Stephen Craft was sentenced to death
in nineteen eighty nine. He's been rotting on San Quentin's
death row ever since. But in our dramatized scenario, we
imagine a nightmare too close for comfort. Craft almost walks free.
Let's set the stage. It's twenty eleven. The California prison
(29:30):
system is drowning in overcrowding lawsuits. Budgets are slashed, files
are lost, paperwork is scanned, misfiled and corrupted by the thousands,
and deep in a forgotten bureaucratic black hole, a clerical
error is made. A simple checkbox eligible for parole review
(29:51):
is ticked in Craft's digital record. Now nobody notices at first.
Enter Ono Delgado, a newly appointed parole analyst.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
She's overworked, undertrained, and processing files like she's feeding a
paper shredder. She flags Craft's file for review. It's sent
to a junior clerk, then to a parole calendar, then
somehow it lands on a judge's desk. The fictional tension
ramps up as a preliminary hearing is quietly scheduled. But
(30:32):
here's the kicker. This isn't a courtroom battle with cameras
and reporters. It's a procedural meeting buried in the maze
of California's prison reform chaos, one where over three thousand
case files are being audited for possible release recommendations due
to constitutional violations tied to long term solitary confinement. And
(30:57):
guess what Craft qualifies. This is where the real world
sociology of incarceration intersects with our darkest fears. The system
isn't just flawed, it's a monster of its own, with
so many limbs that one hand doesn't know what the
other is doing. It's a commentary on bureaucracy so big,
(31:20):
so underfunded, so digitized and disorganized, that even death row
can become a loophole. Psychologically, this act explores the concept
of institutional blindness when data becomes detached from identity, when
decisions are made by automation, evil hides in the code.
(31:42):
A man responsible for at least sixteen, maybe sixty murders
becomes nothing more than an inmate number in a spreadsheet.
And from my law enforcement perspective, I've seen the paperwork
nightmares that happen when someone gets lost in the system,
warrants that don't get served, violent offenders who slip through,
(32:04):
intake errors, and it always comes down to one thing.
A name becomes a file, and the file becomes a mistake.
In our dramatized version, it takes a true crime blogger, Yes,
let's bring in the online sleuths who catches wind of
the hearing. She sounds the alarm, A retired detective picks
(32:26):
it up, victims' families are notified, and a last minute
media blitz stops the hearing in its tracks. The public
outrage is nuclear protests, interviews, a full on state investigation
craft is yanked back into the shadows of death row.
But the damage is done, the public's faith shattered, and
(32:49):
we're left asking how many other killers are sitting behind
bars one typo away from release? And if Kraft almost
got out, who did up? Next? Act seven, the podcaster
who went too far? What if digging into Craft's legacy
wasn't just risky, it was fatal? There's something undeniably addictive
(33:12):
about true crime, isn't There The clues, the theories, the chase.
But what happens when the pursuit of truth becomes a
game of Russian Roulette? In this dramatized act, we meet
Marshall Dean, a former journalist turned indie podcaster whose show
Into the Abyss starts gaining traction after he releases a
(33:35):
multi part series titled The Scorecard Secrets. Marshall is slick, charismatic, sharp,
but he's also dangerously naive. He gets access to previously
unreleased court documents through a freedom of information request, then
through a shady online forum, he gets his hands on
(33:57):
something even more valuable, a digital scan of pages the
public never saw, Allegedly Page's craft kept hidden from even
his own defense team. The content disturbing, specific filled with
new code words and geographic hints, and for Marshall it's catnip.
(34:18):
He starts connecting Craft to unsolved disappearances in Oregon, Utah
even oversees, and he makes one critical mistake. He goes
public before checking his sources. He names names, one of
them a retired military officer living in Encinitas, who promptly sues.
(34:39):
But that's not the worst part. Marshall starts receiving emails,
then packages. One contains a single polaroid photo of a
bound man, face obscured, taken in what looks like a
nineteen eighties motel. Another package holds a voice recording. The
voice calm, chill articulate. It says, you talk like you
(35:02):
know the story, but you've only read the index. Marshall's
girlfriend finds him pacing at night, paranoid, obsessive, walls covered
in maps and red thread like he's auditioning for a
conspiracy documentary, but then he disappears. His last recorded podcast
episode is nothing short of manic. He accuses law enforcement
(35:24):
of covering up ongoing abductions. He claims Craft had protections
and maybe still does. The episode is taken down within hours,
but not before going viral To this day. Marshall Dean's
body has never been found. Police ruled it a suicide.
Theories online range from a deep state silencing to being
(35:48):
kidnapped by the same people Craft once ran with, So
what are we really looking at here? Psychologically this act
touches on obsession and identity. How the pursuit of truth
can become a surrogate for control, especially when someone's lost
everything else. It's the echo chamber of internet sleuth culture,
(36:13):
where validation becomes currency and danger feels like prestige. Sociologically,
we're looking at the blurring of entertainment and investigation. When
we treat real horror like a puzzle to solve, are
we commodifying trauma? And when podcasters start chasing clout more
than clarity, who gets hurt? And from a law enforcement lens,
(36:36):
this hits hard. I've seen it, people diving so deep
into a case they start to spiral. The frustration of
red tape, the burn of unanswered questions. It becomes personal,
and when that line blurs, the consequences can be real
in our fictional lens. Marshall's story is a cautionary tale
(36:56):
not just for the podcasters, but for all of us
who consume true crime with popcorn in hand, because when
you stare too long into the abyss, well you know
the rest. Next up, Act eight, The Lost Logs. What
if Craft's digital footprint was never truly erased and someone
(37:18):
just found it. Technology in the seventies and eighties wasn't
what it is today. But Randy Stephenkraft wasn't just a
sadistic killer. He was organized, calculated, methodical, and in our
next dramatized act, we imagine something modern law enforcement is
very familiar with, the digital ghost trail. The story opens
(37:41):
in twenty twenty four. A graduate student at University of California,
Irvine named Jaipatel, cyber forensics major Queer, brilliant and deep
into his thesis on early digital criminal archiving, starts scraping
old defense attorney records and law enforcement dumps for metadata.
(38:03):
His goal to prove that even in the analog era,
patterns of serial violence left digital fingerprints through payroll records,
early telecom logs, vehicle registrations, and pre GPS traffic patterns.
But while filtering legacy zip drives from a shuttered DA's
office database, he stumbles across something unexpected encrypted log files
(38:28):
hidden deep inside a mislabeled partition, timestamped between nineteen seventy
eight and nineteen eighty two, hexadecimal entries, GPS coordinate frameworks
before the tech even existed, and a directory labeled Boy's
Night ji decrypts the first one. It's chilling. Each file
(38:51):
contains what looks like a first person chronicle, not just
dates and names, but Craft's thoughts, his justifications, his impressions,
his rituals. These aren't just logs. There blueprints thought logs
of predation, packaged like software code, and one log entry
is from three months after Craft's arrest. In this fictional twist,
(39:14):
Jai goes to the authorities. He expects a medal. What
he gets is a cease and desist. A university ethics
panel threatens to revoke his thesis, but he's already uploaded
the logs to a blockchain archive. Now, conspiracy forums are exploding.
True crime addicts start cross referencing entries with missing persons
(39:36):
from across the Western United States, and what they find
unsolved cases that police had never linked to Craft, coordinates
near truck stops in Nevada, mentions of Canadian border towns,
a chilling entry about the one who wanted to go
with me. Let's talk psychology. This is the mind of
a predator who wanted to outlive himself, someone who record
(40:00):
arded his crimes, not to hide them, but to preserve them,
to make sure the world would know someday, how brilliant,
how methodical, how above the system he really believed he was.
It's not uncommon. The drive to document isn't always narcissism.
It's legacy building. It's the predator rewriting history on their
(40:23):
own terms. Sociologically, we have to ask why weren't we
looking for these digital traces? Because the system wasn't built
to law enforcement wasn't trained for it. And as someone
who's worked on the inside, I can tell you data
and egos don't mix well. You tell a seasoned detective
that some twenty somethingter coder just cracked open the past
(40:46):
with a decryption key, and you'll see eyes roll faster
than bodycams activate. But here's the punch. What if Craft
never acted alone. What if the logs prove he was
part of a larger network, And what if this archive
isn't his at all, but a recovered copy from someone else.
Still operating, and just like that, the logs are closed,
(41:10):
the final tapes cataloged, the voices silenced again. But here's
the thing about monsters like Craft, even behind bars, even
buried beneath the years of dust and archived evidence, their
influence doesn't die. It lingers, infects. It slips under the
(41:31):
skin of the people tasked with understanding them, people who
thought they could study the darkness without becoming part of it.
Because sometimes the final victim isn't one of the names
on the scorecard. Sometimes it's the one who dared to listen.
Let's move now to our final act, the shrink who
(41:51):
couldn't sleep. Welcome to Act nine. Let's wind the clock
back nineteen eighty four. Randy Stephen Kraft sits in a
maximum security interview room, and across from him is doctor
Elliot Fry, a soft spoken forensic psychologist contracted by the
state to evaluate Craft's competency and mental state post conviction.
(42:12):
At first, Frey is clinical. He's there to do a job,
run the checklist, check for psychopathy, dissociation, sexual sadism, disorder.
But Craft, he's charming, disarmingly articulate. Not once does he
posture as crazy. He calls Frey doctor with smug amusement
(42:32):
and offers up insights no one asked for, and then
he gets into Frey's head. Over the course of months,
Craft begins speaking in parables, philosophical riddles. He breaks down
why certain men were chosen. He compares himself to an
editor trimming weak chapters from a bloated book. Frey is disturbed,
(42:55):
but also captivated. He begins to dream in Craft's voice.
He finds himself journaling obsessively after sessions. One night, he
wakes up at three forty seven am, the exact time
Craft claimed he disposed of his cleanest kill, and finds
the phrase some deserve to be erased written in his
(43:17):
own handwriting. The line between patient and predator starts to blur.
In this fictionalized act, doctor Fry becomes the first and
only person Craft begins speaking to openly, not confessing, explaining theories, patterns, justifications.
Fray tries to warn the Department of Corrections that Craft
(43:39):
may have accomplices still at large, that there are names
not yet discovered, but no one listens. He's labeled compromised.
His contract ends quietly, his credentials suspended, But the real
twist years later when a young profiler in training pulls
the files, she find means something strange. Fray's personal journals
(44:04):
include not only detailed notes on Craft, but speculation about
unsolved cases dating back to the early two thousands, crimes
committed long after Craft was behind bars, crimes with matching mo's,
and a detail never made public, a red shoelace tied
(44:25):
in a double knot. Let's dig into this from a
psychological lens, this is what we call vicarious trauma, when
those who work closest to darkness begin to absorb it.
But Frey's story also touches on transference, where the emotions
and behaviors of one person begin to project onto another.
(44:45):
And Craft he was a master manipulator, intellectually dominant, emotionally sterile,
but never without purpose. From a sociological standpoint, this story
asks who watches the.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
When we assign humans to interpret monsters, we pretend they're
immune to the infection, but the truth evil can echo,
especially in institutions that prioritize results over well being, and
from a CoP's perspective, this hits differently We've all seen officers, detectives,
even techts who get too close, who forget to put
(45:31):
emotional armor back on. And in phrase case, he thought
he was the expert, but Craft was the apex predator.
In the end, this act isn't just about Craft's violence.
It's about the violence we invite into ourselves when we
stare too long, listen too hard, and think we're immune.
(45:52):
It's about the danger of believing we can dissect evil
without letting it bleed into us. And that's a on
the guilty files. True crime rewired the scorecard killer. We've
twisted timelines, cracked open sealed files, and reimagined the horrors
of Randy Stephen Craft through a darker, more expansive lens.
(46:16):
But let's bring it back to center for a second.
Because for all the dramatizations and what ifs, the facts remain.
Craft was a monster who preyed on the vulnerable, queer men,
military youth runaways, the overlooked and underestimated. We explored nine
alternate paths today, each built on the bones of truth, because,
(46:40):
as we know in criminology and sociology, the scariest fiction
often springs from fractured reality. We questioned what if someone
survived and remembered, what if Craft wasn't alone, what if
the military hid the truth? And what if those tapes, logs,
or codes are still out there? But we also unpacked
(47:03):
bigger questions about identity, about systems that protect predators, and
about the fine, fragile line between those who chase monsters
and those who become consumed by them. Now, I want
to leave you with a story, one from my own
days as a beat cop in Atlanta. It's about a
queer teenager I met outside a fetish club on Cheshire
(47:26):
Bridge Road. Multiple calls came in concern. Clubgoers noticed a
boy who looked far too young to be loitering outside,
the kind of kid who sets off alarm bells not
because he's doing anything wrong, but because the vibe is off.
And when I pulled up, he's stiffened, guarded, ready for judgment.
(47:47):
But I didn't give him that. I gave him curiosity, compassion.
I knew where he was standing, what kind of club
it was, and I didn't flinch. Eventually he opened up,
told me about an older man who gave him a
prepaid phone, said it was for checking in. Harmless at first, right,
(48:07):
but then the man started texting things, asking for photos,
giving instructions. The teen hadn't acted on any of it yet,
but it was heading somewhere. Dark grooming doesn't always come
with sirens. It's soft, subtle, strategic. I told him what
i'd seen, what that kind of manipulation becomes. I didn't preach,
(48:30):
I didn't shame. I just showed him the future that
might be coming if he stayed silent. And that was
the moment we turned the tide. I called his mom.
She came, and together we had a real conversation about queerness,
about trust, and about how predators cloak themselves in kindness.
(48:52):
That night didn't end in an arrest. It ended an intervention.
And I tell you this now because the same systems
that failed to see Craft's victims are still out there,
still struggling to recognize red flags unless they're screaming, still
underestimating queer youth, still uncomfortable talking about the gray areas
(49:12):
where abuse grows. If you take anything from this episode,
let it be this. The monsters don't always live in shadows.
Sometimes they hold the flashlight. So let's keep talking, let's
keep questioning, and let's never forget the stories behind the stats,
and hey, if you're as deep in the rabbit hole
(49:32):
as we are, you won't want to miss our Friday
episode of The Guilty Files Revisited, where Brian and I
come together to break it all down. We'll debate theories,
dissect fact versus fiction, and serve up some behind the
scenes banter you won't hear anywhere else until then. Stay curious,
stay uncomfortable, and stay loud. This is the Guilty Files
(49:54):
rewired signing off it in
Hello, true crime lovers, Welcome back to the Guilty Files.
True Crime Rewired, the podcast where we take one crime,
two perspectives, and create endless intrigue. I'm Danny, your guide
for the second act of this case, where we take
the hard facts from earlier this week and twist them
into something unexpected, daring, and just a little wicked. Think
(00:30):
of me as your pilot through the tangled web of
true crime, with the side of sass and a dash
of drama to keep you hooked. At The Guilty Files,
True Crime Rewritten. We believe every crime has two sides
to the story, and every listener deserves the thrill of both.
So sit back, lean in, and let's rewrite the narrative.
(00:52):
Because true crime isn't just meant to be solved, It's
meant to be explored. Let's get started. Welcome back listeners
to the Guilty Files. True Crime Rewired, the place where
(01:15):
fact meets fiction and where we're not afraid to ask
what if. I'm Danny, a former beat cop in Atlanta,
a double major in psychology and sociology, and someone who
spent far too many nights wondering what makes people tick
and what makes them snap? If you joined us earlier
this week on the Guilty Files Uncovered. You know Brian
(01:39):
took us deep into the horrific case of Randy Stephen Kraft,
the so called scorecard Killer, a man who lived two lives,
the affable, well educated computer consultant by day and a
sadistic serial predator by night. With a tally sheet of
cryptic notations, Craft likely murdered dozens of young men across
(02:01):
the West Coast, military personnel, hitchhikers, and drifters, many targeted
for their vulnerability, their queerness, and their invisibility. But today
we turn that file inside out. Today we ask what
happens when we let the imagination run wild, Still grounded
(02:21):
in what we know, but unshackled from what we can prove.
These are fictionalized dramatizations designed to entertain, provoke, and deepen
our understanding of the people, systems, and psychology behind these
real crimes. Will journey through nine acts, nine chilling what ifs,
(02:43):
each one grounded in the very real terror, Craft unleashed,
and each one asking what more we might learn or
what horrors might still be hiding in the cracks. So
buckle up, let's rewire the case file of Randy Stea.
Even before we dive headfirst into the fictional rabbit hole,
(03:04):
Let's take one last breath of reality. Here's what we know.
What we can prove about Randy stephen Craft. No speculation,
no hypotheticals, just the cold, ugly truth served straight. No chaser.
Randy Craft was a computer whiz with a college degree,
a soft spoken demeanor, and a terrifying double life. From
(03:28):
the outside, he was the kind of guy you'd trust
to fix your modem or politely chat with you in
a grocery store line. Inside, he was calculating sadistic methodical
Between the early nineteen seventies and his arrest in nineteen
eighty threeft is believed to have murdered as many as
sixty seven young men across California, Oregon and beyond. Let
(03:53):
me say that again for the people in the back.
Sixty seven. Though officially convicted for sixteen murders, the real number,
judging by the infamous scorecard found in his car, maybe
far far higher. His victims were mostly young men, military personnel, hitchhikers,
(04:15):
queer men, and runaways, the kind of individuals who slipped
through the cracks of our systems invisible to institutions disposable
in the eyes of authority. And that's not just tragic,
that's structural. Psychologically, Craft was a control freak who sexualized dominance, humiliation,
and death. He drugged victims with tranquilizers, tied them up,
(04:39):
tortured them, and often mutilated them post mortem. There were burns,
bite marks, missing testicles. He took souvenirs, and he dumped
bodies like discarded wrappers, off highways and canyons in plain sight.
And the kicker the police didn't catch him through some
genius detect of work. No CSI dramatics here, they got lucky.
(05:04):
He was pulled over for suspected DUI in nineteen eighty three.
And guess what was in the passenger seat. A dead marine,
still warm, tucked under a jacket like he'd fallen asleep
on the ride home. But Kraft had a ledger in
the car, a cryptic list with sixty five entries, each
one believed to correspond to a murder, nicknames, dates, inside references.
(05:30):
It became known as the Scorecard, and it's still giving
cold case investigators migraines to this day. Sociologically, this case
exposes the deep failures in how institutions handle missing persons,
especially when the missing are queer, transient, or military. The
(05:52):
lines of communication between jurisdictions were a mess. Priorities were
shaped by public image, not public sea safety, and predators
like Craft knew how to exploit every blind spot. Now,
as someone who's worked the streets, who's seen what gets
flagged and what gets filed under not our problem, I
(06:14):
can tell you this Craft was calculated. He used the
system's apathy as camouflage and it worked for over a decade.
So yeah, that's the reality, the bones of the story.
Everything we're about to unravel in the next nine acts
will take creative liberties, but it's rooted in this horrifying truth.
(06:37):
Craft was real, His victims were real, and the questions
we're about to ask they matter. Now let's go deeper.
What if one of Kraft's victims opened his eyes and
remembered everything? Welcome to Act one, the one who got away.
Let's start here, because every horror story is garrier when
(07:00):
someone lives to tell it. In this dramatized reimagining, we
meet Miguel, a young marine stationed out of Camp Pendleton, closeted,
conflicted and lonely. He wanders into a bar one Friday night,
looking not for trouble, but maybe for someone who sees him.
Enter Randy Craft, friendly, well dressed, You look like you
(07:25):
could use a drink, Miguel accepts, And here's where the
story fractures. Because the drink, it's laced. But Miguel, he's
stronger than expected. Maybe he hadn't eaten. Maybe his metabolism's
working overtime. Whatever the reason, the sedative doesn't knock him
out completely. We imagine a gut wrenching blur. Miguel paralyzed
(07:50):
in the passenger seat craft, humming along to the radio,
casually checking his rear view mirror. Miguel tries to speak,
but his tongue feels like rubber. Time slips, sound warps.
He passes out and wakes up in a drainage ditch
miles from the base. His ribs ache, his wrists are bruised,
(08:13):
his jenes are gone, but he's alive. Now here's where
we deepen the psychological terrain. Miguel can't remember everything. At first,
he doesn't want to. He tells no one. The shame,
the fear, the internalized homophobia. It's crushing but over the
(08:34):
next several weeks, fragments start returning, the smell of Craft's cologne,
the click of duct tape, the taste of vodka and
orange juice. He begins to draw, to write, to dissociate less,
until finally he sees the man's face in a dream
(08:55):
and he remembers the license plate. From a sociological perspective,
Miguel is every marginalized survivor silenced by stigma. He lives
in a system military, masculine heteronormative that doesn't just ignore him,
it conditions him to erase himself. Reporting the assault could
(09:15):
mean career suicide, ostracization, or worse. But what happens when
he does come forward? In our fictional take, he finds
one detective who listens, just one That detective burned out
and buried under unsolved files, pulls records. She starts connecting
the dots, similar injuries, same dumping grounds, overlapping timelines, and
(09:40):
with Miguel's partial plate number, she opens a case that
had gone cold a dozen times over. In real life,
we know this didn't happen, but maybe it could have.
Maybe someone like Miguel was out there, survived, remembered, and
stayed silent. Psychologically, this act speaks to the resilience of
(10:02):
memory and the strange cruel ways the brain protects us.
It also underscores the trauma gay men faced, not just
from predators, but from the silence demanded by institutions. Sociologically,
it's a lens into systemic erasure, how queerness, youth, and
(10:23):
vulnerability intersect in a way that makes victims easier to overlook.
And as a former officer myself, let me be real,
I saw too many cases dismissed because the victim didn't
fit the mold. This act, it's a gut punch reminder
of who gets believed and who gets buried. What if
(10:44):
the cryptic code Craft kept wasn't a puzzle but a
confession waiting to be unlocked. Welcome to act too. The
score that spoke. Now, let's talk about that infamous list,
the so called scorecard found tucked neatly in Craft's car.
That lined sheet of paper bore sixty five cryptic entries,
(11:07):
short phrases, weird abbreviations and nicknames that would make sense
to no one but the man who wrote them. It
looked like nonsense, but in this dramatized lens. It's more
than a log. It's a confession, a code, and it's
talking if we know how to listen. We imagine a young,
(11:30):
hungry linguist working for the LAPD as a civilian analyst,
fresh out of grad school, not yet hardened by bureaucracy.
She doesn't just see a list. She sees syntax, repetition, code, structure.
And when she pairs Craft's list with geographic data and
time stamps from cold case files, something wild emerges. EDM
(11:56):
wasn't just shorthand, it meant electro doosed Marine airplane hill,
not a nickname, but a physical location where a body
was dumped near a military flight path, twilight time of death,
or maybe where he watched the light leave their eyes.
The story takes on a new life. Each phrase begins
(12:18):
to map to a kill. The list isn't just record keeping,
its ritual, like a perverse form of journaling, and in
our fiction, the linguist builds a digital interface, cross referencing
phrases with case files, survivor statements, road maps, hospital records,
and she discovers there are more than sixty five. Psychologically,
(12:43):
this is vintage narcissism. Craft wasn't just killing. He was authoring, documenting.
He believed himself to be the smartest man in the room,
and this was his personal mythology. Sociologically, it's a striking
example of how predators exploit gaps in bureaucracy. The scorecard
(13:05):
wasn't even treated as serious evidence until much later. Why
because law enforcement wasn't ready to believe someone could be
that organized or that prolific. That was the blind spot
from a police procedural perspective. This act raises the question
why didn't we bring in coders, linguists, behavioral experts outside
(13:27):
the badge. The Craft case illustrates how hierarchical tunnel vision
can kill momentum. Sometimes the answers are there, but they're
written in a language the institution refuses to learn. And
for the true crime fan listening at home, this act
hits on something deeper, that insatiable hunger to decode, to
(13:51):
uncover the puzzle, to beat the killer at his own game.
What if we could have What if we still can
up next? What if Craft didn't act alone? What if
he wasn't the only monster in the car? Welcome to
Act three, The dark duo theory. Let's lean into a
(14:12):
theory that's been whispered in online forums and lingered between
the lines of case files, A theory that's as disturbing
as it is plausible. What if Randy Stephen Craft wasn't
acting alone. In our fictionalized reimagining, we introduce a second man.
We'll call him Greg. He's never been named, never caught,
(14:35):
never officially linked to the case. But he's there, lurking
just beyond the periphery, in the blurred outlines of survivor testimony,
in the time gaps between victims, in the patterns that
don't quite line up. Greg is the kind of man
you wouldn't remember even if you saw him twice. Average plane,
(15:00):
polite enough to keep suspicion low, dark enough to be
dangerous in just the right company.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
In this dramatized version, Greg meets Craft at a gay
bar in West Hollywood, a place where masks are worn
easily and secrets come cheap. They hit it off over drinks,
bond over politics, push boundaries, and eventually they feed each
other's worst instincts. Craft we know was calculated, meticulous, even
(15:37):
he liked order control sedatives. Greg not so much. In
our story, Greg's the chaotic one, loud, crude, impulsive. He
likes to watch the fear unfold. He's jealous of Craft's
obsession with keeping records, wants the adrenaline without the archives. Together,
(15:58):
they become something more than just killers. They're a ritual.
Greg distracts, Randy doses. Greg initiates the violence, Randy finishes it.
Two sides of the same psychopathy, and they're just careful
enough to keep Greg's fingerprints out of reach. From a
psychological standpoint, this kind of killer dynamic isn't far fetched.
(16:22):
We've seen it before. Charles Ang and Leonard Lake, the
toy box Killer and his accomplices, even Fred and Rosemary West.
These aren't just partners in crime. They're mirrors for one
another's depravity, amplifying and escalating behavior that might have remained
dormant in isolation. Think about this. Many serial predators harbor
(16:46):
violent fantasies long before they act, But when they find
someone who validates, even celebrates those fantasies, that's when fantasy
crosses into reality. Also touches on follower psychology, the phenomenon
where a more dominant personality draws in a weaker one
(17:08):
who lacks the internal inhibitors to say no. It's not
always a matter of persuasion. Sometimes the follower has the
same desires they've just been waiting for permission. From a
sociological angle, let's talk about invisibility. Greg is fictional, but
the type of person he represents isn't. Marginalized communities, especially
(17:31):
queer men, during the seventies and eighties, existed largely outside
the protections of society. Crimes in those communities were under reported,
under investigated, and under publicized. A second killer he could
have easily slipped through jurisdictional cracks, especially if he never
(17:51):
left a trail. And if you've worked the beat as
I have, you've seen what happens when departments don't share information.
Different precincts, different counties, different states, no unified system. One
guy gets flagged in Santa Ana, another in San Diego.
Nobody talks. Meanwhile, a predator like Craft or Greg, is
(18:15):
driving up and down the Five Freeway, turning men into
entries on a scorecard. Now imagine a witness, a lone survivor.
He tells police there were two of them, but he's drunk,
or he's homeless, or he's queer and afraid. That statement,
it goes in the file, but it doesn't go anywhere.
(18:37):
That's how Greg survives the headlines. That's how he becomes invisible.
And if he was real, if Greg existed, what if
he's still out there living in the suburbs coaching little
league following true crime reddit threads about Craft, wondering when
(18:57):
someone will put two and two together. Maybe this episode
is his wake up call. What if Craft recorded everything
and the tapes are still out there. This is act
for the lost tapes. We've all heard it before. If
these walls could talk. But what if, in Randy Kraft's case,
they didn't have to. What if Craft left behind his
(19:19):
own voice, his own twisted soundtrack, just waiting to be found.
In our dramatized version of events, we flash back to
the night of Craft's arrest. He's pulled over in Orange
County for suspected DUI. In the passenger seat is the
lifeless body of a young marine in the trunk, beer bottles, tranquilizers,
(19:42):
nylon rope, and the now infamous scorecard, but tucked under
the driver's seat, barely noticed by the responding officers is
a plastic grocery bag containing a small, unassuming keyfob, no markings,
no labels, just a number at on its side. Cut.
Two months later, an overworked property clerk doing inventory finds
(20:06):
the tag, traces it, and links it to a storage
unit rental on the outskirts of Long Beach. The contents
dust trash bags, molded boxes, and at the back, one
locked crate. Inside dozens of audio cassette tapes, carefully labeled
with Craft's neat calculated handwriting. Each tape begins the same way,
(20:30):
a calm, detached voice. This is Randy Stephen Kraft. The
subject is unconscious tonight. I'm testing something new. Then breathing,
muffled sounds, pleading a thud, silence, more silence, but then commentary,
(20:53):
Craft narrating his actions, not with remorse, with fascination. He
dissects e like a behavioral case study, talks about their
physical reactions, their fear thresholds, the effectiveness of different drugs.
This is more than a trophy collection. It's a manifesto,
a data set, an archive of horror. Now here's where
(21:17):
things twist. The detectives listening to these tapes begin to
realize something chilling. Some of the victims described were never
officially connected to Craft, some don't appear on the scorecard,
some were reported missing after his arrest. This fictional find
cracks open a horrifying possibility. Either Craft killed more than
(21:42):
we thought, or someone else kept recording after he was
locked up. From a psychological perspective, this act taps into
narcissism in its purest Formft isn't just reliving his crimes,
he's curating them. It's the killer as director. He wants
to be studied, remembered, understood on his terms. It's the
(22:06):
classic control fantasy, except this time he's controlling his legacy.
It also speaks to post defense behavior. Many serial killers
revisit their crime scenes or collect souvenirs. Craft he built
an audio shrine. Now let's talk sociology, specifically the devaluation
(22:27):
of marginalized voices. Many of Kraft's victims were queer, transient,
or estranged from family. This meant their disappearances often went unreported, or,
if reported, uninvestigated. The systems simply didn't value their lives
the same way. That's not just an oversight, that's a
systemic failure and Here's where I pull from my own
(22:49):
law enforcement experience. Storage units are gold mines. I've personally
cleared scenes where killers hid trophies in dropboxes, climate controlled lockers,
even crawl spaces beneath church property. These hidden caches often
go untouched for years because there's no warrant to search them,
(23:11):
or worse, because no one knows they exist. So imagine
the horror of an investigator realizing we missed this, that
while we were processing Craft's car, his voice was whispering
from a box twenty miles away. And let's not forget
the public. Once these tapes surface, the news media has
(23:32):
a field day. Excerpts are leaked, Activist groups demand transparency,
and families already grieving have to relive their loved one's
last moments through Crafts sick narration. It becomes a national scandal,
one that forces law enforcement to ask how many killers
(23:54):
leave behind something we've never found? And maybe the scariest
question of all, who's still out there listening? What if
Craft wasn't acting alone, but as part of a fringe
underground that believed murder could be ritualized or monetized. Welcome
to Act five Inside the Contract Cult. Let's open the
(24:16):
conspiracy file, shall we. In our fictional retelling, Randy Stephncraft
wasn't just a lone wolf with a twisted spreadsheet and
a soft spot for tranquilizers. What if he was a
cog in a much larger, far darker machine, a network
operating beneath the surface, one that thrived on anonymity, coded language,
(24:40):
and disposable victims. Let me introduce you to our dramatized creation,
the Contract Cult. They meet in basements, in back rooms
and password protected chat rooms of the early proto Internet. Businessmen,
military types, law enforcement, even all mail, all natory, all
(25:01):
addicted to power and pain. In this story, Craft is recruited,
not discovered. His calm demeanor, his analytical mind, his ability
to travel freely up and down the California coast. These
aren't just perks, their requirements. He becomes the group's documentarian,
the archivist, logging victims, methods, reactions, his infamous scorecard. It's
(25:28):
not personal, it's a report. At monthly gatherings. Members trade data, substances, techniques, yes,
even people. They wager on reaction times, on resistance, on
how far they can push someone before they break. It's
evil in spreadsheet form, and craft. He's top of the class.
One dramatized moment takes us inside a coastal mansion rental
(25:50):
near Big Sir, a hidden weekend retreat. Members arrive with
briefcases and aliases. A young man is brought in, unconscious
as he's passed between masked men. Craft sits in the corner,
taking notes, observing, perfecting. Now let's take a pause here,
(26:12):
because yeah, I know this sounds sensational. It is sensational.
But I've worked the streets. I've seen what privilege and
power can cover up, and trust me, there are entire
layers of society that protect predators, not because they don't
believe the victims, but because the predators are simply too connected.
(26:37):
This sociological lens isn't about blaming one group. It's about
examining how systems fail when people in power are allowed
to act without consequence, When being white, male, educated, or
wealthy creates an invisibility cloak. The psychological profile of someone
like Craft would fit in with a network like this,
(27:00):
clinical detachment, narcissistic manipulation, the thrill of secrecy for someone
like him, Hurting someone wasn't just about the kill it
was about the control and what's more powerful than hurting
someone while being watched and applauded. In this dramatization, Craft's
(27:21):
eventual arrest isn't a mistake. It's a sacrifice. The group
lets him fall to protect themselves. They scrub connections, they
reassign aliases, and just like that, the network continues faceless, silent,
and terrifyingly efficient. And here's the final twist of this act.
(27:42):
A journalist deep in the true crime podcast Boom of
the twenty twenties starts digging. She finds phrases in Craft's
scorecard that match phrases from cold cases in other states,
same drugs, same rope, same m o oh. She doesn't
just uncover a killer, she uncovers a system. So let's
(28:05):
take a breath. We've just stared into the void of
something bigger than one man. A web of power, silence,
and untraceable violence. The kind of story that forces you
to ask if monsters can organize, who's really pulling the strings.
But here's the thing about systems, whether they're cult like
(28:25):
criminal or criminal justice, they don't just fail in the shadows.
Sometimes the failure happens right out in the open on
paper with a signature, and that brings us to a
scenario that should terrify anyone who believes the law always
gets it right, because in this next act, the killer
(28:46):
we've been exploring, he almost walks free. Let's talk about
the paperwork nightmare that almost unleashed Randy Stephen Kraft back
into the world. Welcome to Act six, where we ask
the question, what if Craft came closer to getting out
than anyone realized. This is the parole that almost happened.
(29:09):
In real life, Randy Stephen Craft was sentenced to death
in nineteen eighty nine. He's been rotting on San Quentin's
death row ever since. But in our dramatized scenario, we
imagine a nightmare too close for comfort. Craft almost walks free.
Let's set the stage. It's twenty eleven. The California prison
(29:30):
system is drowning in overcrowding lawsuits. Budgets are slashed, files
are lost, paperwork is scanned, misfiled and corrupted by the thousands,
and deep in a forgotten bureaucratic black hole, a clerical
error is made. A simple checkbox eligible for parole review
(29:51):
is ticked in Craft's digital record. Now nobody notices at first.
Enter Ono Delgado, a newly appointed parole analyst.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
She's overworked, undertrained, and processing files like she's feeding a
paper shredder. She flags Craft's file for review. It's sent
to a junior clerk, then to a parole calendar, then
somehow it lands on a judge's desk. The fictional tension
ramps up as a preliminary hearing is quietly scheduled. But
(30:32):
here's the kicker. This isn't a courtroom battle with cameras
and reporters. It's a procedural meeting buried in the maze
of California's prison reform chaos, one where over three thousand
case files are being audited for possible release recommendations due
to constitutional violations tied to long term solitary confinement. And
(30:57):
guess what Craft qualifies. This is where the real world
sociology of incarceration intersects with our darkest fears. The system
isn't just flawed, it's a monster of its own, with
so many limbs that one hand doesn't know what the
other is doing. It's a commentary on bureaucracy so big,
(31:20):
so underfunded, so digitized and disorganized, that even death row
can become a loophole. Psychologically, this act explores the concept
of institutional blindness when data becomes detached from identity, when
decisions are made by automation, evil hides in the code.
(31:42):
A man responsible for at least sixteen, maybe sixty murders
becomes nothing more than an inmate number in a spreadsheet.
And from my law enforcement perspective, I've seen the paperwork
nightmares that happen when someone gets lost in the system,
warrants that don't get served, violent offenders who slip through,
(32:04):
intake errors, and it always comes down to one thing.
A name becomes a file, and the file becomes a mistake.
In our dramatized version, it takes a true crime blogger, Yes,
let's bring in the online sleuths who catches wind of
the hearing. She sounds the alarm, A retired detective picks
(32:26):
it up, victims' families are notified, and a last minute
media blitz stops the hearing in its tracks. The public
outrage is nuclear protests, interviews, a full on state investigation
craft is yanked back into the shadows of death row.
But the damage is done, the public's faith shattered, and
(32:49):
we're left asking how many other killers are sitting behind
bars one typo away from release? And if Kraft almost
got out, who did up? Next? Act seven, the podcaster
who went too far? What if digging into Craft's legacy
wasn't just risky, it was fatal? There's something undeniably addictive
(33:12):
about true crime, isn't There The clues, the theories, the chase.
But what happens when the pursuit of truth becomes a
game of Russian Roulette? In this dramatized act, we meet
Marshall Dean, a former journalist turned indie podcaster whose show
Into the Abyss starts gaining traction after he releases a
(33:35):
multi part series titled The Scorecard Secrets. Marshall is slick, charismatic, sharp,
but he's also dangerously naive. He gets access to previously
unreleased court documents through a freedom of information request, then
through a shady online forum, he gets his hands on
(33:57):
something even more valuable, a digital scan of pages the
public never saw, Allegedly Page's craft kept hidden from even
his own defense team. The content disturbing, specific filled with
new code words and geographic hints, and for Marshall it's catnip.
(34:18):
He starts connecting Craft to unsolved disappearances in Oregon, Utah
even oversees, and he makes one critical mistake. He goes
public before checking his sources. He names names, one of
them a retired military officer living in Encinitas, who promptly sues.
(34:39):
But that's not the worst part. Marshall starts receiving emails,
then packages. One contains a single polaroid photo of a
bound man, face obscured, taken in what looks like a
nineteen eighties motel. Another package holds a voice recording. The
voice calm, chill articulate. It says, you talk like you
(35:02):
know the story, but you've only read the index. Marshall's
girlfriend finds him pacing at night, paranoid, obsessive, walls covered
in maps and red thread like he's auditioning for a
conspiracy documentary, but then he disappears. His last recorded podcast
episode is nothing short of manic. He accuses law enforcement
(35:24):
of covering up ongoing abductions. He claims Craft had protections
and maybe still does. The episode is taken down within hours,
but not before going viral To this day. Marshall Dean's
body has never been found. Police ruled it a suicide.
Theories online range from a deep state silencing to being
(35:48):
kidnapped by the same people Craft once ran with, So
what are we really looking at here? Psychologically this act
touches on obsession and identity. How the pursuit of truth
can become a surrogate for control, especially when someone's lost
everything else. It's the echo chamber of internet sleuth culture,
(36:13):
where validation becomes currency and danger feels like prestige. Sociologically,
we're looking at the blurring of entertainment and investigation. When
we treat real horror like a puzzle to solve, are
we commodifying trauma? And when podcasters start chasing clout more
than clarity, who gets hurt? And from a law enforcement lens,
(36:36):
this hits hard. I've seen it, people diving so deep
into a case they start to spiral. The frustration of
red tape, the burn of unanswered questions. It becomes personal,
and when that line blurs, the consequences can be real
in our fictional lens. Marshall's story is a cautionary tale
(36:56):
not just for the podcasters, but for all of us
who consume true crime with popcorn in hand, because when
you stare too long into the abyss, well you know
the rest. Next up, Act eight, The Lost Logs. What
if Craft's digital footprint was never truly erased and someone
(37:18):
just found it. Technology in the seventies and eighties wasn't
what it is today. But Randy Stephenkraft wasn't just a
sadistic killer. He was organized, calculated, methodical, and in our
next dramatized act, we imagine something modern law enforcement is
very familiar with, the digital ghost trail. The story opens
(37:41):
in twenty twenty four. A graduate student at University of California,
Irvine named Jaipatel, cyber forensics major Queer, brilliant and deep
into his thesis on early digital criminal archiving, starts scraping
old defense attorney records and law enforcement dumps for metadata.
(38:03):
His goal to prove that even in the analog era,
patterns of serial violence left digital fingerprints through payroll records,
early telecom logs, vehicle registrations, and pre GPS traffic patterns.
But while filtering legacy zip drives from a shuttered DA's
office database, he stumbles across something unexpected encrypted log files
(38:28):
hidden deep inside a mislabeled partition, timestamped between nineteen seventy
eight and nineteen eighty two, hexadecimal entries, GPS coordinate frameworks
before the tech even existed, and a directory labeled Boy's
Night ji decrypts the first one. It's chilling. Each file
(38:51):
contains what looks like a first person chronicle, not just
dates and names, but Craft's thoughts, his justifications, his impressions,
his rituals. These aren't just logs. There blueprints thought logs
of predation, packaged like software code, and one log entry
is from three months after Craft's arrest. In this fictional twist,
(39:14):
Jai goes to the authorities. He expects a medal. What
he gets is a cease and desist. A university ethics
panel threatens to revoke his thesis, but he's already uploaded
the logs to a blockchain archive. Now, conspiracy forums are exploding.
True crime addicts start cross referencing entries with missing persons
(39:36):
from across the Western United States, and what they find
unsolved cases that police had never linked to Craft, coordinates
near truck stops in Nevada, mentions of Canadian border towns,
a chilling entry about the one who wanted to go
with me. Let's talk psychology. This is the mind of
a predator who wanted to outlive himself, someone who record
(40:00):
arded his crimes, not to hide them, but to preserve them,
to make sure the world would know someday, how brilliant,
how methodical, how above the system he really believed he was.
It's not uncommon. The drive to document isn't always narcissism.
It's legacy building. It's the predator rewriting history on their
(40:23):
own terms. Sociologically, we have to ask why weren't we
looking for these digital traces? Because the system wasn't built
to law enforcement wasn't trained for it. And as someone
who's worked on the inside, I can tell you data
and egos don't mix well. You tell a seasoned detective
that some twenty somethingter coder just cracked open the past
(40:46):
with a decryption key, and you'll see eyes roll faster
than bodycams activate. But here's the punch. What if Craft
never acted alone. What if the logs prove he was
part of a larger network, And what if this archive
isn't his at all, but a recovered copy from someone else.
Still operating, and just like that, the logs are closed,
(41:10):
the final tapes cataloged, the voices silenced again. But here's
the thing about monsters like Craft, even behind bars, even
buried beneath the years of dust and archived evidence, their
influence doesn't die. It lingers, infects. It slips under the
(41:31):
skin of the people tasked with understanding them, people who
thought they could study the darkness without becoming part of it.
Because sometimes the final victim isn't one of the names
on the scorecard. Sometimes it's the one who dared to listen.
Let's move now to our final act, the shrink who
(41:51):
couldn't sleep. Welcome to Act nine. Let's wind the clock
back nineteen eighty four. Randy Stephen Kraft sits in a
maximum security interview room, and across from him is doctor
Elliot Fry, a soft spoken forensic psychologist contracted by the
state to evaluate Craft's competency and mental state post conviction.
(42:12):
At first, Frey is clinical. He's there to do a job,
run the checklist, check for psychopathy, dissociation, sexual sadism, disorder.
But Craft, he's charming, disarmingly articulate. Not once does he
posture as crazy. He calls Frey doctor with smug amusement
(42:32):
and offers up insights no one asked for, and then
he gets into Frey's head. Over the course of months,
Craft begins speaking in parables, philosophical riddles. He breaks down
why certain men were chosen. He compares himself to an
editor trimming weak chapters from a bloated book. Frey is disturbed,
(42:55):
but also captivated. He begins to dream in Craft's voice.
He finds himself journaling obsessively after sessions. One night, he
wakes up at three forty seven am, the exact time
Craft claimed he disposed of his cleanest kill, and finds
the phrase some deserve to be erased written in his
(43:17):
own handwriting. The line between patient and predator starts to blur.
In this fictionalized act, doctor Fry becomes the first and
only person Craft begins speaking to openly, not confessing, explaining theories, patterns, justifications.
Fray tries to warn the Department of Corrections that Craft
(43:39):
may have accomplices still at large, that there are names
not yet discovered, but no one listens. He's labeled compromised.
His contract ends quietly, his credentials suspended, But the real
twist years later when a young profiler in training pulls
the files, she find means something strange. Fray's personal journals
(44:04):
include not only detailed notes on Craft, but speculation about
unsolved cases dating back to the early two thousands, crimes
committed long after Craft was behind bars, crimes with matching mo's,
and a detail never made public, a red shoelace tied
(44:25):
in a double knot. Let's dig into this from a
psychological lens, this is what we call vicarious trauma, when
those who work closest to darkness begin to absorb it.
But Frey's story also touches on transference, where the emotions
and behaviors of one person begin to project onto another.
(44:45):
And Craft he was a master manipulator, intellectually dominant, emotionally sterile,
but never without purpose. From a sociological standpoint, this story
asks who watches the.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Stay tuned for more of the guilty files. We'll be
right back after these messages.
Speaker 1 (45:08):
When we assign humans to interpret monsters, we pretend they're
immune to the infection, but the truth evil can echo,
especially in institutions that prioritize results over well being, and
from a CoP's perspective, this hits differently We've all seen officers, detectives,
even techts who get too close, who forget to put
(45:31):
emotional armor back on. And in phrase case, he thought
he was the expert, but Craft was the apex predator.
In the end, this act isn't just about Craft's violence.
It's about the violence we invite into ourselves when we
stare too long, listen too hard, and think we're immune.
(45:52):
It's about the danger of believing we can dissect evil
without letting it bleed into us. And that's a on
the guilty files. True crime rewired the scorecard killer. We've
twisted timelines, cracked open sealed files, and reimagined the horrors
of Randy Stephen Craft through a darker, more expansive lens.
(46:16):
But let's bring it back to center for a second.
Because for all the dramatizations and what ifs, the facts remain.
Craft was a monster who preyed on the vulnerable, queer men,
military youth runaways, the overlooked and underestimated. We explored nine
alternate paths today, each built on the bones of truth, because,
(46:40):
as we know in criminology and sociology, the scariest fiction
often springs from fractured reality. We questioned what if someone
survived and remembered, what if Craft wasn't alone, what if
the military hid the truth? And what if those tapes, logs,
or codes are still out there? But we also unpacked
(47:03):
bigger questions about identity, about systems that protect predators, and
about the fine, fragile line between those who chase monsters
and those who become consumed by them. Now, I want
to leave you with a story, one from my own
days as a beat cop in Atlanta. It's about a
queer teenager I met outside a fetish club on Cheshire
(47:26):
Bridge Road. Multiple calls came in concern. Clubgoers noticed a
boy who looked far too young to be loitering outside,
the kind of kid who sets off alarm bells not
because he's doing anything wrong, but because the vibe is off.
And when I pulled up, he's stiffened, guarded, ready for judgment.
(47:47):
But I didn't give him that. I gave him curiosity, compassion.
I knew where he was standing, what kind of club
it was, and I didn't flinch. Eventually he opened up,
told me about an older man who gave him a
prepaid phone, said it was for checking in. Harmless at first, right,
(48:07):
but then the man started texting things, asking for photos,
giving instructions. The teen hadn't acted on any of it yet,
but it was heading somewhere. Dark grooming doesn't always come
with sirens. It's soft, subtle, strategic. I told him what
i'd seen, what that kind of manipulation becomes. I didn't preach,
(48:30):
I didn't shame. I just showed him the future that
might be coming if he stayed silent. And that was
the moment we turned the tide. I called his mom.
She came, and together we had a real conversation about queerness,
about trust, and about how predators cloak themselves in kindness.
(48:52):
That night didn't end in an arrest. It ended an intervention.
And I tell you this now because the same systems
that failed to see Craft's victims are still out there,
still struggling to recognize red flags unless they're screaming, still
underestimating queer youth, still uncomfortable talking about the gray areas
(49:12):
where abuse grows. If you take anything from this episode,
let it be this. The monsters don't always live in shadows.
Sometimes they hold the flashlight. So let's keep talking, let's
keep questioning, and let's never forget the stories behind the stats,
and hey, if you're as deep in the rabbit hole
(49:32):
as we are, you won't want to miss our Friday
episode of The Guilty Files Revisited, where Brian and I
come together to break it all down. We'll debate theories,
dissect fact versus fiction, and serve up some behind the
scenes banter you won't hear anywhere else until then. Stay curious,
stay uncomfortable, and stay loud. This is the Guilty Files
(49:54):
rewired signing off it in
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