All language subtitles for Butchers of L.A. - S01E03 - Keeping Score

The bodies continue to pile
up in Southern California.

The madness has not ended.

I didn't actually feel I was
getting the job done because we

were having so many of them.

And just when they thought
they'd have something,

another body would show up.

And we're going back
and looking at the chart.

We're saying, wait
a minute, there

might be a third guy
here, because that MO was

even a little bit different.

This guy was
picking up marines.

It's like a trilogy of terror
with these three guys.

He was the most sadistic
out of all of them.

He really liked
to torture these people

while they were alive.

He came up with new
and imaginative ways

of inflicting pain.

Total psychopath, way beyond
being any kind of a sociopath.

Police are confounded.

There seems to be very little
that connects these young men.

They didn't know one another.

They weren't even from
the same cities or towns.

He was a hunter.

People would hitchhike.

And if he's willing to stop
and give them a ride,

that was not something
unusual back then either.

A lot of times, it was
the drive to their death.

Orange County
investigators are

dealing with a possible mass
murderer and a list of victims

that continues to get longer.

The most recent
victim, however, is

Jeffrey Nelson of Buena Park.

The 18-year-old's
body was thrown from

a moving car onto
the Garden Grove

freeway last Saturday morning.

1977, Kearney is in prison.

1980, they've got
William Bonin,

but the bodies continue to pile
up in Southern California.

The madness has not ended.

Once Bonin was convicted,
it was a big relief to us.

But there were still cases.

There were still
bodies being dropped.

And when going back
and looking at the chart,

we're saying, wait
a minute, there

might be a third guy
here because that MO was

even a little bit different.

This guy was picking
up marines hitchhiking.

And there was one
case where he had

thrown a marine out of the car,
out of a rolling vehicle.

We were aware of these.

They were still contacting
us about any young boy

who was murdered
anywhere near California.

It's like a trilogy of terror
with these three guys.

There was a series
of bodies found with what

could be considered
anti-gay treatment

of the bodies after death.

There were five or six
of them with foreign objects

inserted into them,
disgusting graphic behavior

with dead bodies.

They are mutilated, much
more so than what we saw

with Kearney or with Bonin.

And it doesn't stop.

It continues more
and more and more.

The homicide victims
were brutalized,

and that's, like,
an understatement.

There were beheadings.

There were ligature
marks, torturing.

There was sodomize.

There were victims that
had tree branches that

were rammed up inside of the
victims, all kinds of evidence

that these people had
been, in many cases,

slowly and agonizingly
mutilated

before they were
murdered and brutalized

further after the fact.

Edward Daniel Moore
was a marine,

and that's significant
with this killer

because marines were
his favorite prey.

He used to troll places
like Camp Pendleton,

the El Toro Marine Air Base.

He knew that
a good many of them

were young, not well-versed
in the ways of the world,

and looking to get drunk and
forget about basic training.

They almost uniformly
had no transportation

because they were literally
fresh off the farm

without a driver's
license or a car.

And they wanted to go
out and have a good time.

He would go to the main gates
of these various military bases

and pick up hitchhikers
who wanted to go into town

and get a drink, see a girl.

Moore was the first of many.

What you find out as you look
at the details about how they

died, it's the most horrendous
thing a detective could ever

experience in a long career.

Nothing can match
the sickening descriptions.

He was probably the most
sadistic out of all of them.

He really liked to torture
these people while they

were alive, cut off
their genitals, sometimes

biting their genitals
off, taking the cigarette

lighter from a car and burning
their eyeballs with it,

mutilating them, cutting them.

And then he would be
driving down the highway,

and just toss their body
out of the car.

He just looked at these
people as pieces of meat.

And then once he was done, he
would discard them like trash.

He came up with new
and imaginative ways

of inflicting pain, jamming
things up people's rectums

and scoring their scrotums,

and splitting their penises and

just the most horrible, awful,
despicable things that one

human being can do to another.

Total psychopath, way beyond
being any kind of a sociopath.

He didn't care about anything
except his own desires

and torturing people.

He got off torturing,
horribly torturing these kids.

He was a hunter,
and a lot of times

his victims were
victims of circumstance.

Sometimes there were
accounts that he

befriended these
individuals in some

of the local establishments,
spent some time with them,

and then convinced
them to drive.

People would hitchhike.

And if he's willing to stop
and give them a ride,

that was not something
unusual back then either.

A lot of times, it was
the drive to their death.

Keith Crotwell was there
in the parking lot at Ripples.

Ripples was
a up-and-coming gay disco,

I guess you would call it.

It was much more than a bar.

But Crotwell went there
with a couple of his friends

to see if they
could pick up girls.

And then this guy
shows up after he's

been circling the parking lot
for a while, who had a mustache

and had deep, dark
eyes that seemed

to look right through you, and
says, you guys need some brews.

And of course, they thought
that was a great idea.

So he had them hop in his car.

And then took
them for a ride

and served up beer that he
already had in the cooler

in his back seat.

Seemed very convenient,
but, you know,

they were young and dumb, and
they didn't pay any attention

to any of the danger signals.

And they took the beers,
and they drank them.

One of them, after
the fact, described to me

how he got deposited
out of the car

like he was too small
a fish being chucked out

by the fishermen
who had a bigger

fish that he was going to fry.

His two buddies, you know,
they woke up with hangovers,

and somehow, they got home.

But when they tried to get
in touch with Crotwell,

he wasn't home, and nobody
knew where he was.

And his parents started
to think that he had run away.

Some time later,
a father and his boy

were out on one of the jetties
at the Long Beach Marina,

and they came across
a rotting human skull.

The police showed up.

They bagged the skull
and did some testing

and matched it to a headless
body that had been found off

of a freeway many miles
away from Long Beach

in Orange County.

Turned out, it was
Keith Crotwell.

And at least the mystery of his
disappearance was solved.

But how his head was
separated from his body

went unsolved
for quite a while.

They were dropping cases
on us left and right.

I mean, it was unbelievable
the burden that we had.

And the serial killers
were just continuing.

Early on, there was
a lot of crossover,

because, obviously, they hadn't
identified Bonin or Kearney.

They just knew that they
had a bunch of victims.

And then within those
victim profiles,

there were certain differences
among those victims,

primarily in the way
they were killed.

One of the big things
that they focused on

was the alcohol
and diazepam overdose.

There were also things about
victims being emasculated

and also victims being dumped
on the side of freeways.

Whoever was doing
that, the suspicion

was they had been exposed
to some military training.

A couple of techniques that
were used of putting paper

in the nostrils,
that would be done

to keep liquids from
expelling out of the nostrils

after death.

When you're hauling
the body away to dump it,

it doesn't mess up
your car or your van.

Another thing, using a sock,
stuffing it into the rectum

in order to prevent the corpse

from expelling fluids
that way.

And that was an important
clue that they had to go on.

I didn't
actually feel I was

getting the job done because we
were having so many of them.

And I think everybody
involved realized

that we had six investigators
working on this thing 16 hours

a day.

And just when they thought
they'd have something,

another body would show up.

Mark Hall went out partying
on New Year's with his friends.

Everybody got
drunk, and everybody

half remembered what happened.

The bottom line
was the next day,

Mark Hall was
among the missing,

and the friends had no
idea what happened to him.

Only several days
later did they

learn that he had
been murdered

and his horribly
mutilated body was

left in a relatively remote
part of Southern Orange County.

Police are confounded
by this because there

seems to be very little that
connects these young men.

They didn't know one another.

They weren't even from
the same cities or towns.

And what was the link?

What was the factor,
the X factor,

that would make it possible
to find out who was doing this?

Nobody knew where to turn.

The CHP, the California
Highway Patrol,

they were patrolling the 5
freeway down by Mission Viejo

in Orange County,
and there was a sergeant

and his officer
in a car because there

wasn't much happening.

It was kind of a slow night.

And they see this car weaving.

It's starting to weave
from lane to lane.

What's going on?

Well, it could be a DUI.

He was driving
a little bit slower

than the posted speed limit.

He was weaving
in and out of his lanes.

He was kind of driving
on the right shoulder,

so they thought that this
individual was intoxicated,

so they initiated
a traffic stop.

Initially, he did not stop.

He kept driving.

They shined the light
in the back of the car.

They can see the driver
moving around

inside the vehicle,
which, again, raises

the officers' suspicions.

But he eventually pulls over to
the right shoulder and stops.

Once he stops, he
gets out of the car

and comes back and approaches
the officers on foot.

Based on my experience, that,
again, is also suspicious,

because one of two things.

Most people don't approach
officers at a stop.

And number two,
the way my brain works

is there's something in the car
that he doesn't want me to see,

so he's distracting
my attention away from the car.

These two officers do
their DUI investigation.

He takes him to the side
of the highway.

And he's saying, wait,
have you been drinking?

Uh, I only had two drinks.

I only had two drinks.

Well, we want to check
you out and see.

And they give him
the field sobriety test.

He's not passing it.

He's having difficulty.

He's slurring his speech.

He's stumbling.

He can't do finger to nose.

They make the determination
that the driver

is under the influence
of an intoxicating substance.

They place him under arrest
and put him in the back seat

of their patrol car.

The passenger officer goes
up to check on the car.

They notice an individual
sitting on the passenger

seat of that car.

Initially, the officer
thinks that he's

either passed out or asleep.

He tries to rouse him
to see what his story is.

Perhaps he can, you
know, drive the car away,

but that passenger
is unresponsive.

So one of the two
officers went over

to the passenger
side, opened the door,

and the fellow fell over.

The officer steps in there
and kind of shakes the guy.

The guy doesn't move.

And then he takes a pulse.

It's cold.

And then all of a sudden,
he opens the door.

And there it is, the guy is
exposed, his genitals showing.

His hands are
secured behind him.

And he looks
a little closer, and

it looks to be some ligature
marks around his neck.

They were his
shoelaces that had

been tied around
his wrists, and

that he'd probably been
strangled with a belt.

He was a tall fellow,
and turned out

that he was a marine
who had been

stationed at nearby
Camp Pendleton

in Southern Orange County.

They called EMTs,
and they showed up and

transported the victim
to the nearest hospital,

but they determined that he was
pretty much dead on arrival.

This was just supposed
to be a DUI stop,

an easy traffic stop.

Now they're going to have to
call the homicide detectives.

There's a dead body in the car.

His story was
that he just picked

up this individual hitchhiking
on the side of the road.

And perhaps he had some
sort of medical emergency.

Perhaps he ingested
some sort of substance

that led to his death.

The driver
of the car was arrested

for suspected homicide.

That is not
the end of the story.

They identified
the driver through

his California identification.

And at the time, he had
a limited criminal history.

He had some arrests
for solicitation in Long Beach.

The driver turned out
to be a computer repairman

named Randy Steven Kraft.

They called
the homicide detectives

because there was
a dead body there,

and eventually, they
searched the car.

When they went into the trunk,
they found a piece of paper.

And it had all these
names abbreviated,

and they went down.

The first one was Stable.

It turned out that was where
Randy Kraft would pick up.

That was one of the gay bars.

And you go down, it would
say the name of where

the person was picked up
or some characteristic

of that person
all the way down,

but it talked about other
places like Portland, Oregon.

It talked about Michigan.

One thing leads to another.

And they think that Kraft
might have been responsible

for, like, 67 murders.

Randy Kraft was born in 1945,
grew up in Southern California.

His parents had moved
out here at the beginning

of World War II to work in the
defense industry, his father

for an aircraft maker.

He had three older
sisters who were

substantially older than him.

He was doted upon because he
was the only boy in the family.

And all three of his
sisters and his mother

treated him with deference.

He was the little prince.

But there was this dark aspect
of his early upbringing.

His father liked
to drink, and he

would have this
personality change

and go into rages at times.

There are a couple
of bits of evidence in--

when Randy was a baby.

He supposedly fell
down the stairs

and broke his collarbone
when he was a toddler.

Breaking a baby's
collarbone with a fall

is pretty damn difficult.

I mean, babies
don't just fall and

break a bone the way that an
alte kocker like myself does.

Their bones are
elastic, so the fact

that he would have
a broken collarbone

would cast suspicion
on him right off the bat.

And then there was a second
incident when he, again,

suffered a fall and passed
out and had to be taken

to a health clinic nearby.

Both of these are incidents
when he was a baby,

and the obvious culprit
would be his father.

I haven't been able to ever
get anyone to confirm that.

The closest that any of the
three sisters came to saying it

was the middle sister, Doris,
who told me that, yeah, Dad

could really put them away.

And when he did, he was
completely unpredictable.

Randy grew up in the 1950s,
identified as a conservative,

a Republican, as a young
man, had said,

I want someday to be in
politics, perhaps a US Senator.

That's what he was
thinking in the '50s.

In 1964, he was involved
in politics as a 19-year-old.

He actually helped
campaign as a volunteer

for the Republican
presidential nominee,

Senator Barry Goldwater.

But then as he got
a little older,

his political views
started changing.

He no longer reflected
his parents' views.

He went off to college,
Claremont College,

where he joined the ROTC.

And he became a little
bit, if you will,

more progressive
or more liberal,

adopting political
views and cultural

views that were
more common among

college students in the 1960s.

He joined the US Air Force
and was

assigned to Edwards Air
Force Base, which is just

north of Los Angeles County.

He painted aircraft,
supervised, later

became an airman first class.

So he had a good Air Force
career going.

Kraft had hinted to his
parents that he was gay.

He would bring his male friends
over to the house to meet them,

but they didn't quite seem
to pick up on it until finally

he came out and said, I'm gay.

His father didn't
take it very well,

his mother, somewhat
more understanding.

It's also a confession,
if you will,

that he made to the military,
to his supervisor

at Edwards Air Force Base.

If, in the '60s or the '70s,
the military found out,

especially you telling
them that you were gay,

they would kick you out.

They didn't want you.

So they initiated
a general discharge for him

for medical reasons, almost
as if Kraft had lost a leg or

something, that he wasn't fit,
not needed in the military

anymore, and that ended
his military career.

Kraft returns home
to his parents' house

and starts doing a variety
of jobs, including bartending,

working at gay bars, working
for a swimwear company,

working for a water company.

He goes back
to school and brushes up

his education résumé
studying education.

He was an aspiring
computer programmer,

which, given the early '80s,
was an up-and-coming field.

He worked for a couple
different companies

and then worked
as an independent contractor

as well to do
computer programming

for these institutions.

He was living a homosexual
lifestyle in Long Beach.

He had a significant other that
he lived with in Long Beach.

They had an "on again,
off again" relationship.

But there was
a dark side to what

Kraft was doing in his
years after the military.

He was cruising the roads
of Southern California,

going to gay bars,
picking up young men,

drugging them with
drugs and alcohol,

sodomizing and killing them.

Now, Randy's past
victims were older,

like, say, they were marines,
so they were a little bit

harder to control.

But he was using
drugs and stuff

of that nature to knock
them out and then

strangle them and kill them.

Kraft began experimenting
with pharmaceuticals early

on, as early as his
college days,

on his own girlfriend
at the time,

because he did have
a girlfriend at one time,

and then later on,
his so-called friends.

He tried it out
on them to see--

they were his guinea pigs--

to see how they would react.

Over time, he kind
of perfected it.

Kraft was genuinely
a classic sadist.

He had to keep
his victims alive.

And he learned over
time how to dose them

so that he could keep them
alive but under his control,

literally, for days.

That's what we were
dealing with back in the day.

It was surreal.

There was one
marine victim who

he took a lot of pictures
of, Polaroid shots,

who probably had been alive
for the better part of a week.

And--and he, you
know, he just kept

dosing him with exactly
the right amount of medication

because he wanted to, you know,
hear the screams, I guess.

Kraft was a monster.

One who survived
Kraft was a biker

named Joey Fancher,
one of Kraft's earliest

would-be victims.

He was a 12- or 13-year-old
skateboarder

in Huntington Beach.

He cut class
on a regular basis.

And he'd go down to the pier
in Huntington Beach.

And he met this guy.

He talked a good line.

And he had lured Fancher
to his hotel room, I guess,

on the promise of beer.

He gave him something to drink.

And the next thing Fancher
knew, he awakened in his bed.

His pants were down,
and he was exposed.

There was nobody there,
but it was getting dark.

And obviously, he'd been
out for several hours.

He got up and got the hell
out of there and went home.

The police did investigate.

They did find all
these prescription

drugs in his
possession, but they

never did anything about it.

He wasn't charged, and Fancher
got his first taste

of Southern California justice
by doing the right thing

and telling his parents
and then seeing nothing

happen as a direct
result of his shining

a light on this pervert.

Crotwell was the case
wherein, ultimately, two

of Long Beach's finest had
enough circumstantial evidence

in terms of Kraft
having been spotted

in the vicinity of the body,
not the head, but the body.

He had been seen leaving
the parking lot at Ripples

in his car that evening.

It ultimately brought
two homicide detectives

to his front door,
and they wanted

him to come down
to headquarters

and submit to questioning.

And Kraft did so.

He went to the Long
Beach Police Department,

went into the classic
little interrogation

room with these two cops who
were recording the whole thing.

He managed, over the period
of an hour or so,

to dance around most
of their pointed questions

and point out that
he had car trouble

and he needed help
from his roommate.

And he walked away
from his car because it

had gotten stuck in the sand.

And that was all
just coincidental

that he happened
to be around when

whoever it was that killed
this poor unfortunate

had left the body
just a few yards away.

You would think that the cops
would follow up on that.

But there's no
evidence that the cops

did anything further on that.

They just made the judgment
call that, yeah, he

was this friendly
computer techie,

and he just happened
to be in the proximity

of this freeway killer victim.

It was yet another example
of Randy Kraft literally

getting away with murder.

One of the things that
highlighted Randy Kraft was

he was known
as The Scorecard Killer.

And during his search of that
Toyota after his arrest,

they found what they believed
to be an encrypted list

of potential victims.

The scorecard, which was
a sheet of notebook paper

that looked like it might
have been bloodstained, some

of them were
relatively obvious,

like Edward Daniel Moore,
because it was EDM.

That was easy
for law enforcement

to connect to a body.

Crotwell was equated with
the term, parking lot.

They were memory
triggers to relive

the experience of each murder.

Kraft took impeccable notes.

It was almost like a--like
a highway of what he did.

But you go down
that list, and

there are a lot of entries that
are easily connected to murder

victims, but there are
a good many that remain

anybody's guess to this day.

In 2016, I was assigned
to the Orange County Cold Case

Homicide Task Force,
which, at that time,

was an entity that was run by
the District Attorney's Office.

And it was a multi-agency
entity that worked primarily

on solving cold cases.

One of the individuals
on that list

was a John Doe
for our agency from 1974.

The thing about
that individual is

that his naked body was
tossed off a fire break, which

would have been rural Southern
Orange County back in 1974,

and that there were tire
tracks along the side

of this fire break.

And by all indications, it
looked like this person had

been dumped off the freeway.

However, at that time,
in 1974, his death

was ruled accidental due
to alcohol and

diazepam intoxication.

It had only been
five or six days,

so, unfortunately, it was
difficult to determine

whether he had been
strangled or not, just

based on the condition of,
for lack of a better term,

the flesh.

But they were still able to do
toxicological examination.

So fast-forward to 1983,
and all these bodies

are coming through Orange
County and jurisdictions

with that same
characteristic, they

reopened that investigation
to say, hey, this victim

may be a victim of Randy Kraft.

My work in that
detail, I learned

how to do investigative
genetic genealogy,

which is using familial DNA
to identify these individuals.

So in late 2022, we
submitted a forensic specimen

for this 1974 John Doe
to a private lab

to do DNA processing in hopes
of getting him identified.

And over the course
of the next 10 months,

we successfully identified
him as Michael Schlicht.

His mom was still alive,
so we went out and

interviewed mom and a sister.

And the last they'd
ever heard from Michael

was he was hitchhiking
to California

from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

And coincidentally, on Kraft's
scorecard is an entry for Iowa.

Meanwhile, they
impound the car.

They find all sorts of forensic
evidence within the car.

And it was a short time
after that that they started

putting together all
the evidence against this guy,

and they found literally
a drawer full of pictures

of men looking like they
were asleep in an apartment

somewhere, and they
were all dead.

He had photographed
them after he had

drugged them and killed them.

He would dismember bodies.

They found jars of testicles
for him and the pictures.

They realize he is the last
of the freeway killers.

After some 350
personal interviews

with people who
knew Randy Kraft and

several searches of Kraft's
car and Long Beach residents,

Orange County
Sheriff Brad Gates

says he now has a wealth of
information on the man accused

in the strangulation
deaths of six young men

and now a suspect
in at least 10 more murders.

Kraft has already been accused
of killing Geoffrey Nelson,

Wyatt Loggins,
Roger Duvall Jr.,

Mark Hall, Terry Gambrel,
and Eric Church.

Then there's 25-year-old
Michael Lane.

His picture was found
at Kraft's residence,

but it's unknown
if he's alive or

dead, the same for these men,
all believed to be marines.

Meantime, Randy Kraft, who
remains in jail without bail,

is awaiting his
preliminary hearing.

That's scheduled to start here
in Orange County on Monday.

The trial, which
at the time was

deemed to have been the longest
in Orange County history,

went on for weeks and weeks.

He never for a second
let down the notion

that he'd ever engaged
in any sort of mischief.

He was an upstanding citizen.

He's purported to have
viewed all of this

as being a persecution
because he

was gay, even
though the evidence

is more than overwhelming.

In court, he seemed like he
was bored with the whole thing.

Cuts, severs off Geoffrey's
testicles and his penis.

And when he's through
with Geoffrey's body,

he discards it out of his car.

Kraft had his excuses.

It came out later,
after the investigation

and during
the trial, that Kraft

broke away from his
family long enough

to go out, find Mark Hall,
maim him, drug him,

kill him, and leave his
body up in the hills

overlooking Lake Elsinore.

He maintained that he
was with his family

for New Year's,
that they watched

the Rose Parade together.

And, I mean, there
was a chunk of time

in the middle of the night
when he was missing,

but no one seemed to pay
much attention to it.

Randy was weird that way.

He would wander off and show
up later, fresh as a daisy,

and his family
suspected nothing, ever.

16 times today, the jury
foreman read out the verdict

for Randy Kraft.

We want to see justice done.

Our son will not
be brought back.

We have to represent our boy.

He was--he can't
be here, but we can.

Mrs. Barbara Loggins has
waited for nearly nine years

to see the man who killed
her son Wyatt convicted.

That wait ended
late this morning.

We, the jury, find the
defendant, Randy Steven Kraft,

guilty of the crime of felony
murder in the first degree,

Robert Wyatt Loggins.

Kraft only sighed when the
first guilty verdict was read.

45 minutes later,
it was all over.

Each time, it was guilty
of murder in the first degree.

He is suspected
in 21 other murders

in California,
Oregon, and Michigan.

He could get life with no
parole or the gas chamber.

His trial, which began
in '88, ended in '89 with his

sentencing to the gas chamber.

After it was all
over, after all three

freeway killers
were prosecuted,

we looked back on it.

Why did this happen
in Southern California,

especially Los Angeles?

What made this kind of a magnet
that attracted these misfits,

where they wanted
to find young men

and have sexual relations
with them and kill them?

That is the most interesting
thing about these killers,

is that they were very good
at mimicking being normal,

because they had to get these
people in their clutches.

They had to win them over
to get them in the van,

to get them
in the car, to get them

to come back to their houses.

These men were very
good at portraying

being average,
everyday, normal people.

It's just amazing that these
three serial killers operated

at the same time in the same
geography, three serial killers

who were each different,
yet had the same motive,

to inflict pain
and suffering and

death for their own pleasures.

These guys, they would talk
about murdering people like you

and I would talk about where
we were going to lunch.

That's a sociopath.

They have no remorse.

They have no feelings
or consideration for anybody.

It was all about
sexual gratification.

But why did it take us
so long to catch them?

That's always a question an
investigator will ask himself,

especially afterwards.

And especially when you're
dealing with youth, you know,

it's just--it's harder.

Those things, and they
stay with police officers.

The homicide investigators
that worked the freeway killer

case and everything, they still
think about it for a long

time afterwards.

You don't forget
those kind of things.

It was a golden age
for serial killers,

especially freeway killers.

It happened.

It was very unfortunate.

And many, many,
many young lives

were lost because of that.

I don't think
the world has seen

the last serial killer yet.

I'm not sure we ever will.

What happened at the height
of these murders,

this changed the way
a lot of kids

lived, because you don't
see hitchhikers anymore.

I mean, really, if you
come around California,

you can drive anywhere
in LA, you don't see

people hitchhiking anymore.

And the carefree days
of that, long gone.

And I think Kraft and Bonin
had a lot to do with that.

It changed everything.

It really, really did.

If you add up all
of the murders to which they

confessed, were convicted
of, suspected of,

it comes to something like 100.

What a horrible score to think
that for that period of time,

these men were able to carry
out these crimes as butchers

across all of Los Angeles.