Original subtitles

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.