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Thread: Randy Steven Kraft - California Death Row

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    Randy Steven Kraft - California Death Row


    Randy Steven Kraft


    Summary of Offense:

    Randy "Score Card Killer" Kraft, a soft-spoken computer programmer, was convicted and sentenced to death on November 29, 1989 for strangling 16 hitchhikers, mostly from Orange County, after drugging and sexually assaulting them. He is on death row at San Quentin. His killing spree ended in 1983 when police pulled over his car in Mission Viejo and found a dead Marine in the passenger seat. Photographs of some of his victims and a handwritten, coded "death list" were also found in his car, suggesting he may have killed as many as 65. His victims were: Edward Daniel Moore, Roland Young, Lance Tagg, Michael O'Fallon, Michael Cluck, Ron Wiebe, Scott Hughes, Richard Keith, Keith Crotwell Mark Hall, Robert Loggins, Jeffrey Bryan Sayre, Don Crisel, Michael Inderbeiten, Geoff Nelson and "John Doe".

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    On May 28, 2009, Kraft filed an appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit over the denial of his habeas petition in Federal District Court.

    http://dockets.justia.com/docket/cir.../ca9/09-55806/

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    Authorities look for serial killer ties in Marine's 1974 murder

    Long Beach police investigating the cold case murder of a U.S. Marine identified 37 years after he was found dead say they are aware that serial killer Randy Kraft was active in the area at the time.

    So far, however, police have cautioned that they have no direct evidence tying Kraft to the slaying of Oral Alfred Stuart Jr., 18. Stuart's naked body was found at an apartment carport on Spring Street near the 605 Freeway in November 1974.

    His brother, Carl Stuart, said he believes Oral may have been the victim of a serial killer.

    Randy Kraft, a soft-spoken computer consultant who had served in the military, preyed on men along Southern California freeways. He was convicted of 16 slayings that occurred between 1972 and 1983 after he was found with a dead Marine in his car by two California Highway Patrol officers. He was known to target men in the military. Kraft remains on death row in San Quentin state prison.

    Long Beach Police Lt. Lloyd Cox said detectives seeking to solve the case are "mindful of Kraft" and looking into a possible connection, but have no direct evidence at this time to link him to Stuart's killing.

    For years, Oral Stuart was known only as John Doe No. 155. The cause of his death was undetermined.

    But after cold case detectives reopened the case, they used his Marine-related tattoo to help identify him. Stuart had been classified as a deserter after he failed to return to duty at Camp Pendleton.

    In an interview, his older brother Carl Stuart said his family knew that something bad had happened when he disappeared without a trace.

    Oral Stuart's status will now be changed from deserter to honorably discharged. The Marine Corps is planning a full honor guard funeral at his grave. His John Doe marker will be replaced with a headstone.

    Anyone with information is asked to call Long Beach Police Department homicide Dets. Bryan McMahon and Steve Dougan at (562) 570-7244.

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lano...ch-murder.html
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    April 22, 2013

    Why Isn't Randy Kraft Dead?

    Thirty years after his arrest in Orange County, one of California’s deadliest and most depraved serial killers still lives and breathes on San Quentin’s death row. What’s wrong with this picture?

    "Do you know the area around where Mission Viejo is, and all that?” Max Gambrel asks over the phone. “That’s where Kraft was apprehended. California Highway Patrol made the stop there.”

    Max is a truck driver in his mid-40s who lives in Commiskey, Ind., a small farming town not far from Crothersville, where he grew up. There’s not a whole lot going on there—if you need anything much more elaborate than fresh fruit and vegetables, he explains, you’ve got to go over to Seymour, the big town about 15 miles north. Max doesn’t mind. He prefers the gentle pace of life in the country. He’s never been to Southern California, and doesn’t much desire to visit.

    But he’s spent a lot of time during the past three decades trying to picture a place in Orange County. Not Disneyland, or the beach, or the luxurious stores at South Coast Plaza. But the otherwise unremarkable stretch of Interstate 5 near Mission Viejo, where, about 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, two CHP officers spotted a brown 1979 Toyota weaving from the right lane onto the shoulder, and decided to pull it over. At the wheel, the officers discovered a slight, mustachioed 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach named Randy Steven Kraft, who had alcohol on his breath. He failed a sobriety test, so they arrested and handcuffed him.

    In Kraft’s passenger seat was a man with a dark jacket draped over his lap, who appeared to be asleep. Kraft said he was a hitchhiker he’d picked up. When one of the officers opened the door and pulled away the jacket in an effort to rouse him, he was startled to see that the man’s pants were pulled down, and that he had marks on his wrists, as if he had been tied. The passenger wasn’t breathing, nor did he have a pulse. One of the arresting officers, Sgt. Michael Howard, found it eerie how Kraft calmly asked, “How’s my friend?” when Kraft obviously knew his passenger was dead.

    The victim was a 25-year-old Marine corporal, stationed at the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro. Apparently, as investigators later pieced together, he was trying to get to a friend’s party after a softball game, and had decided to hitchhike. The driver who’d picked him up apparently offered him a beer, which the hitcher didn’t know was laced with sedative pills like those the officers found on the floor of Kraft’s car.

    The passenger was Terry Gambrel, the final victim of one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. Terry was Max Gambrel’s cousin.

    Max has imagined that scene many times. Terry was the friendly, practically-a-big-brother relative who lived next door when Max was a boy. “I remember riding bikes with him and playing basketball and softball,” he says. “A lot of people gravitated to him. He was very likeable.”

    Max was 15 when Terry died. His family sheltered him as best they could from the grisly details. It wasn’t until years later, when he started reading true-crime books, that he happened upon Dennis McDougal’s 1991 “Angel of Darkness,” and learned of the sickening things Kraft had done to the bodies of his other victims. He imagines what Kraft might have done to Terry with the buck knife officers found on the driver’s seat. “It’s fortunate he didn’t have a chance to mutilate my cousin,” Max says.

    He still misses Terry. “We all miss him,” he says, even after all these years. And he still thinks about Kraft, who was convicted of 16 murders and linked to more than 65 others by investigators. For years, Max read books and articles about murder and watched “Criminal Minds” and other TV crime dramas, hoping to understand what would make someone kill so many people. Finally, he gave up. “I can’t fathom why he did it,” Max says. “There is no why.”

    Instead, Max Gambrel wonders why, three decades after his cousin Terry’s murder, the man who was sentenced to death for killing him somehow is still alive.

    Max Gambrel isn’t the only one who can’t figure out why the deadliest—and arguably, most loathsome—killer in Orange County history has yet to meet the fate decreed for him in November 1989, when a jury in Santa Ana voted to recommend the death penalty. In sentencing him, Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin noted that Kraft’s extreme depravity—including jamming a swizzle stick up the penis of one of his victims—shocked even the judge’s world-weary sensibilities. “I can’t imagine doing these things in scientific experiments on a dead person, much less [to] someone alive,” McCartin explained. The father of that victim screamed, “Burn in hell, Kraft!” as the defendant was led from the courtroom.

    Many years later, we’re still waiting for that to happen. Instead, Kraft, a Westminster High School alum, is going on his 24th year on death row at San Quentin state prison, as his case inches its way through appeals, delays, and lack of political will that is the death penalty system in California. And with no end in sight to the legal maneuverings, it seems more likely that Kraft, who turned 68 in March, will die of natural causes behind bars—which is how the overwhelming majority of California death row inmates have died since Kraft went to prison.

    Kraft’s longevity behind bars proves that the death penalty in this state—notwithstanding the voters’ decision in a 2012 referendum to keep it on the books—is hopelessly broken. If we don’t put a needle in the arm of a serial torture-killer who was caught with a dead victim and with a mountain of other incriminating evidence against him—including snapshots of murder victims and an extensive trophy collection of their possessions—then who should we execute? Moreover, Kraft’s interminable saga—and the frustration that continues to bedevil those connected to the case—sends the disturbing message that justice seldom provides a salve for the pain caused by vicious crimes.

    Among those most perplexed by Randy Kraft’s ability to avoid execution are the people who voted to convict him. “He’s lived longer in prison than the whole lives of most of the kids that he killed,” says James Lytle, who was the jury foreman. “I mean, come on now.”

    Juror Pat Marcantel Springer, a former Anaheim resident who, like Lytle, spent most of 11 months listening to a gruesomely detailed recounting of Kraft’s crimes, agrees. “I think they should execute him,” she says. “He should have been executed a long time ago. It was so obvious; being caught with a dead Marine in your car is pretty much a giveaway.”

    Springer, a first-time juror when chosen for the panel, says she knew nothing about Kraft’s case and had a naive notion of the depths of evil. “I didn’t realize that with murder, they don’t always just come up and shoot somebody,” she recalls. “All this torture, I didn’t know about that. I never thought about somebody cutting off another person’s body parts. I would go home at night and lie in bed, and keep visualizing [the victims]. And you couldn’t talk to anybody about it.”

    She remembers being taken aback when she first saw Kraft, whose unexceptional 5-foot-10 stature, 160 pounds, and quiet manner were a jarring contrast to the atrocities he committed. “When I first saw him, it was like, ‘I’m your next-door neighbor,’” she says. “He didn’t look any different from anybody else.” But the evidence, she recalls, was overpowering. And despite spending close to $5.5 million on investigators and experts, defense attorneys C. Thomas McDonald, James Merwin, and William Kopeny weren’t able to counter the case presented by prosecutor Bryan Brown of the Orange County District Attorney’s office.

    When jurors finally began deliberations, Springer recalls that they almost immediately agreed he was guilty of Terry Gambrel’s killing and some of the others. “He had the pictures of those people in his house, so that was easy,” she explains. They spent most of their deliberations going over a few of the murders in which the evidence was a little more complex. They acquitted Kraft on just one count of sodomy, because they were unsure whether the victim was alive when Kraft had sex with him. When the verdicts were announced to a packed courtroom on May 13, 1989—oddly, almost six years to the day after Kraft’s arrest—this one count led to a painful scene. “The mother of the victim started screaming, I think because she thought we were saying he hadn’t killed her son,” Springer recalls. “That was a gut-wrenching feeling.”

    During the penalty phase of the trial, Springer—who took seriously her duty to be impartial—finally allowed herself to form a personal opinion of Kraft. “I’d look at him and think, ‘What a creep. He’s trying to put one over on us,’ ” she recalls. “I think he really thought that we were going to come back and say he didn’t do it, because they kept telling us what a genius he was.” (An employer who tested Kraft reportedly found that he had an IQ of 129, though during the penalty phase of his trial, Kraft’s legal team called UC Irvine neuroscientist Monte Buchsbaum to testify that Kraft had suffered brain damage that might explain his sexual violence.) “But there’s a fine line between being a genius and being stupid.”

    Springer had no difficulty voting for the death penalty, and when the verdict was announced and the defense attorneys asked for the jurors to be polled, she stared straight at Kraft when she affirmed her vote. Yet after she went back to her life, Springer says she had trouble putting him out of her mind. “I remember sleeping in my living room, being afraid to sleep in my bed. I had nightmares about Kraft, that he was coming to get me.”

    The dreams abated over time, only to be replaced by a more persistent sadness after she was invited to meet with victims’ families. “When I met those people, they told us how their lives just had been torn apart,” she remembers. “Some of them had turned into alcoholics because of it. It was just heartbreaking.”

    Lytle, the jury foreman, says he found it hard to listen to testimony about male rape and sexual mutilation—“I think that’s why they only had two men on the jury,” he says with a nervous laugh. He says he’s also still haunted by what he describes as a minor, but still eerie, personal connection to the case. Though he didn’t know Terry Gambrel at the time, he narrowly missed crossing paths with the Marine on the night of his death, because he had been invited to the same party—thrown by Lytle’s future brother-in-law—that Gambrel was trying to get to. (Kraft’s attorneys have tried to raise that tangential link as an issue in appeals, but Lytle, who was questioned by the judge about it during the trial, says he doesn’t remember whether he went to the party, didn’t know Gambrel, and never discussed the victim with his relatives.) “It’s conceivable that I might have met him,” he says. “It was a little side thing that happened, but it brings it close to home.”

    Lytle, who was working his way toward an education degree, says he paid a price for serving on the jury. Unable to work for nearly a year during the trial, he got so far in the hole financially that he had to give up his dreams of becoming a teacher and sports coach. After the trial, when he drove the freeways to reach construction sites where he worked, he’d pass the places where Kraft dumped his victims. That made him uneasy. And even after voting to send Kraft to death row, questions about the case still troubled him. One afternoon, before Kraft was transferred to San Quentin, Lytle went to the Orange County Jail and filled out the paperwork to visit him. “I wanted to meet him face to face, and see what he had to say.” Visiting hours ended before he was able to see Kraft, and it’s not clear whether Kraft would have agreed to the meeting, anyway. Lytle eventually moved from Orange County to Arizona, where he works as a cab driver. He’d still like to ask Kraft why he committed such depraved violence. “Being a guy, seeing what we had to see, I still want to know why. Without that, there’s no closure.”

    It’s hard to imagine that if Lytle ever did meet Kraft, he’d be able to get him to open up about what motivated him to drug, molest, and slaughter so many young men. Nobody has come up with a good explanation for why Kraft committed his crimes. There’s no indication he was ever subjected to any sort of abuse, though he did suffer a head injury in a fall that left him unconscious as a year-old toddler.

    In the only interview Kraft has ever given—a 30-minute meeting with Los Angeles Times reporter Jerry Hicks in November 1983, in which Kraft later said he was misquoted—Kraft claimed he was being unjustly accused because he is gay, and that the so-called scorecard of 61 names in his car was a list of friends, not people he’d killed. Back in 1987, when I was a reporter for the Orange County Register, Kraft angrily slammed down the phone in the visiting area when I tried to interview him, and failed to respond to written questions I recently sent to him at San Quentin. At his sentencing, he continued to maintain his innocence, and judging from court filings, has stuck to that argument ever since. In 2001, a Canadian anti-death penalty website posted what appeared to be a message from Kraft, though he oddly referred to himself in the third person:

    “Randy was convicted on hysteria, innuendo and common prejudice against gay persons such as himself. There never was any real evidence against him. There is none today. Instead, the prosecutor lied to make up for no evidence, and hid evidence helpful to Randy. The police also hid helpful evidence at critical times. And the trial judge looked the other way, a Marine Corps veteran prejudiced against gay persons.”

    That, of course, is nonsense. Aside from the inconvenient fact of a body in his car, the “real evidence” against Kraft included 47 damning photographs found under his Toyota’s driver-side floor mat. One, for example, showed a murder victim propped on the floral couch in Kraft’s Long Beach home. The sofa and the wall behind it were stained with human blood. There also was the jacket found in Kraft’s garage, which matched the description of one that belonged to a man who’d been strangled in Michigan. In the house, investigators found a shaving kit that bore the name of a murdered Oregon hitchhiker, and a Norelco twin-head razor that the father of another victim had purchased at a flea market and rewired for his son. There was the piece of glass found near the body of yet another victim, which bore Kraft’s thumbprint. And there was the testimony of a man who, as a 13-year-old, had been drugged and raped by Kraft. There’s more evidence against Kraft than there was against Lee Harvey Oswald, another infamous killer who insisted “I’m just a patsy.”

    Unlike President Kennedy’s assassin, though, Kraft is better guarded; decades ago, Orange County Jail officials foiled an inmate plot to kill him. Plus, he’s had an unwieldy, glacial process to shield him from ultimate punishment. Kraft, who couldn’t afford a lawyer for his appeal, had to wait more than two years for the state to assign him counsel; he finally got one only after he filed a lawsuit, and a federal judge told California to explain why he shouldn’t be released. Once he finally did get representation, things didn’t move much faster. It took his attorney, Northern California appeals specialist Richard Power, until 1997 just to file his opening brief. The California Supreme Court didn’t even agree to hear Kraft’s appeal until May 2000.

    After the state’s justices rejected the appeal in a strongly worded decision three months later, it moved over to the federal courts in 2001 for a new round of litigation. A dozen years later, that process has slowed to a virtual halt and shows no sign of resolution. In a 2009 ruling, a federal judge found that many of Kraft’s appeals claims, which ranged from allegations that the prosecutor withheld evidence to the original trial court’s failure to allow testimony from a psychic, were meritless. But the court concluded that he could continue to litigate other points, such as whether Lytle’s tangential connection to Terry Gambrel should have disqualified him as a juror, and whether the piece of glass with his thumbprint found near a victim’s body was valid evidence. As this article goes to press, the last entry in the federal docket was in August 2011. California Deputy Attorney General Adrianne S. Denault says in an email that the state is awaiting rulings on two petitions by Kraft, one in the U.S. Central District of California and the other by the California Supreme Court.

    One factor, undoubtedly, has been the sheer size and complexity of his case—just the 38,000-page trial transcript, in terms of word count, probably amounts to several times the complete literary output of novelist John Grisham. That massive proceeding linked 16 murders, which in turn has given Kraft and his various attorneys over the years a multiplicity of issues for appeal. Power, who handled Kraft’s California appeal, notes that it ran to 717 pages. “We pulled out the stops, everything but the kitchen sink,” he says. “It just goes on forever. The conclusion doesn’t start until Page 685.” (According to a court document, the state paid Power and another attorney $345,000 for the legal work on that appeal—further adding to the millions of tax dollars spent on Kraft’s defense.)

    And Kraft’s own maneuvers have slowed the process as well. He seldom seems content with his lawyers, and has changed counsel multiple times. In 2009, he unsuccessfully asked to have a federal judge remove his then-public defender, charging that the state was manipulating the attorney in “puppetlike fashion.” His former attorney Power complained in a 1993 note to a judge that Kraft was an “extremely difficult” client, in part because of his desire to play attorney and file his own “voluminous” motions. Whether Kraft is merely cantankerous, or whether he’s trying to run out the clock, is hard to say.

    Either way, it’s costing California taxpayers a lot of money. A 2011 study published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review found that condemned criminals have cost $4 billion since 1978, due to the lengthy litigation, extra security on death row, and other costs. Kraft’s full cost to taxpayers has never been disclosed, but if we assume his trial cost at least $11 million—what it cost to convict Northern California serial killer Charles Ng in the 1990s, according to one study—and throw in several million more for years of federal and state legal work, and the additional $90,000 per year it costs to keep an inmate on death row instead of in the regular prison population, a ballpark figure of $15 million sounds about right.

    That’s why Power—who stops just short of conceding his former client’s guilt—suggests the state should consider cutting its losses at this point. Besides, he argues, if the death penalty were off the table, Kraft conceivably would talk to researchers and provide insights that could prevent future serial killings. “You need to talk to people like Randy,” he says. “You’d be better off studying, trying to figure out what drives things.” He adds: “You might even say, ‘Hey Randy, are there any more bodies out there? People want to have closure.’ You might be able to find out.”

    Prosecutors aren’t likely to do that, and even if they did, Kraft never has shown any inclination to cooperate. (In 1989, Judge McCartin said of Kraft: “I sat there for a year and looked at Mr. Kraft. I didn’t see any remorse, feelings, or regret. It was like he was in another world.”) According to author McDougal, Kraft last year rebuffed a Naval Criminal Investigative Service cold-case investigator who wanted to talk with him about the recently identified body of an 18-year-old Marine whose body was dumped near the 605 Freeway in Long Beach in 1974.

    Instead, Kraft probably will spend his remaining years in San Quentin as inmate E38700, awaiting the injection—these days, the state is considering a single dose of the animal euthanasia drug pentobarbital—that most likely will never come. (“I was just thinking that I could look at this as being away at some sort of school, taking some class I never signed up for,” Kraft wrote from jail in a 1983 letter to his sister.) In a blog post last year, the death row chaplain, Jesuit priest George Williams, described the accommodations: a dark, cramped, windowless cell, fronted by heavy metal mesh and a barred door, containing a stainless-steel toilet, sink, and stool built into the wall. There’s a thin 1-inch cotton mattress on a shelf, and a small television. The background noise is incessant, the aroma—“a locker room, mixed with a cafeteria, mixed with an outhouse”—tends toward nauseating.

    Kraft does get regular exercise, and a mid-2000s photograph he sent to someone, now available for auction on a website devoted to serial-killer memorabilia, shows him in shorts and a tank-top, flexing his aging pecs and lats. He listens to Nat King Cole, Jimmy Buffett, and Brooks & Dunn CDs. For someone who once saw himself as living “on the edge,” his social life isn’t much. Long ago, Vanity Fair reported he was part of a regular bridge game with three other serial killers, but it’s unclear whether the game continued after one of the regulars, “Freeway Killer” William Bonin, was executed in 1996.

    Kraft must be at least a little lonely, because he signed up a few years ago for a website that tries to match up prisoners with pen pals. “I’m not an old fogey,” his profile reads. “I like to read all sorts of things and listen to most kinds of music. I enjoy and am pretty good at crossword puzzles and Sudoku and I like to write. … I am friendly, low-key and sincere.” He laments that most of the mail he does get is from souvenir hunters, people with weird fantasies, and true-crime writers. “I’m beginning to wonder if there are any sincere people out there,” he says.

    If Kraft is trapped in a cramped, tedious little hell of his own making, that’s the one consolation Max Gambrel clings to when he thinks about his cousin Terry’s killer. He admits he has fantasized about killing Kraft: “If I had five minutes in a locked room, I’m pretty sure I could do that.” But he’s also religious, and there’s that line in Romans 12 about how vengeance belongs to God, not man. “I’m glad he’s still alive,” Max has concluded. “He loved his freedom, and the longer he’s in jail … it’s the only justice my family has.”

    http://www.orangecoast.com/features/...ft-dead/page/1


    On May 22, 2013, the California Supreme Court DENIED Kraft's habeas petition.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...doc_no=S172964

  5. #5
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    Jay Roberts recounts his seduction at the hands of serial killer Randy Kraft as a US Marine

    Jay Roberts was the living definition of a hardcore infantryman.

    He served as a scout sniper in a unit of the US Marines known as "The Walking Dead". Soldiers don't come tougher.

    But during a creepily perfect spring afternoon in 1980, Roberts was seduced by one of America's most prolific serial killers.

    "Simply put, that afternoon, we - the serial killer and the young Marine sniper - were perfect for each other," he says.

    Roberts has recounted his afternoon with the notorious murderer Randy Kraft in a spellbinding post on Thought Catalog. The Marine had no idea who the stranger he met in 1980 really was before reading about Kraft online decades later.

    Kraft was, and still is, the prototypical psychopath - charming, intelligent and utterly ruthless. He softened up his victims with a combination of charisma, drugs and alcohol before mutilating and killing them.

    Those victims likely number in the dozens. Kraft has been convicted of 16 murders and is currently sitting on death row in California, but he's suspected of killing up to 51 more.

    "The perverse cruelties he inflicted while his victims were still alive are beyond imagination," Roberts says. "Quite a few were young Marines he picked up in bars, or hitchhiking. They ended up as strangled, mutilated corpses dumped on roadsides."

    Roberts describes himself as a "Randy Kraft pin-up boy" - 73 kilos and 175cm tall with light brown hair. He was a "Marine's Marine", straight, youthful and tough. That made him exactly the sort of person to whom Kraft was attracted.

    The serial killer approached Roberts in a carpark next to San Clemente beach during the spring of 1980.

    "He was engaging, intelligent and pleasant - a warm guy with a wry smile," Roberts says. "We talked for several hours about everything - books, current events and travel. We were becoming fast friends ... He suggested continuing the conversation just up the hill in his motel room, where he had some 'good beers'.

    "Normally, I wouldn't have gone to a motel room with a stranger, but I never gave it a thought. I just liked the guy so much, and he seemed so kind and together, that it never occurred to me he could be dangerous."

    The pair kept chatting as they entered Kraft's motel room, until the killer asked a jarring question: "What do you think of sex with guys?"

    "Finally, the long-delayed light bulb went off for dumb, naive me," Roberts says.

    At that point in his life, Roberts says, "gay men might as well have been Martians". He was not intolerant of homosexuality, just completely unfamiliar with it.

    "At one point, he observed that lots of Marines like gay sex ... I told him that approaching them for gay sex seemed like a foolproof way to get a right proper ass-kicking," Roberts says.

    "He responded with a line I remember more than anything else said that afternoon, and I was struck by how casual, confident and analytic he was about the thought: 'No, you just have to get them away from their friends.'"

    Even then, the danger lights weren't flashing in the soldier's head. Kraft's statement made sense to him. It reminded Roberts of his role as a sniper, where he was trained to "separate one from the herd".

    Roberts was still fascinated by the stranger before him, who was so different to his unsophisticated, brawn-over-brains mates in the Marine Corps.

    "I was enchanted. Eventually, though, we were at an impasse on the sex stuff, so I mentioned that perhaps I should go," Roberts says. "I thought maybe I'd led this guy on by coming up to his room, and it wasn't fair to him for me to be sitting there being a tease."

    Before Roberts left, Kraft asked whether he could "at least take a picture ... to remember this wonderful afternoon". He asked the Marine to take off his shirt, "in the wide-eyed way kids do when asking for extra sauce on their sundae".

    "As I stood shirtless before his camera, his demeanour changed; I sensed a hint of neediness in him, a powerful worship of my young Marine self," Roberts says. "And I was still there in that room. And my shirt was off. Quite comfortably off."

    Something clicked in Roberts' head when Kraft suggested another photo, this one with his belt loosened a bit. He finally mustered the willpower to leave.

    "As I turned away, he looked at me with an expression I can only characterise as winsome disappointment. I felt profoundly sorry for him," Roberts says.

    "He made me feel special in the most irresistible way. For one impossibly beautiful California afternoon, I was very much in love with him. And I've never had another man, before or since, affect me that way."

    Similar afternoons probably played out between Kraft and his victims, many of whom were Marines. Those men never made it out alive.

    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...-1226751245649
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    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  6. #6
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    Gay serial killer breaks his silence

    By Matthew S. Bajko
    The Bay Area Reporter

    For nearly 30 years Randy Kraft has sat on California's death row attempting to clear his name. A gay man given the nicknames "the Scorecard Killer" and "the Freeway Killer," Kraft has been described as one of the "deadliest and most depraved serial killers" in the state's history.

    In May 1989 a jury convicted him of killing 16 men over the course of 11 years in southern California and, that November, recommended the death penalty. Prosecutors had also tied him to the deaths of eight additional men in Oregon and Michigan.

    In the summer of 2000, with Kraft's appeals of his verdict in state court exhausted, the California Supreme Court upheld his conviction and death sentence. Kraft then turned to the federal courts to seek a new trial of his case. He has been mired in the federal appeals system ever since, and on numerous occasions, he has petitioned to have a new federal public defender assigned to represent him.

    To this day Kraft has never confessed to the murders he was found guilty of committing. And other than an interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter six months after his arrest in 1983, Kraft has not spoken publicly about his case other than through copious court filings over the years.

    During his jury trial, Kraft did not testify on his behalf. After the trial court judge refused to grant his request to testify about only one of the murder charges he was facing, he opted, based on the advice of his attorneys, not to take the stand to defend himself.

    Kraft, 71, contacted the Bay Area Reporter last fall about his desire to publicly discuss his case before he dies.

    "This has been bottled up so long," a graying Kraft, dressed in dark blue pants and a light blue shirt, said during an interview in March over a lunch of a microwaved southern fried chicken sandwich and a cheese and bean burrito. "I am getting older. I am going to die here. And I am frustrated my attorneys aren't saying these things. If I don't say something it will never be said."

    Over the course of 10 months, through written correspondence and three in-person meetings at San Quentin State Prison, Kraft repeatedly maintained his innocence and alleged he had been the victim of a criminal and judicial system biased against him because of his sexual orientation.

    "To begin, I did not kill Terry Gambrel," Kraft wrote last November in one of his first letters, referring to the Marine found slumped over in the passenger seat of his car when two CHP officers pulled him over on Interstate 5 in Orange County for suspected drunk driving late one night 33 years ago. "And neither did I kill or assault any of the other persons as the authorities claim. Notwithstanding that, I have been imprisoned since May 14, 1983, some 32 years, nearly half of my life."

    Nonetheless, several times Kraft stressed that he has no expectation of ever stepping foot aside of jail. At his age, he expects he will die an inmate.

    "Even if the federal courts agree with everything I am saying and sends it back to the state courts, I will still die in here because it takes so long. That is just the way it is," said Kraft during a May interview. "I think the court is waiting for me to die. It is death penalty by attrition."

    Odds are Kraft, one of 741 death row inmates in the Golden State, will die of natural causes rather than be put to death. As the B.A.R. noted in September, California has not executed anyone since 2006. Two years ago, a federal judge ruled that the state's death penalty system was unconstitutional because it is arbitrary and plagued with delays.

    And, for the second time in four years, the state's voters this fall are being asked to abolish the death penalty. Polling indicates the fight to pass Proposition 62 next Tuesday on the November 8 ballot is tight, with the latest poll released this week by Stanford's Hoover Institution showing voters evenly split on the measure.

    A competing ballot measure, Proposition 66, which would keep the death penalty in place and accelerate the state appeals process, had been trailing with voters. But the Hoover Institution poll found it leading 38 to 24 percent, with as many Californians undecided as they are in favor of the measure.

    "It looks like it will pass, and then at the last minute, everyone changes their mind," said Kraft about the death penalty repeal efforts. "Maybe it will pass this time."

    In 2012 many of his fellow death row inmates were rooting for defeat of the measure, said Kraft, since it would not only have dismantled death row but have sent the prisoners to various prisons around the state.

    "Last time it was on the ballot, some people here didn't want it to pass because they didn't want to be transferred elsewhere," recalled Kraft.

    Should this year's Prop 66 pass, Kraft said he wouldn't mind being transferred to a prison closer to Orange County, where his sister, who is in her 80s and frequently speaks with him by phone, lives and could potentially visit him. Yet he expressed some misgivings about leaving San Quentin, it having been his de facto home now for close to three decades.

    As for being released from prison, Kraft admitted he doesn't see himself resuming his old life. As he recalled telling one of his former attorneys, who asked what he would do if his conviction was overturned, Kraft replied, "My life is here now. Almost all of the people I care for are here. I don't have any former life to return to; it is obliterated. I don't pine for release; my life is here. I'll die here, and that's OK with me."

    The fact that Kraft is still alive continues to cause outrage in Orange County. In 2013 the local magazine Orange Coast ran a story titled "Why Isn't Randy Kraft Dead?" and quoted several of the jurors who convicted Kraft expressing disbelief that he has yet to be executed.

    The author also spoke with Max Gambrel, a cousin of Terry Gambrel who grew up next door to him in Indiana. He expressed mixed emotions about Kraft, saying that while he has thought about killing him himself, he is also "glad" he remains behind bars.

    "He loved his freedom, and the longer he's in jail ... it's the only justice my family has," Max Gambrel told the publication.

    The night of his arrest

    Born in Long Beach, the youngest child of four and the only son of parents Opal and Harold Kraft, Randy Kraft grew up largely in the Orange County town of Midway City. He attended Claremont Men's College, from which he graduated in 1968 with a B.A. in economics.

    He then joined the U.S. Air Force and was stationed at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California. He was discharged in 1969 after disclosing his homosexuality to a superior and moved back home with his parents.

    Seven years later he had met Jeff Seelig, who worked as a baker, and the two were living together in a home in Laguna Hills. Kraft was working as a computer consultant, a job that often had him traveling to other states.

    The night of May 12 Kraft said that he and Seelig had gotten into a fight about money and the next morning Seelig left to attend a chocolate show in Los Angeles. That night he thought about driving up to join him, but because of their argument the day prior, he instead headed south to San Diego. He had a few drinks at a gay bar called The Brig and set out to return home sometime after midnight.

    He stopped at a rest area off Interstate 5 not far from Camp Pendleton to clear some bottles and trash out of his car. There is where he encountered Gambrel, 25, a Marine stationed at El Toro, California.

    "He was sitting down, holding stuff in his lap near the trash can in the parking lot. He looked out of sorts and I asked him if he was OK," said Kraft. "He didn't say anything to me other than he said 'El Toro.' I thought he was drunk or whatever and would take him to the base."

    A frequent cruiser of rest areas for gay sex hookups, Kraft said Gambrel "didn't look the type" and Kraft helped him to his car. Eventually, they drove off toward the (now decommissioned) Marine Corps Air Station near Irvine. Kraft estimated they had been in the car for roughly 20 minutes, with Gambrel not saying anything and "drooling out of the side of his mouth."

    He told the B.A.R. that his car was weaving not because he was drunk but because he was trying to help Gambrel and simultaneously drive.

    "I was shaking him, trying to wake him, shouting at him, trying to see if anything was in his mouth blocking his airway, looking to see if he was wounded or bleeding," wrote Kraft. "Then I noticed the lights of the CHP patrol car that was pulling me over."

    It was near San Juan Capistrano where the two CHP officers pulled him over and conducted two sobriety tests on him. Kraft insists he was told he had passed the tests but the officer wanted to run his license. At that point the other officer, who had been trying to rouse Gambrel, called over to his partner who then "roughly handcuffed and shoved" him, Kraft said, into the back seat of the patrol car.

    "I didn't think the cops would take Gambrel to a hospital. I thought they would initiate CPR or do whatever was necessary," wrote Kraft in one letter. "Instead they did nothing and at first tried to prevent the paramedics from starting CPR. Those first 4-5 minutes are critical, and the CHP did nothing."

    According to court documents, the one officer found Gambrel with "no pulse and was not breathing. Upon lifting a jacket from Gambrel's lap, (he) observed that Gambrel's pants were unbuttoned and pulled down between his waist and his knees so that his penis and testicles were supported by the crotch of the pants. The crotch area was wet."

    A paramedic, according to court documents, said that Kraft told him that he had given Gambrel some of his Ativan, which he had been prescribed to treat panic attacks. Kraft, however, claims Gambrel stole the Ativan and that he did not know he had taken any that night until after seeing the police reports.

    At trial a doctor testified that Gambrel had died from asphyxia due to ligature strangulation and that the ligature "consisted of a strap that had been tightened" around his neck, according to court documents.

    Kraft repeatedly insisted to the B.A.R. that Gambrel was never dead in his car.

    "Had the CHP realized that, things would have unfolded much differently," he wrote. "But they assumed he was dead and that I had killed him and was driving around for hours with his body in the passenger seat."

    In the course of their investigation, the police found in Kraft's car a list of names split into two columns on a piece of legal pad paper. The prosecution argued it was coded references to Kraft's numerous murder victims over the years and used it in court to tie him to their deaths.

    On several occasions in his letters, and in speaking to the B.A.R. , Kraft disputed that characteristic of the document. He said it was a list of people he was going to invite to a surprise housewarming party he planned to throw for Seelig, as they were redoing their bathroom and installing a spa to an outdoor deck.

    Written out in mnemonics, Kraft explained, "One column was the names of people I wanted to invite and the other column were maybes. It was in code so he wouldn't recognize it."

    The purported "murder list" would later factor into why Kraft's attorneys advised him not to take the stand at trial. In explaining their thinking, Kraft wrote, "If one believed what the prosecutor claimed about the list – that it is a list of murder victims – that it amounts to a confession. The prosecutor claims the list is a confession, but he reaches that conclusion by psychic powers, imagining what was in my mind when I wrote it."

    Over the years Kraft learned that three of the judges who handled his case, including the presiding trial judge, the late Donald A. McCartin, had served in the US Marine Corps, and therefore, he contends should have recused themselves. And he maintains a key piece of evidence in the case – his fingerprint on a glass – "was manufactured."

    The appellate courts, however, have rejected Kraft's contention that he should have been tried solely for the death of Gambrel and not had that charge be combined with the murders of the 15 other men.

    "I didn't get a fair trial," said Kraft. "The government turned it into a serial killer trial."

    http://ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=72040

  7. #7
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    Michael Ray Schlicht


    Authorities identify 17-year-old boy believed to be early victim of serial killer sitting on death row

    By Alberto Luperon
    Law & Crime

    Randy Steven Kraft, better known as the “Scorecard Killer,” has been on California's death row for decades, but that doesn’t mean investigators stopped suspecting him of other unadjudicated slayings.

    Now, after 49 years, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has identified a teenage John Doe they believe died at his hands.

    The slain boy is Michael Ray Schlicht, 17.

    According to deputies, two people were off-roading on a fire road on Sept. 14, 1974, in unincorporated Laguna Hills, present-day Aliso Viejo. Investigators determined he died three to five days before from an accident due to alcohol and diazepam.

    Authorities worked on trying to identify him, but he ended up at an unmarked grave in El Toro Memorial Park.

    In 1980, sheriff’s investigators noted other deaths in 1978 from alcohol and diazepam intoxication in Southern California, including their county.

    “These deaths were classified as homicides,” they wrote. “Over the years, multiple young men were found deceased throughout Orange County and Southern California, including several within a few miles of where John Doe’s remains were discovered.”

    Authorities arrested Kraft, now 78, in May 1983 for murder after a California Highway Patrol officer did a traffic stop on him and found Terry Lee Gambrel, 25, dead in the front passenger seat, empty bottles and an open Lorazepam battle at his feet.

    Investigators described finding a coded list believed to have upward of 67 victims of Kraft.

    Jurors convicted him in May 1989 of 16 murders. He was suspected of committing 10 more, though the Orange County District Attorney’s Office did not file those cases.

    Nonetheless, authorities believed that their 1974 John Doe was one of Kraft’s early victims.

    Working with the forensic genetic genealogy company Othram Labs, they tracked down Schlicht’s mother in Kansas, Missouri, and used her DNA to confirm a match.

    The teenager was from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

    “Family members have been notified and are in the process of having a headstone installed to mark his final resting place,” authorities wrote.

    Deputies now focus on investigating his murder. They ask anyone with information to call Orange County Crime Stoppers at 1-855-TIP-OCCS or crimestoppers.org.

    https://lawandcrime.com/crime/author...-on-death-row/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

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