On August 9, 1980, the decomposing body of John Robert Murray, forty-five, known as Jack, was found in his van a few blocks from his home in Van Nuys. He had been stabbed in the chest and his head had been cut off. The head was never found. Two days later a nurse named Carol Bundy, thirty-seven, called the police. She had already told co-workers at the nursing home where she worked that she had killed people. She told the police that she had shot Murray with her chrome Raven pistol five days before he was found, and that her roommate, Douglas Clark, was the man who had been killing young women along Sunset Boulevard all summer. Both were arrested that day, she at her home in Burbank.
She was born Carol Mary Peters on August 26, 1942. Both her parents were abusive alcoholics. Her mother died when she was a child, her father began sexually abusing her at eleven, and after he remarried he placed her in foster homes. At seventeen she married a man of fifty-six. By 1979 she had left a third, abusive husband, with whom she had two young sons, and had begun an affair with Murray, the manager of her apartment building and a part-time country singer. She tried to pay his wife to leave him; the wife made him evict her instead. Bundy kept turning up where he sang, and at one of those places, a bar called Little Nashville, she met Clark early in 1980. He moved in with her within weeks, and they found they shared violent sexual fantasies. She bought him two pistols.
On June 11, 1980, the stepsisters Gina Marano, fifteen, and Cynthia Chandler, sixteen, were picked up on the Sunset Strip; they were found the next morning beside the Ventura Freeway, each shot in the head. Later that month Karen Jones, twenty-four, was found shot behind a Burbank steakhouse, and the headless body of Exxie Wilson, twenty, was found in Studio City. A few days afterward a passerby opened a small pine box in an alley and found Wilson's head wrapped in a T-shirt printed "Daddy's Girl." Bundy later told detectives that she and Clark had kept the head in their freezer, that Clark had used it sexually, and that she had made it up with cosmetics: "Where I had my fun was with the makeup. I was making her over like a big Barbie doll." Marnette Comer, seventeen, was found near the Golden State Freeway at the end of June.
Bundy said she had told Murray about Clark and the killings, and then grew afraid he would go to the police. She met him in his van, shot him and stabbed him, and cut off his head so the bullets could not be traced to her gun. In sealed testimony that September she told the court as much. She also admitted being in Clark's car when he shot a young woman they had picked up, and co-workers testified that she had told them she helped dump the body. Clark later claimed that Bundy had fired that shot herself and fondled the dying woman on the way to the dumping ground. "I don't know if you guys have ever in your life shot anybody," she told officers, "but it's really fun to do."
Prosecutors dropped the death penalty in exchange for her testimony against Clark. On May 2, 1983, to their surprise, she withdrew her pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity and pleaded guilty in Los Angeles County Superior Court to Murray's murder and to the murder of the unidentified woman, calling herself a reluctant partner in the hands of a maniac. With no special circumstances proved, life without parole was off the table. On May 31 she was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life for Murray and twenty-five years to life, consecutive, for the unidentified woman, fifty-two years to life in all.
Clark represented himself, was convicted in 1983 of six murders, including Marano, Chandler, Jones, Wilson and Comer, and the attempted murder of a woman he stabbed in his car in April 1980, and was sentenced to death. He blamed Bundy and Murray to the end, and died of natural causes on death row on October 11, 2023. Bundy died of heart failure at the Central California Women's Facility on December 9, 2003, at sixty-one.