Carol Mary Bundy was born in Bay City, Michigan, on August 26, 1942, into a violent household, and lost most of her sight to a degenerative condition. She trained as a vocational nurse, married several times, lost custody of her two sons, and by 1979 was living in a North Hollywood apartment block and going to the country and western bar where a musician named John Robert Murray sang. She began an affair with him and, when it ended, told his wife about it.
In January 1980 she met Douglas Clark at the same bar and he moved in with her. Over that summer they killed at least six people in Los Angeles, mostly young women and runaways picked up along Sunset Boulevard, shot in the head during sex acts in Clark's car. Carol bought the ammunition, helped clean up, and photographed at least one victim. Clark brought the severed head of Exxie Wilson back to the flat, and Carol kept it in the freezer and made it up with cosmetics. The Los Angeles press called the pair the Sunset Strip Killers.
On August 5, 1980, she asked John Murray to meet her in his van, where she shot him, stabbed him, and cut off his head, because she had told him too much and was afraid he would go to the police. Days later, at the nursing home where she worked, she told a colleague she was tired of it all and had killed people. The colleague called the police.
She led detectives to Clark and gave a long statement, and each of them afterwards said the other had been the driving force. She pleaded guilty in 1983 to the murders of John Murray and Exxie Wilson and was sentenced to fifty-two years to life. She died of heart failure at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla on December 9, 2003, aged sixty-one.