At about one in the morning on June 27, 1980, a wooden box was found in an alley in Studio City. Inside was the severed head of Exxie Wilson, a twenty-year-old woman whose body had been found four days earlier. It had been frozen and appeared to have been scrubbed. It was wrapped in a pair of blue jeans and a pink T-shirt printed with the words "Daddy's Girl," and those clothes turned out to belong to another young woman, Marnette Comer, who was also dead. The man who left the box was Douglas Daniel Clark, a Burbank factory worker who, with his girlfriend Carol Bundy, would become known as one of the Sunset Strip Killers.
Clark was born in Pennsylvania on March 10, 1948, the third son among five children of a Navy lieutenant commander who went on to naval intelligence work, and he grew up moving from posting to posting. He met Carol Bundy, then thirty-six, a vocational nurse and mother of two who had left an abusive husband, at a bar called Little Nashville on Christmas Day 1979. By 1980 he was living in the San Fernando Valley with Bundy, a former vocational nurse. The women he killed that summer were mostly teenage runaways and young women working the stretch of Sunset Boulevard known for its nightlife. He shot them in the head, usually with a .25-caliber pistol, and dumped their bodies around the valley. Testimony at his trial described an obsessive interest in necrophilia, and he was convicted of sexual contact with human remains.
Comer, seventeen, had been reported as a runaway from Sacramento on January 15, 1980, and was last contacted by police in Anaheim on May 23. Snake hunters found her nude, mummified body on June 30 in a dark ravine off Foothill Boulevard near Sylmar, within sight of the Golden State Freeway; she had been dead twenty to ninety days and had been shot three times in the chest. Her sister had last seen her on May 21, wearing the pink "Daddy's Girl" T-shirt. Clark told Bundy he had killed a girl on May 31 whom he called "Foothill," because he had dumped her body near Foothill Boulevard. That was Comer. On June 11 two stepsisters, Gina Marano, fifteen, and Cynthia Leigh Chandler, sixteen, vanished in Huntington Beach on their way to meet friends; a highway worker found them the next afternoon near a freeway ramp by Forest Lawn cemetery, each shot in the head with a .25-caliber pistol, and the absence of blood where they lay told the police they had been killed somewhere else. He told Bundy about the murders and invited her to take part in the ones that followed.
Karen Jones, twenty-four, and Exxie Wilson were both killed between midnight and two in the morning on June 23, 1980. A police officer patrolling Sunset Boulevard had warned Jones not to loiter there only hours before; she was found shot once in the head, behind a steakhouse in Burbank by most accounts. Wilson's headless body was found that morning in a restaurant parking lot in Studio City. The coroner found that the head had probably been cut off after death and that fifteen to twenty cuts had been needed to sever it. Clark took it home and kept it in the refrigerator before leaving it in the alley.
The sixth victim has never been identified. On August 26, 1980, after Clark's arrest, a worker inspecting water towers near the Sierra Highway in the Antelope Valley found scattered human bones and a clump of blonde hair. She was a young woman who had died one to two months earlier, shot in the back of the head with a .25-caliber bullet, and she was designated Jane Doe 18.
The case broke because of a killing Bundy committed herself. She had come to know what Clark was doing during June and, by her own account, became more and more involved, and she confided in John Robert Murray, known as Jack, forty-five, an Australian country singer who had been her apartment manager and her lover. Afraid that he would go to the police, she lured him into his van on August 5, 1980, after one of his shows, shot him in the head, cut his body with a knife and cut off his head; Clark, by the court's account, helped her get rid of it. On August 11 she telephoned the police, confessed to the Murray killing, and named Clark as the man who had shot the women. He was arrested that day.
Clark was cooperative under questioning, but told the detectives that there were things he did not want them to know and would not tell them; Detective Stallcup testified that he was the coolest murder suspect he had ever interviewed. He admitted picking up prostitutes on Sunset Boulevard and elsewhere, said he read the newspaper religiously and had followed the Sunset killings because they involved prostitutes, and described cruising Anaheim with Bundy after reading about them to see where other prostitutes worked. On April 25, 1980, Bundy had applied to buy two .25-caliber Raven automatic pistols at a pawnshop in Van Nuys, and witnesses said Clark habitually carried two small Ravens. The plant watchman at the boiler plant in Burbank where he worked testified that Clark came in after hours on the night of August 9, said he was not feeling well and needed to get something from the building, and signed in at 2:06 a.m. and out at 2:15. Both pistols were found in a cosmetic bag hidden near the top of the boiler room, about five minutes' walk from the watchman's station. Ballistics tests matched every bullet recovered from every victim to one of them, the nickel-plated Raven. The rest of the case was circumstantial too: telephone records, blood in a car, a woman who identified his voice from a police tape, a storage garage he had rented and lied about, and letters he wrote from jail.
Bundy pleaded guilty in 1983 to two counts of first-degree murder, for Murray and for one of the women, and avoided the death penalty. Clark's defense, which he pressed for the rest of his life, was that Bundy and Murray had committed the Sunset killings together and that Bundy killed Murray to frame him. He dismissed his lawyers, represented himself, and called Bundy as a defense witness; the prosecution never called her. Testifying under immunity, she repeated that he was the killer. The jury was told it could not convict him of the Murray killing or of a separate charge of molesting a twelve-year-old girl, or weigh his admissions about either.
Clark acted as his own lawyer at trial and lost. He was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, attempted first-degree murder, mayhem, and mutilation or sexual contact with human remains. On March 16, 1983, a Los Angeles County judge sentenced him to six consecutive death sentences, eight months for the mutilation count, and nine years plus a three-year enhancement for great bodily injury on the attempted murder; the mayhem sentence was stayed. He was admitted to death row on March 24, 1983. On July 30, 1992, the California Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Armand Arabian, upheld the six murder convictions and the death judgment but reversed the convictions for attempted murder and mayhem, which concerned an attack on a woman it identified only as Charlene A., and set aside all but one of the multiple-murder special-circumstance findings, since the law allowed only one. Justices Stanley Mosk and Joyce Kennard each dissented on his self-representation, Mosk on the futility of letting a man defend himself in a capital case and Kennard on the trial court's refusal to let him stand mute. Rehearing was denied on September 23, 1992.
California carried out no executions after 2006, and Clark spent forty years on death row at San Quentin State Prison without his sentence being carried out. He was pronounced dead at 3:39 in the afternoon of October 11, 2023, at an outside medical facility, aged seventy-five; prison officials said he died of natural causes, and the Marin County coroner's office investigated the official cause. Bundy had died at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla in December 2003, at sixty-one.