Shortly after 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, two California Highway Patrol officers in southern Orange County saw a car weaving in its lane on Interstate 5 and pulled it over. The driver, Randy Kraft, a 38-year-old computer programmer from Long Beach, told one of them that his passenger was a hitchhiker. He failed field sobriety tests and was arrested for driving under the influence. When Sergeant Michael Howard reached into the car, he found that the passenger had no pulse and was not breathing. He was Terry Lee Gambrel, a 25-year-old Marine stationed at the El Toro air station, and he had been strangled.
In the car officers found photographs of young men and, in a business binder in the trunk, a sheet of paper with 61 short, cryptic entries in Kraft's handwriting. Prosecutors later said it was a list of his victims. Six years after the stop, an Orange County jury convicted Kraft of the first-degree murders of 16 young men killed between 1972 and 1983, and he was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2000. He has never admitted any of the killings, and as of October 2026 he remained under sentence of death in a state where executions have been halted since 2019.
Kraft was born in Long Beach, the youngest of four children and the only son of Harold and Opal Kraft, according to a 2016 profile in the Bay Area Reporter, San Francisco's LGBT newspaper. FOX 11 Los Angeles gives his birth date as March 19, 1945. His parents had come to California from Wyoming, the Long Beach Post reported in a 2013 history of the case, and the family moved into Orange County when he was small. He grew up mostly in Midway City and attended Westminster High School, which Orange Coast magazine names as his school.
He went on to Claremont Men's College and graduated in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in economics, the Bay Area Reporter said. Classmates remembered him as politically conservative in those years; the Long Beach Post wrote that he backed Barry Goldwater and the Vietnam War before turning to support Robert Kennedy. He then served in the U.S. Air Force at Edwards Air Force Base and was discharged in 1969 after he disclosed that he was gay. The Long Beach Post wrote that the discharge was recorded as being for medical problems.
After the Air Force, by the Long Beach Post's account, he worked as a bartender in Sunset Beach, where a small group of gay bars had grown up in the late 1960s. He moved into computer work in the 1970s. His employer, Lear Siegler, sent him on business trips to its Peerless division in Tualatin, Oregon, and in February 1983 he was working on an assignment at the St. Ives Laboratory in Palos Verdes, according to the Supreme Court. Orange Coast reported that an employer had tested his IQ at 129.
He had two long relationships in those years. In a recorded police interview in 1975, he called a man named Jeff Graves his "other half." By April 1978 he shared an apartment on Molino Avenue in Long Beach with his partner, Jeff Seelig, and by 1983 he lived in a house on Roswell Avenue in Long Beach, the court record shows. The Bay Area Reporter described Seelig as a baker and placed the two men in Laguna Hills by 1976.
The California Supreme Court described what the 16 victims had in common. All were white males between 18 and 25, and all but one were single. Most were strangled with a ligature, and most had alcohol or diazepam, the tranquilizer sold as Valium, in their blood. Many had no car of their own at the time they disappeared and were hitchhiking or walking, and several were Marines from Camp Pendleton, El Toro or Tustin. Their bodies were left along freeways and ramps in Orange County and the Long Beach area, in canyons, and in one case in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Edward Daniel Moore was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton. His body was found at about 1:45 a.m. on December 26, 1972, on the shoulder of the Seventh Street off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway in the Long Beach area. He had been dead about three days and had been strangled.
The second count concerned a young man whom no one could name. He appeared to be between 18 and 25. His body was found at about 1 a.m. on April 14, 1973, on Ellis Avenue between Golden West and Gothard streets in Huntington Beach. He had been suffocated. He went to trial, and was still described in the 2000 opinion, as "John Doe Huntington Beach."
Ronald Gene Wiebe was 20. On the evening of July 27, 1973, he left his mother's home in Los Alamitos, saying he was going to the Sportsman's Lodge for a few beers. His body was found on July 30 at the Seventh Street on-ramp to the San Diego Freeway in Seal Beach. He had been strangled with a ligature.
Keith Daven Crotwell was 19. He was last seen alive on March 29, 1975, in Long Beach, slumped in the passenger seat of a car that drove away from a parking lot near a restaurant called Big John's. His skull was found on May 8, 1975, near a jetty in the Long Beach Marina, and other remains were found that October in Laguna Hills. The court did not record a cause of death.
Mark Howard Hall was 22. On New Year's Eve 1975 he was drinking with a friend, Philip Holmer, at a party in San Juan Capistrano, and Holmer last saw him at about midnight, lying on a sofa. His body was found on January 3, 1976, in the mountains near Silverado Canyon and Bedford Peak. He died of suffocation combined with acute alcohol intoxication.
Scott Michael Hughes, 18, was a Marine at Camp Pendleton. On April 14, 1978, he told a fellow Marine that he planned to travel to Washington State to visit his brother, who had cancer. His body was found the following Sunday near the Riverside Freeway on-ramp at Euclid Street in Anaheim. He had been strangled with a ligature.
Roland Gerald Young was 23. He had been arrested for public drunkenness on June 10, 1978, and the Orange County Sheriff's Department released him from jail at 8:19 that evening. His body was found the next morning on Irvine Center Drive in Irvine. He had been stabbed four times in the chest.
Richard Allen Keith, 20, was a Marine at Camp Pendleton. On June 18, 1978, he hitchhiked to Carson to visit the home of his girlfriend's mother, and he left at about 11 p.m. His body was found at 5:15 the next morning off Moulton Parkway in Orange County. He had been strangled with a ligature.
Keith Arthur Klingbeil, 23, lived in Everett, Washington, and had hitchhiked from home to Southern California. His body was found at about 3:30 a.m. on July 6, 1978, in the slow lane of northbound Interstate 5 between La Paz Road and Oso Parkway. The cause of death was an overdose of acetaminophen, with ligature strangulation as a contributing factor.
Michael Joseph Inderbieten, 21, lived in Long Beach. On November 17, 1978, after an argument in a crowded car, he got out and said he would walk home, and his friends last saw him heading toward Pacific Coast Highway. His body was found at about 6:15 the next morning on a transition ramp from Seventh Street in Long Beach. He had been suffocated. Kraft was also convicted of sodomy in his case, with a finding that he had inflicted great bodily injury.
Donald Harold Crisel, 20, was a Marine stationed at Tustin. A fellow Marine saw him walking alone near the base at about 1:30 a.m. on June 16, 1979, on his way, he said, to a nearby restaurant. His body was found that night on the Irvine Center Drive on-ramp to the northbound San Diego Freeway. He died of a multiple drug overdose.
Robert Wyatt Loggins Jr., 19, was also a Marine at Tustin. On August 22, 1980, he went out drinking with three other Marines, walked off on his own near the Huntington Beach pier and refused their efforts to bring him back. He did not report for work the following Monday. His body was found on September 3, 1980, in the foothills near El Toro. The medical evidence could not fix a single cause: strangulation or smothering was possible, and the drugs and alcohol in his body could also have killed him.
Eric Herbert Church was 21. His body was found at about 11 a.m. on January 27, 1983, beside the on-ramp from Seventh Street to the northbound 605 freeway in Long Beach. He had been strangled with a ligature.
Geoffrey Alan Nelson, 18, and Rodger James DeVaul Jr., 20, were friends. They were last seen together between 11 and 11:30 p.m. on February 11, 1983, outside the home of an acquaintance, Bryce Wilson, in Cypress. At about 1:30 a.m. Nelson came back and knocked, but Wilson could not be woken. Nelson's body was found at about 5:15 that morning on the Euclid Street on-ramp to the Garden Grove Freeway; he had been strangled with a ligature. Kraft was also convicted of mayhem in his case. DeVaul, who had a girlfriend, was found at about 3 p.m. on February 13 on a hillside near Glendora Ridge Road and Mount Baldy Road in the San Bernardino Mountains, still wearing Nelson's jacket. He died of compression of the neck. The jury acquitted Kraft of a sodomy count concerning DeVaul.
Terry Lee Gambrel, 25, was a Marine at El Toro and was engaged to be married. He was last seen at about 9 p.m. on May 13, 1983, when he told his roommate he needed a ride to a party at a friend's house. Orange Coast reported that he had been hitchhiking to a party after a softball game. He was found dead in Kraft's car a few hours later.
For most of the years covered by the charges, these deaths were investigated one at a time by different departments. Some were not treated as homicides at first. When Michael Ray Schlicht's body was found near a fire road in 1974, his death was recorded as accidental, from alcohol and diazepam, the Orange County Sheriff's Department said in 2023.
Kraft came to the attention of police once, in 1975, over Keith Crotwell. Crotwell and a friend, Kent May, had spent time with a man in a car near Big John's in Long Beach on March 29. A witness watched the car drive away with Crotwell slumped and possibly unconscious inside, and never saw him alive again. His remains were identified through dental X-rays, and Crotwell's friends found the car, a Mustang, which was registered to Kraft. Long Beach Detective Michael Woodward asked Kraft to come in, and on May 19, 1975, Detective Robert Bell interviewed him. The recording was later played for the jury.
Kraft told Bell that he had picked up two young men in a parking lot on Granada Avenue, drunk beer with them and driven around for about 20 minutes. One got out; the other wanted to stay. Kraft said his car then became stuck on an embankment, that he called his "other half," Jeff Graves, for help, and that a man with a pickup truck pulled the car free with a rope. He denied killing Crotwell or disposing of his body. Bell confirmed that Kraft went to work the next day. No charge followed. After Kraft's arrest, Graves told detectives on May 31, 1983, that Kraft had telephoned him early one morning, probably in May 1975, to say he had car trouble, and that he had gone to help him. The defense offered that statement at trial to support Kraft's account.
The killings attributed to him did not stop in Southern California. Lear Siegler sent him to Oregon on business, and young men were found dead beside Interstate 5 there in 1980, 1981 and 1982. In December 1982 two cousins were found dead in a field in Michigan after he had been in Grand Rapids. None of these deaths led to him until after his arrest.
The court record gives the stop as about 1 a.m. on May 14, 1983, near Interstate 5 in San Juan Capistrano; Orange Coast placed it near Mission Viejo. Sergeant Michael Howard and Officer Michael Sterling had seen Kraft's car, which Orange Coast described as a brown 1979 Toyota, weaving in its lane. Kraft told Sterling his passenger was a hitchhiker, failed the field sobriety tests and was arrested for drunk driving. Howard, entering the car from the driver's side, found the passenger without a pulse or breath. Howard later recalled to Orange Coast that Kraft asked him, "How's my friend?"
Gambrel's trousers had been pulled down, and his wrists bore marks like those left by a wide rubber band. On the floor of the car was a vial of Ativan, a prescription tranquilizer whose generic name is lorazepam, made out to Kraft, and he told a paramedic that he had given Gambrel some of it. Tests found a blood-alcohol level of 0.067 percent and lorazepam in Gambrel's blood. The cause of death was ligature strangulation. Officers also found a buck knife in the car.
The search warrant for the car turned up more. Under the floor mat were photographs of young men, among them DeVaul, Loggins and Church; Orange Coast put the number at 47. Three small balls of maroon fiber lay on the front floor. In the trunk, in a business binder, was a notebook with the sheet of 61 cryptic entries. A third warrant was executed at his home on May 18, 1983, and the searches of the house and garage on Roswell Avenue found items that prosecutors later traced to victims.
The sheet from the trunk is the reason the press called him the Scorecard Killer. The entries were short phrases in Kraft's handwriting, and prosecutors read them as reminders of particular young men. They linked 13 entries to the charged murders: "EDM" for Edward Daniel Moore, "Airplane Hill" for the unidentified man in Huntington Beach, "7th St." for Ronald Wiebe, "Parking Lot" for Keith Crotwell, "New Years Eve" for Mark Hall, "Euclid" for Scott Hughes, "Jail Out" for Roland Young, "Marine Carson" for Richard Keith, "Hike Out LB Boots" for Keith Klingbeil, "Dart 405" for Michael Inderbieten, "Marine Drunk Overnight Shorts" for Donald Crisel, "MC HB Tattoo" for Robert Loggins and "2 in 1 Beach" for Geoffrey Nelson and Rodger DeVaul together. No entry was linked to Terry Gambrel or Eric Church.
Prosecutors linked eight more entries to the Oregon and Michigan deaths, among them six beginning with the word "Portland" and one reading "GR 2." They linked 21 others to young men whose deaths were never charged, and they could not match the rest to anyone. The total figure of 67 victims that appears in news reports and in sheriff's releases since then comes from this reading of the list, not from any court finding.
The trial judge admitted only the 13 entries tied to the charged counts. On their own, the judge said, the entries "meant nothing," but in context the prosecution's reading was a reasonable one. On appeal, the California Supreme Court held that the list was relevant, admissible as Kraft's own statement, and not unfairly prejudicial.
Kraft has always given a different explanation. He told the Bay Area Reporter in 2016 that the sheet was a coded guest list for a housewarming party he planned for his partner, Jeff Seelig, with one column of people he wanted to invite and another of possible guests. He said he had written it in code so that Seelig would not recognize it. The Long Beach Post reported that he had also described the names as friends and lovers.
The California Supreme Court summed up the prosecution's case in one sentence: "Physical evidence linked defendant to eight of the murders." For the others, prosecutors relied on how much the killings resembled one another and on the list.
Some of the physical evidence came from the car. Photographs under the floor mat showed DeVaul and Loggins, and negatives found at the house produced more pictures of DeVaul. Loggins also appeared in photographs found in the house and in a briefcase. A prosecution expert matched corduroy trousers in one photograph to a pair Eric Church had owned, maroon fibers on Church's body matched fibers from the car, and Church's father identified an electric shaver found in Kraft's garage as his son's. A fiber found with Nelson was consistent with Church's socks.
Other evidence came from the scenes. A piece of glass from a bottle found near Mark Hall's body carried Kraft's right thumbprint. Fibers on Scott Hughes's shorts were consistent with carpet from the Molino Avenue apartment, though not conclusively. A hair connected with Roland Young was consistent with Kraft's but not definitive. Laboratory evidence of the sexual assault on Michael Inderbieten was presented as consistent with Kraft's blood type and secretor status. A tire pattern was found on Donald Crisel's clothing, though the defense argued that Kraft's tires would not have made it.
Kraft was charged in Orange County Superior Court in case number C52776. The case grew to 19 counts: 16 of first-degree murder, two of sodomy and one of mayhem, with special-circumstance allegations that made him eligible for the death penalty. The cases were tried together in Santa Ana.
Kraft's lawyers asked the court to sever the 16 murder counts into separate trials. A psychology professor, Steven Penrod, testified for the defense that trying many counts together makes a conviction more likely, because jurors draw conclusions about a defendant's character. The trial court denied the motion, finding that most of the evidence would be admissible on all the counts anyway. The Supreme Court later upheld that ruling, pointing to the shared features of the victims and the way their bodies were left, and found that the charged murders were similar enough to show a common plan.
The trial began about five years after the arrest, Vice reported in 2014. Superior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin presided; Judge James K. Turner also handled parts of the case, the Supreme Court's record shows. Bryan Brown of the Orange County District Attorney's office prosecuted. Kraft was defended by C. Thomas McDonald, James Merwin and William Kopeny, and Orange Coast reported that the defense spent close to 5.5 million dollars on investigators and experts. The trial record ran to some 38,000 pages, and the jurors, only two of them men, spent most of 11 months on the case, the magazine said.
Kraft did not testify. He told the Bay Area Reporter that he had asked to testify about only one of the charges, that the judge refused, and that his lawyers advised him not to take the stand.
The defense contested the identification evidence count by count. It offered alibi witnesses for several dates, including a bridge game on the night of February 11, 1983, when Nelson and DeVaul disappeared, a birthday party on February 13, and a New Year's Eve party on the night Mark Hall was last seen. Defense experts challenged the soil, hair and fiber comparisons.
The lawyers also pointed to other possible suspects. A witness said a heroin seller had told him he had stabbed someone and dumped the body near Culver Road, close to where Roland Young was found. A sheriff's deputy had looked into a pickup truck seen near the place where Keith Klingbeil was found; the prosecution showed it had stalled about a quarter mile away, and the defense showed that sheriff's employees had destroyed some of the evidence in that case. A friend of DeVaul said "rough characters" had visited his home shortly before he died, and soil and hair samples from that scene did not match Kraft. A resident near the place where Loggins was found had seen a man and a woman unloading a plastic bag, and military police had information about other suspects in Crisel's death.
The jury returned its verdicts in May 1989. It found Kraft guilty of all 16 murder counts and of the sodomy of Michael Inderbieten and the mayhem on Geoffrey Nelson. It acquitted him of the sodomy count concerning Rodger DeVaul and of the special circumstance tied to it. It found true the special circumstance that the Inderbieten murder was committed during a sodomy, and it returned multiple-murder special circumstances on 11 of the counts. The trial court later struck 10 of those 11 findings as duplicates, leaving one.
At the penalty phase, prosecutors put before the same jury evidence of crimes for which Kraft had never been charged.
The first was the oldest. In March 1970 a 13-year-old boy who had run away from home was drugged and sexually assaulted at Kraft's apartment in Long Beach. He did not report it until August 1983, after Kraft's arrest, and he testified at the trial.
The rest concerned the deaths of eight young men in Oregon and Michigan. Michael O'Fallon, 17, was found on July 17, 1980, at the Talbot Road interchange on Interstate 5, about 10 miles south of Salem; a camera marked with his initials was found in Kraft's garage. The next day, July 18, 1980, a man who could not be identified was found about a mile south of Woodburn. Michael Cluck, 17, was found on April 10, 1981, in a ditch on Pebbles Road, and his shaving kit was later found in a hallway drawer in Kraft's house. Brian Whitcher was found on November 24, 1982, south of Wilsonville, and his brown velour pullover was in Kraft's garage. Lance Taggs, 19, was found on December 9, 1982, half a mile east of Interstate 5 between Wilsonville and Canby; his tote bag and nunchakus were found at Kraft's home. Anthony Silveira was found on December 18, 1982, off Boones Ferry Road near the interstate, west of Hubbard.
In Michigan, Dennis Alt, 24, and his cousin Christopher Schoenborn, 20, were found on December 9, 1982, in a vacant field about four miles from the Alt family farm. Schoenborn's jacket was found in Kraft's garage, and his key chain, bottle opener, boots and belt were found in the house. Anthony Silveira's army jacket turned up at the Grand Rapids hotel where Kraft had stayed, and hotel staff found Dennis Alt's keys there.
The defense answered with 44 friends, relatives, co-workers and teachers who spoke for Kraft's character, along with four members of the clergy and 13 correctional officers. Monte Buchsbaum, a University of California, Irvine, scientist, testified about abnormalities in a PET scan of Kraft's brain; Orange Coast reported that he linked them to brain damage that might explain sexual violence. The psychologist Craig Haney testified that Kraft would adjust well to life in prison without parole. On the Oregon deaths, the defense pointed to another man, L.H., who had been seen near where Lance Taggs was hitchhiking.
The jury chose death. The Long Beach Post gives the date of the jury's verdict as August 11, 1989.
On November 29, 1989, Judge McCartin denied the defense motion to reduce the verdict to life without parole and sentenced Kraft to death on 11 counts, those concerning Hughes, Young, Keith, Klingbeil, Inderbieten, Crisel, Loggins, Church, Nelson, DeVaul and Gambrel. On the five earliest murder counts he imposed consecutive terms of 25 years to life, and he added determinate terms for the sodomy, the great bodily injury finding and the mayhem. All the prison terms were stayed pending execution. The state prison system recorded Kraft as received on November 30, 1989.
At the sentencing, Orange Coast reported, McCartin said: "I can't imagine doing these things in scientific experiments on a dead person, much less [to] someone alive." As Kraft was led out, the father of one of the victims shouted, "Burn in hell, Kraft!" Vice identified the man as Darwin Hall and reported that he later told the Los Angeles Times, "I hope this ends it."
The jury foreman, James Lytle, later told Orange Coast that Kraft "has lived longer in prison than the whole lives of most of the kids that he killed." Another juror, Pat Marcantel Springer, told the magazine, "I think they should execute him." By the magazine's estimate the case, including the trial, appeals and years of confinement, has cost California about 15 million dollars, a figure that rested on an assumed trial cost of 11 million.
A death sentence in California is appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court. Kraft waited more than two years for a lawyer to be appointed, Orange Coast reported. Richard Power took the case and filed a 700-page opening brief, Vice said, and Orange Coast put the filing in 1997. Power and Elizabeth Barranco represented him on the appeal; the cost of the work by its two lawyers was put at 345,000 dollars. "This was a huge case," Power told Vice.
On August 10, 2000, the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in an opinion by Justice Werdegar, writing for a unanimous court: "We affirm the judgment in its entirety." The decision is People v. Kraft, 23 Cal.4th 978.
The court rejected each of Kraft's main claims. It held that the trial court had not abused its discretion in refusing to sever the counts. It upheld the admission of the 13 list entries. It upheld the searches: Sergeant Howard's seizures at the scene were justified by officer safety and by the rule of inevitable discovery; the magistrate had good reason to issue the warrant for the car, since a strangled man had been found in it and officers suspected Kraft in similar killings; the warrant's breadth was "commensurate with the scope of the investigation"; and officers were entitled to look under the floor mats for the photographs the warrant described and to search the binder in the trunk, because a plan for a murder might have been written down in advance.
The automatic appeal is followed in capital cases by habeas corpus proceedings, in which a prisoner can raise claims outside the trial record. A June 1, 2026, list of people under sentence of death kept by the state's Habeas Corpus Resource Center shows that state habeas counsel had been appointed for Kraft and that no habeas petition was then pending before the California Supreme Court.
His federal habeas case began in 2001, Orange Coast reported, and a federal ruling in 2009 found many of his claims without merit but allowed some to go forward. Kraft has repeatedly tried to change lawyers. He went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit himself in 2009, in a death penalty habeas appeal against Robert K. Wong (No. 09-55806), and in 2014 he filed a petition in that court against the federal district court in Los Angeles (No. 14-72292). In 2013 a deputy attorney general told Orange Coast the state was waiting for rulings on two petitions. The Bay Area Reporter reported in 2016 that he had been in the federal system since 2000 and that appellate courts had rejected his claim that he should have been tried only for Gambrel's death. The reports do not mention a final federal ruling on his habeas petition.
Kraft spent decades on San Quentin's condemned row. Orange Coast reported in 2013 that he was inmate E38700 and lived in a small, windowless cell, where he listened to Nat King Cole, Jimmy Buffett and Brooks and Dunn and had signed up with a pen pal service. Vice reported the next year that he spent his days with music, cards and legal briefs.
In 2016, at 71, he spoke to the Bay Area Reporter. Apart from a 1983 newspaper interview, the paper said, he had until then spoken publicly only through court filings. He denied killing Gambrel, saying the Marine was alive in his car and that police had not given him proper care. He said his thumbprint on the glass near Mark Hall's body "was manufactured," and that three judges in his case, including McCartin, had served in the Marines and should have stepped aside. "I didn't get a fair trial," he said. "The government turned it into a serial killer trial." He told the paper he expected to die in prison. "I am getting older. I am going to die here," he said, calling his situation "death penalty by attrition." He said a sister in her 80s, living in Orange County, kept in touch with him by phone.
Gambrel's cousin, Max Gambrel, told the Bay Area Reporter he was glad Kraft remained locked up. To Orange Coast he said, "There is no why."
California has not carried out an execution since 2006, the Bay Area Reporter noted in 2016. On March 13, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Executive Order N-09-19, which placed a moratorium on executions, withdrew the state's lethal injection protocol and closed the execution chamber at San Quentin. The order did not change any conviction or sentence.
Voters had approved Proposition 66 in 2016, and under it the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation moved people with death sentences out of San Quentin into other prisons, first in a pilot program from January 29, 2020, to January 29, 2022, and then under permanent rules approved on January 31, 2024. By May 28, 2024, everyone on San Quentin's East Block had been moved, and the department says San Quentin no longer provides long-term housing for condemned prisoners. The California Institution for Men in Chino was one of the main receiving prisons. In May 2025, FOX 11 Los Angeles reported, citing state inmate records, that Kraft was held there; Associated Press reports the same month still described him as at San Quentin.
Kraft's name appears seven times, once for each of seven offense dates, on the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's condemned inmate list updated October 2, 2026. The list gives his age as 81, his trial county as Orange, his sentence date as November 29, 1989, and his date of reception as November 30, 1989. He therefore remained under sentence of death as of that date.
Two young men who died in the years Kraft is suspected of killing have been identified through investigative genetic genealogy since 2023. Neither death was ever charged.
On September 14, 1974, two people riding off-road vehicles on a fire road in what was then unincorporated Laguna Hills, now Aliso Viejo, found a young man's body below the trail. He had been dead three to five days. The death was ruled accidental, from alcohol and diazepam, and he was buried in an unmarked grave at El Toro Memorial Park. In November 2022 the Orange County Sheriff's Department sent tissue samples to Othram, a private laboratory, in work paid for by the group Roads to Justice. A DNA profile came back in February 2023, and genealogists traced his family. In October 2023 investigators found likely grandparents, and a relative told them she had not seen her 17-year-old brother since April 1974. A DNA sample from a woman believed to be his mother, taken in Kansas City, Missouri, confirmed that he was Michael Ray Schlicht of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The sheriff's department said in November 2023 that he had "long been thought to be an early victim of Randy Kraft," and his family arranged a headstone. "The age of the crime no longer matters," Kristen Mittelman of Othram told KWWL in Iowa.
The second was in Oregon. On July 18, 1980, police were called to a body beside Interstate 5 near Woodburn, south of Portland. The man could not be identified despite checks of military and FBI records, the Woodburn Independent reported. Evidence from the Oregon cases had been sent to California for Kraft's trial and stayed in Orange County until 2024. That year an investigator from the Orange County Sheriff's Department offered the Oregon State Police cold case unit help with genetic genealogy. A profile was built from a blood sample, relatives submitted DNA, and in April 2025 the man was identified as Larry Eugene Parks, 30, a Vietnam veteran last seen in Pensacola, Florida. His family had lost touch with him in 1979 and did not know what had happened to him. "We are very confident that we have the correct person of interest," said Kyle Kennedy, an Oregon State Police spokesman, who said Kraft was the only person under investigation and that evidence was still being processed to establish the link.
Proven by final judgment on direct appeal: the first-degree murders of the 16 young men, the sodomy of Michael Inderbieten and the mayhem on Geoffrey Nelson. The jury acquitted Kraft of sodomy in DeVaul's case. A federal habeas case was brought; its outcome has not been reported.
Attributed but never charged: the eight Oregon and Michigan deaths presented at the penalty phase. The jury heard that evidence when choosing the sentence, but Kraft was never tried for any of those deaths and has not been convicted of them. The same applies to Michael Ray Schlicht and to the further deaths prosecutors linked to entries on the list.
The number 67: news reports since 1983, and sheriff's releases in 2023, describe the list as believed to record 67 victims. That figure is an interpretation of the list, not a finding of any court, and it does not match the trial record exactly. The Supreme Court recorded 61 entries, of which prosecutors linked 13 to charged counts, eight to the Oregon and Michigan deaths and 21 to other uncharged deaths, while some entries stood for two people. Different outlets give other totals: Vice in 2014 said investigators had tied him to 45 killings; Orange Coast said more than 65; FOX 11 said he was strongly suspected in at least 51 more. Several reports in 2023 said Orange County prosecutors had suspected him of 10 further murders that they did not charge.
Other possible victims: the Long Beach Post's 2013 history named Wayne Joseph Dukette, 30, a bartender whose body was found beside the Ortega Highway in October 1971 with no visible sign of foul play, and others, among them Vincent Cruz Mestas in 1973 and James Dale Reeves in 1974, as part of the series of killings. No court has ruled on any of those deaths, and what evidence linked them to Kraft was not reported.
Kraft's own position: he denies every killing, including Gambrel's, says the list was a party guest list, and says the thumbprint evidence was fabricated. The courts rejected his challenges to the evidence.
March 19, 1945: Randy Steven Kraft is born in Long Beach, California (date as given by FOX 11).
1968: graduates from Claremont Men's College with a degree in economics.
1969: discharged from the Air Force after disclosing that he is gay.
March 1970: a 13-year-old runaway is drugged and sexually assaulted at his Long Beach apartment; the boy does not report it until 1983.
December 26, 1972: Edward Daniel Moore's body is found in Long Beach.
April 14, 1973: a young man still unidentified in 2000 is found in Huntington Beach.
July 30, 1973: Ronald Gene Wiebe is found in Seal Beach.
September 14, 1974: Michael Ray Schlicht's body is found near Laguna Hills; his death is recorded as accidental.
March 29, 1975: Keith Daven Crotwell is last seen; his skull is found May 8.
May 19, 1975: Kraft is interviewed by Long Beach police about Crotwell; no charge follows.
January 3, 1976: Mark Howard Hall is found near Silverado Canyon.
April to July 1978: Scott Hughes, Roland Young, Richard Keith and Keith Klingbeil are found in Orange County.
November 18, 1978: Michael Inderbieten is found in Long Beach.
June 16, 1979: Donald Crisel is found in Irvine.
July 1980: Michael O'Fallon is found beside Interstate 5 in Oregon (July 17); on July 18 an unidentified man is found beside Interstate 5 near Woodburn, the man identified in 2025 as Larry Eugene Parks (Woodburn Independent, AP).
September 3, 1980: Robert Loggins Jr. is found near El Toro.
April 10, 1981: Michael Cluck is found in Oregon.
November and December 1982: Brian Whitcher, Lance Taggs and Anthony Silveira are found in Oregon; Dennis Alt and Christopher Schoenborn are found in Michigan on December 9.
January 27, 1983: Eric Church is found in Long Beach.
February 12 and 13, 1983: Geoffrey Nelson and Rodger DeVaul Jr. are found.
May 14, 1983: Kraft is stopped on Interstate 5 with Terry Gambrel dead in his car and arrested; the list is found in the trunk.
May 18, 1983: a third search warrant is executed at his home.
About five years after the arrest (Vice): trial opens in Santa Ana before Judge Donald A. McCartin.
May 1989: the jury convicts him of 16 murders, sodomy and mayhem, and acquits him on one sodomy count.
August 11, 1989: the jury returns a death verdict (Long Beach Post).
November 29, 1989: sentenced to death; received by the state prison system the next day.
1997: opening brief filed in the automatic appeal (Orange Coast).
August 10, 2000: the California Supreme Court affirms, People v. Kraft, 23 Cal.4th 978.
2001: federal habeas proceedings begin (Orange Coast).
2009: a federal ruling rejects many claims and lets others proceed; Kraft files a Ninth Circuit appeal (No. 09-55806).
2014: Kraft files a Ninth Circuit petition (No. 14-72292).
November 2, 2016: Bay Area Reporter interview at San Quentin.
March 13, 2019: Governor Newsom's moratorium on executions.
November 2023: Michael Ray Schlicht is identified.
By May 28, 2024: all condemned prisoners have been moved out of San Quentin's East Block.
April and May 2025: Larry Eugene Parks is identified; Oregon State Police name Kraft as the only person under investigation.
October 2, 2026: Kraft is listed by the state as condemned, age 81.