Randy Steven Kraft was convicted in May 1989 of sixteen murders committed in southern California between 1971 and 1983. Investigators have connected him to as many as sixty-seven deaths across California, Oregon and Michigan. He was sentenced to death for eleven of the sixteen and to life without parole for the other five, and remains under sentence in California, where no execution has been carried out since 2006.
He was born in Long Beach, California on March 19, 1945 and grew up in Westminster, in Orange County. He was academically able, took a degree in economics at Claremont Men's College, and worked on a Republican campaign. He was discharged from the Air Force in 1969 after disclosing that he was gay. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he worked as a well-paid computer consultant in Long Beach and lived with a partner in a quiet suburban house.
From 1971 he killed young men: hitchhikers, Marines and sailors picked up along the freeways of southern California, and later in Oregon and Michigan. He gave them alcohol and tranquillisers, sexually assaulted and tortured them, strangled or suffocated them, mutilated the bodies and left them at the roadside. The nickname the Freeway Killer came from where the bodies were found, and was applied at various times to three different men working the same roads.
He was stopped on the San Diego Freeway near Mission Viejo in the early hours of May 14, 1983, when California Highway Patrol officers pulled his Toyota over for weaving. He got out and walked back towards them. In the passenger seat, upright with the seatbelt fastened, was Terry Gambrel, a twenty-five-year-old Marine, strangled with his own belt. The car held prescription drugs, alcohol and restraints.
In the boot were photographs of dead and unconscious young men, and a folded sheet of paper carrying sixty-one entries in two columns: EDM, MARINE DOWN, 2 IN 1 HITCH, GR2. Detectives read roughly forty-three of them against known victims. The rest have never been deciphered with confidence. It is the reason he is called the Scorecard Killer. His own account, given in a rare interview, was that the list was guests for a surprise housewarming party for his boyfriend.
The Orange County trial was the longest and most expensive the county had run. The jury deliberated eleven days and convicted him on May 12, 1989 of sixteen counts of murder, one of sodomy and one of emasculation. It recommended death on August 11, and Judge Donald McCartin imposed sentence on November 29. He was flown to San Quentin the next day.
Two of the sixteen were killed in Michigan: Jeffrey Schoenborn and Eric Alt, whose mothers travelled to California to testify at his penalty hearing. A Kent County grand jury had indicted him for those deaths, on witnesses who placed him with both men and on the scorecard entry reading GR2. Grand Rapids, twice.
He has never admitted to any of it, including the body in his car, and has maintained his innocence throughout. He litigated the direct appeal for more than a decade, challenging the admissibility of the scorecard, the use of uncharged crimes and the conduct of the prosecution; the California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in all respects on August 10, 2000, finding no reversible error. Federal petitions followed.
Cold cases are still being attached to him. In November 2023 the remains of a teenager believed to have been killed by him nearly fifty years earlier were identified through investigative genetic genealogy. In May 2025 Oregon State Police named him as the suspect in the murder of Larry Eugene Parks, a thirty-year-old Vietnam veteran whose body was found beside Interstate 5 on July 18, 1980.
He is eighty and has been in custody for more than forty years under a death sentence that California has not carried out and, since the 2019 moratorium, does not intend to. Sixteen convictions stand. The other fifty-one entries on that sheet of paper have never been read.