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.
He was born in Long Beach, California, on March 19, 1945, the fourth child and only son of Harold Herbert Kraft, a production worker at Douglas Aircraft who had come west from Wyoming after Pearl Harbor, and Opal Lee Kraft, born Beal, who worked as a seamstress and then a school cook. In 1948 the family moved to Midway City in Orange County, into an old Women's Army Corps dormitory his father rebuilt as a three-bedroom house, and they were active in the Westminster First Presbyterian Church. He was put in accelerated classes, founded a world affairs club at Westminster High School, played varsity tennis, and graduated tenth in a class of 390 on June 13, 1963. He said later that he had known in high school that he was gay. At Claremont Men's College he joined ROTC, rallied for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and then broke with his parents' politics, registering as a Democrat in 1967 and campaigning for Robert F. Kennedy. In 1966 he was arrested for lewd conduct after propositioning an undercover officer in Huntington Beach, and no charges were filed. He graduated in economics in February 1968, eight months late, joined the Air Force that summer, and supervised the painting of test planes at Edwards Air Force Base. On July 26, 1969, he told his superiors he was gay and was given a general discharge, officially on medical grounds. In March 1970 he took a thirteen-year-old runaway, Joseph Fancher, to his Belmont Shore apartment, where the boy was drugged, beaten and sexually assaulted before he escaped; the search was made without a warrant, and no charges were filed. Through the 1970s and early 1980s he worked his way up to computer consulting, and he lived first with Jeffrey Graves, a teaching student he met at California State University, Long Beach, and from 1976 with Jeff Seelig.
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 tranquilizers, bound, sexually assaulted and tortured them, often burning them with a car cigarette lighter, strangled, suffocated or beat them to death, mutilated the bodies and left them at the roadside. Prosecutors said he kept parts of some of them in his freezer. 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. His first victim, investigators believe, was Wayne Joseph Dukette, thirty, a bartender at a gay bar called The Stable in Sunset Beach, found beside the Ortega Highway on October 5, 1971, his death put down at the time to alcohol poisoning; the first entry on the list later found in Kraft's car reads "Stable."
The sixteen he was convicted of killing were Edward Daniel Moore, Ronald Gene Wiebe, Keith Daven Crotwell, Mark Howard Hall, Scott Michael Hughes, Roland Gerald Young, Richard Allen Keith, Keith Arthur Klingbeil, Michael Joseph Inderbieten, Donald Harold Crisel, Robert Wyatt Loggins Jr, Eric Herbert Church, Geoffrey Alan Nelson, Rodger James DeVaul Jr, Terry Lee Gambrel, and a young man who went to trial as John Doe Huntington Beach.
That last one had a name, and it took twenty-two years to get it back. He was found lying in the road at Huntington Beach on April 14, 1973, dressed but with no shoes. Leads went nowhere and he was buried as a John Doe. On the scorecard he was entry five, AIRPLANE HILL, after a dip in the local roadway that would throw a fast car off the pavement. In 1995 a deputy coroner using a new identification method established that he was Kevin Clark Bailey, seventeen, born at Middletown, New York, to a mother who was seventeen herself when she had him. He is the only victim among the sixteen who was still unidentified when Kraft was convicted.
Kraft 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 toward them. He had failed a sobriety test when Sergeant Michael Howard, checking the young man slumped in the passenger seat under a jacket among empty beer bottles and an open bottle of lorazepam, found that he was cold and had a ligature mark around his neck. He was Terry Gambrel, a twenty-five-year-old Marine from the El Toro air base, his hands tied with a shoelace; a belt on the back seat matched the bruising on his neck. The seat and carpet were soaked with blood, though Gambrel had no open wound.
Under the carpet was an envelope of more than fifty photographs of young men who appeared to be asleep or dead. In a ring binder in the trunk was a handwritten list of sixty-one coded entries: EDM, MARINE DOWN, 2 IN 1 HITCH, GR2. By 1988 detectives had matched forty-three of them to known victims; later identifications have left about fifteen entries, standing for perhaps seventeen more dead, that no one has been able to read. Some name a victim, as EDM does Edward Daniel Moore; others name a place, such as Golden Sails, the Long Beach hotel parking lot where Craig Jonaitis was found in 1975; and at least four record two victims at once. 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.
He had come close to being caught eight years earlier. On March 29, 1975, he picked up two youths, Keith Crotwell and Kent May, in a Long Beach parking lot and plied them with beer and Valium; friends watched a black-and-white Mustang come back, push May out unconscious, and drive off with Crotwell slumped against the driver. When Crotwell's skull was found on a jetty near the Long Beach Marina that May, the friends found the car, took the license number and gave it to police, and it was registered to Kraft. He admitted the drive and said Crotwell had walked away while he went for a tow truck. Detectives tried to file homicide charges, but the district attorney declined because the coroner, with only a skull to examine, called it accidental drowning. Crotwell became one of the sixteen. By then investigators from several counties had already met to compare fourteen similar deaths, and some believed more than one man was involved.
He was charged with Gambrel's murder on May 16, 1983, and on September 8 with fifteen more. The trial opened on September 26, 1988, before Judge Donald A. McCartin, lasted thirteen months, heard nearly 160 prosecution witnesses and more than a thousand exhibits, and was the most expensive the county had ever run. The defense did not dispute that the sixteen had been murdered and argued they were the victims of someone else, pointing out that investigators had once blamed some of them on Patrick Kearney or William Bonin. The jury deliberated eleven days and convicted him on May 12, 1989 of sixteen counts of murder, one of sodomy against Inderbieten and one of mayhem against Nelson, and acquitted him of a second sodomy count concerning DeVaul. Sixteen murders span nineteen numbered counts for that reason. The jury recommended death on August 11, and Judge Donald McCartin imposed sentence on November 29. Kraft told him: I have not murdered anyone, and I believe a reasonable review of the record will show that. "If anyone ever deserved the death penalty," McCartin said, "he's got it coming." Kraft was flown to San Quentin the next day.
Two more deaths, not among the sixteen, were put before the jury at the penalty hearing: those of the cousins Dennis Alt, twenty-four, and Christopher Schoenborn, twenty, whom Kraft was seen talking to at a seminar at the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the night of December 7, 1982, during a business trip; they were found in a field near the hotel two days later, and the list reads GR2, Grand Rapids, twice. Prosecutors also presented Oregon killings from his business trips there, among them Michael O'Fallon, seventeen, of Denver, found south of Salem in July 1980, whose camera was later found in Kraft's garage, and the defense called the evidence highly speculative and offered a brain scan it said showed frontal-lobe abnormalities.
He has never admitted to any of it, including the body in his car. 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. In 1993 he sued the journalist Dennis McDougal, author of the 1991 book Angel of Darkness, and its publisher for sixty-two million dollars, arguing that it had damaged his good name and his prospects of future employment; the suit was dismissed in June 1994.
Some of the evidence never fit one man. Footprints on the beach where John Leras, seventeen, was left in January 1975 showed two people carrying him; semen on Eric Church, one of the sixteen, did not match Kraft's blood type, although photographs of Church in Kraft's car and Church's electric razor in his house tied them together; and bodies thrown from cars moving at more than fifty miles an hour suggested a second person in the car. Prosecutors privately said they had left some killings uncharged for that reason. They suspected Graves, who had lived with Kraft through the years of sixteen of the attributed deaths and told investigators after the arrest, "I'm really not going to pay for it." Graves died of AIDS on July 27, 1987, at thirty-eight, as police were preparing to question him again. In 2000 a small-time criminal named Bob Jackson told McDougal he had killed two hitchhikers with Kraft in Wyoming and Colorado in the mid-1970s; neither state could corroborate it, and no charges followed.
Two more victims have been given names while he has been inside, both through investigative genetic genealogy, and neither is among the sixteen. In November 2023 the Orange County Sheriff’s Department identified a body found on a fire road northeast of Laguna Beach on September 14, 1974 as Michael Ray Schlicht, seventeen, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one of two young men, with a Marine named Oral Alfred Stuart Jr., identified in 2012, who may be the entry that reads Iowa. His death had been recorded at the time as accidental, from alcohol and diazepam. In May 2025 Oregon State Police identified a man found beside Interstate 5 near Woodburn on July 18, 1980 as Larry Eugene Parks, thirty, the entry that reads Portland Elk, a Vietnam veteran last seen in Pensacola, Florida, whose family had lost contact with him the year before. Kraft is the only person under investigation for that killing, and until the identification the family did not know what had become of him.
He is eighty-one and has been in custody for more than forty-three years under a death sentence California has not carried out and, since the 2019 moratorium, does not intend to. When San Quentin's condemned unit was emptied he was moved, and as of 2026 he was held at the California Institution for Men in Chino. He still denies every killing. His own former attorney has stopped short of conceding his guilt and suggested the state cut its losses; one estimate of what the case has cost is fifteen million dollars. Sixteen convictions stand, and fifty-one further deaths are attributed to him and have never been tried.