In the summer of 1980, young women were being shot to death in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, and the newspapers called the unknown killer the Sunset Slayer or the Sunset Slasher. The case broke on August 11, 1980, when a vocational nurse named Carol Bundy telephoned police. She confessed that she had killed her former lover, Jack Murray, and she named the man she lived with, Douglas Daniel Clark, as the person behind the Sunset killings.
Clark, a licensed steam engineer at a plant in Burbank, denied everything. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him of six counts of first-degree murder, and on March 16, 1983, he received six consecutive death sentences. He spent the rest of his life on death row, insisting that Bundy and Murray had committed the killings together. The California Supreme Court upheld the murder convictions in 1992. A federal appeals court rejected his last appeal on October 10, 2023. He died of natural causes the next day, aged 75.
Little was reported about Clark's early life. Los Angeles Magazine described him as an Air Force veteran from a well-to-do family who was 31 in 1980. The California Supreme Court quoted his own statements to police about his youth, including that he spent part of his schooling in Switzerland. Psychiatrists who testified at his trial described him as above average in intelligence. One of them found him sane but described personality disorders, including self-destructive conduct and a narcissistic focus on himself.
By 1980 Clark worked as a licensed steam engineer at a plant in Burbank, where he trained a newer boiler operator. City News Service, reporting his death in 2023, called him a former Burbank factory worker. He did not own a car. He told police he drove the cars of Carol Bundy, a blue Buick station wagon and a Datsun.
Bundy was a vocational nurse. According to the court, she met Clark in December 1979 at a country-western club where Jack Murray sometimes sang; Clark was looking for someone to live with. Los Angeles Magazine described her as a 37-year-old nurse in Van Nuys with a traumatic past, including abusive parents and a violent first husband, and said Clark moved into her apartment, where she lived with her two sons.
By early 1980 they shared an apartment in Van Nuys, though Clark moved in and out repeatedly. In June he stayed for a time at another woman's house, from June 3 to June 22, a witness testified. In late June the couple planned to share a new apartment in Burbank, and Clark moved in about a week before Bundy did. After her arrest Bundy told police she had been "overwhelmed" by his dominance and charm and had fallen in love with him, City News Service reported.
In April 1980, the court found, Clark picked out two .25-caliber Raven automatic pistols at a pawnshop in Van Nuys and sent Bundy to buy them, telling her that he was an ex-felon. She applied for them on April 25 and received them on May 16. One was chrome and the other nickel. Clark later told police that he carried a .25 automatic in his boot, knowing it was illegal, and that he had test-fired the Ravens into a telephone book. Bundy testified that he had access to both guns and sometimes carried both.
The first attack in the trial record was not a killing. At about 10 p.m. on April 27, 1980, a woman on Sunset Boulevard was approached by a man driving a blue station wagon. Once she was in the car he stabbed her, and she got away. She later picked Clark out of a photo lineup and identified him in court.
Bundy testified that late one night in April, Clark came home covered in blood. He told her that a rival he called Nick had attacked him, that he had stabbed the woman by accident, and that he had killed Nick. Clark was convicted of attempted murder and mayhem for this attack, but the California Supreme Court reversed both convictions in 1992. The woman survived.
The court's range for the killings begins about May 31, 1980. Marnette Comer was a young blonde woman whom the court record describes as a prostitute. Her sister last saw her on May 21, 1980, wearing a pink T-shirt printed with the words "Daddy's Girl." Her body was found on June 30, 1980, near Sylmar, in Los Angeles County. She had been shot. The coroner estimated that she had been dead for 20 to 90 days.
By Bundy's account, Clark told her that he had picked Comer up on Sunset Boulevard in Bundy's new Datsun and shot her, and that Comer had kicked and broken the car's gearshift handle. Writings by Clark seized in the case showed firsthand knowledge of Comer, the court said.
Gina Marano was 15 and Cynthia Chandler was 16. The two girls were family; the court describes Cynthia as Gina's half sister. Gina always carried an address book full of business cards, and it mattered a great deal to her, her family told investigators. On June 1, 1980, the girls went to a party at a home in Hollywood. Gina's father last saw them in early June. On June 10 a driver picked up two girls hitchhiking, one of them a blonde who said her name was Cindy, and dropped them at a freeway on-ramp.
Both girls were found dead on June 12, 1980, in the Los Angeles area. Both had been shot.
Bundy testified that Clark told her he had picked up the two girls and shot them both. He gave her two bullets. A few days later he drove her to the area, with a Raven pistol on the seat beside him, and threatened her. Clark's own notes, the court said, referred to Cynthia, and after his arrest he recognized her photograph and told police her telephone number was in his wallet.
Gina's address book was the start of a trail. On June 16, 1980, a woman whose relative was the driver who had picked up the two hitchhikers took a call from a man who said he was a Hollywood police officer. He said one of the victims had been carrying her brother-in-law's business card and told her it was not necessary for him to contact police. Telephone records showed calls made that day from the home of a woman Clark knew, and Clark later admitted making them.
On June 22, at about 11:30 in the morning, a young woman who had met the girls took a call from a man who said he was a Los Angeles police detective and that her number had been found with the bodies. At 7:11 a.m. on July 24 the same man called her again. This time he said he had killed the girls, and he threatened her. That call came from the Burbank apartment Clark shared with Bundy; he clocked in at work at 7:28 that morning. Both women who took calls later picked out Clark's voice from a tape. After his arrest police found a note in his wallet with the second woman's telephone number on it.
At about 2 to 2:30 a.m. on June 23, 1980, a police officer patrolling Sunset Boulevard met Karen Jones, whom the court record describes as a prostitute, and warned her not to loiter there. At 3:15 a.m. her body was found; Los Angeles Magazine places the discovery in Burbank and describes Jones as a coworker of Exxie Wilson. She had been shot.
Later that morning Exxie Wilson's body was found. She had been shot, and the coroner estimated that she died between midnight and 2 a.m. In Clark's account as Bundy gave it, he first saw the two women together in Studio City, chose Wilson, and later went back for Jones.
Between 4:30 and 5 a.m. that day, Bundy testified, Clark woke her at the Van Nuys apartment and told her he had killed two prostitutes. He said he shot Wilson, and then shot Jones because she might be able to identify him. Bundy did not claim to have been present at either shooting.
On June 27, 1980, part of Exxie Wilson's remains was found in Studio City, with clothing that included the "Daddy's Girl" T-shirt Marnette Comer's sister had last seen her wearing.
Bundy's own part in the Sunset case began here. She testified that she helped Clark dispose of Wilson's remains. When police later searched Clark's apartment, they found in a filing cabinet a newspaper article about the discovery. The jury convicted Clark of mutilation of human remains in Wilson's case.
The last killing in the trial was of a young woman who has never been identified. On August 26, 1980, after Clark's arrest, her remains were found in the Antelope Valley, in the northern part of Los Angeles County. The coroner found that she had died about one to two months earlier of a gunshot wound. She is known in the court record as Jane Doe 18.
Bundy testified that sometime in late July or early August, Clark told her that he had picked up a prostitute in Hollywood and shot her in the Datsun. Bundy said she was not present. The court found that her account matched what investigators found.
Jack Murray managed the apartment complex where Bundy had lived and sometimes sang at a country-western nightclub. He had been Bundy's lover. Bundy told police that she had learned in June that Clark was involved in the Sunset killings and had helped him dispose of Wilson's remains, and that she became afraid Murray would go to the police. She shot him, the court recorded, and Clark helped her conceal evidence of the killing. His body was discovered in Van Nuys on the night of August 9 to 10, 1980.
Murray's killing is Bundy's crime. Clark was named in the first complaint as an accessory to it, but that charge is not among his convictions, and the jury that tried him for the Sunset killings did not convict him of anything connected with Murray.
On the night of August 9 to 10, Bundy testified, she asked Clark to get rid of the two pistols. He was gone for about 15 minutes. The log at his plant showed him signing in at 2:06 a.m. on August 10.
On August 11, 1980, Bundy called police and confessed to killing Murray. She accused Clark of the Sunset killings and told them she had helped dispose of Wilson's remains. Los Angeles Magazine reported that she first called with a tip, then confessed, and that she also told coworkers she had "taken lives." Until that call, the California Supreme Court said, police had not focused on Clark at all.
Clark was first taken into custody for his possible role in Murray's death and was then questioned about the Sunset killings. Los Angeles Magazine, by contrast, reported that he was arrested at his boiler-tending job in Burbank on a separate charge involving a child. Los Angeles Magazine also named two Los Angeles Police Department detectives, Helen Kidder and Peggy York, as part of the investigation.
Detective Stallcup, who questioned Clark, testified that he was the coolest murder suspect he had ever interviewed. Clark was cooperative in some ways. He admitted trolling Hollywood for prostitutes and carrying a .25 automatic in his boot, and he told the detectives, "I've been a little weird for a long time." But he denied knowing anything about the murders, and told them, "there are some things I don't want you to know and I'm not going to tell you." A judge later held a pretrial hearing on these statements, found no coercion and full compliance with Miranda, and denied Clark's motion to suppress them.
On August 15, 1980, another employee at Clark's plant told a boiler operator whom Clark had trained that police were coming to search for guns. Before they arrived, the boiler operator found two Raven pistols in a cosmetic bag hidden in a remote spot near the top of the boiler room. Detective Stallcup took custody of them that day. Ballistics tests matched the bullets recovered from every victim to the nickel-plated Raven.
Most of the case against Clark was circumstantial, the California Supreme Court said, but it came from many directions.
Clark told police he had given up a garage he rented in Burbank in May 1980. Other evidence showed he kept it through June and abandoned it in July. Investigators found stains there that tested positive for blood, and a bootprint that matched Clark's black boots, the boots in which he admitted carrying his pistol. A large ski painting kept in the garage had blood spots matching Gina Marano's blood type characteristics, shared by only about one person in 200, an expert testified. Bundy said Clark laughed and told her the stains were Marano's, and that the two of them cleaned out the garage together.
Clark had regular use of Bundy's blue Buick station wagon, which she sold on July 17, 1980, and of her Datsun. Bullets and blood were found in both. Blood in the Buick matched Karen Jones's characteristics, shared by about one person in 125, and some of Exxie Wilson's. The telephone records and the two women's voice identifications tied him to the calls. His apartment held the newspaper story about the discovery of Wilson's remains.
Clark wrote many letters from jail, and the prosecution used them. To a woman he knew, he wrote urging her to "remember" facts his way, suggested she would be responsible for his death if she did not, and asked her to say that he had carried the chrome Raven, not the nickel one. He asked her to photograph crime scenes. She later destroyed some of the letters at his request. He wrote to Bundy trying to persuade her to testify that Murray was the killer. To another correspondent he wrote that Bundy could "lay it on dear, dead Jack," the court recorded, adding its own bracketed note that "it" meant the murders. In one letter to Bundy, the court noted, he implied that he was trying to manufacture reversible error.
The preliminary hearing began on October 20, 1980. The complaint charged six murders, three counts involving a 12-year-old girl, and one count of being an accessory to the Murray killing. Clark was arraigned on November 13, 1980. The public defender declared a conflict, and the court appointed Paul Geragos. Clark asked repeatedly to act as co-counsel in his own case, and the court refused in December 1980.
On June 12, 1981, Maxwell Keith was appointed to defend him. That July, Clark was granted some privileges as his own lawyer, though without law library access until April 1982, when Penelope Watson was appointed as a second defense lawyer. The attempted murder case for the April 1980 stabbing was filed that same month and joined to the murder case in June 1982.
Clark's relations with Keith broke down. On July 26, 1982, he tried to dismiss Keith while keeping Watson. On August 13 he formally asked to represent himself, and on August 20 the court denied the request as untimely. On August 27 Keith tried to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity without Clark's consent; the court refused to accept it, so no insanity plea was ever entered. Jury selection began on September 7, 1982. On September 20 Clark was removed from the courtroom after complaining about Keith.
On October 12 and 13, 1982, after a hearing on his waiver of counsel, the court let Clark take over his defense, keeping Keith and Watson as standby counsel. On October 28 he began cross-examining the prosecution's pathologist, and the court continued the trial to Monday, November 1.
That morning, outside the jury's presence, Clark made several motions, among them a motion to remove the district attorney's office from the case and a request that a law student be allowed to work for him as a law clerk. The court twice warned him not to abuse his status as his own lawyer, called the recusal motion "frivolous," and told him not to argue it further. "You have not heard this motion," Clark replied. When the jury came back and the judge told him to go on with his cross-examination, Clark announced that "the defense stands mute throughout the rest of the trial." The court treated this as giving up his self-representation, and Keith and Watson took over that afternoon. The next day Watson told the court that Clark had reconsidered. The judge said Clark was "playing games" but restored his right to represent himself, warning that any further misbehavior or delay would end it.
On December 2, 1982, Clark gave his own opening statement, telling the jury he would prove that Bundy and Murray were the real killers. On December 6, after what the California Supreme Court called "a series of abusive and threatening remarks" aimed at the judge, the court revoked his self-representation for good and reappointed the standby lawyers, who defended him for the rest of the trial. On December 8 it refused to restore it.
The prosecution did not call Carol Bundy. Clark did. She testified for the defense under a grant of immunity, and she gave the jury her account of each killing as Clark had described it to her. She said Clark had committed the crimes and that Murray had nothing to do with them. The court found that Clark's claim against Murray had no supporting evidence. A 12-year-old girl also testified at trial, describing rides with Clark in which he pointed out prostitutes.
The jury convicted Clark of six counts of first-degree murder, for Gina Marano, Cynthia Chandler, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer and Jane Doe 18, and found multiple-murder special circumstances and firearm use true on each count. It convicted him of mutilation of human remains in Wilson's case, and of attempted murder and mayhem in the April stabbing, with findings that he used a deadly weapon and inflicted great bodily injury. It set the penalty at death.
On March 16, 1983, the Los Angeles County court imposed six consecutive death sentences. It added a consecutive eight-month term for mutilation or sexual contact with human remains and a consecutive nine-year term for attempted first-degree murder, with a three-year enhancement for great bodily injury. The sentence for mayhem was stayed. Clark was received on California's death row on March 24, 1983.
Bundy pleaded guilty in 1983 to two counts of first-degree murder, City News Service reported. Los Angeles Magazine dated her plea to May 2, 1983, and said she admitted killing Murray and handing Clark the gun used to kill an unidentified woman, describing herself as a "reluctant partner." Her sentence was not reported. She died on December 9, 2003, at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla, aged 61. CDCR records, which call the pair the Sunset Strip Killers, describe her as Clark's crime partner.
Clark's appeal went automatically to the California Supreme Court, as every death judgment does. The court decided it on July 30, 1992, in People v. Clark, in an opinion by Justice Arabian joined by Chief Justice Lucas and Justices Panelli, Baxter and George. Justices Mosk and Kennard each wrote a separate dissent.
The majority reversed the convictions for attempted murder and mayhem in the April 1980 stabbing, and it set aside all but one of the multiple-murder special-circumstance findings. In all other respects it affirmed: the six murder convictions, the mutilation conviction and the death judgment stood.
Much of the opinion dealt with Clark's fight over who would conduct his defense. The court held that his July 1982 attempt to dismiss Keith was not a clear request to represent himself, that the trial judge acted within its discretion in denying the August 1982 request as untimely, and that his complaints about his lawyers did not require new counsel. It found no error in the judge's refusal to give him advisory counsel or a law clerk, whose help it called "merely convenient" rather than "reasonably necessary." On the stand-mute episode, the court read Clark's announcement as part of a deliberate pattern of manipulation rather than a sincere choice to present no defense, and it quoted the United States Supreme Court's warning that the right to represent oneself "is not a license to abuse the dignity of the courtroom." A dispassionate reading of the record, the majority wrote, showed that Clark "was playing games with the court." It found that his December 1982 conduct was meant to disrupt and delay the trial. It also noted his letter implying that he was trying to plant reversible error in the record, and it concluded that he had not succeeded.
Justice Kennard's dissent argued that the trial court erred in not letting Clark represent himself by standing mute. The other dissent, by Justice Mosk, found error in the grant of self-representation itself.
In October 1992 Clark asked the federal court in Los Angeles for lawyers and a stay of execution. His appointed lawyers filed a habeas petition in 1997. The federal court paused the case while he took his claims back to the state courts, which summarily denied them in 2003, and in 2004 his lawyers filed an amended petition.
The district court held that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) applied to the case and denied the petition. It allowed an appeal on two issues: his right to represent himself and his complaints about his lead lawyer. The Ninth Circuit heard argument in San Francisco on September 19, 2023, before Judges Sidney R. Thomas, Mark J. Bennett and Lawrence VanDyke. On October 10, 2023, in an opinion by Judge Thomas, the panel affirmed the denial of relief.
The panel held that Clark's 1992 filing, which asked only for counsel and a stay, was not a real habeas application, so AEDPA's stricter standards governed. It held that the state court reasonably found his July 1982 request equivocal, since he wanted to dismiss only one of his two lawyers, which amounted to a bid for a hybrid defense. It held that the state court reasonably found the August 1982 request untimely. It upheld the November 1, 1982, revocation, noting that a court may end self-representation for serious and obstructionist misconduct, and that Clark had dropped his stand-mute threat after a cooling-off period, asked to represent himself again and gone on to do so. On his complaint about his lead lawyer, the panel said the United States Supreme Court has never recognized an automatic Sixth Amendment violation arising from an irreconcilable conflict between lawyer and client, and that Clark had raised no claim that his lawyer was ineffective and pointed to no specific failing.
California has carried out no execution since January 17, 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions by executive order on March 13, 2019, the CDCR noted. Clark had been held on condemned status at San Quentin since 1983. On October 11, 2023, the day after the Ninth Circuit ruled, he was pronounced dead at 3:39 p.m. at an outside medical facility. He was 75. The CDCR said he died of natural causes and that the Marin County coroner's office would determine the official cause. The department lists him among condemned people who have died since 1978, with the cause given as natural causes.
The Associated Press, reporting his death, described the victims of the Sunset Strip Killers as teenage girls and female sex workers. City News Service described them as women aged 15 to 24 whom he picked up in Hollywood.
Clark's defense, from his opening statement in 1982 onward, was that Carol Bundy and Jack Murray committed the Sunset killings and that Bundy killed Murray to frame him. Bundy's testimony, given for the defense under immunity, contradicted that, and the California Supreme Court found that the claim had no supporting evidence. Los Angeles Magazine reported in 2020 that Clark still maintained his innocence and that the criminologist Christopher Berry-Dee had supported him. No court accepted his claim.
How far Bundy took part is disputed. In her trial testimony she said she was not present at the killings of Jones, Wilson or Jane Doe 18, and her admitted role in the Sunset case was helping to dispose of Wilson's remains. Los Angeles Magazine reported that she later admitted handing Clark the gun used to kill an unidentified woman and described a killing in Hollywood that she joined, while saying she only gave Clark the gun. City News Service wrote that she sometimes accompanied him on the killings. Her own guilty plea is the only judgment on her role, and its exact terms were not reported.
Some later accounts give details of the victims' deaths that conflict with the court record, including wrong dates and places. No other killing was charged against him.
December 1979: Clark meets Carol Bundy at a country-western club.
April 25, 1980: Bundy applies to buy two .25-caliber Raven pistols at a Van Nuys pawnshop; she receives them on May 16.
April 27, 1980: A woman is stabbed after getting into a station wagon on Sunset Boulevard; she survives.
About May 31, 1980: The court's range for the killings begins.
June 1, 1980: Gina Marano and Cynthia Chandler attend a party in Hollywood.
June 12, 1980: The two girls are found dead in the Los Angeles area.
June 16 and June 22, 1980: Two women receive calls from a man claiming to be a police officer.
June 23, 1980: Karen Jones and Exxie Wilson are found.
June 27, 1980: Part of Wilson's remains is found in Studio City.
June 30, 1980: Marnette Comer is found near Sylmar.
July 17, 1980: Bundy sells the Buick station wagon.
July 24, 1980: The caller phones one woman again and says he killed the girls.
Late July or early August 1980: The killing of the woman later known as Jane Doe 18, by Bundy's account.
August 9 to 10, 1980: Jack Murray's body is found; Clark signs into his plant at 2:06 a.m. on August 10.
August 11, 1980: Bundy confesses to killing Murray and names Clark.
August 15, 1980: Both Raven pistols are found hidden in the plant's boiler room.
August 26, 1980: Jane Doe 18's remains are found in the Antelope Valley.
October 20, 1980: Preliminary hearing begins.
September 7, 1982: Jury selection begins.
October 13, 1982: Clark is allowed to represent himself.
November 1 and 2, 1982: He announces he will stand mute; his self-representation is revoked and restored.
December 6, 1982: His self-representation is revoked for good.
March 16, 1983: Six consecutive death sentences; received on death row March 24.
1983: Bundy pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.
July 30, 1992: The California Supreme Court affirms the murder convictions and death judgment and reverses the attempted murder and mayhem convictions.
October 23, 1992: Clark files his first federal request.
April 23, 1997: Federal habeas petition filed with 27 claims.
2003: The California Supreme Court summarily denies his state petitions.
December 9, 2003: Bundy dies at the Central California Women's Facility.
June 22, 2004: Amended federal petition filed with 23 claims.
September 19, 2023: Ninth Circuit argument.
October 10, 2023: Ninth Circuit affirms the denial of habeas relief.
October 11, 2023: Clark dies of natural causes, aged 75.