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 mummified body off the Golden State Freeway near Sylmar on June 30. 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; they were found the next morning beside the Ventura Freeway near Griffith Park, each shot in the side of the head. 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. Jones was found that day behind a steakhouse in Burbank, shot once in the head. Wilson's headless body was found by pedestrians 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. On August 5, 1980, after a show by John Robert Murray, forty-five, an Australian country singer who had been her apartment manager and her lover, she drunkenly told him what she and Clark were doing. When he suggested he might go to the police she lured him into his van, shot and stabbed him and cut off his head, and she then confessed to a co-worker. Clark was arrested on August 11. Bundy agreed to testify against him in exchange for avoiding the death penalty, and in 1983 she pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. Each of them blamed the other. Clark told the jury Bundy had committed the killings with Murray.
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. The California Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1992 in People v. Clark.
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.