Douglas Daniel Clark was born on March 10, 1948, into a comfortable and much-travelled family; his father was a naval officer and later an engineer, and Clark spent parts of his childhood in the Marshall Islands, India and Australia and was educated at an international school in Geneva. He came back to the United States, drifted through jobs, and by 1980 was working as a boiler operator in Burbank and living with Carol Bundy, a nurse he had met in a North Hollywood country and western bar.
Between June and August 1980 at least six people were killed. Gina Marano, fifteen, and Cynthia Chandler, sixteen, stepsisters, were found beside the Ventura Freeway in June. Karen Jones, twenty-four, and Exxie Wilson, twenty, were killed in late June; Wilson's head was removed and taken away, and was found days later in a wooden box in an alley in Studio City after Clark had kept it in the flat's freezer and Carol Bundy had made it up with cosmetics. Marnette Comer, seventeen, a runaway, had been killed earlier and was found in San Bernardino County. A sixth woman has never been identified. The Los Angeles press called the pair the Sunset Strip Killers.
Almost all were shot in the head with a small calibre pistol during oral sex in Clark's car, along Sunset Boulevard and the streets around it, which is where the newspapers got the name for the case.
It came apart when Carol Bundy shot and decapitated her former lover John Murray on August 5 to stop him talking, and then told a colleague at work what she had done. She gave police a full statement. Each of them has said ever since that the other was the driving force, and Clark's defence at trial was that Bundy had committed the murders with a former boyfriend.
He conducted much of his own defence, was convicted on six counts of first degree murder in January 1983, and was sentenced to death. He has been on California's death row ever since and continues to maintain his innocence.