Murder, They Wrote : The Randy Kraft Case

S uperior Court Judge Donald A. McCartin’s eighth-floor courtroom in downtown Santa Ana has a peculiar notoriety: Two of the nation’s most sensational trials played out there with shocking, oftentimes gruesome, revelations.

In 1989, McCartin sentenced Long Beach serial killer Randy Kraft to death for the mutilation murders of 16 young men.

And, in 1990, McCartin ordered computer entrepreneur David Brown to spend the rest of his life in prison for masterminding the murder of his fifth wife, 23-year-old Linda Bailey Brown, so Brown could collect nearly $1 million in insurance money and marry his teen-age sister-in-law, Patti Bailey. It’s a crime for which Brown’s teen-age daughter, Cinnamon, was convicted five years earlier.

Given the sensational ingredients of each case--drugs and sexual obsession, murder and manipulation--it’s not surprising that, seated among the reporters covering the trials, were book authors quietly taking notes.

This week, the results of their research began hitting bookstores.

“Angel of Darkness” (Warner Books; $19.95), by Los Angeles Times reporter Dennis McDougal, chronicles the life and crimes of Randy Kraft, whose trail of victims, prosecutors believe, may actually number as many as 67. The victims--many of them Marines, most of them hitchhikers--were believed to be drugged by Kraft, who then tortured and strangled them. Their bodies, many of which were sexually mutilated, usually were dumped along freeway ramps or in remote areas.

“If You Really Loved Me: A True Story of Desire and Murder” (Simon & Schuster; $22.95), by best-selling true-crime writer Ann Rule, tells the gripping tale of David Brown, “the ultimate sociopath,” who would “use ‘love,’ sexual enslavement, lies, money and mind manipulation to turn those who trusted him into puppets who would do his bidding.”

When two California Highway Patrol officers pulled over a brown Toyota Celica for making an illegal lane change on the San Diego Freeway in Mission Viejo shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday, May 14, 1983, they thought they would be making their second drunk-driving arrest of the evening.

They had no idea they had bagged an even bigger prey.

The thin man with the prominent chin, mustache and piercing dark brown eyes got out of the car and walked briskly back toward the CHP unit. As one of the officers says in Dennis McDougal’s “Angel of Darkness,” “drivers don’t normally do that unless they’ve got something to hide.”

What the officers discovered in the front passenger seat of 38-year-old Long Beach computer consultant Randy Kraft’s Celica was a dead 25-year-old Marine named Terry Lee Gambrel.

The officers also found a couple of pill vials and empty Moosehead bottles on the floor; on Kraft’s seat was a folded, 5-inch buck knife. The Marine’s shoes had been removed and his hands were tightly bound with the laces. And there were marks on his neck, made by the tightening and loosening of his own belt.

The two officers had stumbled upon the man police investigators throughout Southern California had spent years searching for.

A coded so-called “death list” was later found in the trunk of Kraft’s car, leading investigators to believe Kraft was responsible for as many as 67 murders over a 12-year period in Southern California, Oregon and Michigan.

At the time of Kraft’s arrest, McDougal was an investigative reporter for the Long Beach Press-Telegram assigned to cover the case.

“It was fairly obvious to everybody involved that this was the guy they had been looking for close to a dozen years and that he might be the record holder in sheer number of bodies, so I knew then that this was a book,” said McDougal.

McDougal, whose received a “mid-five-figures” advance, said he talked to close to 300 people both on and off the record in the course of writing “Angel of Darkness.”

“This was a real tough book to do because there was very little on-the-record cooperation,” said McDougal, 43, who was hired by The Times to cover the entertainment industry shortly after Kraft’s arrest. “It’s amazing how few people on the prosecution or defense side want their names associated with a serial killer.”

McDougal said he had long been intrigued by “what goes into creating the sociopathic mind.”

“The homicide detectives I’ve spoken to maintain that whatever it is that goes into creating someone like Randy Kraft is in all of us, but that there’s something either organic, or maybe behavioral conditioning, that civilizes us.

“I’m not so sure how thick or thin that layer of civilized influence is, but it occurred to me that this was a hell of study: To look at someone like Randy Kraft and figure out what made him tick.”

In chronicling Kraft’s life from his childhood in Westminster through his gay lifestyle in Long Beach, McDougal paints the portrait of a man friends, relatives and co-workers remember as easy-going and business-like, patient and considerate with children, and someone who never missed a family get-together.

But then there was his secret life at night, cruising the freeways, picking up hitchhikers.

In chilling detail, McDougal provides vivid background portraits of Kraft’s victims and their inevitable encounters with the man with the piercing dark-brown eyes.

McDougal was unable to talk to Kraft, who has granted no interviews since a single jail house interview with a reporter in 1983. At the time, McDougal said, Kraft “maintained that the famous list found in the trunk of his car was actually a coded list of the names of the people he played cards with.”

Well into the writing of the book in 1990, however, McDougal tracked down Jeff Seelig, Kraft’s former roommate and lover, who convinced the author to try writing Kraft again. He did and they exchanged several letters.

“It was a strange kind of correspondence,” said McDougal. “I’d pose direct questions to him and he’d come back with a long, single-spaced typewritten, two-page letter that never answered the (questions) but continued to maintain his innocence.”

McDougal said that in some ways, Kraft reminds him of Hannibal Lecter , the imprisoned-insane psychiatrist/murderer of the movie, “The Silence of the Lambs.”

“The single most frightening thing about Randy Kraft is that intellectually he’s not just a cut above your run-of-the-mill serial killer if there is, in fact, a run-of-the-mill serial killer. This guy is genuinely brilliant at some level.”