Randy Kraft

What the record shows

Randy Steven Kraft is a California serial killer convicted of murdering 16 young men in Southern California between 1972 and 1983. According to the California Supreme Court's 2000 opinion in People v. Kraft, an Orange County jury convicted him in May 1989 of 16 counts of first-degree murder, one count of sodomy and one count of mayhem, and he was sentenced to death on November 29, 1989. Investigators attribute more deaths to him: the Orange County Sheriff's Department said in 2025 that it believes he is responsible for more than 60 killings in California, six in Oregon and two in Michigan. He has never confessed and, the Associated Press reported in 2025, denies killing anyone.

The court opinion sets out the 16 murders. The earliest victim, Marine Edward Daniel Moore, was found strangled near a Long Beach-area freeway off-ramp on December 26, 1972. Others followed through the 1970s, including Ronald Wiebe, Keith Crotwell, Mark Hall, Scott Hughes, Roland Young, Richard Keith, Keith Klingbeil, Michael Inderbieten, Donald Crisel and Robert Loggins, with a final cluster in 1983 of Eric Church, Geoffrey Nelson and Rodger DeVaul. Most were strangled with a ligature or suffocated after being given alcohol and sedatives, and their bodies were left beside freeways in Orange and Los Angeles counties. The opinion notes that physical evidence, including a thumbprint at the Hall scene and victims' property and photographs found in his home and car, linked Kraft to eight murders; the rest rested on the common method and his written list.

Kraft was arrested early on May 14, 1983. According to the opinion, California Highway Patrol officers saw his car weaving on Interstate 5 in southern Orange County and arrested him for drunk driving; his passenger, 25-year-old Marine Terry Gambrel, was dead of ligature strangulation, with a vial of Kraft's prescription sedative on the floor. A notebook in the car held a sheet of 61 cryptic handwritten entries. Prosecutors linked 13 to the charged murders, eight to Oregon and Michigan killings and 21 to uncharged victims, hence the press name Scorecard Killer.

The trial opened in Orange County Superior Court in September 1988 and ran about 13 months, according to reporting summarized in the Wikipedia article. The jury returned guilty verdicts on May 12, 1989 and a death verdict on August 11, 1989. Death was imposed on the 11 murders committed after 1978; the five earlier murders drew consecutive 25-years-to-life terms, stayed. The CDCR condemned list records the sentence date as November 29, 1989.

In the penalty phase, the opinion records, prosecutors presented eight uncharged murders in Oregon and Michigan. Oregon victims found near Interstate 5 between July 1980 and December 1982 included Michael O'Fallon, Michael Cluck, Brian Whitcher, Anthony Silveira and an unidentified man; travel records placed Kraft in the Portland area on each date, and several victims' belongings were in his home. In Michigan, Dennis Alt and Christopher Schoenborn were found strangled in Kent County on December 9, 1982, last seen at the Grand Rapids hotel where Kraft was staying.

On August 10, 2000, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the judgment in its entirety in an opinion by Justice Werdegar. Kraft remains under sentence of death; California executions have been halted by a gubernatorial moratorium since 2019, and official and AP reporting in 2023 and 2025 placed him at San Quentin.

DNA work has continued to develop the case. In November 2023 the Orange County Sheriff's Department used genetic genealogy to identify a John Doe found in Laguna Hills in 1974 as Michael Ray Schlicht, 17, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, calling him a presumed early Kraft victim. In May 2025 the department and Oregon State Police identified the 1980 Oregon John Doe as Larry Eugene Parks, a 30-year-old Vietnam veteran, and Oregon State Police named Kraft the sole person of interest.

Kraft was born in Long Beach, California, on March 19, 1945, according to the Wikipedia article, graduated from Claremont Men's College in 1968 and received a general discharge from the U.S. Air Force in 1969. He worked as a computer programmer; the court opinion notes his employment with Lear Siegler from 1980 to 1983, whose business travel coincided with the Oregon and Michigan murders.