Have you ever heard of the Scorecard Killer active in Long Beach in the seventies.
That is this topic of our True Crime Tuesday.
The story is true, sounds true?
No, it sounds made up. I don't know.
Gerry and Shannon present True Crime.
Dan Salcito is a retired homicide detective with the Orange County Sheriff's Department. He says he's not the media version of what a killer looks like. If you put him in a room filled with people, he's the last one you'd pick. Talking about the Scorecard Killer.
It's weird.
So twelve thirteen years ago, Dan Salcedo was nearing retirement. He and a partner were on a I guess you'd say a field trip to visit Robert Craft Randy Craft, sorry, different guy Randy Craft in San Quentin. And that been about thirty years since Craft had been pulled over by a couple CHP officers down in Mission Viejo, and they found some pretty interesting clue that he may have been a bad guy, the dead marine in his passenger seat.
Salcedo was already headed up to Santa Cruz part of an active investigation, and decided he was going to stop by San Quentin one more time, just take another shot at Randy Craft, just to see if there was any other information that he would be able to pull out of him. And that description of not your normal serial killer is kind of how he described it. He said he looked like everyone else. To this retired detective, there's
nothing remarkable about Randy Craft's appearance or his persona. And he said he had a kind of a pathetic, get off my lawn attitude, but otherwise was utterly unimpressive. And he didn't see what some detectives describe in the eyes of killers. He didn't see the aura of evil or the junkyard stare. Just a bitter old man, is the way this retired detective described Randy Kraft.
He was referred to as a scorecard killer for a codd list of more than sixty entries believed to correspond to his victims, mostly young men and marines, whom he tortured, raped and murdered before dumping their bodies, sometimes on roadsides, off ramps, public spaces, and for a decade he trolled and terrorized the Southern a Southern California area while confounding law enforcement. Up until that random traffic stop with the dead marine in the passenger seat.
When he was.
Convicted, he was believed to be the most prolific serial killer in the country at that point.
And although his total may have been eclipsed.
He was convicted of sixteen murders, they said he's suspected of at least sixty five more, and there are potentially one hundred or more unsolved murders throughout California, Oregon, and in Michigan.
He was born in Long Beach in nineteen forty five. Parents had moved there from Wyoming, and they said the ultra conservative nature of Orange County was befitting for him, given high school classmates described him as somewhere right of Attila the hun.
He went to Claremont College. After he graduated, studied economics. Big Berry goldwater supporter, supported the Vietnam War.
He grew a beard.
They said that he kind of fell into the worldwide protest back in sixty eight, which would have been an unusual spin for him. He just as voraciously supported the efforts of Robert F. Kennedy, and in nineteen sixty eight he came out as gay. He was dismissed from the Air Force on account of what they referred to at the time as medical problems.
He went to Sun's at Beach a lot, the gay bars. He would go back and forth from Laguna to la He was fully entrenched in a newly gay social life, apparently lived off a diet of meth and beer, diving into excesses.
So it's about this time.
That he starts running into people and decides that he could take advantage of them. He ran into one overly confident runaway, asked him for a cigarette and being obliged, this guy was then lured in not only by the prospect of having a place to say, but Randy seduced him with the idea that there may have been a lady waiting at his apartment to take the young runaways virginity. So they go up to pch in Belmont Shore, some wine, some pot, a couple of pills handed out like juice
and candy until the kid was basically knocked out. Randy took advantage of him. When the boy had a chance to stumble into Belmont Chores. He nothing of the said nothing of that attack, including a sexual assault.
For thirteen years.
He was so prolific and so active. They're still connecting bodies to this guy. In twenty twenty five, we are talking to or about the Scorecard Killer, the man who created a lot of terror in the seventies, especially in the gay man community, as he would troll the different gay bars, ended up fixating on marines, young gay men that he would drug and kill and dump along the highways and byways.
Yeah.
One of the reasons why I'd never heard of this guy is because the southern California landscape of serial killers was rampant, shall we say, in the seventies, especially for young men, especially for hitchhikers, because not only did you have Randy Craft again, the so called Scorecard Killer, but you had William Bonnen, you had Patrick Kearney, and their killing spreees overlapped. They are credited, is blamed, that's the right word. They're blamed for at least one hundred and
fifty murders at different times. All of them were referred to by the moniker the freeway killer because of the similarities. So Patrick Kearney is caught in nineteen seventy seven, they figure their detectives think they got their guy. Bodies keep showing up. William Bonnen captured in nineteen eighty and they figure they got their guy, but they continued. These bodies
kept piling up until Randy Craft was caught. And again we talked about that random traffic stop in nineteen eighty three when he was caught on suspicion of drunk driving with the corpse of our marine in the passenger seat. These stories. He's convicted of sixteen. They believed that he had a list of more than sixty in the car, hence the scorecard, but that they're still finding victims.
Yes, they have identified recently a man who was found dead along the highway up in Oregon more than forty years ago that they now believed was the work of the scorecard killer. Oregon State Police Captain Kyle Kennedy says the man found identified as a thirty year old Larry Eugene Parks, a Vietnam veteran whose family had lost contact with him in seventy nine. His body was found in July nineteen eighty along the five a suburb of Marion County, Oregon.
There would burn and they didn't identify him.
They just identified him last month and they have linked his death Larry Parks to Randy Kraft.
Interesting because.
Parks's body was found just a day after a seventeen year old was found along five, also near a different exit there in Marion County. We're talking about the area a long Eye five between Salem and Portland. And at the time they said due to similarities in the evidence and the conditions of the bodies and the age and the gender, they suspected that the two murders were related. But at the time the investigation into Parks's body into
Eugene Parks, it went cold. O'fallen, the seventeen year old that was also found there, was later linked to Randy Craft when investigators said they found a camera in his garage after the drunk driving arrest in nineteen eighty three, and it was Michael o'fallen's mother's initials that were inscribed on the camera. During the trial that mom took the
stand was able to identify that camera. And again, as I mentioned, one of the reasons why they had a hard time figuring out who this was is that William Bonnen was also active in the at that time.
He was that truck driver out of Downey.
And again they just assumed that there was there was only one on their loose because why would you ever assume that there were three serial killers that were active, all at the same time.
Eighty years old, he is still alive, you wonder.
I mean, what a time for serial killers the seventies and the eighties and then DNA testing and all the things, and people were.
More attuned to this sort of thing. But I mean, it's not like.
DNA and environmental factors stopped producing serial killers.
They're just not. You're just going to get caught these days.
Well, that is a question is will there ever be serial killers like we saw?
And what are they doing in lieu of the killing? They walk amongst us, not killing.
But wanting to doing.
What now something to think about when you go to sleep tonight. You know what the good industry
Answer that late night knocked at the door.