On this day in 1983, Highway Patrol officers in Orange County in California pulled over a man who was driving erratically.
The driver was Randy Kraft, who was arrested for driving while intoxicated after he failed a field sobriety test. Inside his car, officers found the body of 25-year-old Marine Terry Lee Gambrel.
Gambrel’s body was in the passenger seat, with a jacket covering him. When officers moved the jacket, they discovered his jeans were unzipped and his genitals exposed. His hands were bound with shoelaces, his wrists had welt marks, and there was a ligature mark around his neck. He had been strangled to death.
Later, when police thoroughly searched Kraft’s vehicle, they found an envelope containing photographs of more than 50 young men in pornographic poses. Many of the men photographed appeared to be asleep or were clearly dead.
Police also found a folder with a handwritten list containing 61 coded notations. They had just discovered one of the world’s worst serial killers. Kraft was dubbed the Scorecard Killer.
In 1989, Kraft was convicted of the rape, torture and murder of sixteen young men between 1972 and 1983. Police, however, believe he is responsible for up to 51 other killings that were not brought to trial.
He was sentenced to death but remains incarcerated at San Quentin Rehabilitation Centre. He is now 81 years old.
After police deciphered the coded list that Kraft kept, they discovered they had interacted with him on several occasions in the past but failed to connect him to the growing number of murdered men being found alongside California’s freeways.
At the same time that Kraft was murdering young men and leaving their bodies near California freeways, another gay serial killer, Patrick Kearney, was also picking up boys and young men, murdering them, and dumping their bodies near freeways.
Kearney was arrested in 1977 and confessed to killing 35 people, but police had realised they had more than one serial killer operating in the area, as their methodologies were different.
Kraft was gay. He told his family he was gay in the late 1960s and was given a medical discharge from the US Air Force after he told his superiors he was a homosexual. Kraft has never admitted his involvement in any of the deaths attributed to him.
