Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of the Scorecard Killer active in
Speaker 1: Long Beach in the seventies.
Speaker 2: That is this topic of our True Crime Tuesday.
Speaker 3: The story is true, sounds true?
Speaker 2: No, it sounds made up. I don't know.
Speaker 3: Gerry and Shannon present True Crime.
Speaker 1: Dan Salcito is a retired homicide detective with the Orange
Speaker 1: County Sheriff's Department. He says he's not the media version
Speaker 1: of what a killer looks like. If you put him
Speaker 1: in a room filled with people, he's the last one
Speaker 1: you'd pick. Talking about the Scorecard Killer.
Speaker 3: It's weird.
Speaker 4: So twelve thirteen years ago, Dan Salcedo was nearing retirement.
Speaker 4: He and a partner were on a I guess you'd
Speaker 4: say a field trip to visit Robert Craft Randy Craft, sorry,
Speaker 4: different guy Randy Craft in San Quentin. And that been
Speaker 4: about thirty years since Craft had been pulled over by
Speaker 4: a couple CHP officers down in Mission Viejo, and they
Speaker 4: found some pretty interesting clue that he may have been
Speaker 4: a bad guy, the dead marine in his passenger seat.
Speaker 4: Salcedo was already headed up to Santa Cruz part of
Speaker 4: an active investigation, and decided he was going to stop
Speaker 4: by San Quentin one more time, just take another shot
Speaker 4: at Randy Craft, just to see if there was any
Speaker 4: other information that he would be able to pull out
Speaker 4: of him. And that description of not your normal serial
Speaker 4: killer is kind of how he described it. He said
Speaker 4: he looked like everyone else. To this retired detective, there's
Speaker 4: nothing remarkable about Randy Craft's appearance or his persona. And
Speaker 4: he said he had a kind of a pathetic, get
Speaker 4: off my lawn attitude, but otherwise was utterly unimpressive. And
Speaker 4: he didn't see what some detectives describe in the eyes
Speaker 4: of killers. He didn't see the aura of evil or
Speaker 4: the junkyard stare. Just a bitter old man, is the
Speaker 4: way this retired detective described Randy Kraft.
Speaker 1: He was referred to as a scorecard killer for a
Speaker 1: codd list of more than sixty entries believed to correspond
Speaker 1: to his victims, mostly young men and marines, whom he tortured,
Speaker 1: raped and murdered before dumping their bodies, sometimes on roadsides,
Speaker 1: off ramps, public spaces, and for a decade he trolled
Speaker 1: and terrorized the Southern a Southern California area while confounding
Speaker 1: law enforcement. Up until that random traffic stop with the
Speaker 1: dead marine in the passenger seat.
Speaker 3: When he was.
Speaker 1: Convicted, he was believed to be the most prolific serial
Speaker 1: killer in the country at that point.
Speaker 3: And although his total may have been eclipsed.
Speaker 4: He was convicted of sixteen murders, they said he's suspected
Speaker 4: of at least sixty five more, and there are potentially
Speaker 4: one hundred or more unsolved murders throughout California, Oregon, and
Speaker 4: in Michigan.
Speaker 1: He was born in Long Beach in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1: Parents had moved there from Wyoming, and they said the
Speaker 1: ultra conservative nature of Orange County was befitting for him,
Speaker 1: given high school classmates described him as somewhere right of
Speaker 1: Attila the hun.
Speaker 4: He went to Claremont College. After he graduated, studied economics.
Speaker 4: Big Berry goldwater supporter, supported the Vietnam War.
Speaker 3: He grew a beard.
Speaker 4: They said that he kind of fell into the worldwide
Speaker 4: protest back in sixty eight, which would have been an
Speaker 4: unusual spin for him. He just as voraciously supported the
Speaker 4: efforts of Robert F. Kennedy, and in nineteen sixty eight
Speaker 4: he came out as gay. He was dismissed from the
Speaker 4: Air Force on account of what they referred to at
Speaker 4: the time as medical problems.
Speaker 1: He went to Sun's at Beach a lot, the gay bars.
Speaker 1: He would go back and forth from Laguna to la
Speaker 1: He was fully entrenched in a newly gay social life,
Speaker 1: apparently lived off a diet of meth and beer, diving
Speaker 1: into excesses.
Speaker 3: So it's about this time.
Speaker 4: That he starts running into people and decides that he
Speaker 4: could take advantage of them. He ran into one overly
Speaker 4: confident runaway, asked him for a cigarette and being obliged,
Speaker 4: this guy was then lured in not only by the
Speaker 4: prospect of having a place to say, but Randy seduced
Speaker 4: him with the idea that there may have been a
Speaker 4: lady waiting at his apartment to take the young runaways virginity.
Speaker 4: So they go up to pch in Belmont Shore, some wine,
Speaker 4: some pot, a couple of pills handed out like juice
Speaker 4: and candy until the kid was basically knocked out. Randy
Speaker 4: took advantage of him. When the boy had a chance
Speaker 4: to stumble into Belmont Chores. He nothing of the said
Speaker 4: nothing of that attack, including a sexual assault.
Speaker 3: For thirteen years.
Speaker 1: He was so prolific and so active. They're still connecting
Speaker 1: bodies to this guy. In twenty twenty five, we are
Speaker 1: talking to or about the Scorecard Killer, the man who
Speaker 1: created a lot of terror in the seventies, especially in
Speaker 1: the gay man community, as he would troll the different
Speaker 1: gay bars, ended up fixating on marines, young gay men
Speaker 1: that he would drug and kill and dump along the
Speaker 1: highways and byways.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of the reasons why I'd never heard of this
Speaker 4: guy is because the southern California landscape of serial killers
Speaker 4: was rampant, shall we say, in the seventies, especially for
Speaker 4: young men, especially for hitchhikers, because not only did you
Speaker 4: have Randy Craft again, the so called Scorecard Killer, but
Speaker 4: you had William Bonnen, you had Patrick Kearney, and their
Speaker 4: killing spreees overlapped. They are credited, is blamed, that's the
Speaker 4: right word. They're blamed for at least one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty murders at different times. All of them were referred
Speaker 4: to by the moniker the freeway killer because of the similarities.
Speaker 4: So Patrick Kearney is caught in nineteen seventy seven, they
Speaker 4: figure their detectives think they got their guy. Bodies keep
Speaker 4: showing up. William Bonnen captured in nineteen eighty and they
Speaker 4: figure they got their guy, but they continued. These bodies
Speaker 4: kept piling up until Randy Craft was caught. And again
Speaker 4: we talked about that random traffic stop in nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: three when he was caught on suspicion of drunk driving
Speaker 4: with the corpse of our marine in the passenger seat.
Speaker 4: These stories. He's convicted of sixteen. They believed that he
Speaker 4: had a list of more than sixty in the car,
Speaker 4: hence the scorecard, but that they're still finding victims.
Speaker 1: Yes, they have identified recently a man who was found
Speaker 1: dead along the highway up in Oregon more than forty
Speaker 1: years ago that they now believed was the work of
Speaker 1: the scorecard killer. Oregon State Police Captain Kyle Kennedy says
Speaker 1: the man found identified as a thirty year old Larry
Speaker 1: Eugene Parks, a Vietnam veteran whose family had lost contact
Speaker 1: with him in seventy nine. His body was found in
Speaker 1: July nineteen eighty along the five a suburb of Marion County, Oregon.
Speaker 2: There would burn and they didn't identify him.
Speaker 1: They just identified him last month and they have linked
Speaker 1: his death Larry Parks to Randy Kraft.
Speaker 3: Interesting because.
Speaker 4: Parks's body was found just a day after a seventeen
Speaker 4: year old was found along five, also near a different
Speaker 4: exit there in Marion County. We're talking about the area
Speaker 4: a long Eye five between Salem and Portland. And at
Speaker 4: the time they said due to similarities in the evidence
Speaker 4: and the conditions of the bodies and the age and
Speaker 4: the gender, they suspected that the two murders were related.
Speaker 4: But at the time the investigation into Parks's body into
Speaker 4: Eugene Parks, it went cold. O'fallen, the seventeen year old
Speaker 4: that was also found there, was later linked to Randy
Speaker 4: Craft when investigators said they found a camera in his
Speaker 4: garage after the drunk driving arrest in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 4: and it was Michael o'fallen's mother's initials that were inscribed
Speaker 4: on the camera. During the trial that mom took the
Speaker 4: stand was able to identify that camera. And again, as
Speaker 4: I mentioned, one of the reasons why they had a
Speaker 4: hard time figuring out who this was is that William
Speaker 4: Bonnen was also active in the at that time.
Speaker 3: He was that truck driver out of Downey.
Speaker 4: And again they just assumed that there was there was
Speaker 4: only one on their loose because why would you ever
Speaker 4: assume that there were three serial killers that were active,
Speaker 4: all at the same time.
Speaker 2: Eighty years old, he is still alive, you wonder.
Speaker 1: I mean, what a time for serial killers the seventies
Speaker 1: and the eighties and then DNA testing and all the things,
Speaker 1: and people were.
Speaker 2: More attuned to this sort of thing. But I mean,
Speaker 2: it's not like.
Speaker 1: DNA and environmental factors stopped producing serial killers.
Speaker 2: They're just not. You're just going to get caught these days.
Speaker 4: Well, that is a question is will there ever be
Speaker 4: serial killers like we saw?
Speaker 1: And what are they doing in lieu of the killing?
Speaker 1: They walk amongst us, not killing.
Speaker 3: But wanting to doing.
Speaker 1: What now something to think about when you go to
Speaker 1: sleep tonight. You know what the good industry
Speaker 3: Answer that late night knocked at the door.