HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'll lick the queen's pussy. I will lick the Queen's dead pussy. She's dead, she's dead.
BEN KISSEL Soon, soon. Is she?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I know for a fact she's dead because why? Because I finally slept. Not wondering what the
queen's doing. What is the queen doing? This series that we're about to launch into, first of all
Kissel's a big fan of this guy.
BEN KISSEL What do you mean a big fan of this guy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You remember because Dogmeat, he's been sending messages about this character for like a
minute. He has been obsessed with this guy.
MARCUS PARKS A while.
BEN KISSEL It's because his last name and is cheese-related, if you think about Kraft cheese and then I just
thought he was quite intriguing. So I'm happy we're covering him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you're a big old fan. Big fan.
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's been saying this, Randy Kraft's number one fan Ben Kissel. And this is really going to be an
interesting series.
BEN KISSEL Ridiculous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But this heavy hitter, I'm going to say straight up, it's like we're in the way back machine to
2011.
BEN KISSEL Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is old school muck.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You best get your goddamn true crime grime boots on because it's about to get icky sticky up
in this shit.
BEN KISSEL Lace them up folks. Welcome to The Last Podcast on the Left. I am Ben Kissel hanging out with
Marcus Parks and Henry Zebrowski. Yes, this is true, I have been requesting that we do this
man for quite a while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You love this guy.
BEN KISSEL I don't love him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You love him. You love his look, you love his attitude, you love what he does.
BEN KISSEL It is interesting. It's a disgusting tale that will be wonderful to learn about for our audience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh so you're just saying from an educational standpoint, you love what he does.
BEN KISSEL I only talk about everything from an educational standpoint.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh I know! Same thing with tincture with the fact that Jerry ate a tub of butter last night.
BEN KISSEL Buddy, I have had no sleep, Jerry in a tub of butter. It's been a day. Also I found out someone
was stealing copper pipes from my house. I don't know what's going on anyway! All right,
Randy Kraft Part 1. Let's get into it.
MARCUS PARKS Now even though serial killings in America peaked during the 1980s with an estimated 200
serial killers operating nationwide at any one time, the 1970s always have been and most likely
always will be the decade of the serial killer. These were days when serial killing was fully
acknowledged as a reality for the first time. Even though the phenomenon had been occurring
in human populations for most likely the entirety of modern consciousness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Every since there's been sharp things, people have been killing groups of people with them.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. It seems like most technologies are only created for violence.
MARCUS PARKS Or pornography or sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You see pornography, remember because they chose Blu-ray which is why Blu-ray went over
instead of HD.
BEN KISSEL That's right. Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They were really big. And then also when it comes down to it yeah, I guess it's really about can
you kill with it, can you cut meat with it, or can you fuck it?
BEN KISSEL It's all about killing and coming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And so is this series.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Partly though, this acknowledgement came from the fact that serial killing couldn't be
ignored any longer because the longer we study serial killers, the more I truly realized the
scope of what even 100 killers operating at one time really means.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS There's a reason why investigators had to codify serial killer investigation, creating
designations like MO, victim type, and motivation. This was not only to catch killers but to
separate multiple killers who were operating at the same time in the same place using similar
methods.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why I believe we have to end the serial killer free market, it needs regulation.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I think it really comes down to it, let me be clear. I'm going to call up my friend Cornpop
here.
BEN KISSEL Cornpop, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Come on folks, we need some regulation here, folks.
BEN KISSEL Unbridled serial killer competition. That's what we need on the streets of this country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. I feel like maybe you're laissez-faire libertarian attitude towards serial killer
activity is why we're getting so many different types. And yes, it's helpful for beer and weed.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But I don't know if it's great for the bunch of people living by the freeway.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS And as far as investigation goes, so does the media follow with serial killer nicknames to
differentiate between headlines. Often those nicknames came from MO or victim type like BTK
in the case of the former or the Co-ed Killer in the case of the latter. Sometimes however, as is
the case with say Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gawy! Small-headed Gawy!
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness, you're going to drive him to kill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Gawy! I actually just saw a special called Catching The Killer, it's the same thing I talked about
last week about how it was a whole episode of Canadian cops bragging about how they almost
didn't catch Bruce McArthur. And they did another one about how they almost didn't catch
Gary Ridgway.
BEN KISSEL Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cutting back to him just being like, 'Yeah, I killed her. Yeah. Yeah, I'd do it again.'
BEN KISSEL He's such a piece of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I was like we didn't get this guy?
MARCUS PARKS Well as with the Green River Killer, the nickname comes from the location where the bodies
were found and that's certainly the case with today's subject, the Freeway Killer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (guitar riff) It's a cool name but there was a lot of them.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS I mean the thing is, the Freeway Killer, I think it sounds somewhat generic. It's nowhere near
as evocative or catchy is the Night Stalker or the Hillside Strangler. You know what the fuck
you're getting with those guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sometimes. Yeah, don't go anywhere near a hill.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely not, let alone the side of one.
MARCUS PARKS But what the media and the police didn't know at the time is that the Freeway Killer was
actually three different men operating at roughly the same time in roughly the same region
using roughly the same disposal method.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So who is Bill Cosby here and who's Carlos Mencia?
BEN KISSEL Well we have no idea. Either way, someone's stealing a lot of material and that ain't right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. And that's their worst crimes.
BEN KISSEL Do you ever think they would run into each other and be like, what brings you out here? Isn't
that interesting? Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This sounds like it is a sketch, it is a sketch. But yes, there might have been. Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS Well partly these Freeway Killers used California's highway system as an easy getaway device
after they disposed of the bodies, just like Richard Ramirez used the freeways of Los Angeles
to quickly flee from the neighborhoods where he committed his crimes. Other motivations
however included making sure that the victims would be found.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is key. This is really key to this style of serial killer because these three, right now I think
we're gonna loosely call this a series of Freeway Killers because we're gonna eventually cover
the other two in a series where we pair them together so we can talk about their similarities
and differences and also to Randy Kraft.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because it's fascinating to see how three different people can operate basically doing the same
type of crime but wildly different within the crimes.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also the umbrella is very similar. But we're really going to talk about how one key element
is for you to find them so that somebody's out here killing young men.
BEN KISSEL And one has to wonder if they can or cannot drive 55.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It depends on Sammy Hagar. What piece does he fit in the puzzle?
BEN KISSEL We just don't know, do we? I don't understand why he can't drive 55. It's not that fast. But
nonetheless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I hate driving 55.
BEN KISSEL Yes, indeed. I guess he only goes 54.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You asshole. You asshole! It's faster than that.
BEN KISSEL No.
MARCUS PARKS But interestingly outside of the disposal methods, the Freeway Killers shared a few other
curious characteristics. All three were gay, all three mutilated victims in horrific ways, two out
of the three likely used accomplices, and all had unimaginable body counts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Now on that last point, the reason is easy to see. Since these serial killers were gay, their
victim pool included gay men and straight men. And as we know gay men in the 70s were right
at the bottom with sex workers when it came to the less dead. This didn't really change until
fairly recently because even in the 80s and 90s as it was with Jeffrey Dahmer, crimes involving
even a whiff of homosexuality were often deemed too icky to investigate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just recently Bruce McArthur hid under the same exact series of homophobic lenses that
allowed him to operate in Toronto for 13 years without anybody knowing that these men were
missing. Because again, it's this weird thing. It's like with little boys, especially with little boys
back in the 70s, they're runaways. Oh, they just didn't come home. You know how kids are,
they don't come back. Where they kind of said the same thing about these adult men with
apartments and jobs. Like how these gay men are, sometimes they'll get into a hang gliding
accident because they go on a whim. Sometimes these gay men, they tried to swim across the
Atlantic because they're so proud. They're so full of pride.
BEN KISSEL You're such an expert on the gay male.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's almost like I'm deeply embedded within them.
BEN KISSEL Yeah I'm starting to think no one ever ran away ever. I think everyone was just kidnapped and
killed and it's really sad because I love the idea of a good runaway. You know, spiteful. Think
about that little mouse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just think about that music video.
MARCUS PARKS Runaway Train.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) Runaway train never going back, wrong way on a one-way track.
BEN KISSEL I actually think that's very offensive given the recent Amtrak accidents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god. He should have thought about that.
MARCUS PARKS That song is actually not about runaway children, it's actually about lead singer Dave Pirner's
deep dark Midwestern depression.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wow.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever man.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Soul Asylum, they're a Twin Cities band. We talk about them on The Replacement series
on No Dogs in Space that is coming out widely soon.
BEN KISSEL All right! That's the plug.
MARCUS PARKS Underrated band, Soul Asylum. Underrated band.
BEN KISSEL Wow, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's a hot take that I didn't know about.
BEN KISSEL We gotta let him have it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, sure, absolutely.
BEN KISSEL I'm not touching that at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you like Collective Soul too?
MARCUS PARKS Hey, Soul Asylum, listen to their first punk records. They were a band like 10 years before
Runaway Train ever even came out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (singing) Runaway Train never going back.
BEN KISSEL Can we get back to the comforts of serial killers, please?
MARCUS PARKS Well to my point, murders involving gay men, no matter how brutal, they were often chalked
up to a lovers spat gone wrong or at least that's the vibe I get from many of these
investigations at least until the body counts reach into the dozens. Before that someone got
jealous and killed someone else.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah and it's kind of what I was told coming up in show business and comedy is the idea is to
be undeniable, right. You have to build up a base so undeniable that they have to pay
attention. Which kind of does feel like that, this idea that once it gets to about 24 victims the
cops are like, 'I'm starting to see a bit of a pattern here'.
BEN KISSEL A bit of a pattern. And you do wonder if the serial killer, I'm sure we'll get into more with
Randy Kraft, I wonder if they were like, 'When are y'all gonna catch me? Because this has been
going on for a long time and frankly I'm tired.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He was very happy to continue on.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Speaking of the brutality though, even though the straight killers certainly had their
moments, the gay serial killers active in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were much more prone to
overkill murders. Harold Schechter wrote in his serial killer encyclopedia that this rage comes
from the prevailing homophobia of American society which creates a self-hating violent
homophobia in the killers that externalizes itself in brutal torture and mutilation. In effect, the
more brutally they kill the victim, the more effectively they kill their own sexuality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it's a full symbolism of just that moment that you had with somebody where it's like you
have maybe a slightly consensual moment and then all of a sudden you have moved, especially
in Randy Kraft's case, because he's very dangerous.
BEN KISSEL Sounds like it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Randy Kraft is one of those true heavy hitters, super predator type guy that was a shapeshifter
that could be who you wanted him to be. He looked like Will Forte. Kind of has that kind of
character actor face too where you flip the mustache upside down, all of a sudden he's a
happy guy. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Like he does a couple of things, he messes his hair around, he's a different guy. He's one of
these things, he's a shapeshifter.
BEN KISSEL So you're going to give him the ooh, take your glasses off, put your hair down, all of a sudden
that's not an ugly librarian, that's a hot woman!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who's that? Who's that?
BEN KISSEL Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So yes, you have these moments and then as soon as you do it, because The level of detail of
mutilation that Randy Kraft will put these bodies through will really show this is the rage here.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's at an 11.
BEN KISSEL I don't like that whatsoever.
MARCUS PARKS But speaking to the point of investigation, homosexual serial killers were also among the most
prolific. While gay men make up a small sliver of the serial killer population, just 5%, the kings
of body counts outside of Gary Ridgway and Samuel Little are John Wayne Gacy, Dean Corll,
and the killer we're covering today, Randy Kraft. In addition to being known as the Freeway
Killer, Randy Kraft was also named the Scorecard Killer because he kept a running tally of his
victims so he could remember each one, using a thinly veiled pneumonic device for each
murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also he was a prolific trophy collector. He would collect many things from these bodies.
This is also one of these guys that much like BTK, much like John Wayne Gacy in a way, people
would especially high body counts where it kind of becomes the second job, right.
BEN KISSEL it sounds exhausting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a whole other life he leads on top of what we would find out at the time, especially at the
height of his murders, he was just working in IT.
BEN KISSEL And when did he get into cheese? When did he get into the big game? Do we know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. I feel like this is one story that might have been made better by inherited wealth.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Well some designations on the scorecard were simple. They would just used the initials of the
victim or the location of the kill. Others though were more descriptive. He'd use names like
Skates, Hari Kari, Teen Trucker, Deodorant. One of them was Marine Drunk Overnight Shorts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, that's the one.
BEN KISSEL Wait a second. He maligned the great name Harry Carey, one of the greatest commentators in
the history of commentators?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hari Kari. No, it's Hari Kari.
MARCUS PARKS No, it's not Harry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, not that guy.
BEN KISSEL Not that guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Well if the scorecard found on Randy's person at the time of his arrest is to be believed, and
there's every reason to believe it, then Kraft is one of the most prolific known serial killers in
American history with a body count of 67.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is one of those, right, where we talked about how serial killers are the least truStable
human beings on the face of the planet and I think that's obvious.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. And politicians, I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, you're not supposed to believe any one of these people, right? But the thing about
Randy Kraft is number one, he maintained his innocence until the day he fucking - he's still
alive. He still says he's absolutely innocent.
BEN KISSEL Really?
MARCUS PARKS He's in San Quentin right now.
BEN KISSEL So he doesn't say that he's guilty?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And the other thing is sometimes what you can tell about somebody like LRH, right, it's all
about the lies you tell yourself. What do you tell yourself in your most private moments?
BEN KISSEL I mean L. Ron Hubbard was probably like, 'Yep, still can't see it.' Looking down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh his penis! He doesn't need to see it because he just has to wait to get it hard and then it
comes over the horizon. Like, 'There he is. There's my boy.' But Randy Kraft, he kept this, this is
a very private document. No one was supposed to know this document.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also it's interesting that he had to lie to himself by putting it in code even though he was
the only one who was going to see it because that's how closely he guarded the secret in his
own secret life. Randy Kraft is again a perfect predator, an ultimate character-changing entity,
malevolent entity.
BEN KISSEL I have a Marmaduke cartoon in my wallet. But I guess he had a scorecard of everyone he
killed. Weird. Different people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just don't want to flip over the Marmaduke comic, what I mean? I don't wanna see what's on
the back of that.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Well even more interesting is that like gay serial killers such as Dean Corll, possibly John
Wayne Gacy, and one of the other two Freeway Killers, Randy Kraft most likely had an
accomplice during some of his crimes. Besides just the different semen types found at some
crime scenes-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Raspberry, apricot.
BEN KISSEL No, inaccurate.
MARCUS PARKS Kraft is believed to have had an accomplice because many of his victims' bodies were thrown
out of a moving vehicle and it is presumably quite difficult to push a body out of the passenger
seat while driving down the freeway.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But one thing we do know is that Randy Kraft, his car did turn into a fucking moving serial killer
studio. So we don't know if he had tools, literally like a grabby hand or some shit.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he had a big Pee-Wee Herman, Rube Goldberg machine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he drops the marble at the very top of when he's just like, 'Just sit there for a second,'
and watch it roll back, it's a basketball.
BEN KISSEL You planning on throwing me out of this car or something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If it works.
BEN KISSEL Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I just gotta get my precious machine to work.
BEN KISSEL This sucks.
MARCUS PARKS The disposal of course came after Kraft had castrated his victims, chewed their nipples off,
violated them with sticks or branches, cut them up, and sometimes burned their eyes out with
his car cigarette lighter, all while they were still alive and most likely within the confines of his
Ford Mustang or his Toyota Celica.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Tiny cars both.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I tell you what, I couldn't afford the package that gave it a center drain. I wish I had a
center drain, honestly I'm ruining all my carpet in here.
BEN KISSEL It was just a different time when everyone just catered to smokers and they're just like, 'We
better make sure we have the push in there.' I burned my finger on it once when I was a child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah, of course.
BEN KISSEL I didn't burn anyone's eyes out with it though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. I haven't seen the back of that Marmaduke comic.
BEN KISSEL It's actually something from Desperate Housewives. It's a little commercial for them. That's on
the back of the Marmaduke. It's from the paper! Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Someone doth protest too much. And honestly it is weird because when Kissel came in, I
actually didn't know why he had ditched his shirt in the trash can and then I looked at it and it
said Randy Kraft number one on it. And I was like this you wore this for St. Patrick's Day?
BEN KISSEL I just thought he would be a good topic! I'm trying to help. I'm on no sleep. My dog ate a tub of
butter. Can I get a break?
MARCUS PARKS As far as the other two Freeway Killers go, William Bonin and Patrick Kearney, we'll be
covering them in a future series because each has a fascinating story all their own. Although
we will be touching on them here and there, particularly in the case of magician Vernon Butts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Everybody wants to touch on Butts.
BEN KISSEL I guess so. It makes sense.
MARCUS PARKS For Randy Kraft's story though, we used the book 'Angel of Darkness' by Dennis McDougall
which wrongly makes a connection between homosexuality and criminality instead of seeing
that gay communities are just like any other community and that crime breeds when you're
looked at as less than human.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You read this book, you read 'Angel of Darkness' and he's so horny, so horny.
BEN KISSEL Are we talking like Mr. Hat from South Park?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Seriously it is in this realm. Here's a little selection because I'm going to read two selections up
top here. You can kind of see true crime, I love it because sometimes you really get into it,
these guys are fucking such assholes. "Long beach has been a quiet haven for gay men and
women as far back as WWII. Sailors interested in sex stalked the seedy dives along Ocean
Boulevard and Pine Avenue."
BEN KISSEL You can see him getting hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Looking for someone, anyone, male or female, to spend the night with. More often than not,
they found them. After the war, according to local lore, many of these gay sailors blended into
this 500,000 population bedroom community and they created their own subculture deep
within the gay heart of Los Angeles.
BEN KISSEL Wow, he must have been more aroused than when Stephen King wrote that child sex scene.
MARCUS PARKS Nevertheless, the facts in this book are solid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS So 'Angel of Darkness' with it's hack title is our source today.
BEN KISSEL Seamen dripping from the vessel. Another thing about true crime contact.
MARCUS PARKS As the seafoam crashed on the waves again and again, like the semen of so many sailors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Two of them like pink pythons writhing in subterranean pleasure.
BEN KISSEL God, I'm just so happy I'm totally straight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Straight as hell. Just thinking about wet butts up and down in a hotel room. But each one of
these true crime stories, the thing about Freeway Killers too because we did research William
Bonin and Patrick Kearney as we were going to, each one has to describe what a freeway is.
BEN KISSEL I know what a freeway is!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Freeways defined Southern California and the premium that its residents placed on mobility.
For the price of an automobile and a driver's license, anybody can move from one
neighborhood to the next in a matter of minutes. It's called a road.
BEN KISSEL Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Those who can't afford a car license can always stick out a thumb and hitchhike downtown to
the mall or to the beach as long as they don't care who they're riding with. Strange things
happen on Southern California freeways. Things that happen elsewhere while people are
usually stationary. People make love while they're on the freeway.
BEN KISSEL What is happening?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They cook, brush their teeth, do and redo their mascara, dress and undress. Men shave,
women have babies.
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Incantations and aerobics, fisticuffs and fellatio, midwifery and mayhem.
BEN KISSEL I think you confused a freeway with a hospital.
MARCUS PARKS I love true crime! I love true crime! Now Randy Kraft was born in March 1945 in Long Beach,
California. Surprisingly Randy did not, as far as we know, come from the sort of abusive
household one might expect from a killer as brutal as Kraft. Instead his childhood seemed fairly
normal. But like Richard Ramirez and dozens of others, Kraft did suffer a severe head injury
while his brain was still developing. At the age of 2, Randy fell down a set of concrete stairs,
bonked his head and fell unconscious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Damn.
MARCUS PARKS Now since he was so young, we can't say for certain if there was a personality change because
toddlers can be kind of psychopathic anyway. But from that moment on Randy was unplugged
from humanity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I mean honestly we need to take guns away from our 7 year olds and our 2 year olds.
BEN KISSEL All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because a 2 year old with a gun is actually incredibly dangerous.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, well it's true then. You have made a solid point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Randy did however manage to hide it quite well. Once he and his family moved to Midway City
in Orange County, Kraft became an average student who played tennis and saxophone. He
even had a small circle of friends, although his friend group, they were just fucking weird, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're assholes. Just straight up assholes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because what it is? To me this is an example of Randy Kraft showing his way of becoming a
character for other people.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And also his direct antisocial personality, this idea that he would create a whole persona that
everybody would hate like somebody who promoted and defended Joe McCarthy.
MARCUS PARKS Well that's the thing. In Junior High, Randy and his friend Billy Manson, their dream was to
grow up to be Republican Senators.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And I mean Randy Kraft was not far off.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. That's a nightmare way to start, my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS To them, Richard Nixon was a liberal. Their real heroes were William F. Buckley and Joseph
McCarthy, the conservative boogeymen of lore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Roy Cohn as well, perhaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Kraft and Manson defended McCarthy's communist witch hunts, read the National Review like
a couple of weirdos, and attended meetings of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.
BEN KISSEL It just seems like he's a rebellious person. So it's interesting that he would choose conformity
at such a young age. I suppose he's trying to again pretend like he's normal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well no, I think it's the opposite. I think all the kids are starting to find a little bit of the
freedom of the time period opening up and then it's a direct thing against the cool group of
kids because in his school, the cool groups were the ones listening to the first edges of rock
and roll and doing all of these things where he immediately positioned himself anti them.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he's one of those true contrarians. That last organization, by the way, the Christian Anti-
Communist Crusade, they produced a film called The Ultimate Weapon. That film was about
communist brainwashing. And of course as we know that shit relates directly to MK Ultra.
You're not out Henry, you're not out.
BEN KISSEL Oh god!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Help me.
BEN KISSEL He's back in the rabbit hole, folks. So is the acronym for that CACC?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's CACC.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI CACC!
BEN KISSEL It's CACC.
MARCUS PARKS Now Kraft and Manson were your classic conservative trolls who wore neatly ironed white
shirts and ties, had close-cropped haircuts, and urged a teacher to found a world affairs club
just so they could pass resolutions condemning the United Nations and pledging support to
the John Birch Society.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love mousse. I like it in my hair and I don't like a man's chest.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely, completely tough, ragged and straight, Randy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS They also once very oddly participated in an Arbor Day celebration by taking a tree, planting it
at night in the middle of the athletic field at their school while dressed and painted black, then
they peed on it and ran away.
BEN KISSEL You know what? That is hilarious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well it was a protest because their principal-
BEN KISSEL Cause there's a tree on the football field.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's the thing, their principal was one of these, what they said at the time, an ecological nut.
And he said on Arbor Day, every one of the students had to go plant a tree, that was the thing
they had to do. And so to be a little bit of a ribald prank, they put it in the middle of the
football field.
BEN KISSEL You know, it holds up to scrutiny. It's innocent enough to be seen as funny but also there's a
tree in the middle of the football field.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And think about that, it only led to 67 men with their penises cut off and shoved up their
own rectums and they were all tortured to death as they screamed and they screamed and
they screamed.
BEN KISSEL I am just saying this one time, if it did happen to be an Ent, put a little football helmet on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's having too much fun. This is what I'm saying, man.
BEN KISSEL I need sleep. You know what butter ships look like coming out of a chihuahua?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Not out of a chihuahua.
BEN KISSEL Oh god, it's been a nightmare!
MARCUS PARKS Now while Randy naturally supported the Vietnam War at first, he switched his support in
college after a friend died in action. From there his beliefs began to shift and he eventually
became just as left wing as he'd been right wing. This may have had something to do with the
fact that Randy was also starting to come to grips with his sexuality, which is somewhat of a
different tack from other gay serial killers like John Wayne Gacy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It really is interesting because it is a moment of, we'll get into it, but it is a weird converse
moment of bravery but I also believe it's a part of his antisocial personality.
MARCUS PARKS While Gacy always maintained that he was bisexual, Randy was out and proud, although it
took awhile for him to reach that point. During college he was so gay that his stomach hurt but
he found outlets in the life guard shacks and restrooms along Seal Beach just south of Los
Angeles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is that what's happening to Kissel?
BEN KISSEL Wait, what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he said he had a bellyache this morning.
BEN KISSEL I do have a bellyache because I didn't sleep because my dog ate a tub of butter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or was it because you were just thinking about how you wish you could be with the man?
Because you can be.
BEN KISSEL Sure!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's not wrong.
BEN KISSEL I know!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can do that.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely. Sure.
MARCUS PARKS You can be. You can make the family three for three, dude. We're behind you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Come on man, Randy Kraft's stan right here.
BEN KISSEL You know he is still alive, maybe I could just start a pen pal relationship with him.
MARCUS PARKS Meanwhile, Randy settled into college life. Residents of his college dorm, Green Hall, were
known as the Green Weenies and by Randy's senior year he'd become dorm president. The socalled
Head Green Weenie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI People liked him but they did say he happened to focus on beer a little bit more than his
studies.
BEN KISSEL Good for him, it's college.
MARCUS PARKS But as one former student put it, Randy with his tuft of chin hair always seemed to have an evil
glint in his eye. He had a strange sense of humor, making snide comments that were funny but
not ha-ha funny. Instead they were odd and unsettling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Do you ever think what it would be like if I cut your eyelids off?
BEN KISSEL What was that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just saying, it would be kind of interesting if you were like a living skull.
BEN KISSEL Oh man, do any gas pumps work in this country?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's funny. Because I noticed when I went to the gas station the other day, I was like do any
gas pumps work in this country?
BEN KISSEL There you go.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally one of his roommates, a guy named Mac, said that one night during one of those
soul searching sessions we have with friends in college, Randy turned to him and cryptically
said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know, there's a part of me you will never know.
BEN KISSEL What part is that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI My asshole. Come on!
BEN KISSEL I get it, all right. Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, no, he was thinking about killing.
BEN KISSEL I see.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. And by the end of college, Randy had switched from being a Joseph McCarthy apologist
to a Robert Kennedy campaigner. But he still joined the Air Force in June of 1968 and was
given the job of painting protective coating on test planes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's interesting because this is another serial killer with political aspirations which I find
fascinating.
BEN KISSEL Him and Bundy.
MARCUS PARKS Now while there were plenty of kids dodging sniper bullets in the jungles of Vietnam who
would love to have scored such a boring job during the war, Kraft felt like the job was beneath
his station. Perhaps his unhappiness with his assignment was part of the reason why Randy
came out to his superiors in the Air Force and was given a general discharge. After that he
moved in with his parents and came out to them as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because you could see right, in a way, because not a lot of people did this, right.
MARCUS PARKS This was 1968.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, not a lot of people did this. So there is a way in my mind that he did this literally to shake
shit up as well. He did it to get a rise out of people I think in a way.
BEN KISSEL Maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Normally I wouldn't say this but for what he went on to do, I would say I feel like everything in
his head is a constructed game a little bit and then when he came out to them, yes, I think he
got off that detail because he fucking hated it because he basically became a painter, he was a
house painter and he didn't want to do that. And then he also understood oh I'm getting feed,
I'm getting that psychopath feed, right. I'm getting that thing that I need. Where I get a bunch
of people in a big kerfuffle because the thing about it is that it really fucks with your entire life.
Getting a general discharge, it fucks your whole career up. It's really hard to get a job because
it's just above dishonorable discharge.
BEN KISSEL And of course if you have any discharge at all, go to the doctor.
MARCUS PARKS It's a good PSA.
BEN KISSEL No problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, really good.
MARCUS PARKS When he came out to his parents, his father reportedly flew into a rage but his mother was
accepting if disappointed. And Randy continued living at home while immersing himself fully in
the local gay scene. Kraft got a job as a bartender at a gay bar called The Buoy Shed.
BEN KISSEL Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some good names, some good bard names in this shit.
BEN KISSEL Buoy Shed, my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, yeah. He began spending his time at other gay bars like Broom Hilda's.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS And a place with perhaps the most non gay name for a gay bar that is still obviously a gay bar,
Stables.
BEN KISSEL Huh. I never thought about it. There was a bar in Brooklyn called Brooklyn Stable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL But it was horse themed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it was horse themed. And I do feel like it's still horse themed but it's like man-horse
themed.
BEN KISSEL Right, okay.
MARCUS PARKS It's unknown what exactly it was that pushed Randy into the world of serial killing. There's
always a trigger. Possibly it could have been his coming out because oftentimes serial killers
begin killing because they aren't able to handle setbacks or trauma like the rest of us do. I
don't necessarily think that he came out specifically to make people upset, I think coming out
for him was actually a very traumatic experience. I think he tried to force it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
MARCUS PARKS He knew what was gonna happen and so he knew exactly how everyone was going to react.
But when they didn't act how he wanted them to react, he now has an excuse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS He has an anger spot basically.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sure.
BEN KISSEL It's not easy to do.
MARCUS PARKS No, it's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You create a trigger point where you do something. It's like yeah, now now I've created what
we've talked about for years covering serial killers, the little validations that bring you to the
point where you have convinced yourself that killing is now compulsory. Well now all of these
factors have driven me to kill.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL And also there's so much shame involved. I remember when my older brother came out he
was so nervous and stuff and I was on the steps and I heard it all. And then it's not easy to do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh yeah buddy, this isn't a normal coming out story.
BEN KISSEL So it is very different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This isn't the story of John Waters or Bobby Bonilla.
BEN KISSEL Bobby Bonilla? Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, I don't know, who knows? This is the story of Randy Kraft. So it colors the coming
out story a little different.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, it's definitely a different story. See while Randy seemed to be fairly mild mannered most
of the time, many of the people who had regular social contact with him said that he could
have a terrifying temper when he didn't get his way. And from what other serial killers have
said, when those negative emotions are combined with a head full of bad wiring, they start
having fantasies about releasing those emotions in absolutely horrific ways. So just like other
serial killers set up situations in which they feel justified to kill, I think Randy Kraft may have
done just that with coming out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, I can see that.
BEN KISSEL Well do you think there's something where he thought there was so much shame in being gay
that he's like that's just a lateral move to start killing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, he loved being gay.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He really cherished that part of his personality I think. It's just more the idea of setting up a
circumstance which is being like the whole world's against me, it's me versus everybody else
and in war all bets are off, there are no rules, I can do whatever I want.
BEN KISSEL Kind of Panzram-y.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A little bit. Because the thing about Randy Kraft too is that because he is one of those types of
killers where he's really tight-lipped, we don't know a lot about his inner life. And the fact that
he said that openly to somebody, like there's some parts of me you'll never know, shows that I
feel like this fantasizing about killing people has been around since his childhood.
MARCUS PARKS Probably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And that it has been a thing that he has thought about for a long time. Because the one thing
about, not to get too political, but stuff like with the John Birch Society, all these type of
people, they're desperate for the absolute control of everybody else, right. They want a fascist
control over your body and your mind. And there's something about that that lends towards
the serial killer mindset.
BEN KISSEL They need order.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, he just wants control over everybody.
MARCUS PARKS So pretty soon after Randy came out, he began inching his way towards serial killing with the
rape of a 13 year old boy named Joey Fancher soon after he moved into his own place.
Fancher had run away from home in March of 1970 and was soon approached by the 25 year
old Randy Kraft on the boardwalk at Huntington Beach. Randy lured Fancher back to his
apartment by telling the teenager that there was a woman waiting who was willing to have sex
with just about anybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god.
BEN KISSEL Is this the movie Big? What's going on here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL This is horrible, they met on a boardwalk?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just being like 13 years old? I know a woman will fuck you right now.
BEN KISSEL Jeez! All right.
MARCUS PARKS So Fancher, young and naive, took a chance and followed Randy back. After smoking a little
weed and giving Fancher some pills, Randy pulled out his collection of black and white gay
pornography which featured several pictures of Randy participating in the actions himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well the way he talked about it too is that it really was a slideshow that you don't want to see
because you didn't know you were about to see it. Like if you wanted to see it, sure. But
literally he's like take a look at this and it was a picture of gay pornography. And he's like take a
look at this one and it was another one, you can kind of see it was like, is that that guy right
there? And then all of a sudden there's another picture of a pile of writhing bodies and then
that guy like smiling and waving at the camera. Like see who that guest star is?
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And now you're like oh, now I'm starting to see, all of this is getting a bit complicated.
BEN KISSEL It's like the final photo in The Shining.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But as Fancher began to pass out, Randy repeatedly raped him and threatened to kill him if he
moved. He then gave him even more pills, suddenly began slapping him for seemingly no
reason, then inexplicably left Fancher in his apartment to go to work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a distancing effect.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because he literally bailed. He sexually assaulted him and then said all right, time to go to
work. And then he left. Didn't tie him up, didn't do anything to cover up the crime. Because I
feel like it's almost this thing of he just kind of finally let himself do whatever it is that he
wanted to do and he was almost in shock about it himself. Like oh wow, I did all this shit. And
then he bugged.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Eventually Fancher recovered, got dressed, and stumbled to a neighborhood bar where
an ambulance was called. When his parents showed up, they were most upset that he wasn't
wearing his new shoes which might give you a hint as to why he ran away in the first place.
BEN KISSEL Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Jesus, it sounds like his parents, I mean they sound like Butters' parents again from South Park.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my God, Butters would have been murdered by Randy Kraft like 25 times.
BEN KISSEL Seriously. He has become my favorite character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL I love Butters.
MARCUS PARKS Oh he's easily my favorite character. Butters is by far the best character on the show.
BEN KISSEL The theme of the day is butter. Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS The cops went and checked out Randy's place and found that he was in possession of two
peanut butter jars full of pills. One was filled with bennies and the other was filled with
seconal. He had uppers and downers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know how these gay men are, they loved their sleepy sandwiches.
BEN KISSEL I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They just love to have a nice napwich and they go right to sleep.
BEN KISSEL So we're not going to investigate it all then?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely not. I don't want to become gay.
BEN KISSEL All right, another horrible job done. Great work!
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. I mean he's right because this was one of those gay things and presumably because
Fancher's parents just wanted to pretend like nothing ever happened, no action whatsoever
was taken.
BEN KISSEL These cops were just making up gay stereotypes as they go, like we all know gays, they keep
the pills in the peanut butter jar, that's common knowledge. I don't know what that is. I don't
think that is true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it was not just in the jar, it was in the peanut butter, like he put Benzedrine in peanut
butter. So it's this idea that this is just what these guys do.
BEN KISSEL Oh my gosh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which is that it's a part of the homophobia thing which we covered a little bit when we talked
about Jeffrey Dahmer.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It comes up again and again and again and again. Which is this idea that gay men and women
live this mysterious life of crime, that's all they do. That's their whole life. Which meanwhile
most of the time gay people are super boring and don't do anything. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL They're just human beings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just normal ass people just chumming around, fucking wearing pants.
BEN KISSEL And Marcus did a great job in the book 'The Last Book on the Left'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I remember.
BEN KISSEL The Dahmer chapter hit that very well. You did a great job.
MARCUS PARKS Thank you very much. Gacy chapter as well because the principles apply to both of them. But
that's the thing is that what it comes from, is that it comes from this idea of dehumanizing the
gay population and frankly looking at them as animals. And it's like, oh of course those animals
do that to each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They can't control themselves.
MARCUS PARKS They can't control themselves, just let them do whatever they want, who cares. The more of
them they kill, the less of them there on the street. So just let them go. And so after Randy saw
how easy it was to get away with violent crime just so long as you made the police feel
uncomfortable, Randy moved on from assault and rape to straight up murder. In September of
1971, a bartender at Randy's regular bar Stables named Wayne Dukette went missing from his
apartment in Long Beach and not long after his car was found parked near a beach area where
he'd last been seen. It wasn't until weeks later that his body was found at the bottom of a
ravine off the Ortega highway, so bloated and putrefied that they were not able to determine
an exact cause of death.
BEN KISSEL Dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hey Joey, do you think maybe a big bird dropped him from the sky?
BEN KISSEL I think maybe we should start investigating these as serial killings. Or just the beginnings of
one maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Listen, okay, you're new here.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Big birds, and I'm not talking about the Big Bird, he's the only innocent big bird.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But big birds quite often murder gay men and litter them across the freeway.
BEN KISSEL So we're not gonna do anything to stop it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Absolutely not. I don't want to be gay.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well Wayne Dukette blood alcohol level was found to be 0.36.
BEN KISSEL Woo!
MARCUS PARKS Just below the point where a person succumbs to acute alcohol poisoning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Man, he was 1/3 booze.
MARCUS PARKS And here's where things get somewhat mysterious with the Randy Kraft murders. Quite a few
of his victims were found with insanely high BAC levels but since Randy Kraft never came clean
about his methods, we don't know how he convinced these men to drink that much or if he
forced them into doing so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This comes up often in his crimes.
BEN KISSEL Ugh. Did he inject them with it like he's a member of Mötley Crüe? I mean what happened
here?
MARCUS PARKS No idea. What we can extrapolate from this is that Randy Kraft did not want his victims to fight
back. Considering the amount of mutilation that Randy would eventually subject his victims to,
it's likely that he wanted them simply in a state of existence, dehumanizing them to the point
where they were nothing more than playthings.
BEN KISSEL He wanted them alive though, not like Dahmer.
MARCUS PARKS Yes.
BEN KISSEL Did he want them alive?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He wanted them alive.
MARCUS PARKS He absolutely wanted them alive while he was torturing them and cutting them up and he
wanted them to scream and wiggle. But he did not want any sort of pushback at all. He didn't
want to work for it.
BEN KISSEL Ugh, okay.
MARCUS PARKS Knowing what we know about serial killers though, it's possible that this murder was some sort
of accident or simply an impulsive act. Maybe Wayne was hanging out with Randy and had too
much to drink and seeing Wayne in such a vulnerable position might have caused Randy to
finally go through with his murderous fantasies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI John Wayne Gacy did it, Jeffrey Dahmer did it. You see this quite often where the first
murderer - well they say accident. They say accident. Oh, there's no way I ever could have
controlled myself from cutting that man to pieces. Where it's like it seems like it's a big
process. There's a lot of steps in which you could stop yourself.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Where he just kind of created, it's this opportunity came and maybe it's also what we also
learned too, Randy Kraft's a process killer as we can now see, right. Because he liked going
through this entire rigmarole, he had his time that he liked to spend with them.
BEN KISSEL You're gonna want to go with the rigmarole on that, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know how else to say routine. His set? Like he goes through his set, his material.
BEN KISSEL No we can stick with rigamarole, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Maybe you could go with the hullabaloo, all of the hullabaloo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All this malarkey, all of this malarkey he goes through. But maybe it also comes down to the
thing is that when you keep them alive, they talk.
BEN KISSEL So this escalation happened over three years between the 13 year old and then the murder?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't even know.
BEN KISSEL We don't really know. Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS It's actually about a year.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. It's a little more than a year but not too long. And that's the thing is that we're pretty
sure that Wayne Dukette is the first actual victim because Wayne Dukette, his designation was
the first one on the scorecard. Randy used the word 'Stable' because that was the name of the
bar where Wayne Dukette worked. And that's how they were able to figure out so many
different victims with Randy Kraft is because the pneumonic devices that he used were very
thinly veiled, even people that were investigating it could figure out Wayne Dukette worked at
Stable, we found Wayne Dukette's body. He probably killed Wayne Dukette.
BEN KISSEL He's missing two key words, 'anything but'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Because that would really describe this man at this point. Anything but stable.
MARCUS PARKS Now as we said, Randy himself was actually a bartender in the scene. He worked nights at The
Buoy Shed. But eventually he cleaned up his act by studying computers at Long Beach State
University. After that he got a job at Aztec Aircraft where he ran computer payroll, beginning a
long and boring career in data processing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you're working at the office right now, alright, if you're at the office, I want you to shut off
the podcast. I want you to go down to processing, right.
BEN KISSEL Is this HR?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm just saying, you know who's killing people, right? This is the time. J'accuse! you want to go
in there, You want to fucking point him out, just see, watch him squirm. See what he does.
BEN KISSEL Office jobs are brutal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know who it is!
BEN KISSEL Sure!
MARCUS PARKS At Long Beach University however, Randy met his first long term boyfriend, Jeff Graves. They
soon moved in together and participated in the freewheeling 70s gay swinger scene, picking
up men at an historic Long Beach gay bar called Club Ripples.
BEN KISSEL Ooh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I love that bar name, it's amazing.
MARCUS PARKS Club Ripples is fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It does really sound fun, their lifestyle does sound fun, it sounds very busy, it sounds very
tiring.
BEN KISSEL When I get older though I'm gonna be like I need my ripple, can I have a little taste of my
ripple please?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just give him some tea, he can't taste it anymore, he lost his tongue 10 years ago.
BEN KISSEL I want my ripple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But Club Ripples is another place too where the author of 'Angel of Darkness' was like again,
'This seedy underbelly of come and fuck.' And meanwhile I was reading another thing about
Ripples where the guy's like, 'Yeah, it was a gay bar but people went there and a lot of times
they just drank and sat there and they'll meet somebody sure, they'll hook up, a lot of times
they'll meet somebody to date or whatever. It's a bar.'
BEN KISSEL It's a bar, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not a dangerous dark fuck labyrinth.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a place. It's got stools.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's a pinball machine.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Now the Long Beach Police Department didn't just refuse to investigate murders in the
gay population, rather they denied the population even existed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS And as late as 1981, their official stance was that there were no gay people in Long Beach at
all. This of course was contradicted by such bars and clubs in the area as Impact, Forced Heat,
and The Mineshaft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If there is a Mineshaft, it's kind of like what you know about the way they pull politics, stuff
like that. Where it's like if it's 20% it probably means it's bigger.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you have a bar called The Mineshaft in your town, there is at least a 20% gay population.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. Well what if there's actually a mine around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Even then you don't want to think about the mine when you're going to the bar! You want to
call it Johnny's.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Or Pizza Kate's. You know what I mean? You want something else, not where you just came
from.
BEN KISSEL Right. How annoying would be The Mimeshaft? Bunch of mimes in there.
MARCUS PARKS Honestly I love mimes. I love mimes, I love clowns, all of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What?
BEN KISSEL Fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's actually more offensive than Kissel's fucking stance about how much he loves Randy
Kraft.
BEN KISSEL I don't love Randy Kraft!
MARCUS PARKS I'm standing by it. I'll stand by my love of clowns til the day I fucking die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have a clown room in our home.
BEN KISSEL I do like clowns. The mime, it's difficult what they do. So I do respect the mime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not fucking difficult.
BEN KISSEL It is difficult.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No it's not.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, the balloon isn't actually heavy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but you just do it with your arms.
BEN KISSEL I'd love to see you try to be a mime for a day.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Yeah this is a podcast, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS This is a podcast, this is an audio medium.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, I'm being a mime.
BEN KISSEL You just failed miserably at being a mime because this is a podcast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I didn't because you couldn't hear me. That's how you know I succeeded.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I haven't lifted an actual heavy balloon.
BEN KISSEL There was some mimery in there.
MARCUS PARKS Now Randy's first long term love affair wasn't a calm one, partly because he and Jeff were
supplementing their open relationship with massive amounts of booze, weed, bennies, and
amyl nitrite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Cool.
MARCUS PARKS Therefore Randy and Jeff fought a lot. And when they'd fight, Randy would get in his car and
cover miles upon miles of highway, all around Southern California.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL Getting some ideas I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We were joking about this, Natalie and I were talking about the cannibal cop because it all
came from the fact that it's all about if your boyfriend or your girlfriend or husband or wife
spends too much time up on the computer late at night, right.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI While you go to bed, they're the cannibal cop.
BEN KISSEL Like what's going on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Now we've been calling each other the cannibal cop if she goes to bed before me or if I go to
bed before her and come down to see her on the laptop being like, you being a fucking
cannibal cop right now?
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI There's a thing about when you get into a fight and the guy goes, 'I'm going out!' And then he's
gone for like two days. It's not good, man
BEN KISSEL No it's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's not good. It's like what are you doing out there? Because your bed's here, your stuff's here.
BEN KISSEL Yeah and the gas prices, none of the pumps work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh these days. Oh Ukraine.
MARCUS PARKS Not coincidentally, Randy's nighttime drives, these happened about the same time that
corpses began popping up off certain freeways.
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS One of those was a 20 year old named Edward Daniel Moore, unimaginatively titled EDM on
Randy's scorecard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Electronic dance music.
MARCUS PARKS On Christmas Eve 1972, Randy Kraft picked up Moore somewhere, took him elsewhere, and
beat him in the face with a metal pipe. Ligature marks around Moore's ankles and wrists imply
that he had been tied up and as a very odd, perhaps practical MO, Kraft shoved a sock up his
rectum. Apparently this was a body transport trick used in the military to keep the body from
purging itself of fluids during transport which implies that Randy in some cases might have
taken his victims to actual locations to torture them in increasingly violent ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He worked within his car up to a point and then we are talking about when he really set up this
pattern, we'll go as we describe more that it really does seem like he is a... One thing about
Randy Kraft as well is that he is highly organized.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He's one of those killers where he's a planner. He plans really explicitly. And so the idea that
maybe that's what it is, is that when you're moving these back and forth, I mean this is
disgusting but you don't want to spill. And you got to put him out someplace where no one will
see you.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS And that's the thing is I don't think that he did all of his crimes within his car because there's a
lot of blood involved in these crimes and if he would have done it inside his car, his car would
have been a traveling fucking slaughterhouse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Everything would have been soaked to the fucking bone with blood at all times. And it's not
like no one ever got in his fucking Mustang. They did of course, he had a long term boyfriend
who had no idea what was going on. So he had to have had some location somewhere where
he was taking these bodies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI A Carl's Jr. A friendly Carl's Jr. You actually would really be surprised what you can do there.
BEN KISSEL And of course the Chevy Slaughterhouse, it was discontinued. I was like why would they name
the car slaughterhouse?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah with all the tarp preinstalled.
BEN KISSEL Come on. I mean I know it's the 80s, I guess the 70s. It's the 70s?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's the 70s.
MARCUS PARKS The 70s.
BEN KISSEL Even weirder.
MARCUS PARKS It goes into the 80s though. Well as far as disposal went, Moore's body had been dumped from
a moving car and was spotted by a motorist at 1:45am on the westbound off ramp of the 405
and 605 freeways about a day after he was last seen alive. Now as I said earlier, Randy Kraft
was not the only person killing dudes and dumping them off freeways in Southern California.
He's simply the most well known. As such by the end of 1972, 11 bodies had been found, only
2 of which had belonged to Randy Kraft.
BEN KISSEL What is going on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the only place where I really say the cops in this crux had a very difficult time.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL What about just patrolling?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The sheer amount of bodies that popped up in a very short amount of time. It was like a
blitzkrieg. It happened really fucking fast. These crimes escalated quickly.
BEN KISSEL Was there a lot of press? Obviously Randy Kraft hasn't admitted to any of this stuff which is so
surprising, but was the media covering this stuff? Did he follow his crimes at all a little bit?
MARCUS PARKS Some of them. Some of them were covered later on but at this point no. And there's also to
remember at this point in the 1970s, the murder rate, today when people talk about how
America is going to the dogs and how crime is on the rise and everything's going to shit, we
cannot imagine the murder rate of the 70s in America. We can't fucking imagine it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS But even though the bodies were piling up, cops still wanted to press the jealous homosexual
lover angle whenever they could. And in the case of Edward Moore, they tried pinning the
murder on his on again off again boyfriend Charles Vine, nicknamed The Major.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Wait until you meet The Minor. That's my son and he's lovely, honestly he's doing wonderful in
school.
BEN KISSEL Very nice. Remember that show Major Dad?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Kind of like that, isn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, this is all like that. A controversial episode of Major Dad.
BEN KISSEL Very controversial, yes.
MARCUS PARKS In fact the Orange County DA believed that a good chunk of the 11 victims had been killed in
one night stands that had gotten out of hand.
BEN KISSEL What?
MARCUS PARKS Although I have no idea where this assumption came from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know, it's just this idea that every single time a gay man has sex, they have to do blood
play and choke and beat the shit out of each other and that's only one out of five times.
BEN KISSEL I mean Jesus. Either way you don't end up on the side of the freaking highway as a corpse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, most of the time you end up at the Jack in the Box.
BEN KISSEL Sure, having a good time.
MARCUS PARKS Nevertheless more bodies kept showing up. By February, a John Doe was found naked lying
face up in a ditch on the Terminal Island freeway with his arms outstretched and a brown sock
shoved up his rectum. On Easter Sunday of that same year, another John Doe was found after
the body had been thrown from a moving vehicle. This one was missing its genitals entirely
because they'd been cut off minutes before the victim died.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Eventually he was identified in 1995 as Kevin Bailey.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Remember this.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, same thing we just now were seeing with Dean Corll, they only are just starting to
identify some of these bodies too.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's how many he killed is that they have to keep digging it up and figuring out more and
more of the shit. And this murder is really where you start to see his specific MO come
through.
BEN KISSEL I don't really want to ask, I guess I'm just a little curious. What did he do with the cock and
balls?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Don't know.
BEN KISSEL Do we have any idea?
MARCUS PARKS No idea.
BEN KISSEL Did he keep them like Dahmer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Some of them we know what he did with it.
BEN KISSEL Is he a cannibal?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. I don't know. Don't know.
BEN KISSEL Gosh.
MARCUS PARKS It's also possible at this time that Randy was experimenting with full dismemberment,
although the victim found soon after Kevin Bailey might have been a victim of one of the other
two Freeway Killers operating at the same time and place Kraft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Good lord.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All you need is to be able to afford a car and a driver's license and you can go anywhere in a
manner of minutes.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. I'm not sure if they were too worried about the license.
MARCUS PARKS This victim, named John Doe 52, was dismembered-
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, John Doe 52.
BEN KISSEL 52?
MARCUS PARKS 52!
BEN KISSEL That's more than the presidents we've had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS I'm just guessing here, I'm speculating completely. I would imagine he's John Doe 52 because
he was probably the 52nd John Doe found in that area or in that city that year. I would
imagine.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI God.
MARCUS PARKS This guy was dismembered, decapitated, and spread across multiple locations. His head was
found in a brown paper bag behind a supermarket, his arm, torso, and right leg were found in
trash bags roadside in San Pedro, and the left leg was found behind The Buoys Shed bar where
Kraft used to work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's kind of like alright I guess this can go here.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, it's a little close to home.
MARCUS PARKS Additionally there were ligature marks around his ankles, his genitals had been removed, his
eyelids had been cut off, his hands were actually never found.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God.
MARCUS PARKS By using context clues, it's likely that this victim was the one named Hawth Off Head on
Randy's scorecard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's always when they do it when it's supposed to be kind of funny to them that it always really
makes my stomach turn. Where's it's this little inside joke to himself.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL He and BTK, man. I think that they both probably thought they were quite humorous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, they thought that. Well he just thought he was a genius. He's that type of person too
where he just thinks that he's the ultimate villain.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But even though he won't admit it. BTK wanted to see everybody writhed when he was giving
his confessions, he's the other type. That's what makes him extra fucking awful is because BTK
continued the trauma in jail.
BEN KISSEL Right. You wonder for the victims families if they would like for him to confess. I don't know
what's better or worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know.
BEN KISSEL It's a horrible situation all around.
MARCUS PARKS Randy's life meanwhile, it was in an upswing. He was doing pretty good.
BEN KISSEL Whoa! All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whoa! Well I also remember when I was listening to some documentary on this and this is
such like a true crime spouse moment where I was making dinner and Natalie walks into the
kitchen and it was just like, 'And he was found bound, his eyelids removed, genitals removed.'
And she's like, 'Having fun?'
BEN KISSEL Watching the Cooking Channel. Weird. Guy Fieri. That's a unique approach.
MARCUS PARKS By 1972 Randy Kraft had found a candidate to believe in with George McGovern and Kraft
campaigned tirelessly.
BEN KISSEL I got some bad news for ya. Maybe not the best choice for Veep.
MARCUS PARKS Kraft also showed up to his high school reunion not as a John Bircher but as an openly gay
liberal data processor who believed weed should be legal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's an incredible character. It really is, it's a character.
BEN KISSEL It's a character, right.
MARCUS PARKS At the same time though, Randy's crimes were continuing. The next victim, Ronnie Wiebe, met
the same fate as the ones before except he was covered in bite marks. Wiebe however
contradicted the police theory that there were packs of rabidly jealous homosexuals
rampaging across Southern California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think a lot more other things would get disrupted if there was just packs of jealous
homosexuals everywhere.
MARCUS PARKS See Wiebe, who was last seen at the Sportsman bar in Los Alamitos at 2am in late July, he was
straight. That meant that any young man might become a victim and it was also becoming
obvious that the same guy was doing it because Wiebe's body was found in almost the exact
same spot as Randy Kraft's second victim. From there Kraft began experimenting even further,
shaving the heads of victims for reasons unknown or shoving pieces of wood, thick and thin,
into the penises and rectums before he committed the act of murder.
BEN KISSEL God dang.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Which would require you to basically, that's why he needed to get you as fucked up as
possible.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI So that you would not physically move against it. Literally he gets you to the point where
you're so pilled up and drugged up, very similar to Dahmer, Nilsen, so then you become a
pliable mannequin.
MARCUS PARKS But perhaps surprisingly Randy did not only prey on the weak and marginalized. Specifically
Randy seemed to enjoy specializing in hitchhiking Marines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI This is the shit that shows, I don't know how to frame this, but it really shows what he wanted
was a challenge in many ways.
BEN KISSEL But then he also wanted them all subdued.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was about subduing a killing machine, right. Because at the time period, coming out of
Vietnam, these are a lot of guys who have seen action. These are people that have killed
people that then become your victim. And he gets really obsessed with young, virile, 5'9"-5'11"
blond Marines.
MARCUS PARKS But I think what it is that what Randy Kraft is doing here is, to put it in video game terms, he's
using a cheat code. He is killing Marines, he is killing these virile, mean motherfuckers but he's
doing it by taking them down to a level where they can't fight back, where they're basically
just flesh bags. So he's not actually doing anything. He's just using the big fucking sword, he's
using Hoarfrost Stomp.
BEN KISSEL Doesn't the movie Rambo start with him hitchhiking?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
BEN KISSEL That's a good thing he didn't get picked up by Randy Randy Kraft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh Randy Kraft vs Rambo! That's a awesome! That's an awesome idea. I'm gonna write that
fucking movie, dude.
MARCUS PARKS Well about an hour away from Long Beach is Camp Pendleton and every weekend Marines
training are stationed at the base spread out into the surrounding communities. And many of
them hitchhike to get to where they wanted to go. And when Randy and Jeff fought, Randy
would sometimes temporarily move in with friends and sometimes disappear for days after
mumbling something about going down to quote unquote "look for Marines".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I gotta go look for Marines, you can tell by their hats.
BEN KISSEL What's that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I'm looking for Marines! There's one, there's one. So I read this very interesting essay about a
guy that realized decades after this, basically he was a young Marine in Southern California
and he heard this idea people were talking about afterwards, this is about 15 years ago when
he wrote this essay where he was looking into this guy that someone brought up about a serial
killer that killed Marines in SoCal from this time period. And he was like, 'I was a Marine in
Socal during that time period.'
BEN KISSEL Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And is it that guy? There's no way it's that one guy.
BEN KISSEL This is not a good aha moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, exactly. It's a AHHHH! moment. Because he realized that he had this moment with a man
that he had never experienced before. Again, this author says, he's like, 'I'm straight as fucking
hell, right. I like boobs!' And you're like okay buddy, okay.
BEN KISSEL All right, got it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he said he was on the beach and then this young yuppie-looking guy rolls up to him and
he starts talking and they hit it off. And then he's like all of a sudden him and this guy, they're
talking, having a great time. And he says hours go past and he's like again, 'I don't talk to chicks
this long!' And then he's talking to this guy and eventually this man turns out to be Randy Kraft
because he obviously saw the picture later on and it was Randy Kraft.
BEN KISSEL Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Randy Kraft is like, 'Let's go up to my motel, come on. I got good beers,' Which at the time was
an enticing thing.
BEN KISSEL Bud Light.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No!
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No. Because at the time Marines could only afford shit beer at shitty little saloons. So he's like
yeah, I'll have some good ass beer, me and my new bro, we're gonna have some friendly time.
Dudes, guys, just being dudes up in his hotel room alone with each other. And so they went up
there and he goes under his little refrigerator and he says that he said that he handed him, this
was an interesting detail, he said he handed him the beer just below belt level in a way that
dudes and friends do, like a symbol of camaraderie, right. And I was like I don't know what that
means.
BEN KISSEL Wait, what?
MARCUS PARKS What? That must be a Marine thing. I don't know, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I don't know. But he said that he had this drink and they're lying on the bed together and then
Randy Kraft does this thing where he's like, 'How do you feel about gay sex?' And he's like, 'I'm
straight, man. I'm super, super straight.' This is funny and all because he realized that he was
falling in love with this man for a moment where they talked about everything under the sun
for hours.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was like that movie Before Sunset, After Sunset where they're hanging out together for an
entire day. And he's like, 'I'm straight'. And he's just like, 'You know, 90% of you Marines love
gay sex.' He's like, 'You guys all love gay sex. And he's just like, 'No we don't. My buddies are all
straight. They're super, super straight.' And he's like, 'Yeah, not until you get him away from
his friends.' And he realized it hit him because he was a sniper in the Marines.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And he was just like oh okay, this all right, this is fine. But eventually he starts telling him, like
he convinces him to take his shirt off, they start taking some pictures.
BEN KISSEL If you work hard for the abs you gotta show them off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what he said! He felt beautiful for the first time in his life. He said it was the first time he
felt seen by somebody.
MARCUS PARKS Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That somebody's there. And then it wasn't until decades later he realized that in a way,
because he held firm, he's like, 'I don't want to have sex with you. This is a feeling I've never
felt before but it's not sexual in that full way. I'm not boned up so, I'm gonna walk away.' And
he said this look on his face was winsome disappointment was on Randy Kraft's face where
he's like all right, I guess you're gonna get out of here. But thanks for the pictures, that's
something I can remember you by. And when he left he realized, he put this all together, he's
like I just put myself in this crazy position, hyper vulnerable position with this dude that I just
fucking met.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It happened that fast. It was like all of a sudden you're in the trap. And he was like in a way he
felt like Randy Kraft kind of let him go. But then there's a part of him that thinks did he put a
Valium in the beer? Because he only had two beers in there and his head started swimming.
BEN KISSEL Oh probably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He didn't know what he was being overwhelmed with. But it's that moment where he's like,
okay then I started putting two and two together when I realized who he was. The hotel was
positioned in a way where if you looked out the window, you literally watched the strip where
you can see from the window, watching Marines walk from from Fleet Week, wherever they're
released.
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You can watch them walk from the bars.
BEN KISSEL That's for the Navy men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yes.
MARCUS PARKS Seamen. They're bringing it back in New York, next couple of weeks.
BEN KISSEL All right!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Woo! You go, boys! But he's like, like a sniper he completely positioned himself perfectly. The
freeway off-ramp was half a mile away. He can completely see physically when you could walk
and when the packs were going and he understood just go after people when they're alone
and that people are different when they're out of the context of their social groups. And it's
really easy to get in. He says like yeah, so I could see sure, definitely he used drugs on some
guys, he used booze on some guys, he used sex on some guys. He did that thing. But for me he
saw a hole in like my love spot.
BEN KISSEL Love spot.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He made me fall in love with him. He was like, 'I witnessed the master class of a sociopath at
the height of his powers and he had me.'
BEN KISSEL Yeah. All right. Love spot reminds me of Jodi Arias. Talking about Jodi Arias, I think we had
some attention to her love spot. Remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL There we go. Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Now some of these Marines were in fact gay but most were either just looking for rides or
looking to get drunk on the cheap. But what they all shared was that they were young,
between 18 and 20. And Randy Kraft took full advantage of their naivete. With Marine Roger
Dickerson, Kraft chewed off his nipple and penis before dumping him on a dead end street off
Laguna Beach after Dickerson told friends he'd found someone to drive him to Los Angeles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Ugh, god. It's just about biting the penis off.
BEN KISSEL Snapping turtle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's just a lot.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. After Dickerson, three more were killed between August and November of 1974, all
picked up at bars or on the side of the road. Two were just strangled but one met his end with
a 4 foot long tree branch shoved up his rectum.
BEN KISSEL Oh gosh.
MARCUS PARKS But perhaps the most graphic murder of a Marine and perhaps the most grotesque of Randy's
entire spree, was that of Mark Hall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. And in the book he described Mark Hall as looking like Ringo Starr, the quote unquote
"slow Beatle".
BEN KISSEL Whoa! Leave him alone! Ringo kept the entire group together, don't even get me going. I'm
team Ringo all the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Jesus Christ.
MARCUS PARKS Taken from a party where he passed out drunk on a couch on New Year's Eve, Hall was found
three days later naked and dead with a 0.67 BAC. It's 30 beers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We've probably had nights-
BEN KISSEL I've had 30 beers in a night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah but it's not good for you.
BEN KISSEL No. Yeah, it's very bad.
MARCUS PARKS When you say 30 beers in a night, you mean you started drinking at 7 and you stop drinking at
7. It's over a 12 hour period.
BEN KISSEL That's a noon to 3am.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, sure.
BEN KISSEL That's a long day.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah but it's many, many hours. Now one thing that we can say about many of these murders
is that Kraft either did them in his car or beside his car because starting with Mark Hall, many
showed evidence that the killer was using his car cigarette lighter as one of his torture tools.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Are we supposed to do a gold star? Are we supposed to say that?
BEN KISSEL I actually think this is a gold star episode in a lot of ways.
MARCUS PARKS I suppose so, sure.
BEN KISSEL I think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's kind of light.
BEN KISSEL I don't think it's very light.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Am I destroyed?
BEN KISSEL Yeah, dude! Yes, you are because he literally chewed a man's genitals off. Yes this is a gold
star.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You're the one who likes this guy.
BEN KISSEL I don't like this guy. Oh my lord.
MARCUS PARKS To tell you the honest truth, I might as well just go ahead and make the announcement now
that every serial killer episode we're going to do from now on is gonna be a gold star episode.
Because we're now, where we're at with covering serial killers, we've covered so many that
the ones left are the ones that are too brutal for people to talk about.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS So it's just going to be this forever.
BEN KISSEL Oh great. That's just wonderful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh God, let's get back in the vibe.
BEN KISSEL Please.
MARCUS PARKS With this first one, Kraft had used the lighter to brand Hall's scrotum, cheeks, nose, upper lip,
and finally his eyeballs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh my god.
BEN KISSEL Jesus, that's sounds horrible.
MARCUS PARKS His legs had been cut deep close to the bone and a cocktail swizzle stick had been jammed into
his penis all the way up to his bladder. Finally Kraft had cut off Hall's genitals and shoved them
up Hall's rectum along with some unidentified burned material and leaves. And according to
the medical examiner, Hall was alive through most of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And if you might need this, honestly, you might need this. So if you want to play a little
drinking game, every single time we say the word 'genitals' take a big long drink so that
eventually you just pass out, you just go to sleep.
BEN KISSEL Isn't that what happened to these poor victims?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's why make sure you're alone.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness. Also don't be on a freeway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah don't be driving because honestly they do not put drinking in the list of the things you
can do on the freeway.
BEN KISSEL No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But also try to hang your head off the side of the bed if you could face down so you just puke
on the floor.
BEN KISSEL Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS And by this point the freeway killings were becoming a bit of a problem in Southern California.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it is a bit of a bummer, yeah. Ugh, it's hard to surf's up.
BEN KISSEL Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Especially after five or so Marines had shown up dead on the side of the road. Problem
was though, like with the Night Stalker murders, these murders were happening in multiple
precincts and they were therefore being investigated piecemeal. For the LAPD's investigation
you had Sergeant John St John, aka Jigsaw John.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's because I like construction.
BEN KISSEL I guess that's a cool name.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah, he'd been working murders for over 20 years.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
MARCUS PARKS But despite his ability to put cases together, hence the nickname Jigsaw John, he could see no
pattern other than that they were all young and male.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And their penises keep falling off!
BEN KISSEL It seems like there's a pattern.
MARCUS PARKS In Seal Beach, where half a dozen bodies have been found, you had Sergeant Gary Buzzard.
But Buzzard was also coming up empty. But at the crime scene where Mark Hall had been
found, there was a shattered bottle of liquor ironically named Winners Vodka with Randy
Kraft's fingerprints still on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI You know that that ain't good, man.
BEN KISSEL No, it is not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI If you have to say no, you're a winner when you're drunk on vodka.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Sometimes you are but a lot of the times, especially if it's in a broken bottle at the side of a
freeway next to a genital-less corpse. You might be not a winner.
BEN KISSEL No, Winners Vodka, it sounds like that will make you blind more so than the cigarette lighters
there. It's like bathtub gin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It should be only for closers.
BEN KISSEL Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS However Randy had never been arrested so this bottle would remain unused until Randy's
trial. But as Randy took two more victims, the investigation ramped up. Detectives looked
closely at the practice of putting socks into the anuses because it was implied that the killer
might have a military background. Additionally some had white tissue shoved up their nose for
the same purpose of purge prevention. These techniques implied that the killer was driving
long distances with the bodies in his car and wanted to keep the whole business from getting
messier than it needed to be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Technically that's good cop work.
BEN KISSEL Yeah. So they're onto something here.
MARCUS PARKS They're trying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI They're trying.
MARCUS PARKS At this point they are trying.
BEN KISSEL Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We've talked about this all the time that sometimes the laziness of cops could know no bounds
but this type of massive amounts of bodies just rolling up really shows this ain't good.
Especially when the cops look like the victims, you're starting to see yourself a little bit, you're
starting to get a little bit of that wet upper lip. Wondering like it kinda looks like my brother, it
kind of looks like me. And you start to like, am I next? It really helps to give them a little bit of
fear.
BEN KISSEL Right. That is interesting.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Eventually the FBI was brought in for a profile. The profile said that the killer lived some
distance from his crimes, cruised to find victims, and was methodical and cunning. This
actually pegged Randy's MO but really didn't do much in terms of capture. A psychiatrist at UC
Irvine also took a stab at the profile, speculating that the killer was quote "completely baffled
as to his sexual preference".
BEN KISSEL What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I think he knows exactly what his sexual preference is.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, the one thing that we can say is that he seems to know what he likes. Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Getting a little too into Freud territory, the psychiatrist said that the killer bit the nipples
and genitals off his victims to make them female, thus reinforcing the killer's self image of
masculinity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh sure.
BEN KISSEL He would just kill women if that was the case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I have a gum addiction. But also you didn't say that correctly, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS How am I supposed to say it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) The psychiatrist said that the killer bit the nipples and genitals off his victims
to make them females.
BEN KISSEL No, you're just making that up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI (German accent) No, I am just always studying the nipple removal signs.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Now profiles aside, Randy Kraft did almost get caught on his 13th victim. But unfortunately his
presumed assumption that a sheen of gay keeps the cops away proved once again to be
correct.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's our next piece of merch.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We're gonna sell that on a t-shirt.
MARCUS PARKS A sheen of gay keeps the cops away. In March of 1975, Randy found 19 year old Keith Crotwell
and 15 year old Kent May hanging out in a parking lot near Belmont Shore. Kraft pulled up in
his black and white 1974 Mustang and offered the boys a ride. They accepted and after a little
bit of driving, Kraft gave them Valium with a few beers to wash it down. Eventually Kent May
noticed just before he passed out in the back seat that Randy wasn't taking or drinking
anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Well he's driving. Hey, he's driving.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL So this is where he toes the line.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. No, no, no, he just likes to pick up kids and give them beer and show them a good time.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, totally normal.
MARCUS PARKS All dudes do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS That's just a fun thing dudes do for kids.
BEN KISSEL Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI The back of Kissel's truck the other day, I saw he had like 10 kids back there.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, 10. That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI All chanting like, 'Drop us off! Drop us off!' I mean it's weird and then he had that weird Randy
Kraft #1 bumper sticker and I was like I don't even know where you got that.
BEN KISSEL What did I do to deserve this today? Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS But instead of winding up dead on the side of the road, Kent May woke up in his own bed.
Apparently a couple of other kids hanging out in the parking lot said that Randy's Mustang
pulled back in and Kent got shoved out onto the pavement, unconscious. The kids took Kent
home but when Keith Crotwell never showed back up, those same kids filed a police report.
Well over a month later, three teenagers out on the beach near a marina jetty spotted Keith
Crotwell's decomposing skull with rotting flesh still attached to the brows, cheeks, and
temples. The rest of his body was never found.
BEN KISSEL Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS Now this, as it always is, should have been the end of it and it should have been ended by the
cops. But as it went, Randy's distinctive Mustang was not found by the cops but by two
Scooby-Doo teenagers who took it upon themselves to find it.
BEN KISSEL Holy shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Zoinks! There's a sock in the butthole, Scoob!
BEN KISSEL Oh my God. If you're a kid, this is kind of cool right, in a sense because this is what you always
dream of but in reality it's really bad. It's very scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI What is the movie with Jerry O'Connell in it? He's the chubby boy in it.
MARCUS PARKS Stand By Me.
BEN KISSEL Stand By Me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, Stand By Me.
MARCUS PARKS What was worse was the fact that the Mustang was found less than a mile from where Kraft
had picked up the boys. The kids took the location of Kraft's car to the police who sent a
detective named Mike Woodward. But all Woodward was focused on when he went to Kraft's
apartment was Krafts big gay mustache, the poster of a big gay man hanging on his wall, and
Kraft's quote unquote "gay tendencies" when he spoke.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. He showed up, he had little boy shorts on, he had a lampshade on his head and he just
went like, 'Golly gee, you want some ritas?'
BEN KISSEL Just a new stereotype is formed in the officer's mind. Well that's what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's what gay men do, they dress as furniture.
BEN KISSEL Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI But he's one of those guys too where he'd shape shift.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Because again, he'd do the macho thing, he's got the fun gay, normal stand up man thing,
right. Because then he has his like, 'Me and my boyfriend, we enjoy our time together and we
maintain petunias every Saturday.'
BEN KISSEL Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And then you have this where he does the whole like floppy wrists mince thing to be like, 'Do
not worry about me. I mean I'm just a silly little goose. I wouldn't do anything like that.' So it's
scary.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. After talking to Kraft, Woodward came up with the theory that Kraft had picked up the
two boys and gave them a little too much to drink. After dropping one off, Kraft made the
moves on the other by the marina. But Crotwell probably just fell in the water somehow.
BEN KISSEL Where's the rest of his body?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Banana peels are all over SoCal.
MARCUS PARKS Detached.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Banana peels are all over Southern California and I'll tell you what, I took a picture-
BEN KISSEL You don't slip on them on the sand!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at this. You wanna talk about this? What I just took a picture of?
BEN KISSEL Do you see a banana peel?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Look at the picture I just took this morning.
BEN KISSEL You're Polish, you can't fall over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That is a banana peel right outside the door of my fucking car.
BEN KISSEL That is a banana peel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Randy Kraft II is striking again, trying to get me to accidentally quote unquote wink wink wink,
trip into a harbor. Look at that! Do you see it, Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS I don't see it. You're holding it up to a fucking zoom camera, I can't see it at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's a banana peel!
BEN KISSEL It's a banana peel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Strategically placed.
MARCUS PARKS Dude, I live in new york city. I see banana peels on the street every fucking day of my life.
BEN KISSEL Sure. It's really a non sequitur. Check your rectum later on this evening though just to make
sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh you know I've been jamming socks up there just so that honestly it pads the roids.
BEN KISSEL All right.
MARCUS PARKS Well Kraft, according to the police theory, was afraid that his sexuality would be exposed. So
when the boy fell into the water, he just walked away to let him drown.
BEN KISSEL Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS At least that's the police theory. And they were fine with this theory by the way.
BEN KISSEL That's fine?
MARCUS PARKS Well that's what happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Boys fall into rivers and stay there forever every day.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL Gosh.
MARCUS PARKS Now at first Kraft denied ever meeting either boy but on his second interview he said that he
dropped off Kent after the kid got too drunk. Then he continued driving around with Crotwell.
But when Kraft's car got stuck on an embankment, Crotwell wandered off while they were
waiting for a tow truck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Just another runaway boy.
BEN KISSEL And then he just lost his entire body somehow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL Yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
MARCUS PARKS Now to the detective's slight credit, they did surmise after the second interview that this dude
totally killed that kid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He might have killed this child.
BEN KISSEL So let's just press charges then we have enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No.
BEN KISSEL No?
MARCUS PARKS No evidence. No body. Because that's the thing is that they had gone and talked to him and let
him know like oh you killed someone, the cops are kind of on your trail. I'm sure he cleaned up
his car, I'm sure he made sure there was no evidence, and there was nothing that was
connecting Randy to a murder. There was no body, there was just a head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI No body, no crime.
BEN KISSEL The head has got to count for something. All right.
MARCUS PARKS But Kraft was set free. Crotwell's death was ruled as an accidental drowning and Kraft was
allowed to murder dozens of times more.
BEN KISSEL Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who do they think removed the head, Flounder?
BEN KISSEL That's the thing, it would be Sebastian if anything. He's got the claws.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh that's true, the claws.
MARCUS PARKS Well a body will dissipate once it gets into the ocean. Saltwater fucks up a body real bad. And
then you got the seals, there's a bunch of seals down there. The seals are going to fuck up a
body quite a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI I actually got an email. Oh yeah seals, serial killers of the ocean. But I also got an email after
we talked about finding skeletons underneath the water.
BEN KISSEL Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And it does kind of preserve, things would be together. His skeleton would be together still. It
would take a lot for his head to be separated from his skeleton unless it was snipped off.
MARCUS PARKS By a seal.
BEN KISSEL Something's gotta happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Who is this fucking Jeffrey Dahmer seal?
BEN KISSEL I don't know. We're not gonna start passing blame on seals here. This is about Randy Kraft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Go to the zoo. If you are free this weekend, get fucking absolutely blind drunk at the zoo and
start accusing seals of murdering little boys.
BEN KISSEL Well the nice thing is you could do a tight five in front of the seals and they will clap for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS Yeah. Well possibly because Kraft was getting his kicks elsewhere, he began winding down
from his more hedonistic bar hopping cruising days and he became more interested in dinner
parties and vacations at Key West. He was becoming a respectable gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Is this what's happening to our friends?
MARCUS PARKS Yeah.
BEN KISSEL I hope not.
MARCUS PARKS It's what happens to all of us eventually.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We get into serial murder and then we get into dinner parties?
MARCUS PARKS No! It's not so much about going out and getting fucked up all the time, it's about let's all get
together and have dinner or let's take a nice vacation together.
BEN KISSEL That's not the bad part.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, after you're done blowing loads into the dismembered butthole of a corpse?
BEN KISSEL That's a problem.
MARCUS PARKS Boyfriend Jeff Graves however, four years younger than Randy, he didn't feel the same way.
They therefore broke up permanently. And Randy started seeing another Jeff named Jeff
Seelig, described by author Dennis McDougal as quote "a chubby apprentice baker".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Whatever.
BEN KISSEL Oh come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI He better be. If you're a baker, I want you kind of chubby.
BEN KISSEL Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS By the start of 1976, Randy would move in with the second Jeff and Seelig would spend 8 years
living with Kraft, never once suspecting that his partner was a serial killer.
BEN KISSEL Oh my God.
MARCUS PARKS And that's where we'll pick back up for Part 2 of Randy Kraft.
BEN KISSEL Oh my lord!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Oh god, you don't know who anybody is ever. And I just want you to remember that you don't
know who your spouse is, you don't know who your friends are. You don't know anything
really about them.
BEN KISSEL I'm gonna say it's rare to find out that your partner is a serial murderer to the point where
they killed 67 people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI 25%.
BEN KISSEL Not 25%. Oh my God. 1% is enough. All right everyone, well thank you so much for listening to
this episode. We're back to murder, that's for dang sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yep.
BEN KISSEL And yeah, we hope you're all doing well out there. I don't know how to segue into come see us
live. We're gonna be in Jacksonville, Atlanta, Memphis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI We won't turn you into a bunch of parts if you come see us live.
MARCUS PARKS Absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Except from falling apart from laughter.
BEN KISSEL Laughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And we'll only split sides when it comes to our jokes.
BEN KISSEL That's right. All right everyone. Well thank you so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI That's good, that's good. It's really good material.
MARCUS PARKS That's solid. That's what you call salesmanship.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Salesmanship. We got Last Comic Book on the Left if you look over at Z2, you can still get your
pre orders in, we're writing stuff for that right now, it's gonna be really fun.
BEN KISSEL Soul Plumber!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Soul Plumber #6 has been released, it's out of the uterus.
MARCUS PARKS Yep. Soul Plumber #6 is out so if you've been waiting for the entire series to be done before
you read it so you can do it all in one go, you can now do it. Please try to go down to your local
comic book store and pick up all six issues if you can. If you can't, you can read it on whatever
comic book app you prefer. But thanks to everyone so much, thanks everyone who read it so
much and all the kind words, we really fucking appreciate it. We worked really hard on it and it
was a fun Frank Henenlotter type ride for us, it was fucking awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It was fun.
BEN KISSEL You guys did a fantastic job writing that, it was so entertaining and John McCrae and PJ
Holden, it's just a fantastic job by them as well. So we're just so lucky to have such talented
people all out there. It's amazing what people can do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It really is.
BEN KISSEL It really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And sometimes what they can do is get you so drunk you get a 0.67 blood alcohol level and
they cut off your lips and your scrotum.
BEN KISSEL Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI It's crazy what people can do.
BEN KISSEL It really is. All right everyone, thank you so much for listening. Take care of yourselves. Hail
yourself!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL Megustalations everybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah, it's nice man. Just be careful, man.
BEN KISSEL Be careful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And again, never go to a second location. I don't know how many times we have to say this
throughout our entire tenure here. Never go to a second location.
BEN KISSEL It's hard when you're drugged like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS Well never take drugs from a stranger. That's another thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Unless they're hot.
MARCUS PARKS Or a drink from a stranger or anything like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Again, unless they're really, really hot.
MARCUS PARKS Unless they're super hot, yeah. That is true. Then you have no choice, then you have to. Right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI And hot people don't lie. They never lie.
BEN KISSEL You sound like horrible parents trying to give a lesson before their kids go to Bonnaroo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI Yeah. Never trust a man named Spider who doesn't sell reptiles.
BEN KISSEL That's a good point.