The frail old man shuffled into the interview room. Shackled by the arms and legs he was escorted into the cell off the interview room. He was small, shrunken, much less than his listed 5-foot-10, 170 pounds. Gone was the hair, the 1980s mustache, and any trace of the smirk he occasionally flashed in court decades earlier.
“It’s weird, when you look at him there’s nothing memorable,” said Dan Salcedo, a retired homicide detective with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, who interviewed the notorious Randy Kraft in 2012. “He’s not the prototypical media version of what a killer looks like. If you put him in a room filled with people, he’s the last one you’d pick.”
Monsters are rarely what you expect and this guy was a definition of the “banality of evil” description that has been applied to some of the worst serial killers and rapists in U.S. history. Banal, boring, and unoriginal, hardly the stuff of nightmares.
Dan Salcedo recently talked to Behind the Badge about meeting Kraft and other cases in his career as homicide detective.
American society seems to have an insatiable appetite for tales of murder and serial killers. Some, like Jeffrey Dahmer, have been profiled at least 20 times. True-crime series, movies, podcasts, and books are in seemingly endless supply. And yet, somehow Kraft has been curiously overlooked. This despite his potentially massive body count and unsolved cases that remain, the depravity of his crimes, and the fact that many of the officials in his tale, and Kraft himself, although so far silent, are available to tell the story.
“The weird part is, a lot of people don’t know about him,” Salcedo said. ”Randy Kraft is the perfect case. No one really knows about his killings. He’s untapped. It would be great to get into his mind.”
Kraft was referred to as the Scorecard Killer, for a coded list of more than 60 entries believed to correspond to victims, mostly young men and Marines, whom he tortured, raped, and murdered before dumping their bodies, sometimes on roadsides, offramps, and public spaces. For more than a decade, Kraft trolled and terrorized the Southland while confounding law enforcement.
It was only a random traffic stop in 1983 on suspicion of drunk driving, with the corpse of a Marine in the passenger seat, that led to his capture.
At the time of his conviction, Kraft was believed to be the most prolific serial killer in the U.S. to that point. Although his total may have since been eclipsed, Kraft was convicted for 16 murders and is suspected of at least 65 others, and potentially 100 or more unsolved murders in California, Oregon, and Michigan.
As recently as Nov. 2023, the remains of a teenager believed to have been killed by Kraft nearly 50 years ago, were identified using investigative genetic genealogy.
Salcedo is convinced, “There are some Kraft-related (killings) that are not solved.”
Kraft has never admitted to any of the killings, including the body found in his car.
The 1970s were a particularly dangerous time in Southern California, particularly for young men and hitchhikers. In addition to Kraft, William Bonin and Patrick Kearney independently roamed Southern California and overlapped in their years of offering fatal transport. The trio and their accomplices may have killed upwards of 150. At different times, all three were conflated and referred to as “the Freeway Killer” because of similarities in their methods.
When Kearney was caught in 1977, authorities thought they had their man. But the bodies kept coming. Bonin was captured in 1980 and the killings continued until Kraft’s apprehension.