Behind the Badge
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.”
Described as one of the most heinous serial killers in U.S. history, Randy Kraft was described as the emodiment of evil. Former OC Sheriff’s Homicide Investigator Dan Salcedo interviewed Kraft outside his cell on Death Row in San Quentin in 2012. (Photo Orange County Sheriff’s Department)
A decade of depravity
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.
Former Orange County Sheriff Detective Dan Salcedo, photographed in his Laguna Niguel home, interviewed serial killer Randy Kraft in 2012 at San Quentin.
Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer
A side trip
In 2012, Salcedo was nearing retirement when he and partner Don Voght took a field trip to visit Kraft in San Quentin. At the time, nearly 30 years had passed since Kraft had been pulled over by two unsuspecting California Highway Patrol officers in Mission Viejo.
Salcedo was already traveling to Santa Cruz as part of an active investigation involving the murder of Christopher Smith. A former resident of the Central California county, Smith was killed in Orange County by business partner Ed Shin in a high-profile case that would later be profiled by ABC and on several television true crime series.
Although Salcedo had no official business up North outside of the Smith case, he wanted to take one last run at Kraft. So, having received permission from prison officials, Salcedo cut north out of Santa Cruz toward the Bay Area.
The Kraft side trip was admittedly the longest of long shots. Rather than ask about the active murder cases in which Kraft was suspected, Salcedo thought showing Kraft pictures of missing and unidentified people might open a door.
Salcedo had already met Kraft when Salcedo had worked as a jail deputy in Orange County.
“He was an inmate,” Salcedo said of Kraft. “In fact, I was the guy who copied his mail.”
Even back then, Salcedo was perplexed about the mystique surrounding Kraft.
“I wondered, ‘What’s so special about this guy?’” Salcedo said. “Randy Kraft looked nothing like how the media portrays a serial killer. He looked like everyone else. I thought, ‘Really, that’s the (Scorecard) killer?’”
To Salcedo there was absolutely nothing remarkable about Kraft’s appearance or persona.
In San Quentin it was the same. Beyond a kind of pathetic angry get-off-my-lawn attitude, Kraft was utterly unimpressive.
When Salcedo stared into Kraft’s eyes he felt – nothing. No simmering aura of evil. No junkyard dog stare. Just a bitter old man.
“Guard,” Kraft called out as soon as Salcedo identified himself.
Former Orange County Sheriff Detective Dan Salcedo, photographed in his Laguna Niguel home, looked into the eyes of serial killer in outside Death Row in San Quentin in 2012 and was left unimpressed. Photo by Michael Goulding, Contributing Photographer
Unsolved puzzle
Described as a real-life Columbo during his tenure as a homicide detective, Salcedo says “I really relish putting the puzzle together. The more convoluted, the more I like it.”
During his career, Salcedo was a part of hundreds of murder investigations. However, he said, in more than 50 cases when he was either the lead or co-lead agent, only two cases remain unsolved.
One was a murder in a pawn shop in Stanton and the other a suspected walk-by shooting. Both cases there were dead ends with no witnesses and no physical evidence that has ever been connected to anyone.
That doesn’t mean Salcedo worked any less hard.
“It’s personal for me,” he said. “To me, if I was assigned a case, I didn’t want to disappoint anyone including myself.
Although Salcedo says the Kraft murders were not an obsession, they were a curiosity. Since the mid-1990s and through the years, Salcedo said, “in my down time, I’d pull the Randy Kraft book.”
The detective would occasionally look at evidence and wonder, “can we connect the dots with Kraft?”
“There have been body dumps that I thought were probably the work of Randy Kraft,” he said. “I got myself acclimated to Randy Kraft’s MO, victims in John Doe books.”
As a detective Salcedo had been known to have a strange ability to draw confessions from even hardened suspects with his seemingly easy-going attitude and ability to chat before bearing down.
During his trip to San Quentin, Salcedo said he hoped Kraft would “just want to get it off his chest, that was my hope.”
It was the longest of odds, but worth a chance.
“He’s never spoken or admitted anything,” Salcedo said. “I think he’ll literally take it to his grave.”
Salcedo got nothing out of Kraft in an interview that lasted only about 30 minutes. Kraft complained of being railroaded and wished cancer on the lead prosecutor and investigator in his case.
In response, Salcedo said, “I told him they were both doing very well and living fulfilled lives.”
Although the talk with Kraft yielded nothing, the trip was not in vain.
Salcedo and his partner were given a personal insider’s tour of the famed prison.
“It was literally a great day,” he said.
