Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Later, both Walter and Doug were sent to Ecolat, the International School in Geneva attended by the children of UN diplomats, international celebrities and European and Middle Eastern royalty. Unlike his brother, Walt, who was popular and outgoing, Doug was considered sullen and arrogant and made few friends. He did not do well with his studies, as he couldn’t be bothered to do the work or complete assignments. Doug Clark claimed that he had developed his preferences for kinky sex while living in Geneva. He was expelled from Ecolat for this reason.

  After he left Geneva, 16-year-old Doug was sent to Culver Military Academy in Indiana. Frank Jr and Carol Ann had already left home by this time and Walt was sent to a boarding school in Arizona; Jon Ronlyn joined him there later. Doug’s parents continued to move around the world: first to Venezuela, then Perth, Western Australia.

  Although intelligent, Doug Clark was happy to scrape through his schooling with minimal effort. He was involved in a number of sports and played saxophone in the dance band. In the three years that he attended the Academy, he did not have any close friends. Instead, he hung around with a group of kids who shared Doug’s distain for authority and had a distinct ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude. He would boast of his family’s wealth and sexual exploits, oblivious to his friends’ annoyance and boredom. The fact that most of his classmates refused to mix with him, and would often avoid contact with him altogether, did not seem to bother him at all.

  Doug’s behaviour and attitude led to many meetings with the school therapist, Colonel Gleeson. Despite the fact that Gleeson had written many letters informing the Clarks of their son’s bad conduct, they showed no concern. In the time he was there, he only received one visit from his mother. The only visit his father made occurred while the lad was on holiday.

  Like most teenage boys, Doug and his classmates were obsessed with teenage girls and the fantasy of sex, but for Doug it was much more than fantasy. He would often bring a girl to his room where he would record their moans and groans as he had sex with them. He would then replay the tapes to his classmates, revelling in the obvious jealousy.

  Aged 17, Doug claimed to meet the love of his life at a Culver dance, where he took her away from another boy. Despite his claims to have been in love with Bobbi, he would take photographs of them having sex and pass them around the school, enjoying the notoriety that they brought him.

  In 1967, at the age of 19, Clark graduated from Culver and went to live with his parents, who were now retired and living in Yosemite. When he was drafted, he enlisted in the Air Force in radio intelligence to ensure that he would not end up in the front line in the Vietnam War. He went first to Texas, and then Anchorage, Alaska, where he was given the job of decoding Russian messages.

  The military discipline in Anchorage reminded him of Culver and he resented his senior officers’ corrections: but the city life made up for it. He spent most of his time in the many dancer bars where he would nurture his ego as he left each night with one of the dancers hanging on his arm. Before his term was up, Douglas Clark left the Air Force with an honourable discharge, a National Defence Service Medal and his benefits intact. What the events were that led up to this are unknown as his story is different every time he tells it, and the Air Force will not reveal anything. Doug claims that he had been witness to the murder of a black man by a white man, and that he had fled when he was called in for questioning.

  With over $5,000, Doug planned to drive from Alaska to the Mexican border, but stopped when he got to Van Nuys, in Los Angeles, where he moved in with his sister, Carol Ann, who was living with her abusive husband.

  At 24 he met, and later married, 27-year-old Beverley in a North Hollywood bar. Blonde and heavy, the woman saw herself as fat and ugly, but felt that Doug, with his big dreams and ambitions, would always try to build her up.

  They bought a car upholstery business, which Doug ran, while Beverley had a job and did the books at weekends. He insisted that he was the one with the intelligence, not she, and refused to listen to any advice she gave about the business. Whenever they began to get ahead financially, Doug would quickly blow it. During the Seventies, the business began to falter, so they sold it. To pay off their debts, Doug worked in a gas station and as a security guard before he started buying goods at auctions to resell at swap meets. Beverley had the job of loading and unloading the truck because, in his opinion, he was a better salesperson than she was.

  Although Beverley could not exactly say what went wrong in the marriage, she did say that Doug was lazy. She would not consider the fact that he liked to wear her underwear as any more unusual than his desire to try wife-swapping, or three-way sex.

  As Beverley gained more weight during their marriage, Doug spent less and less time at home, preferring to go to bars. According to Carol Ann, her brother drank heavily and would become over anxious and angry when drunk. Beverley would deny this, even though she had persuaded him to join Alcoholic’s Anonymous as a condition of them staying together. He kept off the booze for two years.

  Doug was ambitious but could not commit himself to the work that was required to achieve the success he longed for. It had been Beverley’s suggestion that he apply to work for the city as a steam-plant trainee. He agreed and actually completed the training course.

  In 1976, four years after they were married, Doug and Beverley separated and later divorced, although they remained close friends.

  Douglas Clark began work at the Jergen’s soap factory in 1979. His duties as an engineer required him to tend the large boiler. While not befitting his level of education, he enjoyed the sense of power that controlling the three-storey structure gave him.

  In February 1980, Clark set fire to his car outside the factory, while he was working the night shift, in order to claim the insurance. He later bragged to Carol Bundy that the real reason was to destroy evidence.

  By the time he met Bundy, Clark had developed quite a talent for insinuating himself into the lives of fat, unattractive women who would willingly give him free rent, food and money in return for the attention he gave them. When the women demanded more in return, he would quickly leave them and move on to the next lonely soul.

  Just after the Christmas of 1979, Carol Bundy, then aged 37, met Doug Clark at the ‘Little Nashville Country Club where Murray sang Tom Jones hits. Douglas Daniel Clark was a boiler engineer by trade but he was a tradesman with his incredibly smooth manner. He was also well read and liked to sprinkle his conversation with quotations from Shakespeare and French phrases. Thirty-one-year-old Clark was a handsome man with a soft, slightly European speaking voice, a gift which enabled him to have the pick of any woman he chose. He was a leech and a sexual hedonist who enjoyed nothing more than a varied choice of eager girlfriends who were willing to share their home with him. Indeed, at times he was so much in demand he would even forget where he was actually living himself.

  On the evening of their first meeting, Carol Bundy and Douglas Clark spent the night together. On learning of Doug’s rent problems with his landlady, Carol offered him lodgings in her apartment. For a short period, the arrangement was mutually satisfactory. Put simply, Clark traded his body and sex for a roof over his head. Eventually, he came to the view that cash for sex would be more agreeable to him. During his brief stay at Lemona Avenue, Bundy introduced Clark to her sexual playmate, Shannon.

  The tempting proximity of the sexually advanced youngster, and prompted by Carol’s encouragement for three-way sex, proved irresistible to Clark. Bundy photographed him simulating sex with the made-up child, an exposure which would later prove to be his undoing. During an interview at San Quentin State Prison, Clark ranted on about the subject, saying, ‘I had sex with Bundy about three times in all our relationship, although Carol will say otherwise. Murray was her intense S&M lover. She and Jack had sex with the 11-year-old. He tried to orally and vaginally rape the kid. They repeatedly tried to engage my room-mate, Nancy, in three-way sex. Carol even tried to get Nancy to join her and Shannon in thr
ee-way female sex. She told Nancy and Shannon not to let me know she was busy with Jack, trying to have sex with them, since I would not like her and her lover fuckin’ around with one of my girlfriends.’

  * * *

  The first confirmed murders committed by The Sunset Slayer were the double killing of 15-year-old Gina Marano and 16-year-old Cynthia Chandler. The naked bodies of the two attractive teenagers were found, on an incline off the Ventura Freeway, by a Caltrans street cleaner on Thursday, 12 June 1980. The medical examiner established that they had died the previous day. Cynthia was killed by a single .25 calibre gunshot wound to the back of her head, which had left the bullet lodged in her brain, and a second shot had penetrated her lung bursting open her heart. It was also determined that both shots had been fired at point-blank range. Gina had also been shot twice. One round entered behind her left ear, exiting near her right eyebrow, and the second bullet blasted through the back of her head, also exiting behind the left ear.

  At around 8.00pm, on Saturday, 14 June, a woman called the LAPD Northeast Division at Van Nuys. She told a detective that she thought her lover was a murderer. ‘What I’m trying to do,’ she said, while officers recorded the call, ‘is to ascertain whether or not the individual I know, who happens to be my lover, did in fact do this. He said he did. My name is Betsy.’

  Later in the same call, she changed her name to Claudia. The police were anxious to learn the full name of the alleged killer. The informant refused to give out this vital information, but when pressed, she did give a brief description. ‘He has curly brown hair and blue eyes. His Christian name is John, and he’s 41 years old,’ she added. ‘I’ve found a duffel bag in his car, full of bloody blankets, paper towels, and his clothes.’

  This description matched Jack Murray perfectly, and not Clark, who was only 37 at the time. Warming now to her theme, the woman added, ‘He tells me he fired four shots. Two in one girl’s head and virtually blew her head away. One shot in the head and one shot in the chest of the other girl. He used a .25-calibre pistol. Does that jibe with what you’ve got?’ When the caller hung up, a detective wrote on the tape cassette: ‘Either the killer, or one who knows the killer!’

  Over the following days, investigators compiled a list of people who had purchased .25-calibre pistols in recent months. Carol Mary Bundy’s name came up for she had purchased two .22-calibre Raven automatics in Van Nuys on Friday, 25 April. In fact, she was the only female on the register. The gun shop provided the police with her address, vehicle registration and social security number. Amazingly, the police chose to ignore this crucial information, despite the previous telephone call from a woman, indicating a connection with two of the murders. Quite why the police chose to act this way would remain a mystery for some time to come.

  Meanwhile, on Saturday, 22 June, Bundy moved from her apartment to Verdugo Avenue in Burbank. Clark, among others, helped her by taking her furniture and other possessions across town to her new home, which was a stone’s throw from his place of employment at the Jergens soap factory.

  At 3.05am the next day, a Burbank police officer found the fully-clothed body of prostitute Karen Jones, lying in the gutter of a residential street near the NBC studios in Hollywood. She had been shot in the temple, with a .25-calibre pistol, and there were indications were that she had been thrown from a moving vehicle. Ballistic tests on a bullet retrieved from her head at autopsy proved that it matched, in every respect, the same bullets that had killed both Chandler and Marano.

  Later that same morning and, just a few miles away in a Sizzler Diner parking lot, police found the headless corpse of Exxie Wilson, another hooker. The body, which had been dragged behind a trash dumpster, was naked and lying in a pool of congealing blood. Wilson and Jones both shared the same pimp, and he reported that he had last seen them, both alive, shortly before midnight. They had been together.

  During the late hours of Thursday, 26 June, a resident drove into the driveway of his home in Studio City and found an ornate wooden chest obstructing his access. ‘I’d thought I’d found some treasure,’ he later told police, but upon opening the chest, the man was horrified to find a severed head which had been wrapped up in a T-shirt and jeans. At autopsy, it was determined that Exxie had been shot with a .22-calibre bullet, the head had been washed and make-up roughly applied. It had also been refrigerated after decapitation, which had taken place while she was still alive. There were traces of what appeared to be semen in her throat. The recovered bullet matched, in every respect, the bullets that had been used to kill Marano, Chandler and Wilson.

  * * *

  Snake hunters were out looking for trophies in a ravine in the hillside country near Foothill Boulevard in Sylmar, on Sunday, 29 June, when they found the body of 17-year-old prostitute, Marnette Comer. Partially naked and covered with scrub, the corpse, which had been dehydrated and mummified in the summer heat, was lying on its stomach. It was determined, at autopsy, that she had been shot three times in the chest with a .25-calibre pistol and her belly had been slit open. Marnette had last been seen alive on 31 May. The bullets recovered matched, in every respect, the rounds that had killed all of the other previous victims.

  By now the police had traced the ornate chest to a Newberry’s store, in Reseda, where a clerk remembered the customer being an overweight woman who wore glasses with thick lenses and short, black gloves. The sales assistant especially remembered the gloves because it had been a very hot day. ‘She was dumpy, and kinda ugly,’ the clerk told police.

  By now, the clues floating around as to the identity of the mystery informant called ‘Claudia’ were adding up. Five hookers had been shot with the same .25-calibre pistol, and the description of the buyer of the chest matched that of Carol Bundy, the only woman in the whole of California who owned two Raven pistols. Yet still the police couldn’t match up these leads.

  On 29 July, Bundy started to deteriorate mentally. She begged Clark to shoot her. When he refused, she attempted suicide. She sat in her Datsun car and injected herself with insulin and librium. Then she swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Despite her knowledge of drugs, gained from her nursing experience, the suicide attempt failed, and she was found and taken to hospital.

  The next day, her first action was to telephone Jack Murray, from her hospital bed, and ask him to pick her up in his van. When they met, she saw that he was accompanied by a woman called Nancy Smith. Carol was so furious she refused to get in the Chevy and, seething with rage, walked home. Yet none of this prevented her and Murray from having three-in-a-bed sex with young Shannon four days later.

  On Sunday, 3 August, Bundy made arrangements to meet her lover again in the parking lot of the Little Nashville Country Club. Her timing let her down, though, for when she turned up at the rendezvous as planned, she found Murray was already in his van and having sex with a woman called Avril Roy-Smith. Carol banged on the door and Avril left.

  This chance encounter with yet another woman was to be the straw that finally broke the camel’s back. Bundy and Murray drove away from the club together and parked a few blocks away where they prepared for sex in the back of the van. Now undressed, Murray lay on his stomach while, crouching behind him, Bundy parted his buttocks and pushed her tongue into his anus. As Murray groaned with delight, she reached into her over-extended waistband and drew out one of her Raven automatics. With her tongue still in place, she touched the muzzle of the gun to the back of Murray’s head. He felt the cold steel, and froze for an instant before she fired a single shot into his brain. She checked for a pulse and ascertained that he was still alive, so she fired again. Still his heart kept on beating. Throwing the gun to one side, Bundy pulled out a heavy boning knife from her bag, which she repeatedly drove into his back. After a dozen stabs he finally died. To complete her gruesome work, Bundy then slit open her victim’s buttocks and mutilated his anus before hacking off his head. After rummaging through the van’s cupboards, she scattered pornographic videotapes and magazines around the bo
dy. Emptying Murray’s briefcase, she removed several Polaroid sex snapshots, and took his keys and his gun, before placing his head in a plastic bag. She then returned to her own car which was still parked in the club’s parking lot. Now, in the early hours of Monday, 4 August, she drove to a call box and telephoned her own apartment where Clark was sleeping.

  Doug Clark was in bed with Nancy Smith when the shrill ring dragged him out of a heavy sleep. ‘Carol was whispering and giggling on the phone’, he explained, and as the call continued, Nancy, who suffered from epilepsy, started a seizure. Doug told Bundy to shut up and get back home, and then he called for an ambulance. When Bundy arrived five minutes later, paramedics were already on the scene. After the ambulance left, Bundy took Clark to her car where, in the well of the front passenger seat, was Murray’s head in the plastic bag. The ragged and bloody stump was exposed and Clark fell back and vomited. What with Nancy’s fit and now this, it was all too much, but then Bundy coolly asked him if he would help her dispose of the mess. Like a complete fool he agreed, despite the fact that he was about to start his shift at the Jergens soap factory within the hour.

  They drove off in the direction of the factory, with Bundy cradling the plastic-wrapped head in her lap. As they passed a pile of rubbish, she wound down the window and tossed the grisly article out. Murray’s head was never seen again.

  Three days later on Tuesday, 7 August, the sexually insatiable Bundy invited Tammy Spangler, one of Murray’s former girlfriends, over for dinner. Clark knew that Carol was trying to initiate another three-way sex session and declined to take part. In any case, he fancied the attractive woman himself, and he also feared for Bundy’s state of mind. ‘If she could do that to Jack,’ he said, ‘what the fuck could she do to someone else? What about my fuckin’ head?’

  After the meal, Tammy left to go to work, and Bundy and Clark were now alone. Her sexual expectations had been disappointed, so she convinced Doug that they should drive into Hollywood and find another girl who would treat him to a hooker’s blow-job. This was to be his birthday present from Bundy and, reluctantly, he agreed.