Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Carol’s Childhood

  Carol Bundy was born in Louisiana in 1943, the second of three children. When she was a preschooler, her family lived briefly in Los Angeles because her older brother began getting small bit parts in movies as a child actor. He can be seen sitting on Santa Claus’s lap in the classic Miracle on 34th Street.

  Accounts of Carol’s childhood are truly perplexing.208 As a small child, Carol appears to have been loved and cared for by her parents. When she began to lose her baby teeth, her father dipped a doll’s feet in mud and left a trail of little fairy footprints from the window to her bed. Carol remembers her mother telling the girls magical fairy tales as they lay in bed every night. Even though the family was short of money, one Christmas her younger sister received a bicycle while Carol got her own television set. All the children were intelligent and vacations were often combined with academic goals. When Carol began studying American history in school, the family went off in a car for a vacation in Washington with visits to the Smithsonian and to the New England states. Both her father and mother affectionately called Carol “Petunia.”

  Unlike her mother and younger sister, Carol was not a particularly graceful or beautiful girl. She was a little chubby with a dump-linglike body and thin, mousy-brown hair. At the age of nine, she was fitted with thick-lensed glasses and at school was taunted with, “Miss Encyclopedia” and “Four Eyes” by other kids.

  Something then went terribly wrong at home. When Carol was 8, for reasons she cannot explain, she was suddenly cut off by her mother. Her mother locked her outside the house. As the little girl pounded on the door and windows to be let in, she says her mother said, “Go away little girl. You don’t live here. You aren’t my little girl.”

  Little Carol walked two miles to her father’s place of work and he brought her home. Her parents fought into the night, and Carol claims that after that it was as if she no longer existed for her mother. Carol’s younger sister, Vicky, recalls that their mother was not well mentally. She recalls that their mother was never allowed to administer physical punishment to the children, because once she began beating them, she would not stop until she was pulled off. Vicky said that Carol had already developed a defensive psychology toward her mother. She remembers watching Carol calmly smiling and reading a comic book while her mother beat her around the face and body with a belt.

  Carol grew to be an intelligent but withdrawn child who read the dictionary for pleasure and buried herself in science fiction books. When she turned 14, her family life took another seriously nightmarish turn. Her mother suddenly died from a heart attack. That night, her father raped her and her younger sister. He abused her sister for several months and raped Carol one more time. Eight months later, he remarried, and the sexual assaults were replaced by beatings and verbal abuse. It was not long before her father’s new wife left him. After a period in a foster home, Carol and Vicky were reclaimed by their father and they settled in Los Angeles. There, in her first year of high school, Carol engaged in promiscuous sex with boys. She learned that while she was largely unattractive, her sexual willingness would quickly attract attention—although that attention would quickly fade and turn to scorn as soon as the sexual encounter was over. When a rumor spread through her school that Carol was pregnant in ninth grade, she dropped out.

  At the age of 17, Carol married a 56-year-old drunk. She left him, she says, because he wanted her to prostitute herself. She admitted, however, that she took small sums of money in exchange for sex during this period.

  That same year, Carol met 32-year-old science fiction and erotica writer Richard Geis. He liked Carol’s intelligence and wit and the two began a casual relationship. Geis edited Carol’s first short story, which was published in a mainstream magazine; it was about a policewoman who rode to work on a bus. Carol also put out one issue of a science fiction magazine and published several cartoons.

  When Carol was 19, her father committed suicide. Carol began to engage in lesbian relationships, but found that hurt and rejection came as easily from her female lovers as from her male ones.

  One day, Carol asked Geis to pay her way through nursing school. Geis agreed, provided she maintained good grades. In 1968, at the age of 25, after graduating as class valedictorian, Carol was certified as a nurse. In the ensuing years, Carol drifted apart from Geis, but they always remained in touch. (Geis would go on to win the Hugo Award as Best Fan Writer in 1975 and 1976.)

  Carol married Grant Bundy, a male nurse at a hospital where she worked. They bought a house in Van Nuys, a working-class district east of Hollywood. During her marriage to Grant, Carol gave birth to two sons, David and Chris. When Carol left Grant in 1979, taking her sons with her, they were 9 and 5 years old.

  Carol moved into a squalid apartment complex. The manager of the complex was Jack Murray, a part-time country music singer from Australia. Although Murray lived at the complex with his wife, he quickly began an affair with Carol, who became convinced that Murray was going to leave his wife. As her divorce proceeded, the house that Carol owned jointly with her ex-husband was sold, and Carol came into a large sum of money—about twenty-five thousand dollars. Shortly afterward, Jack told Carol he could not leave his wife to marry her because he had discovered she had cancer. Carol quickly gave Jack ten thousand dollars for his wife’s cancer treatment, hoping that he would move in with her. The remainder of her money, she placed in a joint account with Jack, who then proceeded to empty it of an additional eight thousand dollars.

  It was around this time that another scavenger moved in on Carol—Douglas Clark. Carol Bundy, who had a fairly promiscuous background and who often engaged in masochistic sex as a submissive partner, was perfect prey for Clark.

  Douglas Clark

  Douglas Clark was born in 1948, the third son of five children. His father was a senior naval officer and the Clark family lived in Pennsylvania, Seattle, Berkeley, and Japan. In 1959, the father left the navy and went to work as an executive in the private sector as a supply specialist. The family then lived in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific and in India. Neighbors from that period remember Doug as a handsome and normally mischievous child. At home, the only strange incident the family recalled was Doug being caught by his mother at the age of 9 wearing her and his sister’s underwear.

  As an adolescent, Doug was sent to a private school in Switzerland, while his parents moved on to other locations. His fellow students remember him telling exaggerated stories of his family’s wealth. Nonetheless, his classmates were impressed by his ability to seduce older women at the age of 15. This was in 1963 and in Switzerland; the sexual revolution had not yet hit that part of the world, yet Doug was conducting adult sexual relations with local women who lived in Geneva. He was, however, expelled from the school after writing what has been described as a “darkly disturbing” sexual letter to one of the female teachers at the school.

  At the age of 16, Doug was returned to the United States and enrolled in a military academy. There he became famous for sneaking women back into the school for sex. He also would tape record and photograph himself having sex with the women and share the photographs with his fellow students. He was 19 when he graduated the academy.

  Doug Clark then enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was trained as an Intercept Analyst Specialist. He was stationed in Alaska, where his job was to decode Russian radio transmissions. It is a mystery why Clark left the air force before his term of enlistment ended. He told various stories: One was that he had reported a senior officer as a security risk; another was that he had uncovered a plot by white officers to kill a black enlisted man. His military records remain sealed and the only information available is that Doug Clark was honorably discharged, was awarded a National Defense Service Medal, and all his post-service benefits were intact. He moved to Los Angeles after his release from the air force.

  Nothing in his history so far points to Clark as a potential serial killer. His family background was stable and supportive, he was intel
ligent, reasonably good-looking, and successful with women, albeit with a few kinks. He was slightly maladjusted with a propensity for bragging, had a tendency to be rebellious, and was very self-centered and irresponsible. However, that hardly made him an incipient serial killer.

  When Doug was 24, he married a woman who worked as a bookkeeper. They started an upholstery business together, but it failed. In one of those strange coincidences, Doug Clark used to buy upholstery supplies from serial killer Angelo Buono, one of the Hillside Stranglers, who with his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi, raped and killed at least ten women in Los Angeles. After Buono was arrested, Clark would talk often of having been in Buono’s shop where the tortures and murders had taken place. Later, when he began to kill, Clark dumped the body of one of his victims opposite the site where Bouno and Bianchi left one of their victims.

  After his business failed, Doug trained as a stationary engineer and went to work for the City of Los Angeles tending big power plant boilers in San Fernando. For some time he had a drinking problem, but he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking for two years.

  Nonetheless, after four years the marriage broke up. His ex-wife was not too specific as to why the marriage ended other than commenting that he was “lazy around the house.” She remained friends with Doug after their divorce and when he was arrested she could not believe it. She remembered Doug as a perfectly normal man—aside from them wearing each other’s underwear to work one day and his suggesting several times they try wife-swapping and three-way sex. Considering that they were living in California during the early 1970s, those things could hardly be alarming or even unusual.

  By the late 1970s, however, disturbing reports began to filter in about Doug Clark from the San Fernando power station, where he worked. His fellow employees always considered him a braggart, but he was also reported to have threatened his coworkers with violence on at least four separate occasions. His rate of absence was also very high—he failed to go to work 15 percent of his working hours. He always had some extraordinarily elaborate excuse for not going to work. Clark was finally fired in 1979, with the supervisors so nervous about the threats that the police were called to his worksite to ensure he did not come back. Clark applied for work as a stationary engineer at the Jergens Soap factory and was hired.

  By this time Doug began to focus on seducing especially fat and unattractive women. He would quickly move in with them and establish highly domineering relationships. He often lived rent-free and had the women buy food and cook for him. When they became too demanding he would move on. There seemed to be nothing intense about these relationships. He would not go as far as emptying their bank accounts and stealing their property—it would be little things like borrowing their car and returning it with an empty tank of gas or not paying for the groceries or the long-distance calls. Clark developed his petty exploitation of overweight, unattractive women into an art. Women with those characteristics probably satisfied some pathological need in him.

  One night in 1980, in a North Hollywood country music bar, Clark laid his eyes on an overweight woman with mousy hair and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. He asked her to dance, and that is how Doug Clark met Carol Bundy.

  “By the Way, I’m Spending the Night with Your Mom.”

  Although Carol Bundy would have had sex with Clark the night they met, Clark took his time romancing and seducing Bundy. He told her he was an engineer and gazed seductively into her eyes. He was educated in a private school in Switzerland, he said, and was a former military cryptologist. Unlike a lot of serial killers who weaved fantastic stories of their pasts, Clark was open with the truth—the lies would come later.

  He told her that he had to go to a dinner but asked for her phone number, appearing to be smitten by her. Carol, who was an intelligent woman, was impressed with Clark’s own intelligence. When Clark telephoned the next day, Carol must have felt it was “true love.”

  Clark went over, played with her two sons, and helped her put them to bed. He told them, to their delight, “By the way, I’m spending the night with your mom.”

  When he made love, Carol testified, he genuinely attempted to please her. Carol commented that most men attempted to please her in bed, but that it was an effort that required that she heap praise on them. Clark, Carol said, seemed to enjoy pleasing her in bed, spending hours performing oral sex on her, telling her how beautiful and intelligent she was. His soft, intelligent voice was hypnotic, she said. When Clark woke up in her bed that morning, looking like a little lost boy, and asked her if she would mind if he moved a few of his things in with her, she readily agreed.

  Before long, Carol noticed that Clark was actually very self-centered. Although he called her “Motor Mouth,” he showed no interest in hearing about her life. When she tried to show him a short story she had written, he produced a two-inch-thick manuscript of his own of torture stories in dungeons. Their conversation often focused on serial killers and Clark told her of his encounters with Angelo Buono when he was in the upholstery business.

  In the dark, as they lay in bed, Clark began to quietly purr his fantasies into Carol’s ear. He would like to subdue and capture a young girl, take her to a country house with a torture chamber, and keep her there as a sex slave, he told her. On another night, Doug told her that throughout history people had been flagrantly slaughtering each other, which she agreed was true. It was fun to kill, Clark said, and any woman who loved him should be willing to kill for him.

  On one occasion, Doug told Carol that he was an assassin for the Mafia and asked her to help him kill somebody in Denver. Carol immediately showed her willingness to help by asking him the flight schedules and what she should wear.

  In April of 1980, Doug went into a pawnshop and had Carol buy a pair of small .25-caliber handguns. Clark told her that the guns should be registered in her name because he had been convicted of an armed robbery in Indiana and could not possess firearms. This was not true: Unlike many serial killers, Clark had no previous criminal record.

  Their fantasies began to spiral. Clark became mildly abusive and disdainful of Bundy, which only made her more desperate for his attention. Tension also had developed between Clark and one of her sons. Carol sent her sons away to live with their paternal grandparents. She sold the children’s furniture and began to look for an apartment near Doug’s place of work.

  “How Am I Going to Turn You into a Murderer If You Are Clumsy and Not Observant.”

  Police believe that in the late spring of 1980, Clark began to murder young women with Carol’s pistols. On May 31, he picked up a prostitute in the Sunset Strip area and shot her dead. He dumped her body in the Los Angeles hills. On June 11, he lured two young teenage girls into his car and shot them both dead. He took their bodies back to a garage he had rented, had sex with their corpses, and photographed them before dumping their bodies near a road in the Hollywood Hills. Clark told Carol nothing until she discovered a bag of bloodied clothing in her car, which she would often loan him. Carol carefully laundered the clothing.

  After Doug told her he had killed the two girls, Carol immediately called the police—not to turn Clark in, but to confirm that indeed he had committed the homicides. She questioned homicide detectives over the phone, saying that she thought her boyfriend was the killer but did not want to turn him in unless she was sure. Could they give her a few details of the homicides? The conversation ended when the police switchboard inadvertently cut her call off.

  Clark meanwhile took Carol on a guided tour to show her where he had dumped the bodies of the two teenagers and the body of the first victim, who still had not been discovered. He told Carol he had slit the corpse’s stomach open to encourage the “wiggly-squirmies” to consume it. He took the prostitute’s clothes, which he gave to an 11-year-old-girl in the apartment complex (with whom Carol and Clark were having sex), but kept her underwear for himself.

  Carol, correctly, told Clark that he was a sociopath and he took offense at the idea.

  Clar
k focused his trolling on the part of Sunset Boulevard area that straddled Hollywood and West Hollywood—a “ground zero” of the Los Angeles street-hooking scene in the 1980s. This was and is a drab but busy area choked in car exhaust and lined with small, shabby stores, low-income apartments, dingy motels, fast-food joints, and supermarkets, whose parking lots were favored by prostitutes. It was a barren and sun-baked plateau between the downward slope south toward central L.A. and the upward slope north toward the cool of the Hollywood Hills. The prostitutes counted on the rather heavy east-west traffic slowly passing through the area on its way between the various districts of Los Angeles.

  On the night of June 20, Clark took Carol along with him on his next kill. Near a supermarket on Highland Avenue, while Carol sat in the backseat of the car, Clark picked up a prostitute who did not mind servicing him in the car while the fat woman in the back watched. As the girl performed oral sex on Clark, he held up his hand, a signal to Carol to slap one of the small .25-caliber handguns into his open palm. Clark then shot the girl once in the head. She lost consciousness but did not die. Carol jumped over into the front seat as Clark drove away. The girl’s head lay in Carol’s lap, pumping blood, as Carol stripped off her jewelry and clothes. Using a paper towel, Carol wiped away the blood that was bubbling out of the girl’s wound and nose. When they got to the northern fringes of L.A., they rolled her body out into the desert and left her there to die. The identity of the girl, somewhere between the ages of 17 and 20, has never been established to this day.

  Carol remembers that she was not turned on nor repulsed by the murder—she said that she was riveted to the scene unfolding before her eyes by an intellectual curiosity. As she stripped off the girl’s clothes, she thought how difficult it was to undress an unwilling subject, and that the girl had a good body with nice blonde pubic hairs. When she took the girl’s boots off and found a knife tucked inside beneath her cigarettes and comb, she said that she thought to herself, “Dumb broad—the knife won’t do you any good tucked away like that.”