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The Orange County Register

Sunday, May 10, 1987

Chapter 1
The Hitchhiker
By Patrick J. Klgtr
The Register

n the night of May 13,1983, Marine Cpl. Terry Gambrel played in a softball game, then went back to the room he shared with Lance Cpl. Christopher Leake at the Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro. Gambrel, 25, was something of a loner. He and his roommate had known each other for four months and had never
even gone out for a beer together. Gambrel took a shower, got dressed and paused to read a letter, perhaps one he had received that day from his girlfriend back in Indiana. He pulled an already packed red bag from his locker and left without saying where he was going. He had $77 and directions to a party in Santa Ana in his pocket. Ten days earlier, Gambrel's 1978 Mercury Bobcat had been towed by police from a nearby shopping center lot where it had been parked illegally. He would hitchhike to the party. It was sometime before 9 p.m. Four hours later, Michael Sterling, a California Highway Patrol officer, was working the graveyard shift on Interstate 5 near Mission Viejo. His supervisor, Sgt. Michael Howard, was subbing for Sterling's regular partner and was evaluating Sterling's work. The two officers spotted a brown 1979 Toyota Celica in the far-right lane of the freeway going about 40-45 mph and weaving off the road onto the shoulder. They pulled up behind the driver and hit the lights on the patrol car. The Toyota slowed and stopped weaving, but kept going. The officers flashed their high beams and shined a spotlight into the car to get the driver's attention. Howard later testified that he saw the driver turn around, reach into the back seat and -grab what appeared to be a dark cloth that he tossed onto the front passenger seat. The Toyota pulled over. The driver, a then-38-year-old Long Beach resident named Randy Steven Kraft, got out. Sterling noticed the driver's fly was open, except for the top button. He told Kraft he was concerned about his driving and escorted him to the front of the Toyota. Sterling asked Kraft to perform a series of sobriety tests. Howard got out of the patrol car and followed, partly to cover Sterling as a protective measure and partly to observe his work. He paused along the way and glanced into the car, where he saw a man reclined in the passenger seat, apparently asleep. A dark jacket was draped over his lap. Up to that point, it seemed to be a routine drunken-driving arrest, no different than the approximately 5,000 others Sterling had encountered in his 3Vi years as a patrol officer. Kraft told Sterling he'd had three or four drinks but was sober, Sterling later testified. But Kraft had alcohol on his breath and trouble walking a straight line. Sterling told Kraft he was under arrest and handcuffed him. He asked the driver where his friend lived. Kraft said he didn't know, that the man in his car was a hitchhiker. Sterling led the quiet, cooperative driver back to the patrol car and put him in the back seat. Howard appeared at his shoulder and told Sterling to be sure Kraft was buckled in securely. Howard had just attempted to rouse Kraft's passenger and had made a shocking discovery. When he opened the door of Kraft's car, Howard found a pill vial on the floor and a buck knife on the driver's seat. The passenger, later identified as Gambrel, had marks on his wrists as if he had been tied. Under the jacket, his jeans were pulled down and his genitals exposed. He was not breathing, nor did he have a pulse.

Sam Mlrcovteh/Tlw Ragtotar This is multiple-murder suspect Randy Kraft's former home at 824 Roswell Ave. in Long Beach. Within 15 minutes, firemen and a team of paramedics were on the scene. For the next halfhour, they performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and pumped drugs and other substances intravenously into Gambrel's body in a vain effort to revive his stilled heart. They rushed him to Mission Community Hospital. When they arrived at 1:57 a.m., a doctor pronounced him dead. The two patrol officers left the scene with Kraft. They eventually would learn that the man in the back seat of their patrol car would be charged with 16 murders in California and indicted in connection with two homicides in Michigan and three in Oregon. In court, Kraft would be linked formally to 37 murders, and he would be suspected of as many as 64. Kraft, a horde of lawyers, judges and investigators and numerous families across the nation were about to embark on a road that four years later still would have no end in sight. Kraft's house at 824 Roswell Ave. in Long Beach, Sidebotham had applied for a warrant to search the car, and Dr. Walter R. Fischer had begun an autopsy on the dead Marine. The autopsy concluded that Gambrel had been strangled. Tests showed he had consumed alcohol there was .07 percent in his bloodstream and lorazepam, a tranquilizer, before his death. Combining the two, a forensic toxicologist later testified, makes a person less alert or able to respond. The pill vial Howard found in Kraft's car was labeled Ativan, a brand of lorazepam. Paramedic Daniel DeSlauriers later testified that Kraft had admitted giving Gambrel the drug. At 1:15 that afternoon, Sidebotham, criminalist James White and other Orange County Sheriffs Department staff members began searching Kraft's Toyota.

Hardly a routine homicida

At 3:45 a.m., James Sidebotham, a robbery-homicide investigator with the Orange County Sheriff's Department, got a call at home. The earlymorning call was nothing new. In his 25 years with the Sheriff's Department, Sidebotham had investigated 25 slayings with homosexual overtones. He went to Mission Community Hospital and then to the county morgue in Santa Ana where he talked with Deputy Coroner Joe Luckey and viewed Gambrel's body. At 5:35 a.m., he and Sgt. Doug Storm talked to Kraft at the Orange County Sheriffs Department. Kraft refused to waive his rights and would not give a statement. By midmorning, an investigator was standing watch over

The foam filler ih the right front seat of Kraft's car had been saturated with blood. Sidebotham said Gambrel had not been bleeding when his body was discovered in Kraft's car. White lifted the floor mat on the driver's side of the car and found an envelope containing 47 photos of young males some clothed, some nude. One showed a man sitting on ai gold, flowered couch, head tilted back. Sidebotham said tfie man appeared to be dead. The man in the picture later Was identified by his father as Robert Wyatt Loggins Jr., a Marine whose body bound ana stuffed into a trash bag had been found near the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in September 1980. Another of the photos showed a man in light-blue trousers and a green shirt matching those found on the body of Eric Church, a hitchhiker from Connecticut who had been killed in January 1983 aiid dumped on a freeway ramp ifl Seal Beach. Another photo subject was identified as Rodger DeVaul Jr. of Buena Park, who, along with his friend Geoffrey Nelson, had been murdered inlFebruary. Gambrel, Nelson, DeVaul and Church all had been strangled. All had alcohol in their bodies, as well as the sanie types of
Please see CHAPTER 1/C3

Sidebotham and White made other discoveries that indicated this was more thai aroutinehomicide.

They also discovered two unopened bottles of beer in a cooler, scattered empties and prescription vials for nine different drugs, including sedatives such as Ativan and Valium, and Inderal, a drug used to treat angina and migraine headaches that can cause drowsiness. Most of the viah contained pills. On the floor behind the driver's seat, investigators found a brown leather belt The prosecution later would claim, based on the width of the mark on Gambrel's neck, that Kraft had used the belt to strangle the Marine.

Some of what tiny found was innocuous clutter: clothing, computer manuals, newspapers, a dog leash.

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