Relics of Wrecked Lives

In an unmarked graveyard for the cars of killers and dead men, every rusting heap tells a tale of past horrors.

The van used by serial killer William G. Bonin to cruise for victims is here, filled with plastic tarps and puddles, but chunks remain from the carpet that linked him to several victims. In another corner of the lot, a knife murderer’s keys dangle from the ignition of his rotting car, as if he might return someday and drive off.

A scuffed baseball sits among glass shards on the floorboards of Randy Kraft’s faded brown Toyota--the exact spot where investigators turned back a floor mat to find 47 photographs of victims. Did the ball fly into the lot and through the car’s window in anger or error?

Either way, the outside world is creeping in, which is why the lot will soon become history itself.

In this secret junkyard, guarded for six years only by a padlock, razor wire and anonymity, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has tucked away four-wheel relics of homicide cases, from the infamous to the nearly forgotten. But now officials say they are searching for a new, more secure site, where thieves and baseballs will not invade.

“The best security is no one knows the lot exists or where it is,� said Lt. Hector Rivera, who acknowledged, however, that car parts have “walked away� from the property.

Most likely, the scavengers are oblivious to the yard’s official ownership--or its status as a macabre open-air museum. In a region famous for drivers who practically live in their cars, these dilapidated exhibits document that they die--and kill--in them as well.

“These cars have a pretty awful past to them,� said Sgt. Mike Stephany, a homicide unit veteran. “There’s probably nothing else around like this place. There’s a lot of ugly history.�

A history of gang shootings, carjackings, murder for hire, prostitute stabbings and serial killings. “A little bit of everything,� as Stephany puts it.

Ravaged by Elements

The cars have little if any value as evidence--items deemed important are indexed and tucked away in the county crime lab in Santa Ana. The automobile husks that remain are kept primarily for paperwork reasons and, in unsolved cases, to seal up any future legal loophole.

“If we release the car from one of these old cases and then we get an arrest, a defense attorney will ask the judge why we don’t have it and say maybe it had exculpatory evidence,� Stephany says. “We do it to protect ourselves.�

But little protects the cars, which are ravaged by elements that would likely obliterate any overlooked evidence. Weeds, spiders and vermin own these cars now. But the weathered interiors may offer some insight into killers and their victims.

Near the front gate, cinder blocks support a Honda whose owner was gunned down on a roadside for the sad sum of four tires. Close by is a Ford pickup from an unsolved 1991 gang slaying in Stanton. Three cassette tapes still sit on the dashboard, one of them a 1985 Patti Austin album with a jolting title: “Gettin’ Away with Murder.�

Tucked in a rear corner of the yard, near a pile of lawn mower engines, is the pickup truck of Thomas Francis Edwards. The gun range expert was driving the truck in Cleveland National Forest in 1981 when two 12-year-old girls passed by looking for a picnic spot. He turned around, called out, “Hey, girls!� and then shot both of them in the head.

A close inspection of a black Porsche Carrera on the opposite end of the lot shows the impact of invading scavengers. The convertible sports car, owned by a Costa Mesa restaurateur killed in an apparently professional hit, has been stripped of its dashboard instruments, ragtop roof and other valuable items.

Four cars down, another unsolved case is represented by a charred Cadillac, its windows melted into slag. The personalized license plate “JOANS� is still bolted to the car where firefighters found the body of Joan Anderson in 1982. Years later, a mentally disturbed man confessed, only to be released after evidence pointed to a different suspect. The case file now gathers dust.

A property officer had to flip through dogeared inventories to identify Anderson’s car, but no research was needed to point out the vehicles belonging to Bonin and Kraft. In this graveyard, these are the famous headstones.

The grisly careers of the prolific killers overlapped in the late 1970s when their body counts churned an entire region into a panic. Both cruised roadways for young men and boys, and their vehicles were often where they tortured and killed.

Bonin, a Downey truck driver, was convicted of 14 murders and believed responsible for at least seven others. Kraft, a soft-spoken computer consultant, was found guilty of murdering 16 young men, but a handwritten, coded “death list� found in the trunk of his Toyota suggests he may have killed more than 65.

Bonin was executed by lethal injection in 1996. Kraft remains on death row.

The rear doors of Bonin’s van now open with a metallic creak and a puff of dirt. A flurry of raccoon prints mark the rear, right panel, along with a “C.B. Trucker� bumper sticker depicting a grinning cartoon truck.

Inside the van, a uniform layer of dust covers the dashboard, except for a finger-width streak across the odometer where someone checked the mileage, frozen at 85,571. Startlingly, sections of avocado green carpet still lie in the back.

Fibers from the now-mottled shag were a key lead in the search for the elusive killer after they were found on several victims, according to Orange County Superior Court Judge David O. Carter, who worked for a time as a prosecutor on the Bonin case.

“It was a unique weave from a North Carolina factory, and it helped us before we had an eyewitness,� Carter recalled. “That van is still around? I had no idea. I just might stroll over there sometime to see that God-awful thing. I don’t have to, really, though. I can still see that damn thing clearly in mind.�

If Carter does arrange a rare visit to the secret lot, he might get the same half-joking reminder that an officer toting a clipboard gave another recent visitor: “No souvenirs.�

‘Hell on Wheels’

Ghoulish collectors and the celebrity bestowed on serial killers is a sensitive topic and security concern for sheriff’s officials. They agreed to be interviewed for this story only if the lot’s location was kept confidential.

As Carter points out, a “sad, sick� subculture thrives on horrific touchstones taken from murderers and their crime scenes.

Sheriff’s officials would like nothing better than to drop Bonin’s van in a car-crusher, but they must wait until three years have elapsed since his death to get formal ownership. With Kraft still awaiting an execution date, his car will last easily into the next century.

If the so-called “death list� found in the trunk is accurate, Kraft would be the most prolific serial killer ever. And his car was the closest thing the loner had to an accomplice. One cop interviewed for this story called it “hell on wheels.�

In May 1983, California Highway Patrol officers spotted Kraft’s Toyota weaving on the northbound Santa Ana Freeway in Mission Viejo. When they pulled the car over, they found Kraft at the wheel and a dead, partially nude 25-year-old Marine next to him.

The car was often the place Kraft drugged, strangled, molested and mutilated the young men he later tossed into the weeds along freeway ramps and desolate stretches of rural roads.

The only hints of that horror show are absent items--the car’s cigarette lighter, which investigators believed Kraft used as a torture device, and the blood-saturated passenger seat. Bared metal shows on the inside doors, where moldings were yanked out.

What’s left? A crinkly layer of glass from the smashed-out windshield blankets the dash. The fuel gauge shows a quarter of a tank of gas. The ignition key lies flat and solitary in the glove compartment. A blank evidence tag hangs from the steering wheel. Rope and tattered tarp material hug the deflated tires. Somehow, stereo speakers survived the scavengers.

The heap is now just crime history minutiae, really, like the other cars in this soon-to-be abandoned lot. But even for longtime homicide detectives, there is an eerie power.

“It’s just a creepy place,� Stephany said. “It’s hard to look at those cars and not think about what happened in them. Everybody will be better off when we can scrap them.�