Talking with Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  They drove to Highland Avenue where they saw a suitable whore. The prostitute was called over and a deal was agreed. The girl’s name was Cathy, but before she took payment, she said, ‘I don’t do nothing with no woman.’ Her concerns were allayed, and she climbed into the back seat followed by Clark, who left the driver’s seat tilted forward against the steering wheel. This enabled Carol, who sat in the front passenger seat, to have a grandstand view. She gloated at the unedifying sight through her inch-thick spectacles. Clark described what happened next.

  ‘I was on the left an’ Cathy was on my right, and twisted around with only her left buttock on the edge of the seat. She was working me up with her mouth, an’ stuff like that. Then I noticed Carol fidgeting in her seat. She began heaving herself up and down, craning her neck to view the area around the car, like she was looking to see if there was anyone around. I saw Carol’s hand reach around the seat, like she was gonna grope Cathy. Then I saw the fuckin’ gun. For an instant, I thought she was going to shoot me, like she did Murray. But Carol placed the pistol to the back of the hooker’s head and pulled the trigger.’

  The bullet passed clean through the prostitute’s head and struck Clark in the lower side of his stomach. Fortunately, it was only a flesh wound but blood flowed on to his work shirt. ‘I was shocked and freaking out,’ he explained. ‘Carol told me to drive the fuckin’ car while she climbed in the back, tore the clothes off the dead girl and sexually assaulted her, all the while ranting that she was sure the dead girl would have liked it.’

  When the body had been dumped, the two drove back to Bundy’s apartment where he changed his soiled clothes. He wouldn’t see them again until the police arrested him.

  On Saturday, 9 August, the Van Nuys police received a complaint about a Chevrolet van that had been left unattended on Barbara Ann Street. The caller also mentioned a foul smell emanating from the vehicle. Within minutes, a squad car arrived to investigate and a police officer, looking through one of the vehicle’s windows, saw a body in the rear. As the scene was being cordoned off, Detective Roger Pida climbed in to conduct a preliminary investigation and, among the documents scattered about, he found a wallet, which identified the male victim as John Robert Murray. Checking through their computer, the police learned that Murray’s wife had reported him missing several days earlier, and officers were able to ascertain that he spent a lot of time with a woman called Carol Mary Bundy.

  The following morning, two detectives called at Bundy’s apartment in Burbank. She invited them in and they were introduced to Clark and Tammy Spangler. Clark and Bundy were taken downtown for further questioning while Spangler followed in her car to bring them home after the interview.

  At the police station, the couple offered different alibis for the time of Murray’s murder. Clark told the truth and said that Bundy had come home later that night. In a separate interview room, Bundy lied, claiming to have been at home all evening. She was adamant that she had not ventured out. Asked if she owned any firearms, Bundy said that she had recently sold a pair of pistols to a tall guy with red hair and a scar. The only name she could conjure up at short notice was Mike Hammer, which provided the officers with a moment’s amusement. Then Tammy Spangler piped up. She told the detectives that she had seen Murray with a woman called Avril Roy-Smith on the night of the murder. ‘Perhaps you’d better go talk with her,’ she suggested.

  With no solid evidence with which to hold Bundy, they allowed her and Clark to leave while they went in search of Avril who subsequently gave a verifiable alibi to account for the time encompassing Murray’s death. She said that when she left the Chevy van, Jack Murray was very much alive. As Avril departed, heading for the club where she spent the next three hours drinking with friends, she saw Carol Bundy climb into Murray’s van.

  The homicide cops were now very interested in Bundy. The next day, while they were completing their paperwork for the arrest warrant, Bundy walked off her job at the hospital after confessing to colleagues that she was responsible for murdering and decapitating her lover. She told them that she was going back to her apartment to ‘clean out the evidence before Doug gets home’. As soon as she left, a senior official at the hospital reported Bundy’s bizarre allegation in a frantic call to the police.

  On her way home, Bundy called in to see Clark at the soap factory during his shift. She asked the gatehouse security officer to summon him. When he came out, she told him that she had told the police everything. Clark was livid. ‘You crazy cunt’, he snapped, ‘get the fuck away from me.’

  With Bundy now off the premises, Doug stormed back into the factory where he tried repeatedly to phone detective Pida who was not in his office. ‘Bundy was trying to fit me up with murder,’ he has said many times while protesting his innocence for the Sunset Slayings, ‘an’ who the fuck is gonna believe a woman is doing all this murder stuff? An’ she had incriminating photos of me and Shannon hidden away. Blackmail. Yeah. That’s what it fuckin’ is.’

  Just after 11.00am that morning, there was call to the Northeast Division of the LAPD, and a woman – Carol Bundy – asked to speak to homicide detectives. When Officer James Kilgore picked up the phone, the woman said, ‘Sometime, way back, you were having a string of murders involving prostitutes in Hollywood.’

  ‘We still are,’ replied Kilgore, totally unaware that the caller was recording their conversation.

  ‘Do you still have a code name on the girl by the name of Betsy/Claudia?’

  Kilgore said he wasn’t sure.

  ‘All right, never mind,’ said the caller. ‘Would you like your man today?’

  She talked about the murders, and said that the weapon was a .22-calibre automatic. She said her man had told her he had ‘hit over 50 people’. Then she said that she had killed a man named Jack Murray, and admitted her involvement with several of the other murders. ‘The one he cut her head off. Well, I played around with that one … and the fat girl [Karen Jones] that he dumped off near the NBC studios, I was involved with that.’

  Kilgore asked how many murders there had been. ‘Probably 12 or 14 total,’ came the reply. ‘But I can’t verify all of them. I can only verify about eight or nine.’

  ‘And you helped him on some of them?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Bundy. ‘Specifically how I got involved with it was a case of being scared to death because I knew that he had done these things. I felt I had to get involved. If I was involved he’d have no reason to kill me.’

  She then said she was calling to give herself in, and that her real name was Carol Bundy. Finally, referring to the killer, she blurted out, ‘He’s my boyfriend and his name is Douglas Daniel Clark.’

  ‘Doesn’t it make you feel bad that you killed somebody?’ asked the detective. Bundy replied, amazingly, ‘The honest truth is, it’s fun to kill people, and if I was allowed to run loose, I’d probably do it again. I have to say, I know it’s going to sound sick … it’s like going to sound psycho, and I don’t really think I’m psycho, but it’s kinda fun. It’s like riding a roller-coaster. Not the killing, not the action that somebody died, because we didn’t kill them in any way that they’d suffer. It was just killing them straight out.’

  * * *

  After making her telephone call, Bundy started rearranging her apartment, in the belief that she had a few hours to get things in order. She was bent on doing everything she could to incriminate Clark, but she had just minutes, because detectives were about to arrive on her doorstep and arrest her. When they did, they conducted a careful search of the place.

  Almost immediately, Bundy held up a cardboard box that contained a pair of panties and assorted clothing. These items later proved to belong to an, as yet, undiscovered murder victim who would later be tagged ‘Jane Doe 28’. The box also contained a purse belonging to another unidentified victim, ‘Jane Doe 18’.

  ‘This box belongs to Clark,’ she said, ‘And, do you want to see what kind of guy Doug Clark is?’ she asked, as she reached for her
handbag on a table. An officer stopped her because he suspected that the bag might contain a gun but, inside, was Bundy’s key ring. She selected a key and offered it to one of the police officers, to open the cabinet in Clark’s bedroom. The cupboard contained a photo album of Clark with his numerous lovers, including photos of his poses with the 11-year-old Shannon. Also, hidden among various papers was a firearm sales receipt, made out to a Juan Gomez, which later proved to be false.

  Meanwhile, Detective Pida had taken Clark in for questioning to Van Nuys Police Station where he was held for hours, without water or food and denied the use of the toilet. This treatment was illegal, especially when Clark had not even been told of the reason for his arrest. Indeed, at the time, he actually believed the arrest was all about Murray. When he was finally asked what he knew about this murder, to his credit, he admitted everything he knew. When he was asked why he hadn’t gone straight to the police, Clark truthfully answered that Bundy had dozens of incriminating pictures, of himself and Shannon, which she had used as a threat.

  When Pida produced the photograph album, taken from his bedroom cabinet, Clark started to feel decidedly uneasy. The detective showed him a mugshot of the dead Cynthia Chandler, and Doug explained that he knew her personally. They talked about the prostitute murders, to which Clark retorted, ‘Someone is tryin’ to lynch my ass, and I have hunch I know who it is.’

  With little else to book him with, the police initially detained Clark on a holding charge of child molestation. This was a stop-gap measure, for they had wider ambitions as far as Clark was concerned. There was certainly no evidence to say that he had been involved with the Sunset Slayings, other than Carol Bundy’s wild accusations. Nevertheless, Clark was held, without his legal rights read to him, for a further eight hours because he demanded to see an attorney.

  It was now late at night and, when the police finally acceded to his request for legal representation, they informed him that all the lawyers had gone home, and it would take hours before one could be recalled. Then he was illegally moved to another police station 30 miles away. When an attorney did turn up, at Van Nuys Police Station, Clark was no longer there and no one seemed to know where he had been transferred.

  If the police were being ‘unco-operative’, then Clark was quite the opposite. He gave them permission to search his apartment, his motorcycle, and his place of work. ‘I gave them everything,’ Clark railed on. ‘I gave them my fuckin’ boots, my fuckin’ saliva, my fuckin’ blood. I offered to take a polygraph, but changed my fuckin’ mind ’cos I ain’t never trusted the cops. I could see a fit-up coming from a mile off.’

  While he was being grilled, Bundy was unloading her story on the detectives interviewing her. She corroborated Doug’s denial of guilt for Murray’s murder, saying that while she had shot Murray, another man, ‘a psycho’, had hacked the head off to remove the evidence of traceable bullets. Questioned as to why she had left the cartridge casings in the Chevy, she gave conflicting answers. At first, she stated that she didn’t realise that the weapon automatically ejected the cases. Then, in a complete reversal, she said that she did realise that the cases had ejected from the weapon but, had simply forgotten to pick them up.

  During the initial, and extremely thorough, search of Murray’s van, there was no record of any shell casings being found. Some time later, however, a detective said that he had found a single shell casing in the van, and that it had been fired from Bundy’s chrome-plated Raven pistol. This discovery took on a more sinister aspect when it transpired that a police evidence envelope, sealed and marked ‘2 × shell casings found at unspecified sources’ had been torn open and one of the shell cases was missing.

  When she was asked why she had shot Murray, Bundy gave four vague reasons in rapid succession. The first was that he had stolen money from her; second, because he had jilted her; then, she had shot him as he had planned to rape and kill Shannon; and finally, that he was going to report Doug to the police, accusing him of being the deadly Sunset Slayer. None of this made any sense whatsoever but, incredibly, the police seemed inclined to believe her. Regarding which of the four stories, they didn’t seem to know.

  With an attentive audience of good-looking police officers surrounding her, Bundy went on to say that she had been involved with the Cathy murder. The hooker had been shot while sitting in her Datsun. When the police told her that there was no forensic evidence of a shooting in the car, let alone a murder, she changed her account, saying that the crime had taken place in her Buick, which she had loaned to Clark. For his part, Doug says it was most certainly the Datsun because the car only had two doors, and he had to push the driver’s seat forward to let the hooker in.

  Bundy went on to say that she had paid the hooker to give Clark a blow-job as a birthday present, but claimed that it was agreed that he would give her a signal as to when to shoot the prostitute in the head. Douglas Clark vehemently denies this, arguing, ‘No, man, I don’t care who he is. Who would let a half-blind bitch reach over, shoot at the head of a hooker suckin’ his cock and hope like hell she didn’t blow a hole in his knee or chest? I mean, what if her jaw locked shut?’ Perhaps Clark has a valid point!

  When questioned about the Marano and Chandler murders, Bundy claimed that she had not been involved. She had merely learned of the crimes through Clark. It was Doug, she said, who had told her that he had shot both women in the head while they were giving him oral sex. During his interview at San Quentin, Clark was asked to comment on Bundy’s claim.

  ‘You are pulling my pecker,’ he declared. ‘Do you think I’m fuckin’ crazy, man? Some broad is blowin’ me off an’ I stick a gun to her head and blast them away. What about the fuckin’ blood, man? What about my dick, man? I’d have been covered with the shit and it would have been painted all over the inside of the fuckin’ car.’

  Bundy told the police that Doug ‘dragged the bodies from the Buick and into his lock-up garage where he had sex with them’. She added, ‘And it was because of this bloody mess in the car that Doug put it through a car wash.’ Clark has never denied washing the Buick and, indeed, he even volunteered this information to the detectives who confirmed that he had been to the carwash on 21 June, exactly a week after Bundy made her Betsy/Claudia call to the police.

  Clark asserted, ‘Everyone who saw or rode in the Buick from 14 June to 21 June – and there will be many who testify to this – will say that the car was dry, and right after the car wash on 21 June it was soaked and damp with steamy air for a full week. The point is, what fucking vehicle was she washing out, just before the taped call to the police on 14 June? The Datsun was broken down, the Buick was dry, and only the Murray’s Chevy van fits the details she made in that call.’

  It later proved to be the case that, indeed, Murray’s van had been washed out after the first three murders, although the police chose to ignore this vital evidence, that would prove beyond any doubt that Bundy was lying once again to save her own skin. Yet all of this begs the question as to why Clark washed the Buick in the first place. The answer lies in supporting evidence, given by four other people, who confirm that he is telling the truth.

  During the evening of 20 June, Clark visited Joey Lamphier, one of his many girlfriends and, when he left the woman’s apartment, he accidentally reversed over an alley cat, crushing its hindquarters. He lifted the badly injured animal into the Buick where it crawled under the front passenger seat. Douglas Clark is known for his love of cats and, in the past, had taken in several strays. He rescued many more from animal pounds and found new homes for them. Any cat-lover will confirm, therefore, that it would have been in his nature to have been very concerned about this particular cat’s welfare following the accident. Unfortunately, the cat died before he could reach a vet, so he placed the dead creature in a cardboard box and left it by garbage skip.

  After work on the 21 June, Clark drove Timmy, the young son of his current landlady, and Bundy, in the Buick, to the carwash. Carol was pressing for the return of
the car, in preparation for her move to Burbank. Doug hosed the cat’s blood, urine and excrement from under the seat and vacuumed the excess water away. Later, Timmy told police that the small amount of blood was still wet when he got into the car, which totally contradicted Bundy’s claim that the blood had been there for some ten days. And, Clark explained, ‘If this car wash had a sinister motive, why would I have taken a mouthy kid along?’

  Police evidence technicians did find a small amount of what appeared to be blood, under and around the front seat of the Buick, yet in no way was the back seat contaminated in the manner which would have been consistent with Bundy’s claim that three brutal and bloody murders had been committed in this vehicle.

  Around mid-1991, Carol Bundy changed her story yet again. This time for the benefit of a journalist who was writing a book about the Sunset Slayings. She now said that the car wash on 21 June followed the murder of Cathy (Jane Doe 28), which had been committed the night before. Now, according to her latest claim, the blood was no longer that of Chandler and Marano, neither was the Cathy murder committed in the Datsun. This time it was someone else but, once again, the police seemed to ignore these contradictions.

  When questioned about the murders of Karen Jones and Exxie Wilson, Bundy denied any involvement in these crimes, and merely related an account allegedly given to her by Clark. ‘There were three hookers working together,’ she said. ‘Clark picked up Exxie and shot her in the head before decapitating her behind the Sizzler’ Diner.’ (Witnesses heard a vehicle racing away from this precise location at about 1.15am.) Bundy went on to say that Doug returned to pick up Karen Jones and he shot her while she was giving him oral sex in the car. ‘He killed her and dumped the body,’ she said. Witnesses heard a scream around 2.40am, and Karen’s corpse was discovered at this location less than an hour later.