Kraft on Death Row
Surviving a Serial Killer
When he was 13, Dietrich Carpio-Timmerman went to a matinee near his mother’s apartment in the L.A.suburb of Cudahy. It was February, 1980, and Disney’s Return to Witch Mountain was showing – a kid flick he wanted to see badly enough that he didn’t mind going by himself. What followed was cautionary at best, nightmarish at worst.
After Carpio-Timmerman bought his popcorn and settled in, an older guy – mustached, paunchy, shaggy – began circling, getting up, moving to another seat again and again until he was right next to Dietrich.
“There were dark circles all around his eyes, like he hadn’t slept for days,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled a quarter century later. “He looked like a sinister version of a stuffed toy raccoon I had as a child.”
The man’s whispered dialogue was classic predator. Did Dietrich have a girlfriend? Why wasn’t he at the movies with her? Why was he alone? Did he like boys instead of girls?
Carpio-Timmerman was polite, deferential and naïve with the persistent stranger. When the questions grew more insistent, more suggestive and finally, flat out lewd, Dietrich excused himself and said he had to use the restroom. He fairly ran to the lobby where he searched out the manager and told him what had happened. Shaken to the point of tears, Dietrich waited with a concession clerk while the manager did a short reconnaissance. He returned to announce that no one matching the stranger’s description was among the largely kid-only audience, but that a side exit down near the screen was wide open, and hadn’t been shortly before the film began.
After his mother picked him up outside the theater, she half-listened to her son while she hummed along to Crystal Gayle on the radio. Forget about it, she counseled. A harrowing experience perhaps, but no harm, no foul.
Flash forward to June. Dietrich and his mother are watching the nightly news when the face of a newly-arrested suspect in a string of ghastly thrill murders flashes on the TV screen. “William George Bonin” read the name beneath the mug shot. Dietrich gasped. That was the man who had tried to seduce him, he told his mother. But if he was looking for sympathy, he’d come to the wrong place. His mother lectured him on the difference between boys and girls. If it had been a bobbysoxer who’d barely escaped molesting, there might have been cause to go to the police. But Dietrich was a strapping young man who could have and should have protected himself. Besides, the last thing she needed as a single mother was to get involved in a homicide investigation.
“I cried for days when I found out more and more details of Bonin’s crimes, but in my family that was it,” recalled Carpio-Timmerman. “My mother would never speak another word about it, not that she ever really did. She even tried to make it seem like it never happened. However the fear was always there and many times I’d go into the bushes at the back of our apartment building were I had built a fort, and just cry alone so no one would know. I had two sisters, but only my older one lived inLos Angeleswith my mom and me. Neither of my sisters ever knew what had happened until I was 34 years old. Silence and deception were the keys to our family’s very foundation.”
William Bonin
William George Bonin would go down in L.A.infamy as the Freeway Killer, though that turned out to be something of a misnomer. He was the chieftain of a tribe of freeway killers as it turned out. Carpio-Timmerman followed every sordid detail of the case clear to its end, though he knew better than to share his horror and fascination with his family. A few months after Bonin’s arrest, his interest ratcheted up again when it turned out that one of Bonin’s victims was a kid just slightly older than Dietrich who also happened to be the younger brother of one of Carpio-Timmerman’s teachers.
As prosecution got underway, Carpio-Timmerman took steps to face down his own demons himself. Without tipping off his mother, he climbed aboard a city bus armed with a newspaper story that identified where Bonin lived in the nearby city of Downey. He got off near Bonin’s house, appropriately located on Angell Street.
“I don’t know what I thought I would accomplish by doing this,” he recalled. “As I stared at it I began to well-up. The front door opened. I quickly began walking down the street as I saw a man emerge and get into his car. I headed back to the bus stop with my heart in my throat. The car passed me and turned down a street in the opposite direction. I cried all the way back home.”
Three more years would pass before Carpio-Timmerman and the rest of L.A. came to understand that Bonin and his deranged disciples were not the only Freeway Killers. In fact, Bonin was a distant second to the biggest predator of all. Carpio-Timmerman never went to the movies with Randy Steven Kraft, but when he met him face to face, he felt the same chill that William George Bonin gave him on that long-ago afternoon when he went to see Return to Witch Mountain.
With sinister irony, Bonin and Kraft not only came to know each other; they would eventually become Death Row bridge partners inside the walls of San Quentin with two other serial killers completing the foursome. It was in pursuit of answers that Carpio-Timmerman began writing letters to all of the bridge players. By the time he mustered the nerve to request visitation, it was too late to confront Bonin. He was executed in the gas chamber in 1996. Asked in a radio interview days before his death if he had any regrets, Bonin said without a hint of irony that he had always been a pretty good bowler in his teens and did feel some remorse that he hadn’t gone on to be a professional.
Bonin was long gone, but Carpio-Timmerman was still able to ask Kraft the same question he’d wanted to put to Bonin – the question that had haunted him for nearly 25 years. Why?
The answer he got from Kraft was no better than a bowling trophy.
“Randy was one truly deranged man,” Carpio-Timmerman recalled. “He is not only the ultimate sociopath and most psychotic human being I’ve ever had the displeasure of getting to know, but for all his sweetness, he is the scariest man I have ever met. All of this I learned quite by accident because, initially, I was only interested in what he could tell me about Bonin.”
(To be continued)
For the complete story about serial killer Randy Kraft, purchase Dennis McDougal’s 1991 book, ANGEL OF DARKNESS. Available at all online and local book retailers.
The cult classic about Southern California serial murderer Randy Kraft, the mild-mannered computer whiz by day and lust killer at night, who holds the dubious distinction of being one of the most prolific murderers (approximately 67 victims) in modern U.S. history. (Warner Books)
Really fascinating stuff. Very interested to read the next part.