Long Beach Murder in 1975 Tied to String of 37 Killings

by Jerry Hicks

On the night he disappeared, 19-year-old Keith Daven Crotwell was seen leaving the Belmont Plaza parking lot in Long Beach in a Mustang driven by an older man in a sailor’s cap. Six weeks later, after a severed head found in Long Beach Harbor was identified as Cropwell’s, his friends tracked down the Mustang, scouring beachfront neighborhoods and led police to Randy Steven Kraft. That was in May, 1975, eight years before Kraft would be charged with Crotwell’s murder. Twenty-six of the 37 young men Kraft now is accused of killing died during those eight years, and some Long Beach investigators involved in the Crotwell case in 1975 say those slayings could have been prevented if prosecutors had filed charges against Kraft then, as they requested.

As one Long Beach police officer put it: “Let’s just say the Crotwell case is a sore point around here.” “We have so many homicides we have to look into, we usually don’t have the luxury of working a case more than 30 days if we aren’t getting anywhere,” another Long Beach police officer, Sgt. Robert Bell, said recently. “Crotwell was always an open case, and we knew damned well who killed him. But we just had to finally put it on the back burner and go on to other cases.” Murders in Other States Kraft, a former computer consultant who turns 42 this month, has been formally accused by Orange County prosecutors of 37 murders in three states; no one has been convicted of that many serial killings in U.S. history.

All of Kraft’s alleged victims were young men; many were hitchhikers. Most were drugged, sexually molested and strangled; some were mutilated. The Crotwell murder was the fourth of 16 with which Kraft has been formally charged in Orange County Superior Court. If Kraft is convicted, the jury will be told about the other 21 killings that prosecutors say he comm