A6

The Orange County Register

Monday, May 11, 1987

CHAPTER 5
F R O M A1 long and he was unconcerned about his appearance. Holmer thinks that turned some people off. "So far as I know, my roommate and I were his only friends," he said. But Holmer said that beneath the appearance and awkward shyness, there was a sweet, creative soul. Most people "didn't give him the chance or get to know him well enough to find out," Holmer said. Hull used to sling his most prized possession, his Gibson guitar, over his shoulder and ride his bike to Holmer's house. He wasn't a particularly good guitar player, but he played the harmonica expertly, "better than most people you hear on records," Holmer said. It was difficult to persuade him to play because he was selfconscious. But once he started, he'd play for hours while Holmer's roommate accompanied him on the guitar. After they had known each other about a year, Holmer said, Hall began to feel more relaxed with people. The two men worked the night shift together and often got together after work to drink and have fun "He was getting to the point where he was starting to socialize," Holmer said. On New Y e a r ' s Eve 1975, Hall went to Holmer's house at about 2 p.m. They went to Emerson Electric to pick up their checks. They cashed the checks at the Holiday bar, then stayed to drink beer and play pool. They went to a party early that evening where they continued to drink. Hall was drinking hard liquor, a lot of it, and he was drunk when they left, according to Holmer. When they arrived at another party in San J u a n Capistrano shortly before midnight, Hall stumbled over a coffee table and had difficulty walking. The guests started playing poker. Hall played for a little while, but he wasn't up to it, Holmer said. At some point, someone got up to get a beer and noticed that Hall no longer was in the living room. They played cards until daybreak, then went home. Hall didn't show up for work the next

Mark Hall

morning A few days later, the police came to the shop to ask questions. Hall's nude body had been discovered on Bedford Peak in the Saddleback Mountains. He had been bound, burned with a car cigarette lighter on the eyes, chest and genitals, slashed with a knife, and sexually mutilated. His killer had suffocated him by packing his trachea with dirt. He also had a toxic level of alcohol 0.67 percent in his blood, and diazepam, the generic name for Valium, in his body, according to testimony during Randy Kraft's two-month preliminary hearing. Kraft has been charged with killing Hall and 15 other young men. "He was pretty high the night he was killed," Holmer said recently. "There's no way he could have protected himself."

Keith Klingbeil

Eric Church

Did money lead him astray?

Keith Klingbeil's mother figures it was the $50,000 that put her son out on the highway that led to his death. " I ' v e always blamed that money he got for his death," Norma Ulrich explained recently. " I f he hadn't have gotten it, he wouldn't have been hitchhiking." Or perhaps it was how he got the money. The accident took a year from his life and left him with a crippled leg. Not long after the money was gone, he took to the road infused with a wanderlust that eventually made him vulnerable to a killer. Klingbeil's father, Glenn, spent 22 years in the Navy. The family moved around a lot. Keith Klingbeil was born in Florida, but he grew up mostly in Navy towns in Virginia and California. " I was on the ship and spent a lot of time there, so his mother pretty much had the responsiblity of raising him,"

his father said recently. Klingbeil was a bright child. He started his education early at a private school after being refused admission to a public school because he was too young. "He wanted to learn," his mother said. He was in the Cub Scouts and played Little League baseball and midget football. She remembers that he was a kid with a lot of interests. "He liked just about everything," she said. When he was 17, Klingbeil was in a motorcycle accident in Chula Vista. The handlebars went through his spleen, his collarbone was broken and his leg was mangled. He spent a year in the hospital. He finally went home with a painful limp and other problems. "He was on so much Demerol and such in the hospital," his mother said, " I think he got to like it." There was also the S50.000 from his share of the insurance settlement. "It was a lot of money for an 18-year-old," his mother said. Klingbeil spent the money on motorcycles, drugs and good times, his mother said. He dropped out of school. He went to Tennessee with his mother after she divorced his father. When the money ran out, Klingbeil joined the Marines. Although he passed the physical, the rigor of boot camp was too much for his leg. After an early discharge, he entered a Veterans Administration hospital and had an operation to remove a metal pin from the injured limb. Then he took to the road. Klingbeil wandered back and forth to Florida, where he stayed with relatives, or to Everett, Wash., where his father lived. He had many temporary jobs along the way construction worker, carnival worker.

Associated Press/for The Register

Florice and Clayton Church hold photos of their dead son, Eric, in the kitchen of their Coventry, Conn., home. "He was a good worker," said Glenda Perkins, his sister. "He just didn't like restrictions." He had the urge to wander, she said. "He never talked about it much; he just liked going." Klingbeil worked with a carnival in Washington the last summer of his life, according to his father, then decided to head back south. Four days before his death, the Sacramento police cited him for hitchhiking, his father said. His destination may have been his mother's home in Chula Vista. But precisely what happened in the early hours of July 6, 1978, remains a mystery. Shortly before 3:30 a.m., a motorist driving south on the San Diego (1-5) Freeway spotted a body lying on the opposite side of the freeway, three miles south of the La Paz off-ramp. When Thomas Wallstrom of the Orange County Sheriff's Department arrived at approximately 3:30 a.m., paramedics told him Klingbeil had been dead only seven minutes. He had been burned with a cigarette lighter, bound and strangled. Dr. Robert Richards later determined that death was caused by an overdose of acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. In the four hours before his death, Klingbeil had ingested toxic levels of that drug and a small amount of alcohol. Five years later, Randy Kraft was arrested within a few miles of the spot where Klingbeil's body was found. Equipped with the orange backpack and electric razor that years later would become key parts of the investigation into his murder, he drifted West. He traveled to the Grand Canyon, then up to Sacramento. After that, he drifted back to Florida, where he worked at a restaurant. In 1982, he headed back home to Connecticut. According to his father, the restaurant in Florida owed him back wages. Church wrote to the company's headquarters in Southern California trying to collect the money. He was planning a trip back to California in January 1983 and decided to stop at the restaurant's headquarters to pick up the check. When he arrived, though, he was told that the company had mailed the check to his parents' home in Connecticut. His father believes he was hitching a ride back to Sacramento to visit friends when he was picked up by his killer. Clayton Church doesn't remember the exact amount of the check that arrived in his mailbox on the other side of the country. But he thinks it was about $250.

A victim in search of wages

Money, albeit a lot less of it, also put Eric Church out on that fatal highway. But, unlike Klingbeil, Church was not running from a misspent fortune. He was trying to collect a paycheck. Church grew up in Coventry, a small town in rural Connecticut, about 20 miles from Hartford. He was the fourth of Clayton and Florice Church's five children. He dropped out of high school, but like his father, a typewriter repairman, he was handy. He went to auto-mechanics school for a few years and enjoyed working on cars even though he didn't have one of his own. He also liked to cook. " I guess he was pretty good at it," his father remembers. Church worked in many restaurants: a little place in his hometown, a pancake house in Hartford. Then he began to roam.

Chapter 6
A Fatal Friendship
1 w o r r y . " Geoffrey Nelson of B u e n a H H 0^n, l l # l P a r k told his mother again and again. I V I But that didn't seem to stop her. Once, a few y e a r s before, she had opened a newspaper and showed him and his b r o t h e r a picture of a boy they had known who had been m u r d e r e d while hitchhiking. They were shocked. " N e v e r take a ride from anybody, she "He couldn't adjust to everyhad told him. Geoff liked walkbody else's schedule," Mrs. Neling anyway, his mother said in a son remembers. As high-school recent interview. graduation neared, it looked like he was a credit short of graduaNot that she needed to be tion. Somehow, he managed to stern. Judy Nelson had learned squeak by. early that instead of spanking, the way to keep her son in line "After, he said, 'Give me a was to threaten to tickle him. year' to take time and figure out " H e hated to be tickled," she rewhat he wanted to do," his members. He was too busy havmother remembers. He proming fun, creating things, making ised he would go to college. jokes to get into much trouble. He didn't get a job that year He liked to create things. As a and spent most of his time workyoung child, he made origami, ing on his art, poems and music. the Japanese art of folding paHe started a band and was nurper to fashion animals and flowturing his relationship with his ers. His aunt still has them girlfriend. He said he planned to hanging on her wall. His mother marry' her when he was 25, and proudly displays a drawing of a had started paying for a ring on fantasy warrior her son made. a layaway plan, his mother said. He made magic boxes elecIn the last weeks of his life, tronic gizmos for his nephews Nelson was laying plans for his and built a replica of the console future. He did not know that he from the starship Enterprise. He and another young man, 20-yeartaught himself to play the guitar old Rodger DeVaul J r . , also and wrote songs, his mother from Buena Park, stood at a said. crossroads together, about to "He did a lot of things, a little embark upon a last, fatal jourbit of everything pretty much," ney. his friend Bryce Wilson rememTwo friends' last day bers. Sometime in the late morning Nelson had some trouble when or early afternoon of Feb. 11, it came to school. Like his 1983, Nelson awoke at his mother, he had trouble getting girlfriend's house in Buena up in the morning. He was a Park. He got up and dressed in night person. If he went to bed the same clothes he had worn early, he'd just toss and turn.

Geoff Nelson

Rodger DeVaul

the night before: a prized pair of Sergio Valente jeans, a striped shirt his girlfriend had given him and a denim jacket that belonged to Bryce Wilson, who also had stayed over. Wilson and Nelson, who lived a block apart from one another, had been friends for two years. They were close buddies, "like brothers," Wilson later testified. It was a sunny day. The two friends left Nelson's girlfriend's house and went to Wilson's house. There, Nelson called his mother. He told her he was upset because his girlfriend was going to Disneyland that night with another guy, Mrs. Nelson recalled. But still he kept his sense of humor. "Hey Mom, listen, I'm eating," he said, as he munched on a bowl of cereal. " I was always telling him he didn't eat enough," she said. He said he wasn't going to let the romantic setback get him down, she remembers. He was just going to go on with his own life. His year of exploring was

nearly up. He asked his mother if the job his uncle had offered was still open. She told him it was. "I'll contact him on Monday," he said. At about 4 p.m. the two men wandered over to the Electronic Palace, a nearby arcade. About that time, Rodger DeVaul J r . left his father's house on a bicycle he had borrowed from a friend. It had been a disturbing day in the DeVaul household. At breakfast, Rodger DeVaul Sr. told young Rodger that his mother had left them. "He just kind of brushed it off," DeVaul Sr. said in a 1983 interview. "He said, 'She'll be back after she cools off.' " The younger DeVaul was at a difficult crossroads. He recently had been discharged from the Navy because of illness. He had been stationed in San Francisco and wore his uniform proudly. The early dismissal was a big disappointment. When he arrived home, he had gotten a maintenance job at Anaheim Stadium. He was studying auto mechanics at Cypress College. DeVaul was with his girlfriend when he ran into Wilson and Nelson at the arcade a couple of hours later. He left to take her home sometime between 5 and 6 p.m., and Nelson and Wilson wandered off. "We were just doing things, taking up time until nighttime," Wilson testified. At 8:30 or 9 p.m., they met up with DeVaul in front of Wilson's house. They sat on the wall and talked. Wil-

Two bodies are found

son went inside at 11:30, and Nelson and DeVaul walked off. It was the last time they were seen together. The sequence of events after that is murky. At some point, Nelson and DeVaul played their guitars together, Judy Nelson said. Autopsy reports indicate they also shared some food. Sometime between 1 and 1:30 a.m., Sharon House, Bryce Wilson's mother, heard someone at the door. It was Nelson, and he was asking for Wilson. She told Nelson her son was asleep. They talked for a few minutes, and he walked away. She didn't see anybody with him, she later testified. Mrs. Nelson thinks her son may have been on his way to his girlfriend's house. It was Geoff's girlfriend, Mrs. Nelson remembers, who called police the next day to report that Geoffrey Nelson was missing.

strangled. He also had been sexually mutilated. DeVaul's body was found the following afternoon near a road in the Angeles National Forest. Court records indicate he was strangled and sexually assaulted. The prosecution later would allege that the two men died at about the same time. Bryce Wilson later testified that the two victims neither drank nor took drugs while he was with them. DeVaul and Nelson had alcohol, diazepam and propranolol in their systems. Randy Kraft, who eventually was charged with their deaths, had those substances in his possession when arrested, according to court documents.

'Mom, Geoff is dead1

At 5:20 a.m. on Feb. 12, Donald Batchelder, a Los Angeles detective, entered the westbound Garden Grove (22) Freeway from the Euclid on-ramp in Garden Grove. He saw a nude body lying next to the curb. He stopped and started to get out, but noticed what appeared to be a slight movement in the right foot. Realizing that the person might still be alive, he backed down the ramp and drove to a nearby gas station to call for help. An autopsy later determined that Geoffrey Nelson had been

Monday was Valentine's Day. Mrs. Nelson got up and went to work. She had planned to go out with her boyfriend that evening, but canceled and went straight home after work. She made dinner and sat in front of the television. She remembers being swept up in a feeling of dread. She hardly had touched her food when her daughter's boyfriend called. He insisted she come over. When Mrs. Nelson got to the house, her daughter was in tears. "Mom," she said. "Geoff is dead." Mrs. Nelson remembers striking out blindly at whatever was around her. Someone restrained her. How did he die, she wanted to know. She couldn't believe what she heard.

Chapter 7

Marines
ished rural Des Arc, Ark., was on his way to a restaurant late at night when he disappeared. Robert Wyatt Loggins J r . , a handsome young water-polo player from Montclair in San Bernardino County, left a bunch of his Marine buddies who were enjoying a weekend leave. He intended to spend the night on the beach. Terry Gambrel grew up in a rural area near Crothersville, Ind. It is one of those troubling twists of coincidence that the closest big city about 45 miles away is Louisville, Ky., Edward Moore's hometown. On the surface, the two men, who died a decade apart without having known one another, would not seem to have much in common. Gambrel was tall, athletic, competitive. Moore, the product of a hard-luck family, was small and troubled. But a bond links them. Both were men who didn't quite fit in, restless t men who felt the opposing tug of flesh and spirit and sought a meaning for it all. His father was a farmer until his drinking got in the way. It was his mother's weakness, too. "Mom wasn't a terrible person, but she went along with my father," recalled Eddie's sister, Patricia Moore. "She did love her kids." But love, no matter how desperate and intense, too often loses out to the bottle. When Eddie was 11 or 12, his parents were hauled into court, accordPlease see CHAPTER 7/A7

hey w e r e young Marines, most of them far a w a y from the s m a l l towns where they g r e w up. They c a m e to Southern California, a mine field fraught with the new and different, the exciting and dangerous. Some innocently took steps t h a t cost them their lives. When L a n c e Cpl. R i c h a r d Keith, 20, f r o m New Castle, Ind., showed up unexpectedly on talked about their future when Wanda Lynn Shepperd's doorhe got out of the Marines. He step in Carson on the evening of gave her a goodbye kiss and J u n e 18, 1978, she was a little anstepped out into the darkness. gry. He had hitchhiked to her Donnie Crisel, who joined the house from Camp Pendleton. Marines to escape the bleak fuStill, she listened happily as he ture of a laborer in impover-

Looking for a better life

Edward Daniel Moore was struggling to figure out who he was. Up to that point, it all had been so hard and painful, so confusing. Moore saw the Marines as his chance to get his life on the right track. He grew up in Louisville, Ky., the youngest of nine children.