Love and Death: The Sunset Strip Killers
Partners in Crime
On June 20, Bundy accompanied Clark on his Hollywood area cruising and in a parking lot Clark made Bundy lure a young prostitute who used the name "Cathy" to the car. Bundy climbed into the back seat, ostensibly to "watch" Cathy perform oral sex on Clark. She had one of the guns she had purchased in her purse and Doug had the other one with him in the front. Carol was supposed to signal whether or not she wanted to go ahead and shoot the girl herself. But Doug apparently got angry at something the hooker was doing (or not doing), so he reached for the gun, according to Carol, and shot her in the head.
Carol grew excited at what she had witnessed. It did not disturb her at all to see a young girl die in front of her. In Murder Most Rare, the Kellehers say that she may have even photographed it. She then covered the body so they could drive without attracting attention to a place where they could get rid of the body. They ended up near the Magic Mountain amusement park and left the dead girl in that general area, next to some bushes.
Clark soon returned on his own to the Sunset Strip. There he encountered Exxie Wilson. He drove her to the Sizzler restaurant on Ventura Boulevard at Studio City. She began to perform oral sex when he raised the pistol and shot her in the head. In an involuntary reaction, she bit Clark's genitals, which angered him.
He got a bag from the trunk in which he had sharp knives, liquid cleaners, trash bags, and paper towels. He cut off Exxie's head and placed it inside a trash bag. He left the body in the parking lot.
Then he saw a lone blond who had been with Exxie . Her name was Karen Jones. She agreed to get into the car with him, unaware that her friend's head was in the back seat. Doug shot her and pushed her out of the car near the Burbank studios. She was quickly found, and Exxie's body was discovered on the same day a few hours later (although reports are mixed on the order of discovery).
But Doug had driven away to Carol's and placed the head in the freezer to preserve it for their use as a sex toy. Carol admitted to a journalist that they had fun with it. "Where I had my fun was with the make-up," she is quoted as saying. "I was making her over like a big Barbie doll." Once she had the make-up right to Clark's satisfaction, he would penetrate the mouth for a form of necrophilic oral sex, and even take it into the shower with him. They continued to use it in this way for three days before placing it, freshly scrubbed, in the box in which it was found and discarding it in an alley. Carol wore gloves so she would not leave prints.
On August 1, Doug had taken his eleven-year-old companion with him on a prostitute run. He let the girl watch him have oral sex with the prostitute, dropped her off, and then shot the prostitute in the head. He told Carol he had used her corpse for sex and then dumped her near some water towers in Antelope Valley.
Then on August 5, Carol sought out Jack Murray for some companionship. She dropped hints about what she had been doing with Doug, and according to her, he apparently talked about turning Clark in to the police. That was not what Carol had intended, so she knew she had to get rid of him. (Mitchell claims she made this decision to prove her love for Clark.) She lured Murray into his van, had him lie on his stomach, and shot him in the head. But he was not dead, so she proceeded to stab him until he died. After she murdered him, she cut off his head and called Doug, who helped her to get rid of it in a trash can.
The stench in the van eventually led police to the discovery of Jack Murray's body. Carol and Doug were actually at Little Nashville when a commotion occurred just down the street. Carol overheard that the police had found shell casings and realized that they now had evidence linked to her gun. Not only that, Jack's current girlfriend had seen Carol go to his van with him and had told this to the police.
Carol couldn't hold it together for long, and when she admitted to coworkers that she had killed people, the series of murders came to an end. Feeling betrayed by Doug's aloofness, she blamed everything on him, claiming that he was insane and that he had overpowered her. In his turn, when the police arrived, he said that Carol Bundy was a lunatic and that he had nothing to do with any of the crimes. She was framing him for her perverse activities. He talked without an attorney for more than three hours, admitting he knew one of the victims, that he frequented the Strip, and that he had helped Carol to dispose of the head of Jack Murray.
Their nasty demise was as predictable as their relationship had been in terms of the dynamics of dominance and submission. They had performed a deadly dance together and now it would proceed to a new phase.