Forty Years Ago, the Sunset Strip Killers Terrorized L.A. (lamag.com)
by Hadley Meares October 8, 2020
''Douglas Daniel Clark knew an easy mark when he saw one. Around Christmas 1979, the 31-year-old noticed an awkward, solitary woman drinking at the Little Nashville Bar in North Hollywood. From a well-to-do family, Clark was an Air Force veteran who now got his kicks taking money from lonely, older women. “He was very good at murmuring in women’s ears in country bars and getting them to sleep with him and give him a place to stay,” Louise Farr, author of The Sunset Murders, told the Los Angeles Times. “He was essentially a leach.”
The woman’s name was Carol Bundy, a 37-year-old nurse at Valley Medical Center in Van Nuys. She was there to watch apartment manager and singer John Robert Murray, her on-again, off-again married boyfriend, who many compared to a low-rent Tom Jones. Bundy had a tragic life. Both her parents were violent alcoholics, her father had raped her, and her first husband beat her. “Carol was terribly abused by her father as a child,” Farr told the New York Post. “Because of [that], she became subservient. She would do anything to please her man, and she lost any . . . boundaries.”
JUSTICE STORY: The sick Sunset strip killers - New York Daily News (nydailynews.com)
''In 1979, she took her children and moved into an apartment complex managed by John “Jack” Murray, 44, a country-western singer from Australia. He was a headliner at Little Nashville. He was also married, but that didn’t stop Jack from fooling around. Bundy became one of his conquests.
She gave him access to her money, hoping the cash would convince him to leave his wife. Murray cleaned her out but stayed married. Then she tried to bribe Murray’s wife to set him free. That got her evicted.
Bundy was still hanging around the bar when she met Clark, an air force veteran who worked in a Burbank soap factory. They were soon an item.
Perhaps she should have balked when he persuaded her to purchase a pair of .25-caliber pistols, one for him and one for her. It might have been prudent to leave when he told her about murdering two teen prostitutes.
Not only did she stay, she also began to accompany him on his hunting expeditions, sitting in the car while he killed street walkers.''
''On Aug. 9, residents of a quiet street in Van Nuys complained about a stench coming from a van that had been parked there for a few days.
Inside, police found a mutilated, headless corpse, but this one was a male. It was the remains of Jack Murray.
Carol Bundy, leaving her arraignment in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1980. (Huynh/AP)
What happened to him was a mystery, but not for long. After blabbing about Murray’s murder to nurses at the hospital where she worked, Bundy decided to turn herself in.''
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