(Anaheim) An Iowa teenager believed to be one of the first victims of a notorious California serial killer has been identified 49 years after his disappearance.
Long known simply as “John Doe,” the teen was identified Tuesday as Michael Ray Schlicht of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department in California said in a press release that the teenager had long been considered one of the first victims of Randy Kraft, nicknamed the “Scorecard Killer.”
Mr. Kraft, who is incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, was convicted of brutalizing and killing 16 men during a decade-long killing spree in Orange County that spanned ended with his arrest in 1983. In addition to the Orange County murders for which Mr. Kraft was convicted in 1989, authorities said the now 78-year-old man was suspected of killing other people in California, Oregon and Michigan.
The body of the teen now identified as Schlicht was found Sept. 14, 1974, when two people were driving off-road on a fire road northeast of Laguna Beach, Calif., the release said. The 17-year-old’s death was initially ruled accidental due to alcohol and diazepam intoxication.
But other similar deaths in the years that followed caught the attention of investigators who ruled them homicides. Some deaths occurred within a few miles of where Schlicht’s remains were discovered, the release said.
It all ended when a California Highway Patrol trooper stopped Kraft after spotting him swerving and driving on the shoulder of the highway. In the passenger seat of the vehicle was a strangled U.S. Marine.
Prosecutors described Kraft, a former computer programmer, as a fetishist who kept some of his victims’ dismembered parts in his freezer. After his conviction, he told the judge: “I did not murder anyone and I believe that a reasonable examination of the record will show that.” »
John Doe’s death received a new look in November 2022, when Sheriff’s Department investigators submitted tissue samples to a private forensic biotechnology company to develop a DNA profile. Investigators then loaded the profile into a genealogy database to begin building a family tree.
This ultimately led them to Kansas City, Missouri to obtain a DNA sample from a woman believed to be the victim’s mother.