# Douglas Clark

- Link: https://thedarksideofhumanity.com/douglas-clark/
- Published: 2026-10-29T12:43:29-04:00
- Author: Mandi Martyr

Content warning: This case file describes the murders of six women and girls in Los Angeles in 1980, including two teenagers, a decapitation, sexual abuse of the dead (described without graphic detail), a stabbing, and a death sentence. The victims are named where their names are public.TDSH Case File · Los Angeles · Superior Court 1983Douglas ClarkSix murder convictionsAndermann counts reversed 1992Los Angeles 1983Six murder convictions, 1983Los Angeles1980Legal status: Douglas Daniel Clark was convicted by a Los Angeles County Superior Court jury in January 1983 of six counts of first-degree murder and one count of mutilation of human remains, and the jury set the penalty at death. He was sentenced on March 16, 1983. The same jury also convicted him of the attempted murder and mayhem of a seventh woman, Charlene Andermann, but the California Supreme Court reversed those two convictions on July 30, 1992, because her identification of him came after she had been hypnotized; it affirmed the murder convictions and the death sentence. No retrial on the reversed counts was found in any source reviewed for this file. A federal judge denied his habeas corpus petition, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that denial on October 10, 2023. Clark died the next day, October 11, 2023, at age 75, while still under sentence of death, so no appeal or claim remains pending. He maintained throughout that he was innocent. Status checked against the court record and the corrections department’s death notice on October 23, 2026.At 1:30 in the afternoon on June 12, 1980, a highway worker on a freeway ramp near Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles found the bodies of two girls. Cynthia Chandler was 16. Her half sister, Gina Marano, was 15. Both had been shot with a small .25-caliber pistol, and both had been killed somewhere else and left beside the road.Over the next seven weeks the same gun would be linked to four more dead women: Karen Jones and Exxie Wilson, killed within hours of each other in the early morning of June 23; Marnette Comer, found in a ravine off Foothill Boulevard on June 30; and a young woman whose bones were found in the Antelope Valley in late August and who appears in the court record only as Jane Doe 18. Most of the victims were young women working as prostitutes on and around Sunset Boulevard. Newspapers called the killer the Sunset Strip Slayer.The police did not get a name until August 11, 1980, when a vocational nurse named Carol Bundy telephoned them to confess to a different killing, the murder of her lover Jack Murray, and told them her housemate was the man they were looking for. Her housemate was Douglas Clark, a 32-year-old steam engineer who worked in a boiler room in Burbank.Clark’s trial would last into 1983 and produce a capital case unlike most: a defendant who fired his lawyers, represented himself, called the woman who had accused him as his own witness, and then told the jury that whoever killed the victims deserved to die. The California Supreme Court later called the evidence against him “largely circumstantial and painstakingly pieced together through extensive police investigation.” The appeals ended the day before he died.01The victimsCynthia Chandler, 16, and Gina Marano, 15, were half sisters from Huntington Beach in Orange County. Gina’s father, Angelo Marano, was Cynthia’s stepfather. He last saw the girls in early June 1980. He testified that Gina always carried an address book that mattered a great deal to her. On June 1 the two girls had been at a party at a Hollywood house, where Gina wrote a new friend’s phone number into that book. On the afternoon of June 10 a truck driver picked them up hitchhiking and gave the blonde girl, who called herself Cindy, his business card. Neither the address book nor the card was found with their bodies.Karen Jones and Exxie Wilson were both from Little Rock, Arkansas, according to United Press International. Both were working on the streets of Hollywood in June 1980. Between 2:00 and 2:30 in the morning of June 23, a police officer patrolling Sunset Boulevard stopped to warn Karen Jones not to loiter in the area. At 3:15 a.m. her body was found lying by the curb. Exxie Wilson’s body was found that same morning.Marnette Comer came from Sacramento. Her sister, Sabra Comer, last saw her on May 21, 1980, wearing a pink T-shirt printed with the words “Daddy’s Girl.” Her body was not found until June 30, and by then she had been dead for some time. Her T-shirt was found before she was, three days earlier, in circumstances described below.Jane Doe 18 was a young woman with blonde hair who had been dead for one to two months when a worker inspecting water towers near the Sierra Highway found her bones on August 26, 1980. The court record never names her. The California Supreme Court opinion of 1992 still calls her “an unidentified young female.” This file found no public record of her identification since.Charlene Andermann survived. On the night of April 27, 1980, she was stabbed repeatedly in a car on Sunset Boulevard and escaped by forcing the door open. A wire report at the time of sentencing said she had suffered 26 stab wounds. A jury convicted Clark of attacking her, but those convictions were later reversed, and the attack is discussed in that light below.One more man died in this story. John Robert “Jack” Murray, the 45-year-old manager of a Van Nuys apartment complex who sometimes sang at a country-western nightclub, was shot and decapitated in his van in August 1980. Carol Bundy confessed to killing him and later pleaded guilty to his murder. He left a widow, Jeanette Murray, and two young children.02Douglas Clark and Carol BundyExhibitVan Nuys Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, photographed in 2008. Clark told a girlfriend he had obtained his guns at a pawnshop on Van Nuys Boulevard; the court record shows they were bought in Bundy’s name.Photo: Cbl62, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Most of what is publicly known about Douglas Daniel Clark’s early life comes from the penalty phase of his own trial, when his parents testified for the defense over his objection. His father was a career naval officer, and the family moved often for his work. Clark spent a year at school in Switzerland and then attended Culver Military Academy. His mother said his grades were good and she had never noticed anything peculiar about him.Clark did not go to college. He enlisted in the Air Force and was honorably discharged. He then moved to Southern California, where he married Sue Clark in 1972; they divorced around 1976. When an upholstery business he ran failed, he passed an examination to become a licensed steam engineer. By 1980 he was working at a plant on Verdugo Street in Burbank, where he ran a steam boiler and was training another operator.Carol Mary Bundy was a vocational nurse. In late 1979 she was living at the Valerio Gardens apartments, which Jack Murray managed, and she was involved with Murray. In December 1979 she met Clark at a country-western nightclub where Murray sometimes sang. Clark was looking for somewhere to live. By January or February 1980, Bundy had moved to an apartment on Lemona Street in Van Nuys and Clark had moved in with her.Over the next few months Clark moved in and out of the Lemona Street apartment, living for short periods with other women. Three of them testified at trial: Bretta Jo “Joey” Lamphier, with whom he sometimes lived; Eleanor “Cissy” Buster, whose home he moved into after Memorial Day 1980; and Frances Huys, his high school sweetheart, who visited that Memorial Day weekend.On April 25, 1980, Bundy applied to buy two .25-caliber Raven automatic pistols at a pawnbroker in Van Nuys. The guns were nearly identical, except that one had a bright chrome finish and the other a slightly duller nickel finish. She took delivery on May 16. Bundy testified that Clark chose the guns and sent her to buy them, claiming he was an ex-felon. Huys testified that he told her he had persuaded Bundy by falsely claiming a federal conviction. According to Bundy, Clark kept the nickel Raven and the chrome one was hers, though he had access to both and sometimes carried both. Huys remembered his gun as shiny and silver.On June 12, 1980, Bundy applied to rent an apartment on Verdugo Street in Burbank, near Clark’s plant, listing him as a co-occupant. He moved in first. The telephone, the court noted, was “a top priority” to him.03April 27, 1980: the attack on Charlene AndermannThe earliest crime in the case was not a murder. Around 10 p.m. on April 27, 1980, Charlene Andermann was on Sunset Boulevard when a man driving a blue station wagon pulled up and solicited her. She got into the car. She testified that he suddenly began stabbing her, again and again, in the back, neck, arms, chest and stomach. She grabbed the knife by the blade, and it severed tendons in her hand. At one point, she told the jury, she said, “Mister, that’s blood. You’re hurtin’ me.” He laughed and said, “I know.” She managed to get the door open and escape.On May 22, 1980, a police lieutenant trained in hypnosis put her under to try to sharpen that description. He did not ask her about the attack itself. Under hypnosis she gave a description similar to her earlier one, but slightly different, and said she believed the man’s name was “Don” or “Ron.”The identification history that followed is the reason her case ended the way it did. On July 30, 1980, she was shown a photographic lineup that did not include Clark and tentatively picked someone else. On August 5, at a live lineup, she told officers the man was not there; when they urged her to pick someone who looked similar, she chose the same person she had picked from the photographs. It was not until April 1982, nearly two years after the attack, that she picked Clark from a photo lineup. She identified him again in court.Prosecutors filed separate charges of attempted murder and mayhem against Clark on April 2, 1982, and the case was joined to the murder trial that June. Carol Bundy, called by the defense, testified that Clark had come home to the Lemona Street apartment late one night in April 1980 covered in blood and given her an elaborate account in which a rival had attacked him with a knife and he had stabbed a woman by mistake. Clark testified that he had not assaulted anyone. The jury convicted him on both counts.In 1992 the California Supreme Court reversed them. Under a rule it had announced in People v. Shirley in 1982, testimony from a witness who had been hypnotized to restore memory was inadmissible about everything after the hypnotic session, and the court had since held that the rule applied to cases like Clark’s. Her account of the attack and her pre-hypnosis description were admissible. Her photo lineup pick and her courtroom identification were not. That, the court said, “was the only direct identification of defendant at trial,” and it was “by far the strongest evidence connecting defendant with the crimes against Charlene.” The attempted murder and mayhem convictions were reversed.The ruling did not find that someone else attacked her; it found the jury should never have heard the identification. The reversal left Clark legally unconvicted of the attack, and no source found for this file shows that he was retried. The corrections department’s 2023 death notice still listed a nine-year sentence for attempted murder, a discrepancy this file notes rather than resolves.04June 1980: Forest Lawn and the telephone callsThe bodies of Cynthia Chandler and Gina Marano were found by the freeway ramp near Forest Lawn on June 12, 1980. Gina had been shot twice in the head. Cynthia had been shot in the head and the chest, the chest wound from a gun held against her. The coroner found that they had been dead at least 12 hours, probably killed on June 11 or in the early hours of June 12. There were no pools of blood at the scene, and marks on Cynthia’s body showed it had been moved after death. Gina’s address book, which she never went without, was missing.Four days later, on the afternoon of June 16, Laurie Brigges took a call at home from a man asking for her brother-in-law, the truck driver who had given the girls his card. The caller said he was a Hollywood police officer investigating the murder of two girls found by the freeway, and that one of them had her brother-in-law’s business card. He told her there was no need for her brother-in-law to contact police. She thought he gave his name as Detective Clark. She later identified Clark’s voice from a police tape recording, and again in court. Clark admitted at trial that he made calls from Lamphier’s apartment that afternoon but said he had only been talking about hiring movers.Telephone company records showed a call to Laurie Brigges’s number at 2:36 p.m. that day from the apartment of Joey Lamphier, followed four minutes later by a call to the office of the lawyer who had hosted the June 1 party. Lamphier testified that she was at work at the time and that Clark had phoned her there to say he was at her apartment.Mindy Cohen was the guest at that party who had given Gina her number. Around 11:30 a.m. on June 22, a man claiming to be an LAPD detective called her about the murders and told her the number had been found with the bodies. A month later, at 7:11 a.m. on July 24, she was woken by a second call from what she recognized as the same voice. “Well, I killed them and now I want you,” the caller said, according to her testimony. He described the shootings and sexual acts in explicit terms and told her, “You’re next.”That second call was traced to the telephone at the Verdugo Street apartment Clark shared with Bundy. Clark clocked in at work, a few minutes’ drive away, at 7:28 a.m. Cohen also picked out his voice from a recording and said the caller had used the name Doug Clark, though the court noted that a detective had suggested that name to her. Clark testified that he had made the July 24 call but thought he was calling Chandler, and he denied threatening Cohen or telling her he had killed anyone.05June 23, 1980: Sunset BoulevardExhibitSunset Boulevard at the 9000 block in West Hollywood, photographed in March 1990, about a decade after the killings.Photo: Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.Karen Jones was found at 3:15 a.m. on June 23, 1980, lying by the curb in Hollywood. She had been shot once in the head from about six to twelve inches away. A resident nearby had heard a scream sometime between 2:25 and 2:40 a.m. The officer who had warned her about loitering on Sunset Boulevard had seen her alive between 2:00 and 2:30. The coroner’s estimate of her time of death, between midnight and 2 a.m., sat awkwardly against those sightings, and the opinion records both without comment.At 7:15 that morning, the body of Exxie Wilson was found in a restaurant parking lot. She had been decapitated. A red dress with its sash cut into pieces was in a dumpster beside her; no other clothing was found.Four days later, around 1 a.m. on June 27, someone found a wooden box in an alley. Exxie Wilson’s head was inside, wrapped in a pair of blue jeans and a pink T-shirt reading “Daddy’s Girl.” The head had been frozen and scrubbed. The clothes would turn out to belong to another victim who had not yet been found.Bullets recovered from both women were .25-caliber, like those in the Forest Lawn killings. Blood found later in Bundy’s blue Buick station wagon shared seven characteristics with Karen Jones’s, a combination the prosecution’s expert said only one person in 125 would have.Bundy, as a defense witness, testified that Clark woke her at the Lemona Street apartment around 4:30 or 5 a.m. on June 23 and said he had killed two prostitutes. She said that a few days later, at the Verdugo Street apartment, she saw the head in the kitchen, and that she bought the wooden box and helped him leave it in the alley. She had already confessed to a murder of her own.06Marnette Comer and Jane Doe 18On June 30, 1980, Marnette Comer’s body was found in a ravine off Foothill Boulevard, not far from a freeway whose lights could be seen from the spot. She had been shot three times in the chest. The coroner estimated she had been dead for 20 to 90 days. The “Daddy’s Girl” T-shirt and jeans wrapped around Exxie Wilson’s head were hers; her sister identified the shirt.Bundy testified that Clark told her he had killed Comer on May 31, 1980, which would make her the first of the six murder victims to die, and that he called her “Foothill” after the road near which he left her. A letter Clark sent Joey Lamphier from the county jail urged her to go and “see the freeway lights from where #70 [Comer] lay in a ravine for 30 days.” Clark claimed never to have seen or met Comer, yet his writings from jail described the brand of underwear she wore. The court treated both details as signs of firsthand knowledge.On August 26, 1980, after Clark had been arrested, a worker inspecting water towers near the Sierra Highway in the Antelope Valley found scattered human bones and a clump of blonde hair. The victim had been shot in the back of the head with a .25-caliber bullet, one to two months earlier. She was designated Jane Doe 18. Bundy testified that Clark called her “Water Tower.” Clark denied killing her.07August 1980: a confession that named ClarkOn August 11, 1980, Carol Bundy called the police to confess to the murder of Jack Murray. Murray’s body had been found the night of August 9 to 10. According to the court’s summary of that confession, she told officers she had discovered in June that her housemate was involved in the Sunset killings and that she had helped dispose of Exxie Wilson’s head. As she learned more, she confided in Murray. Then, afraid he would go to the police, she shot him and decapitated him. She said Clark helped her dispose of Murray’s head.Clark was taken into custody first on suspicion of involvement in Murray’s death and was then questioned about the Sunset murders by Detectives Orozco and Stallcup. He admitted that he went to Hollywood regularly to “troll” for prostitutes. Shown photographs of the five victims then known, he recognized only Cynthia Chandler, whom he said he had met at the Malibu pier. He said he had otherwise “must have missed” reading about the head in the wooden box, though he also said he read the newspaper “religiously.”He told the detectives he had handled and test-fired both of Bundy’s Raven pistols and admitted that he carried a .25-caliber automatic in a holster in his boot. He said he believed Bundy had gotten rid of the guns and that he had “no idea” where they were. He denied any interest in necrophilia. He told the officers there were “some things I don’t want you to know.” Stallcup later testified that Clark was the coolest murder suspect he had ever interviewed.Four days later, on August 15, a boiler operator Clark had been training at the Burbank plant heard that police were coming to search for guns. Before they arrived, he found two Raven pistols inside a cosmetic bag hidden near the top of the boiler room. The plant watchman testified that Clark had come in after hours on the night Murray’s body was found, saying he was unwell and needed something from the building. The log showed him signing in at 2:06 a.m. on August 10 and out at 2:15. Bundy testified that she had asked him that night to get rid of the guns and that he had once told her he sometimes hid them in the boiler room.08The evidence: guns, cars, blood and paperNo one saw any of the six murders, and Clark never confessed to police. The case was built from objects and records.The gun. Ballistics tests showed that every bullet recovered from every murder victim had been fired by the nickel Raven, one of the two pistols hidden at Clark’s workplace. Bundy said that was the gun Clark kept. In letters from jail, he urged Joey Lamphier to “remember” that he had carried the chrome one instead.The wallet. A slip of paper in Clark’s wallet carried the words “Mindy C.” with Mindy Cohen’s real phone number, and on the other side “Cindy” with the number of the Palm Motel on Sunset Boulevard.The cars. Clark drove Bundy’s blue Buick station wagon and her Datsun regularly. Bundy sold the Buick on July 17, 1980. Officers found .25-caliber bullets and casings from both Ravens inside it, a bullet from the nickel Raven in the Datsun’s passenger door, and evidence of blood in both. Blood in the Buick matched Karen Jones on characteristics shared by one person in 125, and matched Exxie Wilson on characteristics shared by one in five.The garage and the painting. Clark had rented a small storage garage in Burbank from January 1980. He told police he gave it up in May; other evidence showed he kept it through June. On its floor was a stain about two and a half feet wide and eight feet long, as if something bloody had been dragged across it, and a partial bootprint matching the boots Clark was wearing when arrested. A large ski painting kept for a time in that garage, and later hung at the Verdugo apartment, had blood spots on the back that matched Gina Marano’s on characteristics shared by one person in 200.The night of June 11. Cissy Buster testified that Clark went out that night at 10:30 in the Buick, borrowing her Polaroid camera, and came back around 2 a.m. He later showed her photographs of a small car in an underground garage and pointed to a red liquid on the fender he said was blood. She identified Bundy’s Datsun as similar.His own writing. In jail Clark kept “case notes” recording a “4th date w/Cindy” on June 8. He wrote to Bundy urging her to say that Murray was the killer, and to Veronica Lyn Compton, a prisoner in Washington State, about his plan to have Bundy blame “dear, dead Jack.” He told Lamphier to get rid of his buck knife.09A defendant who would not be defendedClark was held to answer at a preliminary hearing in October 1980 and arraigned in Los Angeles County Superior Court on November 13, 1980, with a count of mutilating human remains added. Paul Geragos was appointed at arraignment and relieved in June 1981 over a conflict of interest. Maxwell Keith replaced him, and Penelope Watson was later added to help.Clark asked repeatedly to act as his own co-counsel and then to represent himself outright. Those requests were turned down, most decisively in August 1982, when Judge Ricardo Torres ruled that a request made on the day the case arrived for trial came too late for a case with more than a hundred witnesses. That same month, Keith tried to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity on his client’s behalf. Clark refused it: “I am not guilty by any regard, way, shape or form.”Jury selection began on September 7, 1982. When Clark renewed his request in October, Torres advised him of the risks, found that he had knowingly waived his right to counsel, and granted it, with Keith and Watson ordered to remain in court as standby counsel. Clark called Keith “a buffoon attorney.” The judge said Clark’s accusations against his lawyer were “so outrageous they don’t warrant an answer from the court.”The arrangement did not last. On November 1, angry at the court’s rulings, Clark announced in the middle of a cross-examination that the defense “stands mute throughout the rest of the trial.” The judge treated that as giving up self-representation and put Keith back in charge. Clark told the jury that Keith “is not my attorney and does not represent me.” The next morning he asked for his status back, and it was restored.On December 6, after another dispute over rulings, Clark accused Torres of bias and said, “You have threatened me, you have brow beaten me, will you just back off and do your job?” The judge revoked his self-representation. Two days later Keith relayed an apology and asked that it be restored. Torres accepted the apology and refused: “He’s abused the dignity of this court and the privilege.” Keith and Watson tried the rest of the case.10The trial and the verdictDeputy District Attorney Robert Jorgensen made his opening statement in October 1982 to a jury of eight women and four men. Clark made his own opening on December 2, telling jurors he would show that Carol Bundy and Jack Murray had committed the murders.To make that case he called Bundy herself. She was granted immunity by the district attorney before she testified. She did not implicate Murray. She told the jury instead that Clark had committed the murders, and she described what she said he had told her about each, in accounts the California Supreme Court later summarized at length. She also described her own part: helping him dispose of Exxie Wilson’s head, and killing Murray.Clark testified that he had not killed anyone. He admitted the July 24 call to Mindy Cohen but said he thought he was calling Cynthia Chandler. He admitted the June 16 calls but said they were about hiring movers. He blamed Murray. The 1992 opinion recorded that he made that claim “though without any supporting evidence.” He was also impeached with his jail letters, including those urging Bundy to blame Murray.In closing, Keith argued that the evidence was only circumstantial and that his client’s cooperation with police showed he was innocent. “If someone as smart as Clark were bent on killing for sexual pleasure, he would not leave clues to his identity strewn all around the city,” he said. Jorgensen called Clark a “vile, cowardly butcher of little girls.”The jury deliberated for five days and reached its verdict on January 27, 1983. Judge Torres had it read the next day, January 28. Clark, in a three-piece suit, stood calmly as the clerk read guilty verdicts on six counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances, attempted murder, mayhem and mutilation of human remains.11The penalty phase and the sentenceIn the penalty phase, the prosecution offered evidence of other crimes Clark had never been charged with. The most serious involved two more women. The skeleton of a young woman called Cathy in the record, designated Jane Doe 28, was found near Saugus and Newhall in March 1981. Another woman, Jane Doe 99, was found at Tuna Canyon near Malibu on August 28, 1980. Bundy’s statements to police and her testimony addressed both. Clark testified that Bundy had shot Cathy, and that at the time of the second death he was 385 miles away at his brother’s wedding. He was never tried for either death, and the jury’s verdict was not a conviction for them.The defense presented his parents and two mental health experts. Dr. Gloria Keyes diagnosed antisocial personality and paraphilia but found him sane, with an IQ of 118. Dr. Donald Lunde of Stanford University described sexual sadism.Clark testified against his lawyers’ advice. He told jurors he was innocent, said he had passed a lie detector test, and said that if he were a juror convinced of his guilt he would vote for death himself. “Justice cries out for the death penalty in this case,” he said. “Whoever killed these people deserves to die.” He added that he hoped to win on appeal, but “It’s possible I’ll be executed before proving my innocence.”The jury returned death verdicts on its third day of deliberations, on February 15, 1983. “This is something we won’t forget in a long time, the way these girls died,” the forewoman, Angela O’Neal, told reporters.At sentencing on March 16, 1983, Judge Torres read a long chronology of the killings. Clark interrupted: “Why don’t you cut the bull and get on with the sentencing.” When the judge ignored him, he said, “It’s your soapbox, go ahead.” Torres then imposed sentence: “It is the order of this court that you suffer the death penalty and that the penalty be inflicted inside the walls of San Quentin prison.” Clark asked to be executed within ten days. Under California law the appeal was automatic. Afterward, Keith described his client as “the sickest person I ever met.” Clark was admitted to San Quentin’s condemned unit on March 24, 1983.12Carol Bundy’s caseCarol Bundy had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to her own charges. In May 1983, just before her trial was due to begin, she pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder: the killing of John Robert Murray, and helping Clark kill a young woman whose skeleton had been found in a rural canyon in 1981. By date and place, that woman appears to be Jane Doe 28, the victim the record calls Cathy. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty. On May 31, 1983, Judge Torres, who had also presided over Clark’s trial, imposed the maximum sentence, 52 years to life, calling Murray’s death “a willful, pre-meditated killing.”Bundy told the court she had shot Murray so he could not testify against Clark. Her lawyers asked for leniency on the grounds that she had been an abused child and a battered wife. Murray’s widow, Jeanette Murray, spoke at the hearing. “It’s kind of hard explaining to two young children why they no longer have a father,” she said afterward.If that match is right, Bundy’s plea is the only judicial finding that Cathy was murdered. Clark was never charged with it; at his penalty phase he testified that Bundy fired the shot. Bundy died at the Central California Women’s Facility on December 9, 2003, according to the corrections department. No cause of death appears in the sources reviewed for this file.13The California Supreme Court, 1992ExhibitThe Earl Warren Building in San Francisco, seat of the California Supreme Court, photographed in 2008.Photo: Sanfranman59, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.Because the sentence was death, Clark’s appeal went directly to the California Supreme Court. It decided People v. Clark on July 30, 1992, nine years after sentencing. Justice Arabian wrote for a five-justice majority; Justices Mosk and Kennard dissented.The majority rejected his challenges to the denial and revocation of self-representation, finding that the trial court had been “justified in concluding that defendant intentionally sought to disrupt and delay his trial.” It rejected his complaints about his lawyers and upheld the murder convictions and the death judgment. Apart from the reversal of the hypnosis-tainted counts involving Charlene Andermann, it set aside all but one of the multiple-murder special-circumstance findings, because the jury should not have been asked to find duplicates, and held that the error was harmless. “In all other respects, we affirm the judgment,” the court wrote.Mosk began his dissent bluntly: “I dissent. Justice was not served by the trial court proceedings.” He wrote that “This case illustrates the futility of self-representation in a death penalty case.” Kennard opened hers with a description of the trial: “This death penalty trial was a judge’s nightmare: an extremely complex multiple-murder case in which an obstreperous, manipulative defendant insisted on exercising his constitutional right to represent himself.” She concluded that revoking his self-representation after he chose to stand mute violated his Sixth Amendment right to conduct his own defense, and that the error required reversal.14Federal habeas corpus and deathExhibitThe primary entrance of the James R. Browning U.S. Court of Appeals Building in San Francisco, home of the Ninth Circuit, photographed in 2009.Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.ExhibitSan Quentin, where Clark spent four decades under sentence of death, seen across the bay in 2017.Photo: Frank Schulenburg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.On October 23, 1992, three months after losing his state appeal, Clark filed a document on his own in federal district court asking for a lawyer to bring a habeas corpus challenge. Counsel were later appointed effective September 29, 1993. The petition they filed on April 23, 1997 raised 27 claims. The case was then paused while Clark returned to the state courts, which denied his remaining petitions in 2003. An amended federal petition followed on June 22, 2004, with 23 claims.District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr. eventually denied relief, finding the state court’s rulings on self-representation and substitution of counsel reasonable, and allowed an appeal on those questions. A Ninth Circuit panel of Judges Sidney R. Thomas, Mark J. Bennett and Lawrence VanDyke heard argument in San Francisco on September 19, 2023, and on October 10, 2023, 31 years after his first federal filing, affirmed: “We affirm the judgment of the district court denying federal habeas relief.”The next day, October 11, 2023, Clark was pronounced dead at 3:39 p.m. Pacific time at an outside medical facility. The corrections department said he died of natural causes, with the Marin County coroner to determine the official cause. He was 75 and had been on condemned status at San Quentin since 1983. No execution date had been set: California had not carried out an execution since January 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order N-09-19 of March 13, 2019 had granted a reprieve to everyone on death row. No posthumous filing on his behalf was found.15What the record leaves openClark’s six murder convictions and his death sentence survived every appeal he brought.Jane Doe 18 is still unnamed in every court document reviewed for this file. His convictions for the attack on Charlene Andermann were reversed, and no retrial was found. He was never charged with the deaths of Jane Doe 28, called Cathy, or Jane Doe 99. The trial jury was told that a separate alleged offense against a child had not been proven and could not support any conviction; it is not part of his record, and no other proceeding on it was found. Clark’s claim that Jack Murray was the real killer failed at trial, and the state’s highest court found no evidence connecting Murray to the six murders.He maintained his innocence to the end. The record that convicted him rests on a single pistol, a telephone trace, his wallet, two cars, a rented garage, and the testimony of a woman who admitted killing a man and helping kill another woman. The six women and girls whose names are in it were Cynthia Chandler, Gina Marano, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer, and one who has never been named.16Frequently asked questionsWhat was Douglas Clark convicted of?A Los Angeles County Superior Court jury convicted Douglas Daniel Clark in January 1983 of six counts of first-degree murder and one count of mutilation of human remains, and set the penalty at death. He was sentenced on March 16, 1983. The six victims were Cynthia Chandler, Gina Marano, Karen Jones, Exxie Wilson, Marnette Comer, and a young woman the court record calls only Jane Doe 18. The California Supreme Court affirmed the murder convictions and the death sentence in 1992. He maintained throughout that he was innocent.What happened to the convictions for the attack on Charlene Andermann?The same jury convicted Clark of the attempted murder and mayhem of Charlene Andermann, who survived being stabbed in a car on Sunset Boulevard on April 27, 1980. On July 30, 1992, the California Supreme Court reversed those two convictions because her identification of him came after she had been hypnotized. The ruling did not find that someone else attacked her. It left Clark legally unconvicted of the attack, and no retrial on the reversed counts was found in any source reviewed for this file.How was Clark linked to the murders?No one saw any of the six murders, and Clark never confessed to police. Ballistics tests showed that every bullet recovered from every murder victim was fired by a nickel Raven pistol, one of two hidden at the Burbank boiler room where he worked. A July 24, 1980 call to Mindy Cohen was traced to the Verdugo Street apartment he shared with Carol Bundy, and a slip in his wallet carried her phone number. Bundy, called by the defense, testified that he had committed the murders.Was Douglas Clark executed?No. On October 10, 2023, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the denial of his federal habeas corpus petition. The next day, October 11, 2023, Clark died at age 75 while still under sentence of death; the corrections department said he died of natural causes. No execution date had been set. California had not carried out an execution since January 2006, and Governor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Order N-09-19 of March 13, 2019 had granted a reprieve to everyone on death row.17Related case files The Body After Death: Necrophilia, Possession, and Erasure of Consent Hillside Stranglers Case File: Kenneth Bianchi, Angelo Buono and the Victims Citations & SourcesSources18 Supreme Court of California, People v. Clark (1992) 3 Cal.4th 41, No. S004494, decided July 30, 1992, with dissents by Mosk, J. and Kennard, J. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Clark v. Broomfield, No. 21-99008, opinion filed October 10, 2023. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, “Condemned Incarcerated person Douglas Clark Dies of Natural Causes,” news release, October 12, 2023. United Press International archives: October 30, 1980; October 6 and October 14, 1982; January 28, February 16, March 16 and March 17, 1983; May 31 and June 1, 1983. Wikipedia articles on Doug Clark and Carol M. Bundy, used only to find primary records. Wikimedia Commons, file pages and license data for the five photographs used. Image creditsPhoto: Cbl62, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Photo: Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.Photo: Sanfranman59, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Photo: Frank Schulenburg, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.