Angel of Darkness: The True Story of Randy Kraft and the Most Heinous Murder Spree by Dennis McDougal

Author:Dennis McDougal [McDougal, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Criminals & Outlaws, Murder, Non-Fiction, Serial Killers, True Crime
ISBN: 9780446562485
Google: 3XI3AQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B002PXFY42
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2009-06-26T23:00:00+00:00

16

Miriam Phillips found talking to Randy as easy and as comforting as sharing secrets with an older brother.

It had always been that way, from the first time they met around the swimming pool at the Laguna Hills complex where Jeff Seelig and Randy first shared an apartment back in the mid-’70s. Miriam and her fmancée, Russ, liked them from the beginning and invited Randy and Jeff to their wedding back in New England in 1978. When they settled down in southern California, they counted the candymaker and the computer whiz among their closest friends.

The Phillipses understood that the two men were gay and that theirs was a life-style very different from their own. But there were just as many striking similarities. As is the case with many heterosexual relationships, Jeff was the “gregarious, outgoing, friendly” half of the couple while Randy was “quiet and agreeable,” according to Miriam. The two couples shared dinners and Saturday afternoons and movies together.

“Jeff and I usually picked the movie. I don’t ever remember Randy getting his way. Let’s put it that way,” Miriam remembered. “Throughout the years that I’ve known Randy he’s always been very sensitive, but he’s a very easygoing guy.”

The Phillipses were looking for a house to buy at about the same time as Randy and Jeff. They bought in a new tract in El Toro, in southern Orange County while Randy and Jeff found their fixer-upper in an older neighborhood in Long Beach, just a block from a high school.

After their housewarming, Russ and Miriam were among the first people Jeff and Randy had over to dinner. They were all young upwardly mobile professionals long before the acronym became a dictionary word. They shared disco music, the Star Wars movies, Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, and a modestly affluent urban life-style in common. If the early ’80s represented the Armageddon of the Age of Aquarius, then they were all survivors, bravely moving toward middle age with one eye on their social consciences and the other on their bank accounts.

Miriam liked her friends’ new home well enough. Besides the ramshackle doghouse Randy had built for his mangy white mongrel, Max, one of the first things Miriam noticed in the backyard was the vegetable garden. With his own age now creeping past the thirty-five-year mark, Randy preached a healthy sermon of vitamins, exercise and lots of good, wholesome food, especially fresh vegetables. You are what you eat, Randy believed, which made Miriam a walking, talking Mars bar.

Miriam remembered, “When he saw the amount of junk food I continued to accumulate, he would bring me vegetables from his garden: great tomatoes and things. And I remember specifically, one evening we were … it might have been a brunch, I’m not sure. He was cutting tomatoes and vegetables at the sink and I was talking about junk food—about trying to get away from that and go for the vegetables. Randy was always very concerned.”

Randy revealed to her that he had hypoglycemia, a fluctuating blood sugar imbalance

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