Doug Clark (serial killer)

Douglas Daniel Clark (March 10, 1948 – October 11, 2023) was an American serial killer and necrophile.

Clark and his accomplice, Carol Mary Bundy, were collectively known as the Sunset Strip Killers and were responsible for the deaths of at least seven individuals although they are considered suspects in the deaths of several other women and young girls.

Doug Clark was born on March 10, 1948, and was the third son of five children to a retired Naval Admiral turned international Naval Intelligence officer.

Clark enjoyed a comfortable childhood as a "military brat."

His family moved frequently during Clark's childhood due to his father's job, and he later claimed to have lived in 37 countries including India, Switzerland, and the Marshall Islands.

In 1958, his father left the Navy for a civilian position as an engineer with the Transport Company of Texas, but the family still moved around.

Clark was sent to the exclusive International School of Geneva and later attended Culver Military Academy while his father continued to work abroad.

As a teenager, Clark reportedly recorded his sexual escapades with girls at school without their knowledge and began developing dark sexual fantasies of rape, murder, mutilation, and necrophilia.

When he graduated in 1967, Clark enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and was stationed in Colorado and Ohio.

Clark was eventually discharged from the Air Force, and he drifted around for the next decade, often working as a mechanic.

He moved to Los Angeles and was employed as a steam plant operator for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, working at the Valley Generating Station before abruptly quitting.

Subsequently, Clark became a boiler operator at the Jergens soap factory in Burbank but was fired due to a high rate of absences and violent threats he had made against his coworkers.

During this time, Clark also spent the majority of his spare time in local bars and nightclubs searching for lonely, older women whom he could seduce out of their money.

"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," author Louise Farr, who interviewed Clark and Bundy for her book The Sunset Murders, said.

"He was essentially a leech."

Clark also called himself "the king of the one-night stands."

One of the bars he frequented in the area was Little Nashville, where he met 36-year-old Carol Bundy on Christmas Day 1979.

Bundy was a vocational nurse and a mother of two who had left her abusive husband in January 1979.

Clark moved into her home the same night.

Bundy and Clark developed an intense sadomasochistic relationship, and Clark frequently brought sex workers back to the couple's apartment to have threesomes.

Then, when Clark took an interest in an 11-year-old neighbour, Bundy helped lure the girl into posing for pornographic photographs.

Clark quickly escalated from pedophilia to murder, talking about how much he would like to kill a girl during sex.

He persuaded Bundy to purchase two pistols for him to use, reportedly seeking to fulfill his fantasy of killing a woman during sex and feeling her vaginal contractions as she died.

During 1980, Bundy and Clark are believed to have claimed the lives of at least seven persons, but both perpetrators also admitted culpability in the homicides of additional women.

Clark and Bundy were arrested and jailed on August 11, 1980.

After the pair were arrested, the murder weapons were found hidden at Clark's workplace.

Bundy was charged with two murders: Murray and "Cathy" whose killing she confessed to having been present at.

Clark was charged with six murders.

At his trial, he acted as his defense counsel and tried to blame Bundy for everything, claiming he had been manipulated.

Throughout Clark's case, which began in 1982, he intentionally caused delays by complicating and drawing out the process through misuse of the court to his advantage.

Clark was charged with six murders in Los Angeles, California and was convicted in 1983.

Clark's victims were typically young prostitutes or teenage runaways and his victims were decapitated and their severed heads kept as mementos.

He would also perform sex acts on their corpses.

The jury did not believe him, and he was sentenced to death in 1983.

Clark remained on California's death row until his death from natural causes in 2023.

Bundy made a plea bargain and in return for her testimony was sentenced to fifty-two-years-to-life imprisonment.

Bundy died in prison from heart failure on December 9, 2003, at the age of 61.

Clark squandered countless publicly funded resources, time, and money during his original case proceedings and in the subsequent years.

Additionally, per California law, all cases in which the death penalty was sentenced are automatically appealed and reviewed.

Upon review, his sentence was withheld but only after countless hours of public resources were utilized.