All About the Sunset Strip Killers' 1980 Murder Spree: "It Shook All of Us"

Doug Clark and Carol Bundy were a pair of killers that primarily targeted minors and sex workers in 1980 and 1981, a means to fulfill shared sexual fantasies revolving around abuse, murder, and necrophilia. Between them, the relatively new couple murdered no less than eight people, though they are suspected of killing more.

In the late 1970s, Clark was a U.S. Air Force veteran and Burbank factory worker known for roping in older women for money, according to Los Angeles Magazine.

“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,” wrote Louise Farr, author of The Sunset Murders. “He was essentially a leech.”

In 1979, the then-31-year-old met 37-year-old vocational nurse Carol Bundy at the Little Nashville Bar in North Hollywood. Bundy was a single mother from Massachusetts who’d gone from one marriage to the next, a woman reportedly reared in a horrendously abusive home as a child.

On the night Clark and Bundy met, Bundy was at the country bar to watch her part-time and married lover, John “Jack” Murray, perform with his band. The lead singer was Bundy’s one-time landlord, as documented in court records filed with the Supreme Court of California and reviewed by Oxygen.com.

Clark and Bundy found themselves in a whirlwind romance that resulted in them quickly moving in together in Bundy’s Van Nuys apartment, along with Bundy’s two sons. According to Los Angeles Magazine, the partners began grooming and abusing an 11-year-old neighbor, carrying out graphic and sadistic sexual fantasies, which the couple even photographed.

“Carol told me she was a mousy, little person and her experiences with Doug were the most amazing adventure[s] she had ever been in,” said Farr.

Clark later told police he would “troll” the Sunset Strip in Hollywood — famous for its music venues and bars — and regularly brought home sex workers for him and Bundy, according to court records. Prosecutors believed Bundy helped her new lover as Clark’s fantasies escalated to murder and necrophilia. However, some questioned whether Bundy was a willing participant or if she instead committed the hideous acts in subservience to Clark.

It would be Bundy herself who called 911 in August 1980, blowing the case wide open, as once featured in the Oxygen series Mysteries & Scandals.

On the afternoon of June 12, 1980, a highway worker found the barely clothed bodies of half-sisters Cynthia Chandler, 16, and Gina Marano, 15, near a freeway ramp by Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills. A postmortem examination revealed Chandler was sexually assaulted and shot in the chest and head, while Marano was shot twice in the head, though whether the younger victim was sexually assaulted could not be determined.

The half-sisters were known runaways from Huntington Beach, and attorneys believed they regularly hung out on the Sunset Strip and hitchhiked the area.

Clark, who committed the murders without Bundy’s help, went on to take the victims’ personal belongings and call people from one of the sisters’ address books over a month-plus timespan. He even presented himself as an L.A.P.D. detective investigating the crimes before calling one of the girl’s friends, eventually stalking her and threatening to kill her, too, according to court records.

“I shot them, and then I made love to them, and it felt so good,” Clark told the scared friend over the phone, according to her courtroom testimony. “You’re next.”

Eleven days after Chandler and Marano’s bodies were discovered, at around 3:15 a.m., known sex worker Karen Jones, 24, was found shot to death near a curb behind a Burbank steakhouse, according to Los Angeles Magazine. A local police officer warned her of loitering in the area earlier that morning, and locals heard screams about an hour before she was found dead, court records stated.

Just hours later, a little after 7:00 a.m., the beheaded and nude body of Exxie Wilson, 20, was discovered near a dumpster in the Valley. According to an October 30, 1980, article from The Press Democrat reviewed by Oxygen.com, Jones and Wilson were friends who’d recently moved to Los Angeles from Little Rock, Arkansas, and fell into prostitution.

A coroner ruled that Jones and Wilson died within the same one- to two-hour time frame on June 23, 1980.

Four days later, in the early morning hours of June 27, 1980, Wilson’s severed head was found in a wooden box, wrapped in jeans and a tee that read “Daddy’s Girl” (clothes that would belong to another victim, Marnette Comer).

According to Los Angeles Magazine, Bundy confessed that she and Clark kept Wilson’s head in the freezer and that she used makeup to make it look like “a Barbie doll” for Clark’s disturbing sexual gratification. Court records stated that, like the other victims, Wilson was fatally shot in the head — the head severed postmortem.

On June 30, 1980, the naked and mummified body of 17-year-old Sacramento runaway Marnette Comer was discovered in a Foothill Boulevard ravine near the freeway, according to court records. Though she was Clark’s fifth discovered murder victim, she is believed to have been one of Clark’s first kills.

According to her sister’s on-record statements, Comer was last seen on May 21, 1980, wearing the same jeans and tee found with Wilson’s severed head. She was determined to have been shot in the chest one to three months before she was found.

On Aug. 26, 1980, less than two months after Comer’s body discovered and weeks after Bundy and Clark’s arrests, the skeletal remains of an unknown female were found in a lot of a Newhall, California, oil field. Newhall Jane Doe, believed to be between 15 and 20 years old, was shot in the head.

According to court records, Clark told Bundy he shot the unidentified victim — whom Clark cited as a sex worker — during a sexual act, later abusing the body.

Clark represented himself in court, and was ultimately found guilty of killing Chandler, Marano, Jones, Wilson, Comer, and Newhall Jane Doe. He was also convicted of attempting to kill a woman known only in court records as “Charlene A.” on April 27, 1980, after picking the woman up on Sunset Boulevard and violently stabbing her during a sexual act in his vehicle.

Bundy was found guilty of murdering Jack Murray, as well as an unidentified victim known as “Cathy Jane Doe.” According to court records, the skeletal remains of the female, aged between 17 and 23, were found near a creek bed in the Saugus-Newhall area in March 1981. Like the others, she had been shot to death, and Clark reportedly sexually abused the body postmortem.

Clark and Bundy were never convicted but are the prime suspects in the double murder of two unidentified females found in a riverbed near a Valencia sewage plant. The victims, one of whom was believed to be between 17 and 24, are collectively known as the Valencia Jane Does.

Based on Bundy’s statements, Clark is also suspected of killing an unidentified woman in Malibu, who Clark allegedly admitted to shooting during a sexual encounter and dumping in Tuna Canyon.

Carol Bundy was sentenced to 52 years to life after pleading guilty to two counts of first-degree murder for the murders of Jack Murray and Cathy Jane Doe. The Los Angeles Times reported that in 2003, Bundy visited the hospital multiple times and suffered from heart and respiratory issues and diabetes from behind bars.

Later that year, Bundy died of heart failure. She was 61 years old.

As for Doug Clark, he was sentenced to six consecutive death sentences for six counts of first-degree murder, plus eight months for mutilation/sexual contact with human remains, and nine years for attempted murder with a three-year enhancement for inflicting great bodily injury, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

On Oct. 11, 2023, while serving on San Quentin’s death row, Clark died of natural causes “at an outside medical facility.” He was 75 years old.

Bundy and Clark were featured in Season 4 of Snapped: Killer Couples, now available on Oxygen.