Love and Death: The Sunset Strip Killers
Initiation
Carol found Doug to be suddenly quite controlling. He demanded that she do what he wanted and threatened to abandon her (she said) if she did not comply. He wanted a sex slave, someone who would see to all of his needs, mundane and bizarre. She gave in, expecting that in return he would be true to her. But he soon told her that he was tired of having sex with her and needed something new and more exciting. He brought prostitutes home, according to Mitchell, and to please him Carol went along with it.
In the meantime, Jack Murray faded away, apparently relieved to be free of Carol's delusional neediness.
By the spring of 1980, Carol said later to police, Doug Clark had turned to murder. One day in April, he came in covered in blood. He lied about its source but then on another occasion Carol discovered a bag of bloody women's clothing in the car. Doug then told her about Gina and Cynthia, the two girls found murdered in June and dumped off the freeway. (Furio suggests that Carol was in on this, but other sources indicate that she did not know until he told her.)
Apparently Doug confessed in detail what he had done with the two girls. He said he had picked them up on the Sunset Strip where they sat at a bus stop. Then he made Cynthia perform fellatio on him and ordered Gina to look away. When she refused, he shot her in the head. Then he shot Cynthia. When it appeared that they were not dead, he shot them both again and took the bleeding corpses to a rented garage. There he played with them, posing them for his entertainment, and then he raped the bodies. In the early morning hours, he dumped them by Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery.
He told Carol about this incident and Louise Farr claims that she found herself intrigued and excited by the idea of this kind of kinky sexual escapade. She felt that an intimacy had grown between them that Doug did not have with another woman he was seeing, and she wanted to go along on one of his murder adventures. She apparently thought that this would finally seal their relationship.
Yet she must have had second thoughts, because she did call the Van Nuys police to report what she knew. That was on June 14. When the switchboard cut her off, she did not bother to call back. It's not clear how far she would have taken this had they given her more serious consideration. She might have stopped Clark or she might have pulled away from the police. She was unpredictable.
That evening, she said, Doug urged her to watch the news. She turned it on and saw that another murder was being reported, but this one was a man. His name was Vic Weiss and he had been found in the trunk of a Rolls Royce at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. Doug took credit for this murder.
The following morning, he took Carol out to a ravine and pointed out an area where he had dumped a prostitute after shooting her. (This was the mummified victim, the fifth one to be found.) But he had kept her panties, he bragged, as a souvenir. He described the entire incident for Carol in explicit detail, getting her as excited as he was about sexual murder. She had once been a partner in his violent fantasy life and she had seen that as a sign of real intimacy. She wanted to get in on this.