'Sunset Strip Killer' Douglas Clark dies in prison
Douglas Daniel Clark / California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
A serial killer known as one of the "Sunset Strip Killers" who cruised the streets of Hollywood looking for prostitutes and runaways to pick up and kill has died in San Quentin State Prison, where he was incarcerated on death row for murdering six young women in 1980, officials said Thursday.
Douglas Daniel Clark, 75, a former factory worker from Burbank, was pronounced dead Wednesday from natural causes at an outside medical facility, according to the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Clark was sentenced in Los Angeles County on March 16, 1983, to six consecutive death sentences for his conviction on six counts of first-degree murder, along with an eight-month consecutive sentence for mutilation/sexual contact with human remains, and a nine-year consecutive sentence for attempted first-degree murder with a three-year enhancement for inflicting great bodily injury, according to the state.
Clark and his girlfriend and accomplice Carol Bundy, a former vocational nurse, were known as the "Sunset Strip Killers." Bundy, 61, died at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla in 2003.
Clark's gruesome murders of women ranging in age from 15 to 24 included one in which he decapitated his victim and kept her head in his refrigerator.
Testimony at his 1983 trial showed that Clark had an obsessive interest in necrophilia and had sex with some of his victims' corpses before dumping them in the San Fernando Valley.
Bundy sometimes accompanied Clark on his murderous forays. She told police she had been "overwhelmed" by his dominance and charm and had fallen in love with him.
In 1983, Bundy pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder.