Orange County sheriff’s investigators have helped identify a possible victim in Oregon of Randy Kraft, the serial killer dubbed the “Scorecard Killer,” officials said Monday.
Investigators used a genealogy database to identify the victim found on July 18, 1980, as 30-year-old Larry Eugene Parks, according to Oregon State Police.
Police recovered the body along Interstate 5 near Woodburn in Oregon’s Marion County. He remained unidentified until last month, when staff from the Oregon Medical Examiner’s Office and sheriff’s investigators developed a profile of the victim — a Vietnam War veteran last seen by his family in Pensacola, Florida, in 1979, officials said.
An Orange County sheriff’s investigator contacted Oregon state police in January of last year with evidence to the 1980 missing person’s case and offered to help identify the man using genealogical DNA.
Since Kraft had been prosecuted in Orange County, investigators had evidence from other cases and reached out to Oregon officials, according to Capt. Kyle Kennedy of the Oregon State Police.
“My understanding is it was through that process that they basically came up with some information so they could reach out to potential family members and ask would you be willing to submit DNA samples,” Kennedy said.
Parks’ blood sample was sent to a laboratory in Oregon, Kennedy said. The medical examiners’ office ultimately agreed and confirmed the identity of Parks, Kennedy said.
At 30 years old, Parks would be an “outlier” for Kraft’s victims, Kennedy said. A drifter at the time, Parks’ body was found unclothed, making it difficult to identify him. Investigators believe he was found within 24 hours of his death, Kennedy said.
“He really was just somebody who was dropped on the side of the highway” at the time, Kennedy said.
Kraft was working in the Portland area at the time and is suspected in six killings in Oregon, Kennedy said.
Parks’ body was found a day after investigators found the body of 17-year-old Michael O’Fallon, another suspected victim of Kraft’s, along Interstate 5 near the Talbot exit, Kennedy said.
Kraft, now 80, was convicted in 1989 of killing 16 men over a decade in California and sentenced to death.
Kraft was known as the “Scorecard Killer” because he was arrested with a coded list suspected of containing 67 victims. He was suspected of 10 other murders.
Two years ago, sheriff’s investigators used the same technique to identify another victim tied to Kraft — 17-year-old Michael Ray Schlicht of Cedar Rapids, Iowa — whose body was found Sept. 14, 1974, near a trail in Aliso Viejo, then an unincorporated part of Laguna Hills, officials said.