Doug Clark, serial killer behind grisly Sunset Strip murders, dies on death row

A convicted serial killer who prowled the Sunset Strip, murdering sex workers and runaways — sometimes with the help of his girlfriend — died this week after spending 40 years on death row.

Douglas Daniel Clark, 75, was one half of the duo known as the “Sunset Strip Killers” due to their targeted killings in the summer of 1980 of women who congregated on the stretch of Sunset Boulevard known for its nightlife.

Clark was responsible for at least six Los Angeles homicides that summer.

Clark, who was housed at San Quentin State Prison, had been hospitalized when he died Wednesday of what California prison officials said were natural causes. The Marin County coroner’s office is investigating the official cause of death.

Clark and his partner-in-crime, Carol Bundy, were each sentenced in the spring of 1983. Clark was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder and one count of mutilation/sexual contact with human remains. He was admitted to death row on March 24, 1983, where he remained. California ceased death row executions in 2006.

According to Los Angeles Magazine, Clark and Bundy met in late 1979 and had a whirlwind romance despite Clark’s increasingly sadistic desires. He killed his first victim, Marnette Comer, in early June 1980. Comer was a runaway from Sacramento and was last contacted by police in Anaheim on May 23 of that year.

Clark killed his next two victims, teenage stepsisters Cynthia Chandler and Gina Marano, on June 12. The two had lived in Huntington Beach, but their remains were found near Highway 101 in the L.A. area. Clark confessed to Bundy about the murders and invited her to take part in subsequent killings.

Several days later, two more young women were killed. The decapitated head of one of those victims, Exxie Wilson, was found inside a wooden box left in an alleyway. The body of the fifth victim, Karen Jones, was found behind a Burbank steakhouse.

Bundy would go on to murder and decapitate her ex-boyfriend John Robert Murray. Then a vocational nurse, she eventually confessed to co-workers about the killings she and Clark had committed, and the pair were arrested shortly afterward.

During the police investigation, Bundy testified in a deposition about Clark’s necrophilia and that he kept Wilson’s head in the freezer of their home for sexual purposes.

Bundy died on Dec. 9, 2003, of heart failure at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla.

Carol Bundy, right, listens as her sentence of 52 years to life in prison is handed down in a Los Angeles court on May 31, 1983.

(Wally Fong / Associated Press)