One night in 1980, Carol Bundy called her boyfriend, Douglas Clark, from a payphone to tell him she was bringing her former flame home.
The news irked Clark until she explained that it was just the man’s head.
Another time, it was Clark who came home with the head of a murder victim, a prostitute he killed. Bundy, 37, kept it pretty for him, fixing its hair and applying makeup to the lifeless face.
Then there were the times that Bundy sat in the couple’s car while Clark, 32, shot a prostitute. She helped dispose of the corpses.
These horrifying scenes are what some psychiatric professionals call folie a deux — French for “madness for two.”
Bundy seemed the ideal partner for this kind of demented duo. She was a deeply troubled woman, but whether she would have turned to murder without Clark has been a question since the couple went on a bloody rampage in Los Angeles 40 years ago.
Bundy had been through a lot by the time she and Clark hooked up at the Little Nashville Club, a North Hollywood bar, in 1980.
Born in 1942, she was the dumpy middle child of an alcoholic and a hairdresser who was once a stand-in for Hollywood tap-dance star Ruby Keeler, wrote Louise Farr in her book, “The Sunset Murders.” Carol and her sister endured emotional, physical, and sexual abuse from their parents.
Carol grew up chubby and with vision so poor she had to wear thick “Coke-bottle” glasses. She compensated for her lack of feminine charms by being “easy.”
Still, she had the brains to get through nursing school and landed a job in a hospital, where she met and married a fellow nurse, Grant Bundy. The couple had two sons, but the marriage, her third, quickly dissolved.
In 1979, she took her children and moved into an apartment complex managed by John “Jack” Murray, 44, a country-western singer from Australia. He was a headliner at Little Nashville. He was also married, but that didn’t stop Jack from fooling around. Bundy became one of his conquests.
She gave him access to her money, hoping the cash would convince him to leave his wife. Murray cleaned her out but stayed married. Then she tried to bribe Murray’s wife to set him free. That got her evicted.
Bundy was still hanging around the bar when she met Clark, an air force veteran who worked in a Burbank soap factory. They were soon an item.
Perhaps she should have balked when he persuaded her to purchase a pair of .25-caliber pistols, one for him and one for her. It might have been prudent to leave when he told her about murdering two teen prostitutes.
Not only did she stay, she also began to accompany him on his hunting expeditions, sitting in the car while he killed street walkers.
One morning in June, Bundy found a trophy from Clark’s solo trip the night before sitting on the kitchen counter — a blond woman’s head. Clark was using it to satisfy his necrophilia.
When he was done with it, Carol styled its hair, gave it some makeup, and stuck it in the freezer. Later, they stowed the head in a wooden box and dumped it in an alley. The dead woman was Exxie Wilson, a 20-year-old from Arkansas. Her headless corpse was one of several bodies that had turned up around Hollywood that year.
Most were denizens of the notorious gathering spot for sex workers — the Sunset Strip.
On Aug. 9, residents of a quiet street in Van Nuys complained about a stench coming from a van that had been parked there for a few days.
Inside, police found a mutilated, headless corpse, but this one was a male. It was the remains of Jack Murray.
What happened to him was a mystery, but not for long. After blabbing about Murray’s murder to nurses at the hospital where she worked, Bundy decided to turn herself in.
She had to call police several times, getting busy signals and wrong numbers, before she finally reached a homicide detective. She spilled out the sick details of the murders, including what happened to her one-time lover.
Bundy said she told Murray about Clark’s murder spree but then became worried that he would turn her in. She used the promise of sex to lure Murray to his van, where she shot and mutilated him.
Then she cut off his head, dropped it in a plastic bag and took it home. She and Clark drove around looking for a place to hide it and then just tossed it in a trash bin. It was never found.
The detective asked if she felt remorse. “The honest truth is,” she said, “it’s fun to kill people.”
Bundy and Clark were immediately arrested. There was little physical evidence against Clark until his co-workers discovered the two pistols hidden at his job. Bundy pleaded guilty and got two consecutive life sentences. She died of a heart attack in 2003.
Clark insisted that Bundy and Murray were the killer couple and he had nothing to do with it. A jury found him guilty of the murders of six women, although police believe he killed more. “Gas chamber awaits slayer,” was the headline on a UPI item in the Daily News in February 1983. Thirty-seven years later, he is still alive on San Quentin’s death row.
