ABC may have just killed “Wicked City,” but the story that inspired it still shocks to this day.
It was based on the real story of two of Los Angeles’ most notorious murderers — the Sunset Strip Killers, so-called because they picked up victims along the famous boulevard.
The murders began piling up in June 1980, when the half-naked bodies of two runaways — 15-year-old Gina Narano and her half-sister Cynthia Chandler, 16 — were found in some bushes. Both had been shot in the head.
Soon, another dead woman was discovered behind a steakhouse. Then a decapitated hooker was discovered beside a dumpster. Her head later turned up in a box left in an alley.
Ed Westwick and Erika Christensen played the murderous couple on the show. Unsurprisingly, the actors were more attractive than the real killers — Douglas Clark, then 32, a boiler operator, and Carol Bundy, then 37, an overweight, divorced nurse.
Clark and Bundy met at a bar in 1980 and began dating. Clark had probably killed others previously, and he admitted his dark pastime to Bundy after offing Narano and Chandler. Bundy called police but hung up. She was eventually persuaded to kill with her boyfriend.
“The most frightening crimes are . . . those committed by those you never would have thought capable,” says “The Sunset Murders” author Louise Farr. “Most people felt that Carol was just this meek . . . housewife. The fact that a man could have that much influence on a woman to participate in such bloody, horrible crimes is disturbing.”
Bundy even committed at least one murder on her own, shooting and beheading an ex-boyfriend in his van. She later confessed the killing to co-workers, leading to her and Clark’s arrests.
“Carol was terribly abused by her father as a child,” Farr says. “Because of [that], she became subservient. She would do anything to please her man, and she lost any . . . boundaries.”
Farr first became interested in the Sunset Killers because Bundy had been a customer at a beauty salon her mother managed; Farr spent many hours interviewing the killers in jail.
“My first impression of Clark was that he seemed normal, but after about a half-hour, [I] realized that this man had something wrong [with him],” Farr says. Clark had been a sexual deviant as a youth, wearing his sister’s underwear and recording sexual encounters with unsuspecting women while at school. He had sex with the dead bodies of many of his victims.
The couple killed at least eight people. Bundy confessed her crimes, telling detectives “It was really fun to do.” She was spared the death penalty. Clark has always maintained his innocence, insisting that Bundy and her murdered ex-boyfriend were the killers.
“I have no doubt he’s guilty,” Farr says. “He gave himself away with too many slips … when he was talking to me.”
Bundy died in prison in 2003. Clark, now 67, is on death row in California’s San Quentin State Prison, where he may well be disappointed that his “Wicked City” fame is already over.
“He wanted attention,” Farr says. “When he was in county jail, there were a lot of serial killers inside — the Hillside Strangler — and Doug was miffed because he wasn’t getting as much attention as the others.”