and ankles suggested he had been bound and suspended from a device before his murder. Kraft is known to have killed at least once more in 1973. The victim was a 23-year-old bisexual art student named Vincent Cruz Mestas, whose body was found in the San Bernardino Mountains on December 29. As with several previous victims, one of the victim's socks had been forced into his rectum. Mestas's hands had been severed from his body and were never found. By November 1974, five more victims had been found beside or close to major roadways in southern California, three of whom had been conclusively linked to the same killer. Two of these victims—20-year-old Malcolm Eugene Little and 19-year-old James Dale Reeves—had each been found beside a freeway with foreign objects inserted into their bodies, whereas the body of the third victim, 18-year-old Marine Roger Edward Dickerson, bore evidence of bite marks much like several earlier victims. 1975 On January 3, 1975, Kraft abducted and murdered a 17-year-old high school student named John Leras. The youth was last seen boarding a bus in Long Beach; his strangled body was found the following day, discarded at Sunset Beach with a foreign object protruding from his anus. Drag marks along the beach close to where his body was found suggested that two individuals had carried Leras's body into the water. Two weeks after this murder, on January 17, the body of a 21-year-old named Craig Jonaitis was found discarded in the parking lot of the Golden Sails Hotel near the Pacific Coast Highway and Loynes Drive in Long Beach. Jonaitis had been strangled to death with a length of string, possibly a shoelace. Investigation By January 1975, a total of fourteen victims—whose bodies had been found discarded across four separate counties over the previous three years—had been linked to the same killer. All the victims had been Caucasian males with similar physical characteristics. On January 24, homicide investigators from several jurisdictions in southern California convened in Orange County to discuss their progress in the hunt for the unknown killer. An FBI profile of the killer was read to investigators, describing the individual as a methodical, organized lust killer of above-average intelligence who exhibited an indifference to the "interests and welfare of society." Some investigators believed the murders to be the work of more than one individual, one or more of whom had a military