White/Caucasian male, age 17, John William Leras died on January 4, 1975, in the Sunset Beach stretch of the Huntington Beach shoreline in Orange County, California. On the evening before his death, the 17-year-old male was last seen boarding a bus in Long Beach, headed to a skating rink with a new pair of roller skates; by the next day his strangled body was recovered at the water’s edge at Sunset Beach. Early reports and later summaries note a foreign object had been forced into his body, and drag marks and footprints in the sand suggested that two people had carried the 17-year-old male to the surf before he was discarded.
The discovery landed amid a widening multi-county hunt for a predator targeting boys and young men. By late January 1975, investigators had linked more than a dozen similar homicides across Southern California, most involving young Caucasian males left near freeways or beaches, fueling the belief that a single, organized “lust killer” was at work. The circumstances around the 17-year-old male’s death—last seen alive in Long Beach, found at Sunset Beach with signs of restraint and postmortem violation—fit the emerging pattern.
Years later, attention fixed on Randy Steven Kraft, the “Scorecard Killer.” On May 14, 1983, Kraft was arrested in Orange County after officers stopped his car and found the body of a Marine inside; a search uncovered a handwritten “scorecard” of cryptic entries and other evidence. In May 1989, Kraft was convicted of 16 murders and sentenced to death, and he remains on death row. Although multiple sources and case narratives identify the 17-year-old male as one of Kraft’s early victims, prosecutors did not include this homicide among the 16 counts tried in Orange County; the footprint evidence at Sunset Beach and other inconsistencies in certain cases also led authorities to consider whether Kraft sometimes had help.
Publicly available memorials and victim compilations list the 17-year-old male by name and date, placing his death on January 4, 1975, at Sunset Beach/Huntington Beach and aligning his case with Kraft’s series. These accounts, together with investigative summaries, underscore that while a prime suspect was ultimately arrested and condemned for a constellation of related murders, this specific killing of the 17-year-old male was never adjudicated in court under Kraft’s charges.
