Mark Alan Marsh, 19, male, was a U.S. Marine lance corporal born April 8, 1960, in Akron, Ohio. On February 18, 1980, his remains were discovered off the Templin Highway near Interstate 5 in Castaic, a remote stretch of northern Los Angeles County. He was later interred at Houston National Cemetery in Texas.
The scene was brutal. Marsh’s body was found decapitated, and his hands had been severed after death. Accounts tie his final hours to the familiar corridor of Southern California freeways: he had last been seen hitchhiking toward Buena Park from the vicinity of his Marine posting at El Toro. Some accounts describe additional sexual assault, noting that he had been sodomized with a large object.
From the outset, investigators and later chroniclers linked the killing to Randy Steven Kraft, the “Scorecard Killer,” whose victims were typically young men—many of them Marines—abducted or lured along the same web of roads, drugged, assaulted, and murdered before their bodies were left near freeways. Marsh’s death fits that pattern and appears in victim lists associated with Kraft’s series, though his case was not among the 16 murders for which Kraft was ultimately tried.
Kraft’s capture came three years after Marsh’s death. In the early hours of May 14, 1983, a California Highway Patrol stop led officers to find a deceased Marine in Kraft’s passenger seat, setting off the investigation that ended with an Orange County jury convicting him of 16 first-degree murders. The California Supreme Court later affirmed the judgment, and Kraft was sentenced to death. Marsh’s killing remains attributed to Kraft in secondary sources, but no separate arrest or prosecution specific to Marsh’s murder has been reported beyond Kraft’s broader conviction.
