Robert Avila Jr., age 16, male vanished from Los Angeles in the summer of 1982. He was reported missing on July 21. Eight days later, on July 29, Caltrans workers responding to complaints of a foul odor near the Hollywood Freeway in Echo Park located the body of 14-year-old Raymond Davis; a short distance away—about forty feet—the same crew found Avila’s remains along the Rampart Boulevard offramp.
Records list Avila’s death on July 29, 1982, with burial at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills.
Avila’s body was markedly decomposed when it was found, and later accounts describe evidence of ligature strangulation, specifically with a length of stereo speaker wire. Early contemporaneous coverage noted that the medical examiner had not immediately released findings for Avila even as Davis was confirmed to have been strangled, underscoring how fresh—and grim—the discovery scene was.
In the months that followed, detectives increasingly suspected that the same predator was responsible for both teenagers. Attention focused on Randy Steven Kraft, later dubbed the “Scorecard Killer,” who was arrested after a May 14, 1983 traffic stop in Orange County with a deceased Marine in his passenger seat and ultimately convicted in 1989 of 16 murders. Investigators found a cryptic list among Kraft’s belongings; one entry, “Dog,” is widely believed to refer to Raymond Davis, and another, “Deodorant,” to Robert Avila—an attribution prosecutors have cited in discussing the case’s Echo Park victims.
Although Kraft’s conviction established him as one of California’s most prolific serial killers, authorities did not try him for every suspected victim. Avila’s killing remains among those cases linked to Kraft by proximity, method, and the coded “scorecard,” but not prosecuted separately; the suspicions, the arrest of Kraft, and his life on death row form the closest thing to resolution Avila’s family has had.
