HUNTER: Serial killers Bruce McArthur, Gacy and Candyman the undead

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When cops arrest a particularly egregious fiend, there is always one last question on everyone’s lips: Are there more victims?

Former Toronto Police homicide chief Hank Idsinga told me his detectives always believed that mall Santa turned serial killer, Bruce McArthur, had more victims.

McArthur murdered eight men in Toronto and was finally convicted in 2019. But it was doubtful the serial killer got up one morning when he was 58 years old and started killing people.

Every year, new developments occur in the still-open John Wayne Gacy case. Gacy, who was executed in 1994, murdered 33 young men and boys in suburban Chicago in the 1970s. One detective told me they believe there are at least a dozen more victims.

Gacy’s inspiration for his reign of terror was Dean “Candyman” Corll. Now, 52 years after one of his teen acolytes parked a bullet in the Candyman, new evidence has emerged that he, too, had more victims.

Dozens of teen boys and young men vanished off the streets of Houston in the early 1970s. Cops mostly dismissed these disappearances as runaways.

That changed on Aug. 8, 1973, when 17-year-old Elmer Wayne Henley sent Corll to the morgue. Henley outlined a gut-wrenching rampage of rape, torture and murder that left dozens of boys dead.

Then there were the mass graves. A boat storage facility contained 17 bodies. There were 27 in total.

Some of those tragic boys remain nameless, but a forensic anthropologist told ABC13 one young man has already been identified.

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Donnie Falcon was 16 when he moved from Corpus Christi to Houston in 1971. That August, he vanished without a trace

“We never could find him,” his niece, Debra Christy, said. “Some people said he joined the mafia. Everybody had a story. I heard the stories, you know, like the searching.”

Falcon was recently identified and is considered one of Candyman’s victims. There were at least 30 murders, maybe as many as 35. It’s believed there are also undiscovered unmarked graves.

More than 3,500 kilometres away in Oregon, another notorious serial killer has emerged from the tomb of the death row at San Quentin decades after his grisly murder spree.

Randy Kraft carried the moniker “The Scorecard Killer” during his days of rage because of his detailed descriptions and bizarre scoring system of the murders he committed.

Now, the Oregon State Police say that Vietnam War veteran Larry Eugene Parks, whose body was discovered along Interstate 5 in 1980, has finally been identified.

According to cops, Kraft, now 80, and still on death row at the Big Q, is their only suspect.

“There’s some evidence that we’re processing to determine that link,” spokesman Kyle Kennedy said. “We are very confident that we have the correct person of interest.”

The Scorecard Killer was convicted of the torture murders of 16 young men along the highways of California, Michigan and Oregon, but detectives suspect his true kill count could be as high as 65. For his troubles, Kraft was sentenced to death.

When he was pulled over by the CHIPs in 1983, there was a strangled U.S. Marine in the passenger seat. In the trunk of his car, cops found a coded list detailing 67 murders.

In 2023, the remains of a teenager believed to have been killed by Kraft in California were also identified using investigative genetic genealogy.

Across North America, modern-day monsters buried secrets and bodies, now rapidly being exposed to merciful sunlight.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun