Sunset Murders

In 1980 in L.A. Douglas Clark, with the assistance of his girlfriend Carol Bundy, murdered at least five young women either part of or on the fringes of the demimonde. The son of a career Army officer, Clark traveled around the world as a child, briefly attended a Swiss boarding school and lived in a house in India staffed with a retinue of servants. He developed a deep-seated arrogance which as an adult he fed by having affairs with passive, worshipful, unattractive women. He found an ideal partner in the overweight, visually handicapped Bundy, rejected by her mother and physically and sexually abused by her father. At the trial the self-important Clark sometimes conducted his own defense; he is now on death row. Bundy is serving a life sentence. Freelance writer Farr captures the complex personalities of the two slayers and gives readers an insight into the rootless youths who populate the seedier side of California life. (Apr.)