David Carpenter
David Joseph Carpenter, also called the Trailside Killer, is an American serial killer and sex offender who raped, tortured, and murdered various victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1979 and 1981. He was sentenced to death for seven murders and is believed to be responsible for several more.
Carpenter began committing sexual assaults at age 15 and was admitted to a mental hospital at age 17. He committed all of his murders while on parole for rape and kidnapping convictions. Active primarily in Marin County and Santa Cruz County, Carpenter would hide along tree lines on secluded trails and wait for his target to approach and then would restrain, rape, and sometimes torture them until killing them. A.38 caliber handgun was his preferred weapon, which was used in all but one of the killings. According to pathologists, Carpenter would get so much enjoyment from tormenting his victims that he would lose his stutter.
Both of Carpenter's trials had to be moved to Southern California due to extensive publicity. In 1984, he was tried and convicted in Los Angeles County of two murders and one attempted murder, for which he was sentenced to death. Four years later, he was tried and convicted in San Diego County of five additional murders and given another death sentence. He is currently incarcerated at California Health Care Facility in Stockton, California.
Early life
David Joseph Carpenter was born in San Francisco on May 6, 1930. In his youth, Carpenter suffered physical abuse by his alcoholic father Elwood and domineering mother Frances, mostly concerning his persistent bed-wetting and cruelty to animals. Frances barred young Carpenter from playing outside with neighborhood kids and forced him to learn to play the violin and take ballet lessons. Carpenter attended Glen Park Elementary School, where he was bullied for having a stutter. His teachers recommended him to enroll in speech therapy but Frances resisted all efforts. After he was accused of biting a childhood friend, Carpenter was absent from school for several days and returned with bruises on his arms and legs. Around the time he reached adolescence, he sparked a fierce temper that psychologists would claim developed into sexual rage. He attended Balboa High School until he was thrown out in his sophomore year for dragging a female student down the hall after an argument.Carpenter has acknowledged he molested several children in his adolescence, including two of his cousins, beginning when he was 15 years old. At age 17, he was arrested for the first time on allegations he sexually assaulted a 3-year-old girl. He was placed in custody of the California Youth Authority before spending several years at Napa State Hospital. When referring to the escalation of Carpenter's crimes, his mother was quoted saying to a probation officer, "As soon as he was able to walk, he was getting into trouble". That same probation officer described him as "quite a liar". In 1950, Carpenter was arrested for the rape of a 17-year-old girl, and after pleading not guilty he was acquitted at trial.
In the mid-1950s, Carpenter was employed as a purser on SS Fleetwood. In 1955, he married Ellen Cooke, with whom he had three children before their divorce in 1961. Carpenter later remarked to a psychiatrist that his first marriage was unsatisfactory because Cooke "was not interested in anything but local neighborhood gossip". Cooke would say that Carpenter was domineering, strong-willed, and charming, and said she knew nothing of his prior run-ins with law enforcement.
First offences
Carpenter later gained employment at a San Francisco post office where he met 32-year-old Lois DeAndrade, the future mother of television personality Lisa Rinna. On July 11, 1960, Carpenter, armed with a knife and hammer, was prowling through San Francisco when he approached DeAndrade and slashed her hands with the knife; when she fell to the ground, he beat her on the head with the hammer. The attack was interrupted by Jewell Hicks, a military officer, who shot and wounded Carpenter. Once in recovery, DeAndrade claimed that, despite Carpenter's apparent stutter, she didn't recall him stuttering at all during the attack. After his arrest, he was booked for assault with a deadly weapon and pleaded guilty, receiving a 14-year federal prison sentence. Carpenter claimed his "trigger" to commit the attack was the 1960 film Psycho. During his imprisonment, he earned a high school diploma. Carpenter was released in 1969 and married his second wife, Helen.Sexual assaults
From January to February 1970, Carpenter went on a crime spree in the Bay Area. The first of these cases occurred after he rear-ended a vehicle being driven by a young woman, and after a heated exchange he shoved her to the ground and raped her before stabbing her with a spatula. He was armed with a hunting knife during the second attack, which was against a 19-year-old girl in Boulder Creek. On February 3, he forced his way into the home of 45-year-old Lucille Davis in Modesto, where he bound her wrists and demanded for her car keys, and he subsequently stole her vehicle and drove to Angels Camp. There, he confronted a 21-year-old mother and forced her to drive him to Oakdale while her 16-month-old son sat in the back of the vehicle. When they arrived, Carpenter forced both out and drove off. After he was detained on February 4, investigator James Marston obtained permission from Carpenter's wife to search their vehicle, which was found to have contained the knife used in the second attack.Around the time of his arrest, the Zodiac Killer was active in the San Francisco Bay Area, which drew high media attention and search efforts. In an effort to gain some sort of attention to himself, he began to refer to himself as "Zodiac" to other inmates. Authorities were alerted and investigated him, but since he had been imprisoned during the time three of the murders occurred, he was cleared. On April 26, Carpenter and five other inmates being held at the Calaveras County jail cut their way through cell bars and escaped. He was captured two weeks later and sentenced to five-years-to-life imprisonment for auto theft and escape charges, and five-to-twenty-five years on kidnapping charges.
During a presentencing hearing, it was estimated that Carpenter had an intelligence quotient of 125. He initially served his sentence at Folsom State Prison until being transferred to San Quentin State Prison in 1972, later returning to Folsom before being transferred to California Medical Facility. A psychiatrist's report identified him with having antisocial personality disorder, which the United States Parole Commission defined as someone who is manipulative and a pathological liar.
Acquaintance with Shane Williams
Despite many warnings, Carpenter was paroled for the California convictions in February 1977 but was immediately turned over to federal custody for other convictions. Around 1978, Carpenter befriended fellow inmate Shane Mitchell Williams, who was serving time for several bank robberies committed in Los Angeles.Carpenter was granted full release on May 2, 1979, and transferred to a halfway house for 60 days and afterwards moved in with his parents in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood. Under his parole conditions, he would remain on supervision until October 28, 1982, and would have to report monthly to his parole officer in San Francisco. In October 1979, he began attending a vocational school in Hayward to learn offset printing, and after several months of training he was hired to lecture the course.
After Williams' release, he and his wife, Karen Kilroy, made trips to San Francisco to visit Carpenter, and together the trio attended punk clubs along Broadway. When they confided in Carpenter about wanting to resume committing robberies, Carpenter instructed the couple that using a gun would make getting away with their crimes easier. Thereafter, the couple went on a crime spree with a.38 caliber revolver loaned to them by Carpenter, which had previously been used in several of the murders. Williams and Kilroy committed robberies in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona. On June 1, 1981, after Carpenter's arrest, Williams and Kilroy were arrested for a botched robbery on Ventura Boulevard and subsequently were connected to their previous crimes.
Murders
Carpenter is believed to have begun killing in the summer of 1979. His modus operandi was to hide in tree lines along hiking trails and then confront his targets once they approached. Carpenter was convicted of seven murders which occurred between October 1980 and May 1981 in Marin County and Santa Cruz County. He was also linked via DNA—albeit not charged with—an October 1979 murder in San Francisco. Two other murders, lacking physical evidence, are also believed to have been committed by him, along with the suspected homicide of a teenage girl in Daly City. He originally used a knife in his attacks until he duped a female friend into buying him a.38 caliber revolver in 1980. All of Carpenter's suspected victims were aged between 18 and 44, the majority of which were in their early twenties.Before Carpenter's identification, the murderer was known as the "Mount Tam Killer" by Marin County investigators as most of the killings there occurred within range of Mount Tamalpais. Early on, investigators incorrectly believed the killer was in his 20s or 30s, while Carpenter was 50. After his murders stretched into Santa Cruz County in 1981, he was redubbed the "Trailside Killer". A more accurate depiction of the killer as a balding man in his 50s helped police arrest Carpenter.
1979
On August 20, 1979, 44-year-old Edda Kane was found murdered along a hiking trail near Mount Tamalpais. Kane was a bank employee from Mill Valley and an experienced hiker who had last been seen the day prior by her husband. Kane had been stripped of her clothes and shot once in the head by a.44 caliber gun. Days prior to the murder, one of Carpenter's acquaintances had reported that their handgun, a Charter Arms.44 caliber special, had been stolen. The weapon has never been located, but the circumstances surrounding its possible link to the murder have made Carpenter the case's prime suspect.Two months after Kane's murder, Carpenter murdered 23-year-old Mary Francis Bennett from Deer Lodge, Montana, a graduate of Montana State University. On October 21, he attacked Bennett as she was jogging at Lands End and forcibly dragged her in nearby bushes and attempted to rape her. After a struggle during which Bennett managed to dislocate one of Carpenter's thumbs, he stabbed her over 25 times around her back, throat, breasts and groin. Her neck wounds were so deep that she was nearly decapitated. Several residents reported to have heard Bennett's "prolonged, agonized screams", but didn't investigate as a police car was seen in the area and assumed it would respond to the noises. Carpenter showed up at an emergency room not long after, claiming his thumb had been bitten by a dog. Bennett's body was discovered protruding from underbrush at approximately 4:30 p.m. by a group of hitchhikers, who had followed her blood trail from the access road. Carpenter was named a suspect in her murder in 1981, but was not charged due to lack of evidence. His guilt would be established in 2010 with a DNA match.