David Carpenter

• 1. Introduction

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  David Joseph Carpenter is the American serial killer whom the press came to call the Trailside Killer. In 1980, detectives in Marin County, California, were searching for a man in his twenties or thirties. Carpenter was 50. Pathologists would later say that he lost his stutter whenever he tormented a victim. Between 1979 and 1981, joggers and hikers in the San Francisco Bay Area were attacked on secluded trails, and several never came home. Carpenter was already a convicted rapist and kidnapper when the murders began. How did a man with that record end up free on those trails? Why did investigators spend months chasing the wrong face? What evidence finally brought him to court, and why do his death sentences remain unsettled today?

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• 2. Glen Park Childhood

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  David Joseph Carpenter was born in San Francisco on the 6th of May 1930. His father, Elwood, was an alcoholic, and his mother, Frances, was domineering. Both parents beat him, mostly over his persistent bed-wetting and his cruelty to animals. Frances kept him from playing outside with the neighborhood children. She made him study the violin and take ballet lessons instead.

  At Glen Park Elementary School, classmates bullied Carpenter for his stutter. His teachers urged speech therapy, but Frances resisted every attempt. After he was accused of biting a childhood friend, he stayed away from school for several days. He returned with bruises on his arms and legs. By adolescence he had a fierce temper, which psychologists would later say hardened into sexual rage. Balboa High School threw him out in his sophomore year after he dragged a female student down a hallway following an argument.

  Carpenter has acknowledged that he began molesting children at 15, including two of his cousins. At 17 he was arrested for the first time, accused of sexually assaulting a three-year-old girl. The California Youth Authority took custody of him, and he then spent several years at Napa State Hospital. A probation officer recorded his mother saying, "As soon as he was able to walk, he was getting into trouble". The same officer described him as "quite a liar". In 1950 he was arrested for raping a 17-year-old girl. He pleaded not guilty and was acquitted at trial.

  In the mid-1950s, Carpenter worked as a purser on the SS Fleetwood. In 1955 he married Ellen Cooke, and the couple had three children before divorcing in 1961. He later told a psychiatrist that the marriage disappointed him because Cooke "was not interested in anything but local neighborhood gossip". She described him as domineering, strong-willed and charming, and said she knew nothing of his earlier run-ins with the law. That ignorance would not survive the summer of 1960.

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• 3. Violence Before the Trails

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  On the 11th of July 1960, Carpenter prowled through San Francisco with a knife and a hammer. He had taken a job at a San Francisco post office, where he met 32-year-old Lois DeAndrade, who would later become the mother of the television personality Lisa Rinna. He persuaded her to climb into his car and drove her to the Presidio. There he slashed her hands with the knife and, once she fell, struck her head with the hammer. A military officer named Jewell Hicks interrupted the attack and shot Carpenter, wounding him. DeAndrade survived, and she later said she could not remember him stuttering at all during the assault.

  Carpenter pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and received a 14-year federal prison sentence. He claimed that the 1960 film Psycho had been his trigger. In prison he earned a high school diploma. He was released in 1969 and married his second wife, Helen.

  A crime spree across the Bay Area followed in January and February 1970. In the first case, he rear-ended a car driven by a young woman, and after a heated exchange he threw her to the ground and raped her. Armed with a hunting knife, he next attacked a 19-year-old girl in Boulder Creek. On the 3rd of February he forced his way into the Modesto home of 45-year-old Lucille Davis, bound her wrists and demanded her car keys. He took her vehicle and drove to Angels Camp, where he confronted a 21-year-old mother. He made her drive him to Oakdale with her 16-month-old son in the back seat. At Oakdale he forced both of them out and drove off.

  Carpenter was detained on the 4th of February. Investigator James Marston obtained permission from Carpenter's wife to search their vehicle, and he found the knife used in the second attack. The Zodiac Killer was then active in the Bay Area and drawing heavy media attention and search efforts. Hoping to attract attention himself, Carpenter began calling himself "Zodiac" to other inmates. Authorities were alerted and looked into him, but they cleared him because he had been imprisoned during three of the Zodiac murders.

  On the 26th of April, Carpenter and five other inmates cut through the bars of their cells at the Calaveras County jail and escaped. He was recaptured two weeks later. He received five-years-to-life for auto theft and escape, and five-to-twenty-five years for kidnapping. At a presentencing hearing, his intelligence quotient was estimated at 125. He served time at Folsom State Prison, then at San Quentin State Prison from 1972, then at Folsom again, and finally at the California Medical Facility. A psychiatrist diagnosed antisocial personality disorder. The United States Parole Commission defined that condition as describing someone manipulative and a pathological liar.

  In February 1977, despite many warnings, Carpenter was paroled on the California convictions, but federal authorities took him into custody at once for other convictions. His full release came on the 2nd of May 1979. He spent 60 days in a halfway house and then moved in with his parents in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood. In October 1979 he enrolled at a vocational school in Hayward to learn offset printing, and after several months of training the school hired him to lecture the course. His parole supervision would run until the 28th of October 1982, with monthly reports to his parole officer in San Francisco. Every killing that followed would happen while he was still under that supervision.

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• 4. Murders on the Trails

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  In the summer of 1979, authorities believe, Carpenter began killing. His method was to hide among the trees along a hiking trail and confront people as they walked up. He used a knife at first. All of his suspected victims were between 18 and 44, and most were in their early twenties. He was later convicted of seven murders committed in Marin County and Santa Cruz County between October 1980 and May 1981.

  On the 20th of August 1979-44-year-old Edda Kane was found dead along a hiking trail near Mount Tamalpais. She was a bank employee from Mill Valley and an experienced hiker, and her husband had last seen her the day before. She had been shot once in the head with a .44 caliber gun. Days earlier, one of Carpenter's acquaintances had reported the theft of a Charter Arms .44 caliber special. That handgun has never been found, but the circumstances make Carpenter the prime suspect.

  On the 21st of October 1979-23-year-old Mary Frances Bennett was jogging at Lands End in San Francisco. She came from Deer Lodge, Montana, and was a graduate of Montana State University. Carpenter dragged her into nearby bushes and tried to rape her. In the struggle she dislocated one of his thumbs, and he killed her with a knife. Several residents heard her screams but did not investigate, because they saw a police car nearby and assumed it would respond. Carpenter turned up at an emergency room soon afterward, claiming a dog had bitten his thumb. Hitchhikers followed her blood trail from the access road and found her body at about 4:30 p.m. Carpenter was named a suspect in 1981 but was not charged for lack of evidence. A DNA match established his guilt in 2010.

  On the 8th of March 1980-23-year-old Barbara Ann Schwartz was stabbed to death on a trail near Mount Tamalpais. Searchers found her body in the fetal position several days later, with a bloodied butcher knife nearby. Sheriff Al Howenstein urged local women not to hike alone on Marin County trails. A pair of glasses near the scene may have belonged to Carpenter, but that has never been proven.

  In September 1980, Carpenter showed Mollie Purnell, a former prison pen pal, an advertisement for a .38 caliber revolver priced at $230 in San Leandro. He asked her to buy it as a favor and said he wanted it to join the mafia. She hesitated, so he told her that if trouble ever arose she could say the gun had been stolen from her. She bought it on the 2nd of October and gave it to him.

  Nine days after the purchase, on the 11th of October, Carpenter confronted an engaged couple on the Sky Camp Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore. They were 19-year-old Richard Stowers and 18-year-old Cynthia Moreland, both from Sonoma County. He forced them to their knees and shot them execution-style. After days without word, Moreland's parents and the United States Coast Guard, in which Stowers was enlisted, reported the couple missing. Law enforcement first assumed that they had eloped, and Stowers was labeled a deserter. A guardsman at the Training Center Petaluma even claimed to have seen Moreland alive three days after she vanished.

  On the 14th of October, Carpenter accosted 26-year-old Anne Evelyn Alderson in Mount Tamalpais State Park. She had been attending an event at the nearby Cushing Memorial Amphitheatre. He raped her and shot her to death. Her father, Robert, a respected San Rafael physician, reported her missing, and a search party found her body about a quarter mile east of the amphitheatre the next day. Alderson had graduated from Evergreen Valley College in 1976 after studying environmental issues and animal behavior. She had returned to the Bay Area only months earlier from volunteering for the Peace Corps in Colombia. Her death temporarily shut down hiking on Mount Tamalpais.

  On the 28th of November, 22-year-old Diane Marie O'Connell, a Cornell University graduate from Queens, New York, went missing while hiking near Point Reyes National Seashore. Police found her shot to death and nude the next day. Beside her lay the body of 23-year-old Shauna May of Pullman, Washington, who had been shot while hiking in the same area, probably on the same day. May was also an Evergreen Valley College graduate, with studies in social sciences, mathematics and computer science. Soon afterward, searchers found the decomposed bodies of Stowers and Moreland, and Moreland's 1974 Toyota Corolla turned up abandoned in a parking lot near the Point Reyes trailhead.

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• 5. The Wrong Sketch

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  On the 22nd of October 1980, The Press Democrat reported on the killings and gave the killer the name "Mount Tam Killer". Marin County investigators used it because most of the murders there occurred within range of Mount Tamalpais. A week after Alderson's death, authorities had named a local fugitive, Mark McDermand, as a suspect in hers and several other killings. He had fled an arrest warrant for the shooting deaths of his mother and older brother at their Tamalpais Valley home. McDermand wrote to Sheriff Howenstein admitting those two killings but denying any others. His arrest did not stop the murders in Marin County, so he was cleared. The following year he pleaded guilty to killing his mother and brother and received a life sentence.

  By early December, investigators had linked six murders to the same killer. Their profile described a lustful offender who thrived on psychologically torturing victims and enjoyed hearing them plead for mercy. It called him a misogynist who killed for a relief that never fully satisfied him, so his urges would keep building, and who might be plagued with guilt. It also predicted an easily provoked temper and a physical and mental decline, perhaps with anxiety attacks and hot flashes.

  On the 4th of December, an unknown man claiming to be the killer phoned the Marin County Sheriff's Office three times. He then called the television stations KPIX and KRON. He rejected the profile and insisted he was not the "spoiled child" it described. Over the next two days he made fourteen more calls, each time saying he needed help and was ready to surrender. The calls stopped after the 6th of December. More than 750 tips arrived, some from as far away as South Carolina, yet police still had no solid suspect.

  Part of the trouble was a single witness in Marin County who described a white man with medium-length brown hair. Howenstein's office linked that man to the murders on dubious grounds, and his sketch was distributed throughout northern California.

  On the 29th of March 1981, Carpenter traveled more than 90 miles to Santa Cruz County and staked out Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. From an observation deck he spotted two 20-year-old University of California-Davis students, Ellen Marie Hansen and Steven Russell Haertle. They were walking a secluded trail that led toward Monterey Bay. At gunpoint he marched them farther down the path and opened fire. Hansen was shot several times in the head and died. Haertle was shot in the neck and knocked unconscious. When he woke, he sought help from nearby hikers. The wound left him with severe nerve damage to his vocal cords and an eye, but he made a full recovery. With the killings now reaching Santa Cruz County, the murderer was renamed the Trailside Killer.

  In early April 1981, police in Santa Cruz and Marin counties pooled their resources. Detectives saw an almost identical method in Hansen's murder and the Marin killings, and a forensic firearm examination confirmed the link. They turned to Haertle, believed to be the only person who had seen the killer's face. He described a thin, balding man in his early 50s, between 5'10" and 6' tall. The man wore a baseball cap, horn-rimmed glasses and a yellow and orange windbreaker with the name "Bud" on the front patch. A Fresno resident named Leland Fritz came forward and said he had seen the same man on the trail, along with a red foreign car.

  Police were caught off guard, because they had assumed the killer was much younger. A more accurate composite sketch was drawn by an artist named Dennis Dederick. Authorities opened a tip line that ran 18 hours a day and offered a $25,000 reward. Park rangers fanned out across Northern California to post warnings for people hiking alone. Howenstein lost his bid for re-election in 1982. His defeat was attributed to criticism of his handling of the case, particularly his heavy reliance on the March 1980 sketch that proved inaccurate.

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• 6. Closing the Net

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  On the 2nd of May 1981, Carpenter killed 20-year-old Heather Roxanne Scaggs of San Jose, who worked as an assistant printer at the trade school where he taught. He invited her to visit him in Santa Cruz, claiming he wanted to sell her a used car. Before leaving, she told her mother and her boyfriend, Dan Pingle, that she was meeting Carpenter. Pingle pleaded with her not to go, aware of the murders in the area, but she dismissed the danger. Carpenter drove her to Big Basin State Park along California State Route 236, forced her to strip, raped her and shot her once in the head. Hikers found her decomposing body on the 24th of May, and dental records confirmed her identity two days later.

  Carpenter had already come to police attention through a tip on the 4th of April 1981 from Roberta Patterson, a 69-year-old Ben Lomond resident. She said he resembled the sketch of the killer. She had met him in 1955 while he was a purser on a ship sailing to Japan, and she recalled his bizarre behavior around her then 14-year-old daughter. She learned his name when he signed her autograph book. She said she was "not surprised" when newspapers later mentioned him in connection with his 1960 and 1970 assault convictions.

  Investigators noted that Carpenter matched Haertle's description. When they learned he was the last person known to have had contact with Scaggs, they covertly watched his Glen Park home for a week. They noticed that he drove a red Fiat, like the car Fritz remembered seeing in Santa Cruz. A team of seven FBI agents began its own surveillance on the 12th of May, though it was mostly uneventful. In separate police line-ups, Haertle, Fritz and several other witnesses identified Carpenter with little hesitation.

  Carpenter was arrested outside his San Francisco home on the 14th of May 1981. He was driven to Santa Cruz County and ordered held without bail. A search warrant for his house turned up a Sierra Club book of California hiking trail maps. Paper clips marked pages showing areas where the murders had occurred. Investigators worried that this strong circumstantial evidence might not be enough for a conviction, and they could not find his .38 caliber revolver. He was indicted for Hansen's murder on the 15th of May. The charge for Scaggs followed on the 26th of May, after her body was found. He pleaded not guilty to both.

  After his arrest, the parents of 17-year-old Anna Kelly Menjivar asked investigators to look at Carpenter in her case. She was a Mercy High School student who had disappeared in Daly City in December 1980. Police there had assumed she was a runaway, but the discovery that Carpenter frequented a bank where she worked changed their approach. Her skull and other bones were found off Route 35 in June 1981, though their condition made a cause of death unlikely to be determined. Carpenter was also suspected in the strangulation deaths of Jennifer McDowell and Diane Steffy in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1979, but he was cleared in both. Before his identification, some had theorized that the Trailside Killer was the Zodiac Killer, returning after eight years of silence. That idea was ruled out once Carpenter was arrested.

  The break in the case involved Shane Mitchell Williams, whom Carpenter had befriended around 1978 in prison. Williams was serving time for several bank robberies in Los Angeles. After his release, he and his wife, Karen Kilroy, made trips to San Francisco to visit Carpenter, and the three attended punk clubs along Broadway. When the couple confided that they wanted to resume robbing, Carpenter told them a gun would make getting away easier. He lent them a .38 caliber revolver that had previously been used in several of the murders. The couple committed robberies in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona. On the 1st of June 1981, they were arrested for a botched robbery on Ventura Boulevard, which connected them to their earlier crimes.

  In mid-July, Williams told detectives where he had hidden the gun. Investigators searched the area, near a hiking trail, and recovered the revolver. Testing showed it was the weapon used in Hansen's murder. The gun was traced to Purnell, who first repeated the story Carpenter had coached her to tell, that it had been stolen. When police threatened to charge her as an accomplice to murder, she recanted and admitted she had given it to him.

  On the 31st of July, Carpenter was indicted in Marin County for five murders, after investigators determined that shell casings from those crime scenes came from his gun. Altogether he faced seven murder charges, two rape charges and one attempted rape charge. Santa Cruz District Attorney Arthur Danner asked that the Hansen and Scaggs murder trials be combined. A preliminary hearing began on the 21st of September, and Judge William A. Kelsay granted a defense motion to bar the press from the three-week inquiry.

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• 7. Two Trials

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  In 1982, the California Superior Court agreed to move the Santa Cruz trial to Southern California, because heavy publicity threatened jury selection. The parties settled on Los Angeles County and Superior Court Judge Dion Morrow. After delays through 1983, Carpenter's trial for the murders of Hansen and Scaggs and the attempted murder of Haertle opened on the 24th of May 1984. It was held at the Criminal Courts Building, now called the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center.

  Danner sought the death penalty. In his opening statement he promised that jurors would hear Haertle "identify David Carpenter as the person who held the gun". Santa Cruz County Public Defender Steve Wright answered by warning the jurors against "speculation, hunches and suspicion". Haertle took the stand and pointed at Carpenter without hesitation. He recounted what the gunman told Hansen, "I want to rape you", and her answer of "no". Haertle spoke in a husky voice, the result of the neck wound that damaged his vocal cords.

  The prosecution built its case around ballistics. Mike Waller, a criminologist at the Santa Rosa Crime Laboratory, testified that the bullets from Hansen's and Scaggs's bodies came from Carpenter's .38 caliber revolver. He added that the same gun matched bullets found at the Marin County crime scenes. The defense offered no rebuttal and argued instead that the sperm evidence linking Carpenter to Scaggs was weak, since it may have been deposited a day before her death.

  On the 3rd of July, one of Carpenter's lawyers, Larry Biggam, stunned the courtroom in closing arguments. He admitted that his client had killed both victims, saying "that will not be an issue in your deliberations", and turned to Carpenter's competency instead. Danner replied that this admission was tantamount to guilt in the Marin County murders as well. After a break for the 4th of July holiday, the jury deliberated just over eight hours on the 5th and convicted Carpenter of two counts of murder, one of attempted murder, one of rape and one of attempted rape. It also found the special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty.

  The penalty phase opened on the 15th of August. Prosecutors called 18-year-old Tina Marie Vance, who had met Carpenter in 1980, when she was 14. She testified that during a car ride from Fresno to San Francisco, he showed her a briefcase holding a gun, wires, ropes and a gag. He told her he used them to "scare people". Prosecutors then showed morgue photographs of a Marin County victim with something tied tightly around her neck. The defense objected, but Judge Morrow overruled it.

  The defense turned to Carpenter's childhood. Two childhood friends testified that his mother beat him and forbade him to play outside, forcing violin lessons on him instead. Child abuse expert Jo Ann Cook testified that the abuse he suffered led him into a life of crime. Thomas Szasz, a psychiatry professor from Syracuse, New York, testified for the prosecution that a bad childhood can shape personality but does not control a person's decisions. Danner called Carpenter an "efficient serial killer" who shot his rape victims so they could not testify against him, while photographs of the victims were displayed. Biggam closed with a line he credited to Gandhi: "an eye for an eye eventually makes the whole world blind".

  The jury began deliberating on the 28th of September. On the 5th of October, ending the five-month trial, it ordered Carpenter sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Judge Morrow imposed the sentence formally on the 16th of November, saying, "I must conclude with the prosecution that if ever there was a case for the death penalty, this is that case." On the 26th of November, Carpenter was moved to death row at San Quentin State Prison.

  Three weeks after his sentencing, on the 5th of December, Carpenter was arraigned in Marin County. He accepted public defender Frank Cox as his attorney. The preliminary hearing was delayed for months so that Cox could study the 20,000-page transcript of the Los Angeles trial. In early 1986, Cox advised him to plead guilty to the five Marin murder charges. Carpenter fired him in anger but rehired him not long afterward. In September of that year, the trial was moved to San Diego County, before Superior Court Judge Herbert Hoffman.

  The defense raised an unusual plea of double jeopardy. It argued that both the prosecution and Judge Morrow in Los Angeles had spoken of "overwhelming evidence" of guilt in the Marin murders, cases not yet tried, and that this violated state law. The Supreme Court of California denied a hearing on the matter. The trial for the murders of Stowers, Moreland, May, O'Connell and Alderson began on the 5th of January 1988.

  Marin County Deputy District Attorney John Posey led the prosecution and sought the death penalty. Williams testified after law enforcement agreed not to prosecute him as an accessory to murder. He said Carpenter gave him the .38 caliber revolver at a San Francisco warehouse days before the arrest. The defense questioned this, noting that none of the detectives who had watched Carpenter recalled seeing him with Williams.

  In April, Carpenter testified in his own defense, struggling to speak clearly because of his stutter. He said Purnell was lying when she claimed she had given him the gun used in the murders. He also claimed to have been in Redwood City when several of them occurred. After one day of deliberation, on the 10th of May 1988, the jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder. He was found guilty of raping two of the women and attempting to rape a third. On the 27th of June the jury recommended death, and Judge Hoffman formally imposed the sentence on the 19th of July.

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• 8. Appeals and Afterward

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  In September 1988, Carpenter filed his first appeal, after learning that a juror at the San Diego trial had been improperly told of his criminal record. The following year, the California Superior Court ruled in his favor and overturned the convictions. The Marin County District Attorney fought the ruling, and the case reached the United States Supreme Court in 1994, which reinstated the convictions. The California Supreme Court declined another appeal. In 1995, the Santa Cruz convictions were overturned over juror misconduct, but the California Supreme Court later reinstated them. His 1999 attempt to appeal the Marin County death sentences also failed.

  On death row, one of Carpenter's early pastimes was writing letters to the Point Reyes Light newspaper. He recounted his life, answered readers' questions and criticized the management of the California corrections department. In an interview with journalist David V. Mitchell, he again deflected blame, saying that during the Trailside murders he was guilty only of selling drugs.

  Carpenter became California's oldest death row inmate in 2006, after Clarence Ray Allen was executed. He stayed on death row until 2019, when Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium on executions in the state. Ron Moreland, whose daughter Cynthia was a Marin County victim, spoke of his disappointment. He also said he worried about "biases" in the death penalty that could help convict innocent people.

  In 2023, it was announced that San Quentin would be repurposed as a rehabilitation center. California no longer has a literal death row in the traditional sense, yet Carpenter remains under sentence of death, and he is the oldest death row inmate in the United States. His case has been covered by author Harold Schechter in a 2003 book, The Serial Killer Files, and on television in The New Detectives, Born to Kill? and Very Scary People. In September 2024, Carpenter contracted COVID-19 and was moved to an isolation unit, and he recovered within days. Because he could no longer walk and was struggling to interact with others, he was moved in May 2025 to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.

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