David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer, murdered at least eight persons in the Bay Area of California in the late 1970s-early 1980s. Carpenter was a San Francisco native born there on May 6, 1930. His parents Elwood and Frances were alcoholic and abusive to him; he wet the bed at a late age and abused animals. His mother forbade him to play with other children and kept him inside the house where he was forced to play violin and take ballet lessons. David had a stuttering problem and was bullied at school for it, but Frances resisted all attempts by his teachers to get him speech therapy. At one point he bit another child in the neighborhood, did not show up to school for the next week, and when he came back sported visible bruises on his body. By the time Carpenter started puberty, he developed an increasingly bad temper. He was expelled from school in the 11th grade when he got into an argument with a female classmate and dragged her down the hallway.
Also during his teenage years, Carpenter molested several children including two cousins under the age of 10. He was arrested for the first time at the age of 17 for molesting a 3 year old girl and put into juvenile detention, eventually at Napa State Hospital. His mother reportedly told his parole officer that he'd been getting in trouble almost as soon as he was able to walk. The parole officer also described Carpenter as an inveterate liar. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he was arrested for molesting a 17 year old girl, but he pled innocent and a jury acquitted him for lack of evidence.Carpenter spent some years as a purser on the cruise ship SS Fleetwood. He got married in 1955 to a 19 year old woman named Ellen Heattle and they had three children before divorcing in 1962. Carpenter later claimed that his marriage failed because he found his wife to have an uninteresting personality and that she had little interest in anything but "neighborhood gossip." Ellen's version of events was that her husband was charismatic and domineering, and that he'd never told her a thing about his prior legal scrapes. She said that Carpenter had a "voracious" sex drive and she was unable to keep up with his demands.
>>18464173>He was expelled from school in the 11th grade when he got into an argument with a female classmate and dragged her down the hallway.B-based?
At some point during this time Carpenter obtained a job at a San Francisco post office and met Lois DeAndrade, 32 and the future mother of TV personality Lisa Rinna. On July 11, 1960, Carpenter was prowling around town with a hammer and knife when he encountered DeAndrade, offered her a ride, and drove her to the Presidio where he cut her hands with the knife and struck her head with the hammer. An Army MP named Jewell Hicks interrupted him and shot him in the arm and stomach with his service pistol. DeAndrade was hospitalized and Carpenter was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. Since the attack took place on the grounds of an Army installation, it fell under Federal jurisdiction. Carpenter pled guilty and on March 9, 1961 was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He claimed he'd been inspired to attack DeAndrade after seeing the movie Psycho. Carpenter earned his GED and was paroled from Federal prison on April 7, 1969 after serving eight years.He married his second wife Helen shortly after getting out of prison and almost immediately launched a new crime spree in the Bay Area during the winter of 1970. On January 27, Carpenter deliberately rear-ended a car driven by a young woman named Cheryl Smith. The two argued, after which he threw her to the ground, tore her clothes off, and stabbed her with a spatula, but she escaped. Two days later Carpenter held another woman named Sharon O'Donnell with a shotgun and attempted to swap her car's license plate with his, but she also escaped.
On February 3, Carpenter broke into the home of 45 year old Lucille Davis in Modesto, tied her up, took her car keys, and drove her car to Angels Camp where he encountered a 21 year old woman and her infant son and ordered them into the vehicle. Carpenter told the woman to drive to Oakdale. When they got there, he raped her, ordered her and her baby out of the car, and drove off. Carpenter was arrested the next day and in the car was found the knife used in the second attack.The Zodiac Killer was active in San Francisco during this time and Carpenter began claiming credit for those murders, but police quickly decided that could not possibly be true since the murders had had happened after his arrest, when he was in jail. On April 27, he and five other inmates escaped from Calaveras County Jail. Carpenter was captured on May 1 and sentenced to five to life for car theft and escape, and five to 25 for kidnapping. Psychiatric examination of Carpenter estimated his IQ at about 125 and that he had anti-social personality disorder. He served the first year and a half of his sentence in Folsom Prison, then in San Quentin, in Folsom again, and finally the California Medical Facility.
Although DAs, detectives, and psychiatrists all warned that Carpenter was dangerous and had not been rehabilitated, the parole board nonetheless granted him parole in February 1977. This did not however mean he was a free man because he had violated the terms of his Federal parole from the 1960 conviction, so he was sent back to Federal custody where he met and befriended convicted bank robber Shane Williams. Carpenter completed his prison sentence and was released May 21, 1979, spent two months in a halfway house, and returned to live with his parents in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco. He was to remain on parole for the next three years and make a monthly report to his parole officer in San Francisco. That fall, Carpenter took up technical training courses at a Hayward vocational school to learn offset printing and after a few months he was hired to lecture the course.Shane Williams was released from prison around this time and with his wife Karen Kilroy made regular visits to San Francisco to see Carpenter, and the trio attended punk rock shows along Broadway. Williams told Carpenter that he wanted to resume robberies and the latter told him he ought to bring a gun this time as it would make the job easier. He loaned Williams a .38 revolver and Williams and Kilroy went on a robbery spree in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona that ended when they were arrested in LA on June 1, 1981 following a bungled heist on Ventura Boulevard.
Carpenter meanwhile began a murder spree in the summer of 1979, typically by hiding along hiking trails, concealed by vegetation, and jumping out at hikers as they approached. All his victims were white females ages 18 to 44, the average age being around 22. Before Carpenter was identified, he was known to investigators as the Mount Tam Killer since most of the murders happened around Mount Tamalpais, and they assumed the killer was a young man, not an individual who was pushing 50.That August 20, Edda Kane, 44, was hiking near Mount Tamalpais. A bank teller from Mill Valley and an experienced hiker, Kane's nude body was found, shot in the head with a .44 firearm. A few days earlier, a friend of Carpenter's had reported his Charter Arms .44 rifle missing. The gun never turned up. On October 21, Mary Bennett, a 23 year old Montana native, was jogging at Lands End when Carpenter attacked, dragged her into the bushes, and tried to rape her. Bennett fought him and managed to dislocate one of his thumbs. Carpenter stabbed her 25 times all over her body, cutting her throat so deeply that she was almost decapitated. Several people in the area reported hearing Bennett screaming, but took no action as they saw a police car parked nearby and assume they would do something about it. A few hours later, Carpenter checked into an emergency room at a hospital claiming a dog bit his thumb. A group of hikers spotted a trail of blood and followed it to Bennett's body. Carpenter was suspected of her murder, but could not be conclusively linked to it.
On March 8, 1980, Barbara Schwartz, 23, was hiking near Mount Tamalpais when she was attacked and stabbed to death. Her body was found a week later, curled up in a fetal position, a blood-stained knife nearby. The sheriff's department issued a bulletin urging young women to not hike the trail alone. Six months after the murder, Carpenter showed his ex-prison pen pal Mollie Purnell an ad for a .38 revolver on sale for $230 in San Leandro and asked her to buy it for him (as a convicted felon, Carpenter couldn't buy the gun himself). He claimed he was planning to join organized crime. Purnell was reluctant, but Carpenter assured her if anything happened, she could tell police it was stolen from her. She bought the gun on October 2 and gave it to him. On the 11th, Carpenter encountered a young couple, 19 year old Dick Stowers and 18 year old Cindy Moreland, along the Sky Camp Trail in Point Reyes National Seashore Park. He ordered them to their knees and shot them execution-style.
A week passed and Moreland's parents became concerned about what had happened to them, so they and the Coast Guard (which Stowers was a member of) informed local police of their disappearance but they didn't believe anything bad had happened and they simply ran off together, especially as Moreland's '74 Corolla was nowhere to be found and a guardsman at the Petaluma Training Center claimed to have seen Moreland on October 14. Stowers was listed as AWOL from the Coast Guard and eventually Moreland's car was found in a parking lot near Point Reyes trailhead. That same day of October 14, Carpenter was stalking around Mount Tamalpais State Park when he attacked, raped, and shot 26 year old Anne Alderson. Her father Robert was a physician in San Rafael; he reported her missing and her body was found the next day a quarter mile from the Cushing Memorial Ampitheater, where she had attended a rock concert. Alderson had a degree in animal behavior and environmental issues from Evergreen Valley College and had spent time in South America as a Peace Corps volunteer. Hiking along Mount Tamalpais was temporarily halted.
On November 28, Diane O'Connell, a 22 year old New York native and Cornell University graduate, disappeared while hiking near Point Reyes National Seashore. Her nude body, shot in the head, was found the next day. Nearby lay the body of 23 year old Shauna May, a native of Pullman, Washington, shot dead while hiking near the seashore. The decomposed remains of Stowers and Moreland were also found in the same area. A week after Anne Alderson's death, police announced that a local fugitive named Mark McDermand was suspected in her and other murders. McDermand, 35, had shot his 75 year old mother Helen and 40 year old brother Edwin in their Tamalpais Valley home and fled. Helen McDermand was shot once in the head and Edwin several times in the head and chest. A padlocked door on the outside of the house led to the basement. Detectives busted the door open and on the inside a note was taped to it that read "Dear shitheels. By the time you read this it will be way too late. I'll either be on the news or on a slab. Sincerely, Mr. Hate."The door led to Mark McDermand's bedroom and there were bullet casings and a gun and knife holster there. The exact time of death of his mother and brother was unclear, but was thought to be three or four days earlier. McDermand was arrested and claimed his brother Edwin was mentally disturbed and he referred to him as "the thing." He had killed his mother and then decided to also kill Edwin because "I didn't know what would happen to him once she was gone." McDermand denied anything except those murders. The murders in Marin County continued and he was quickly cleared as a suspect; a year later he was sentenced to life in prison for the deaths of his mother and brother.
As December began, investigators concluded that it was all the work of the same individual. A psychiatric profile deemed him a "lustful" offender who got off on psychological torture and seeing his victims beg for mercy. He probably hated women and killing them was some form of catharsis to him, but not enough and his anger continued to build up. On the 4th, an individual claiming to be the killer made three phone calls to the Marin County Sheriff's Office before calling KPIX-TV and KRON-TV. He said he did not agree with the psychiatric profile they'd made of him. During the next two days, he made another 14 calls, each time claiming he needed help and wanted to surrender, but after that the calls abruptly stopped. Authorities got hundreds of tips, including from as far away as the East Coast, but they had no suspects.On March 29, 1981, Carpenter headed 90 miles south to Santa Cruz County and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. Looking from an observation deck for potential victims, he spotted Steve Haertle and Ellen Hansen, both 20 and students at UC California-Davis, walking on a secluded trail. Carpenter approached them at gunpoint and ordered them to follow him. He told Hansen that he intended to rape her. She refused his demands, so he forced them to keep walking. Carpenter shot Hansen in the head several times, killing her, and wounded Haertle with a shot to the neck. He survived, came to, and got some passerbys to help him. Haertle ultimately suffered significant injuries to his throat and left eye, but managed a recovery.
On May 2, Carpenter invited Heather Scaggs, a 20 year old student at the trade school where he worked, to come visit him in Santa Cruz, allegedly to sell her a used car. Scaggs told her mother and boyfriend Dan Pingle where she was going. Pingle begged her not to go as a number of people had been murdered in the area lately and it was not safe, but she dismissed his concerns. After Scaggs met up with Carpenter, he drove her to Big Basin State Park along Route 236, pulled his gun, and ordered her to undress. He raped her and shot in the head. Scaggs's decomposing remains were found May 24 by some hikers and she was identified through dental records.About a month earlier, Santa Cruz and Marin County police formed a joint task force to find the Trailside Killer, and they concluded that Hansen and the Marin County murders were done by the same person, proven by examination of recovered bullets from the victims. They also decided to interview Steve Haertle, the only known victim of the killer who had lived to tell about it. He described a skinny, balding man aged about 50, of average height, who wore a baseball cap, a yellow and orange windbreaker with the name "Bud" on the front, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses. Another witness named Leland Fritz, also reported seeing the same man and he drove a small red import car. This surprised police as they assumed the killer was much younger, and one witness had reported a late 20s or so man with medium length brown hair. A composite sketch was made and distributed around NorCal. Artist Dennis Dederick was able to make a more accurate sketch from Haertle and Fritz's descriptions.
A tip line was created and a $25,000 reward offered for any useful information. Park rangers were dispatched throughout NorCal to post up warning signs and to warn hikers to proceed with caution when entering hiking trails alone. On April 4, a 69 year old woman named Roberta Patterson who lived in Ben Lomond told police that she believed the suspect was David Carpenter. Patterson had met Carpenter back 26 years ago when he was a cruise ship purser and she was on a cruise to Japan. She remembered him acting "totally bizarre" around her teenage daughter. Patterson got Carpenter's name when he signed her autograph book and years later, when she read in the papers about his 1970 spree of assaults on women, said that she'd half-expected something like that to happen.Since Carpenter appeared to match Haertle's description and it was also discovered that he had been seen with Heather Scaggs prior to her disappearance, police put him under surveillance. They noted that he drove a red Fiat like what Leland Fritz had described. FBI agents also watched Carpenter on May 12, although they failed to catch anything interesting as he went about his daily routine. Haertle, Fritz, and others readily picked him out of a police lineup. He was arrested outside his home in San Francisco on May 14, booked into the Santa Cruz County Jail, and held without bail. Inside the house detectives found a Sierra Club book with maps of California hiking trails and paper clips marking pages of areas where the murders occurred. This was circumstantial evidence, but probably not enough for a conviction, and they did not have his .38 revolver.
Carpenter was charged with the murder of Ellen Hansen, but not of Scaggs as her body was not yet located. He was then charged after the latter was found and he plead not guilty. After Shane Williams's arrest in Los Angeles several weeks later, he told police where the gun was. They found it thrown near a hiking trail and ballistics tests confirmed it had been used to kill Hansen. After the gun was found to have been purchased and registered to Mollie Purnell, she claimed Carpenter forced her to claim it was stolen from her, but when she was told that she could be charged as an accomplice to murder, she admitted she did indeed willingly give him the gun.He was formally charged with five murders on July 31 and in total he faced seven murder charges, two rape, and one attempted rape charge, and at the DA's request the Hansen and Scaggs trials would be combined into one. Meanwhile, the parents of Anna Menjivar, a high school senior who had disappeared from Daly City last December, asked investigators to consider Carpenter a suspect. Menjivar had been written off as a runaway, but it later came out that she worked as a teller at a bank Carpenter frequently used. Her skull and other bones were found off Route 35 in June, but no cause of death could be determined. Carpenter was further suspected in the murders of Jennifer McDowell and Diane Steffy, both found strangled in the Santa Cruz Mountains two years ago, but he was cleared as a suspect.
Due to the extensive publicity around the case, Carpenter's defense requested and got a change of venue for the trial, moving it to Los Angeles. It took until May 24, 1984 for the proceedings to open in a downtown LA courtroom, Judge Dion Morrow presiding. The prosecution sought the death penalty. Summoned to the witness stand, Haertle readily identified Carpenter and described the attack on himself and his girlfriend in detail. He further explained that he had permanent injuries from being shot in the neck. The defense did not contest the ballistics evidence from the crime scenes, instead arguing that semen found on Scaggs's body did not belong to the defendant and it had come from a consensual act of intercourse a day prior to her death. During closing arguments, one of the defense team, Larry Biggam, admitted that Carpenter was guilty, but mentally incompetent.The jury deliberated for eight hours before finding him guilty on all counts. The prosecution then called another witness, Tina Vance, who had gotten a car ride from Carpenter in 1980, when she was 14, and that he'd shown her a briefcase containing a gun, wires, ropes, and a gag, which he claimed was to scare people. One of the Marin County victims had a ligature tied around her neck and Judge Morrow allowed the photos to be shown in the courtroom over the defense's objection. Witnesses for the defense, including people who had been schoolmates of Carpenter, testified that his childhood had been one of physical and mental abuse which had led to his subsequent actions. Thomas Szasz, a psychiatry professor, testified for the prosecution and disputed that that alone was responsible for the murders.
Carpenter was sentenced to death on October 5 and he entered San Quentin's death row on November 26. However, he still had to be charged for the Marin County murders. Carpenter's public defender Frank Cox urged him to plead guilty but he refused and fired him. However, Carpenter re-hired Cox in a few weeks and his trial was moved to San Diego. The defense argued that this trial violated the double jeopardy clause of the Constitution, but the state supreme court refused to hear the appeal and the trial for the murders of Richard Stowers, Cynthia Moreland, Shauna May, Diane O'Connell, and Anne Alderson began on January 5, 1988.At the trial, Shane Williams testified for the prosecution in exchange for not being charged as an accessory in Carpenter's crimes. He said that Carpenter gifted him his .38 revolver at a warehouse in San Francisco days prior to his arrest. Williams' testimony was called into question by the defense, who argued that none of the detectives who had surveyed Carpenter in the days before his arrest had recalled him interacting with Williams. Carpenter also testified in his own defense and claimed Purnell had lied about loaning him the gun and also claimed he was in Redwood City when some of the murders happened. The jury took one day of deliberation to find him guilty on all five counts and he was sentenced to death a second time.
Carpenter maintained his innocence and insisted he did none of the Trailside murders. He appealed three months after his second trial on the grounds that one of the jurors had been improperly told about his past criminal record. The state supreme court overturned his convictions. The Marin County DA's Office appealed to the Supreme Court, which in 1994 overruled the state supreme court and reinstated Carpenter's convictions. The state supreme court declined to hear the case again. A year later, the Santa Cruz convictions were tossed due to juror misconduct but the state supreme court reinstated the convictions. Carpenter appealed the Marin County convictions again in 1999 without success.Carpenter was linked in 2009 via DNA testing to the murder of Mary Bennett. The execution of Clarence Ray Allen in 2006 left him the oldest death row inmate in the state. California governor Gavin Newsom placed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2019. Carpenter suffered a brief bout of COVID-19 but soon recovered. He turned 95 in May 2025; in increasingly feeble health and unable to walk without assistance, he was moved to California Health Care Facility in Stockton. Carpenter expressed his gratitude at being moved to the health center as the food was better and he would get more time outside in the exercise yard to get fresh air and sunshine.
>>18464192>Detectives busted the door open and on the inside a note was taped to it that read "Dear shitheels. By the time you read this it will be way too late. I'll either be on the news or on a slab. Sincerely, Mr. Hate."dude, you're like 35? i think i wrote this note when i was 13.
>>18464175>His mother reportedly told his parole officer that he'd been getting in trouble almost as soon as he was able to walk.Ma, you think just maybe that was your fault for being a total psycho control freak?
>>18464175>Carpenter later claimed that his marriage failed because he found his wife to have an uninteresting personality and that she had little interest in anything but "neighborhood gossip."tf do you think women do, Dave? they're not meant to be your bro, that's what your male friends are for.
>>18464224How do these psychos keep getting laid anyway? Ok the first wife didn't know about his past but the second one had to.
>>18464173Happy 96th, Dave. How you've managed to last this long despite decades of living in a concrete box where you spend 23 hours a day nobody will ever figure out.
>>18464173>my mom bullied me therefore I must killHow many times has this happened? It's like a habit.
>>18464258Proof enough that only men should raise children. Historically the roots of mothers doing sex changes on their kids comes from the Victorian era where mothers made their sons wear dresses and statistically single moms are basically crime factories in general.
>>18464239fucking hell you're right it is his birthday today. mf-er must literally be the oldest prisoner in America and he was already an unc when he did the murders.
>>18464185>Shane Williams was released from prison around this time and with his wife Karen Kilroy made regular visits to San Francisco to see Carpenter, and the trio attended punk rock shows along Broadway.>dude was like 49 at this point and was attending punk showsi think 15 is the absolute maximum age where you can get away with listening to punk
>>18464195>>18464178Think rehabilitative justice works? Well, it doesn't.
>>18464258Bad mothers are the cause of nearly all serial killers. Single mothers, even when they try to be good, usually end up ruining their children.
>>18464275I dunno I'm 43 and I still love Black Flag, Minor Threat and Discharge. To each their own buddy. One of the central tenets of punk rock (as it ought to be, current events may argue the contrary) is caring about what other people think is the lowest level of importance >b-but you should!No I ought not to. Thats why zoomers are so neurotic. Obsessed with cringe. Zoomers have 0 free will by their own volition.
>>18464324More of an argument in favor of banning divorce. Of course most women will piss and moan because they get two black eyes for not listening to their husband but sometimes you have to suffer so your kids don't have to.
>>18464175>Shortly after his 20th birthday, he was arrested for molesting a 17 year old girl, but he pled innocent and a jury acquitted him for lack of evidencethey likely just thought she was a whore and asked for it. oh well, it was a different time.
>>18464330nta but would be more oddball back in the late 70s because this guy didn't grow up with punk or even rock at all, his childhood music was like big band slop
>>18464267Deliberate on OP's part? I dunno.
>>18464186>Several people in the area reported hearing Bennett screaming, but took no action as they saw a police car parked nearby and assume they would do something about ityou people way overestimate police competence here
>>18464239idk, it's a very low stress life>>18464206in his 80s here and looked quite good for it
>>18464188the late 70s-early 80s was dangerous, lots of people were murdered. mostly by boomers but occasionally by pre-boomer uncs like this guy too.
>>18464206damn just like living inside a walk-in closet, no fresh air, no window, is he at least alone in that cell?
>>18464418Think he just has good genetics. The OP photo was taken at age 51 and I would have guessed he was around 40. How long did his parents live anyway?
>>18464530On death row you're alone in that closet of a cell 23 hours a day and are allowed out one hour each day for shower and exercise. Granted, by the time you're as old as Carpenter was in that photo you don't present much of a safety risk to anyone anymore.
>>18464358Most punks I've known personally (even the hardcore variants) are uncs from the early 80s US scene and are pushing 60.
>>18464275The punk scene is filled with tombers and boomers
>>18464358idk but don't think any of my relatives from that generation liked rock at all
>>18464540they shower only three times a week i have heard.
