Almost Trailside: A True Story (14 page)

August 1979, David Carpenter murdered Edda Kane. She was shot and left naked in an area overlooking the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge in Mt. Tamalpais State Park in Marin County.

September 1979, he was released from the halfway house and moved in with his elderly parents on Sussex Street in the Glen Park district in San Francisco.

While David Carpenter continued his criminal activities he found a way to pass as a normal productive citizen. He worked at various occupations, including as a ship's purser, a salesman, and a printer. He took courses in computer printing at the California Trade School, graduating with a degree. Then he was hired as a typesetter instructor at an agency affiliated with the school.

He took up hiking as a hobby but not for the same reasons most people do. He simply liked the shelter of the wilderness for grabbing young women to rape and kill without being seen.

March 1980, David Carpenter murdered Barbara Swartz while she was hiking. She was stabbed repeatedly. Her body was found in Mt. Tamalpais State Park.

June 1980, the body of Anna Mejivas, a friend of David Carpenters, was found slain in Mt. Tamalpais State Park.

Early in October 1980, Rick Stowers and Cindy Moreland disappeared. Six weeks later their bodies were found in Point Reyes Park just north of San Francisco. David Carpenter shot them both to death.

Mid October 1980, David Carpenter murdered Anne Alderson near Mt. Tamalpais State Park where she was jogging. She had been raped, shot three times in the head, and redressed.

November 1980, David Carpenter murdered, raped, and strangled Diane O’Connell and Shauna May in Point Reyes Park. Their bodies were found buried in a shallow grave. The bodies of Rick Stowers and Cindy Moreland who disappeared in October were also found near by.

December 1980, Kelly Menjivar disappears. Six months later the remains of her body are found in Castle Rock State Park.

January 1981, Candace Townsend moves in with David Carpenter and his parents.

February 1981, he began working for Econo Quick Print in Hayward, California.

March 1981, David Carpenter murdered Ellen Hansen by shooting her point blank three times and shooting her boyfriend Stephen Heartle, who survived. Ellen and Stephen were hiking in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

April 1981, after only three months, Candace Townsend moves out of Carpenter’s home.

May 1981, Heather Skaggs, a co-worker of David Carpenter, disappears the day she’s scheduled to go shopping with him. Her naked body was found three weeks later in Big Basin Redwood State Park. She was killed with one gunshot wound to the head and appeared to have been raped.

The same day, Police go to his house to question him about the whereabouts of Heather Skaggs. They notice his red fiat car in the driveway and that he matches the sketch of the suspected Trailside Killer. They also learned that he was a habitual sex offender, an item that was not fully documented in his records. Then they show Stephen Heartle a mug shot of him and Stephen identifies Carpenter as the killer of Ellen Hansen.

From 1979 to 1981, David Carpenter raped and murdered five women and was suspected of killing at least two others.

David Carpenter was watching the news reports and reading the newspapers. He decided to grow a beard in an effort to change his identity.

July 1981, David Carpenter was officially charged with five counts of murder, rape, and attempted rape in Santa Cruz County. His trial was moved to Los Angeles because of pretrial publicity.

At the trial, Santa Cruz District Attorney, Art Danner focused his opening argument on eyewitnesses and ballistics evidence. Carpenter’s gun, a .38 caliber Rossi revolver, had been linked to each of the murders.

Stephen Haertle’s testimony identifying Carpenter as the attacker who shot him and killed his girlfriend, Ellen Hansen, was over-whelming.

July 1984, David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer, was found guilty of all charges. The Los Angeles County jury convicted him of two counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder in the Santa Cruz County slayings. The jury found three special circumstances that they felt warranted the death penalty: committing multiple murders, committing during a rape, and lying in wait.

David Carpenter was sentenced to death via execution in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

David Carpenter, fifty-four years old, balding and bespectacled had no visible reaction. His attorney stated that Carpenter expected to be convicted and had prepared for it. He also stated that his client’s crimes had been impulsive, not planned, and that he had been unable to control himself. Yet, no amount of psychological testimony had convinced the jury that abusive parents were entirely responsible for David Carpenter’s development toward such cruelty.

The second trial for the Marin County murders was delayed for several years by legal argument but eventually opened in San Diego in January 1988. The witness list was huge with more than sixty witnesses to testify against Carpenter. Once again, it was proven that David Carpenter’s gun was the one that shot and killed the victims. For seven days David Carpenter himself took the stand to no avail.

In May 1988, the San Diego jury convicted him of first degree murder in the five Marin County slayings, of raping two of his victims, and attempting to rape a third. The jury recommended the death penalty.

In 1997, after almost ten years of new trial orders and over-turned decisions related to possible illegal juror knowledge, the state Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for the Santa Cruz murders.

In November 1999, they also upheld the death penalty decision from his second trial for the Marin County murders.

As of this year, 2013, David Carpenter remains on Death Row in
San Quentin State Prison
in California. At age 83, he is currently the oldest inmate there.

S
an Quentin State Prison is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men located along the shoreline in unincorporated San Quentin in Marin County, California. It is the oldest prison in the state and houses California’s only Death Row for male inmates, the largest in the United States, and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. It has a gas chamber, but since 1996, executions at the prison have been carried out by lethal injection. Between 1996 and 2006, eleven people have been executed at the prison by lethal injection. There are currently 734 inmates housed on Death Row. In 1851, California’s first prison opened. It was a 268 ton wooden ship named The Waban, anchored in San Francisco Bay and outfitted to hold 30 inmates. After a series of speculative land transactions and a legislative scandal, inmates who were housed on The Waban constructed San Quentin State Prison which opened in 1852 with 68 inmates. The prison held both male and female inmates until 1932 when the California Institution for Women prison was built. The use of torture was banned at San Quentin in 1944. San Quentin State Prison correctional complex sits on 432 acres of desirable waterfront real estate overlooking the north side of San Francisco Bay. The prison itself occupies 275 acres and has its own zip code for mail sent to inmates. As of October 2013, the inmate population was 4223, with 1718 staff, and an annual operating budget of over two-million dollars. San Quentin State Prison has been featured in movies, in videos, and on television. It has hosted concerts, is the subject of many books, and has housed many notorious inmates
.

David Carpenter is one of the best known prisoners on San Quentin’s Death Row. Since his conviction as the Trailside Killer three decades ago, he spends the better part of every day writing letters and working on his complex legal case.

Although he claims to be innocent, set up, and framed for the murders of which he was convicted, DNA samples taken at the crime scenes and from crime evidence have matched Carpenter’s DNA through state Department of Justice files. San Francisco police have confirmed the matches with a recently obtained sample from Carpenter.

Those victims who were fortunate to live under his brutal attacks have positively identified him as the perpetrator. Many other eyewitnesses have identified him. His vehicle seen at crime scenes was positively identified. Ballistics matched his gun and bullets. The undeniable evidence is huge.

David Joseph Carpenter
is
the Trailside Killer and rapist.

Chapter X

T
he killing appetite of David Joseph Carpenter, the Trailside Killer, who spread fear in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in and around the San Francisco Bay Area cities and parklands, is frightening. His unthinkable acts of rape and murder forever interrupted and changed the lives of hundreds of people. His known victims are:

Victim Number One: Edda Kane

On August 19, 1979 Edda Kane went out to hike the trails in a park at the foot of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County which overlooks San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. Edda was forty-four years old, a married bank executive, and lived an athletic lifestyle.

On this day, she found no one to join her so she went out alone to get her workout. When she didn’t return home, her worried husband contacted the police.

Believing she was in trouble, they sent out a search team, including dog handlers, just in case she had fallen and was in some inaccessible place. They found her car untouched in the parking lot but they saw no sign of her.

Edda Kane was found dead the next day. She had been attacked from behind and had a bullet wound on the back of her skull. The police believe, from her position on her knees with her face on the ground, that possibly she had been forced to show subservience to her killer and perhaps even to beg for her life. The killer removed ten dollars from her wallet along with some credit cards, took her eye glasses, but left her jewelry. It was the first known killing on Mount Tamalpais.

Edda Kane had been shot once with a .44 caliber gun and was the victim of an execution style attack. She had not been raped. There was little evidence in the area to assist the police in tracking her killer, so the murder went unsolved.

Eventually, Edda Kane’s murder would gain a different status as more than just an isolated unsolved homicide; it would become the first of more gruesome discovery to come.

Victim Number Two: Barbara Schwartz

On March 8, 1980 the body of Barbara Schwartz was found in a park at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, the same park where Edda Kane was killed.

Out hiking with her dog, the young twenty-three year old baker had been repeatedly stabbed one dozen times in the chest. But there was a witness who had watched the entire episode through the trees and it was she who led the authorities to the crime scene.

This female hiker reported that to her surprise, a man suddenly began to stab Barbara Schwartz with a knife. They struggled for nearly a minute. Barbara fell to the ground and the man fled. The witness ran for help. Police found a pair of blood-stained bifocal glasses that they hoped belonged to the killer.

However, the witness’s description would prove to be wildly erroneous in every respect, which she herself would later admit, and it would mislead the investigation for some time.