David Carpenter
American serial killer on death row
David Joseph Carpenter (born May 6, 1930), also called the Trailside Killer, is an American serial killer and sex offender who raped 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 before 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Carpenter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.