David Joseph Carpenter was convicted by two juries of seven murders committed on hiking trails in Marin and Santa Cruz counties, north and south of San Francisco, between October 1980 and May 1981. Six of the people he killed were hikers he met on remote paths. The seventh was a co-worker. One man he shot on a Santa Cruz trail survived and picked him out of a police lineup. The California Supreme Court, affirming both judgments, described him as the "Trailside Killer," the name the press had given to the unknown gunman while the killings went on.
He was on parole when he was arrested in May 1981. He had served long prison terms for violent attacks in 1960 and 1970. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him in 1984 of the Santa Cruz crimes, and a San Diego County jury convicted him in 1988 of five killings in Marin County. He was sentenced to death twice. A 1979 killing in San Francisco was later tied to him by DNA but was never charged, and no charge was reported in two earlier deaths on Mount Tamalpais. In interviews from prison he has denied the killings.
Carpenter was born in San Francisco on May 6, 1930, according to a 2013 interview in San Quentin News. He had a severe stutter from childhood. At his 1984 penalty trial his lawyer, Larry Biggam, told the jury that he had grown up with a domineering mother and a father who was home only part of the time, did not love him and beat him regularly. Biggam said state officials had found the family to be "one of the worst messes they had ever seen," and he argued that Carpenter was "a damaged human being" who had been "damned at an early age." The California Supreme Court's 1997 opinion summarizes the defense evidence the same way: an abusive and emotionally neglectful childhood, the stutter, and institutions that failed to treat him. A defense psychologist at the 1988 trial testified that he had been placed in juvenile institutions early and that this had made his problems worse.
His criminal record dated to 1947 and included sex offenses, United Press International reported at the time of his arrest. Psychiatric reports cited in the press in 1981 treated the stutter as part of his profile, and UPI reported that women he had attacked said the stutter disappeared during the attacks.
In 1960 Carpenter attacked a woman at the Presidio of San Francisco with a knife and a hammer, and then fired a tear gas gun at a police officer, according to the 1997 California Supreme Court opinion. The woman survived and testified against him at his 1984 penalty trial. She told the jury he had said to her during the attack that "every once in a while, I have this funny quirk." The 1999 opinion lists a felony conviction in 1960. The court and the sentence for that conviction were not reported.
Carpenter committed a string of crimes in late January and early February 1970, which the California Supreme Court later set out as aggravating evidence. On January 27, 1970, he assaulted a woman at knifepoint in Santa Cruz County. The next day he broke into a home in the Santa Cruz Mountains and abducted the woman who lived there. On January 29 he held up a woman at gunpoint in Daly City and took her car. On February 3 he robbed a woman in Calaveras County and took her car, and later that day he abducted a woman and her baby at gunpoint in Angels Camp. Two of the women were sexually assaulted, the court records. He was also convicted of escaping from the Calaveras County jail.
UPI reported in 1981 that he was sentenced in Calaveras County in 1970 for robbery and kidnapping and sent to Folsom Prison, and that while he was there he was charged in Santa Cruz County with rape and robbery. He was moved to San Quentin in August 1972, sent back to Folsom and then transferred to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, where UPI said he was held from 1972 to 1977. A state Corrections Department spokesman, Phil Guthrie, called him a "classic, model inmate" who responded well to psychotherapy and was used as a "co-therapist" in group sessions for other prisoners.
In all, UPI reported, he served 16 years for rape, robbery and other offenses. The California Supreme Court noted in 1999 that he had been in custody for all but two of the years between his convictions and his trial.
UPI reported in May 1981 that Carpenter was paroled in February 1977. At his 1984 penalty trial the Santa Cruz County district attorney, Art Danner, told the jury that his final parole came in 1979. After Heather Scaggs disappeared in 1981, police learned that he was on parole and had a counselor at the State Department of Rehabilitation, according to the 1997 opinion.
By 1981 he was living with his elderly parents in San Francisco. Neighbors described him to reporters as a loner who kept a dachshund. UPI called him a printer. Danner said he had worked as an instructor at a trade school in Hayward, and the California Supreme Court records that Heather Scaggs was his co-worker there. A defense witness at the 1988 trial testified that he had been Carpenter's employer at the trade school and that he was a good employee. He had three adult children, who testified for him at his first penalty trial. His first wife testified for the prosecution in rebuttal at the second.
The series of deaths that the Marin County sheriff later linked began on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Edda Kane, 44, of Mill Valley, was shot and killed near the Rock Springs Trail on August 20, 1979, UPI reported. Barbara Schwartz, 23, also of Mill Valley, was stabbed to death on the mountain on March 8, 1980; UPI noted that she was the only one of the victims in the Marin series who was not shot.
No charge against Carpenter in either death was reported. When he was arrested, the Marin County sheriff, Al Howenstein, said investigators expected the evidence to show whether he had been involved in the Mount Tamalpais killings. When his Los Angeles trial opened in 1984, UPI reported that he faced five murder charges in Marin County, and those five, all from October and November 1980, were the counts tried in San Diego in 1988.
On the afternoon of Sunday, October 21, 1979, Mary Frances Bennett, 23, went out for a jog at Lands End, a park in northwest San Francisco where she often ran. She was found dead that evening in a wooded area of the park. She had been stabbed many times. People walking nearby had found a set of bloody keys and followed the trail to her.
She had grown up on a farm near Deer Lodge, Montana, the second of six children, the Flathead Beacon reported. She graduated from Montana State University in the spring of 1979, passed her certified public accountant's examination on her first attempt that July, and had taken an internship at a San Francisco accounting firm; she had been in California about three months when she died.
Her death went unsolved for three decades. In May 1981, in the days after Carpenter's arrest, UPI listed it among the deaths investigators were examining.
On October 11, 1980, Cynthia Moreland, 18, of Cotati, and Richard Stowers, 19, of Petaluma, were shot near a hiking trail in Point Reyes National Seashore, the federal park on the Marin County coast. Other hikers heard shots between about 1 and 2 p.m. that day, according to the 1999 California Supreme Court opinion. Their bodies were not found until November 29.
On October 13, 1980, Anne Alderson, 26, of San Leandro, was shot near a trail on Mount Tamalpais. A caretaker at a nearby inn last saw her at about 5:30 p.m. Her body was found two days later, the court records. The San Diego jury convicted Carpenter of her murder and of raping her. UPI, writing in November 1980, gave her full name as Anne E. Alderson and said she was found near the Mountain Theater.
On November 28, 1980, Diane O'Connell, 22, and Shauna May, 23, of San Francisco, were shot at Point Reyes. Hikers heard shots at about 3:10 p.m. and again about ten minutes later. UPI reported that Sheriff Howenstein described Diane O'Connell as a young woman from the East Coast who had been staying with friends in the San Francisco area; the 1988 UPI report on the verdict said she was from San Jose. The San Diego jury convicted Carpenter of their murders, of the rape of Shauna May and of the attempted rape of Diane O'Connell. The 1999 opinion spells her first name Diane; the 1980 UPI report spells it Diana.
The two women had been reported missing. On November 29, searchers looking for them found the bodies of a man and a woman in a shallow grave near the Sky Trail on Mount Wittenberg. They were Cynthia Moreland and Richard Stowers, who had not been reported missing, the sheriff said. About an hour and a half later the searchers found the two women, about half a mile away.
At a news conference in San Rafael on November 30, Howenstein linked all seven deaths in Marin County since August 1979. He said the deaths had a ritual character, and he warned hikers to take great care and to travel in groups, because, he said, the killings were "not satisfying" the killer's needs. A witness who had seen a man running from one of the Mount Tamalpais killings described him as about six feet tall, of medium build, with medium-length brown hair, between 25 and 35 years old. When Carpenter was arrested in May 1981, UPI reported, the killings had left joggers and hikers afraid, and the authorities had been urging people not to go into the parks alone.
The gun that connected the cases was a .38-caliber Rossi revolver. A woman friend of Carpenter's bought it in the fall of 1980 at his request, paid for it and gave it to him, the California Supreme Court records. She testified to this under a grant of immunity. When she was first questioned after his arrest, she told police the gun had been stolen, which she said was what Carpenter had told her to say "if anything happened." Two other witnesses saw him with a similar gun in late 1980 and early 1981.
On December 23, 1980, according to evidence at the 1988 trial, he pulled a gun on a man during an argument and threatened to kill him. Another witness testified that he had shown her what he called his "thief kit," a suitcase holding a second gun and some wire.
Ellen Marie Hansen was a sophomore at the University of California, Davis, and Steven Haertle was a junior there. On Sunday, March 29, 1981, the two students came back to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, at about 4 p.m. and set out on the Ridge Trail. About a mile along they passed a man walking the other way. Neither side spoke.
On the way back they met him again. He drew a black revolver, told them to "do what I say," and said he wanted to rape Ellen Hansen. He moved them toward the edge of the trail and fired. Ellen Hansen was shot at close range and died on the trail. She was 20. Steven Haertle was shot in the back of the neck and also hit in the hand. The bullet stopped behind his breastbone, about two inches from his heart.
Haertle ran toward the park's observation deck, where Leland and Kenneth Fritz took him in. The Fritzes had seen the gunman on the deck earlier, and Fred and Maureen Morse had watched him drink from a fountain there. They heard the shots a few minutes later. Fred Morse then met the man on the trail; he said someone had been shot and kept walking. Haertle pointed him out to Maureen Morse as the man who had shot him, but he walked on. Leland Fritz and a young girl saw him drive off fast in a red Fiat. The witnesses described a man in a distinctive gold jacket with "Montana" lettering and a blue or green baseball cap.
Haertle spent eight days in the hospital and still had lingering effects from his wounds when he testified at trial. His description of the gunman matched a composite drawing Marin County investigators had already made, UPI reported in May 1981. UPI reported that he gave police the first eyewitness description of the attacker.
Heather Scaggs, 20, worked with Carpenter at the trade school in Hayward and lived in San Jose with her boyfriend. Her own car was not running, so on May 2, 1981, she arranged to drive with Carpenter to Santa Cruz to buy a car from a friend of his, according to the 1997 opinion. She left home that morning and was not seen alive again.
That night, friends of hers asked Carpenter what had happened. He told them the two had planned the trip but that he had overslept, had car trouble, and never saw her. He gave police the same account in an interview on May 8. The California Supreme Court later held that he was not in custody during that interview, which it called "nothing more than a police interview of a person who knew a young woman who was missing for six days."
Hikers found her body on May 24, 1981, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, about 136 yards off the road and 12 to 15 miles from where Ellen Hansen had died. She had been shot once at close range. She was identified through dental records. Carpenter was convicted of her rape and murder.
Carpenter himself later dated his troubles to that day. "It began because I was supposed to pick up Heather Scaggs on May 2, 1981, but I did not," he told the prison journalist Boston Woodard in 2013.
Two people called a hotline set up for tips on the trail killings, UPI reported, and their calls led police to Carpenter. He was not on the Marin County sheriff's list of 168 possible suspects. On May 13, 1981, he gave the Rossi revolver to a married couple who were committing bank robberies; the man used it in a robbery and, after Carpenter's arrest, buried it under broken asphalt in a vacant lot in San Francisco.
On May 15, 1981, after a week of surveillance, a task force of FBI agents, San Francisco police and Marin and Santa Cruz county sheriff's deputies arrested Carpenter at his parents' home in San Francisco without a struggle. He was taken to Santa Cruz and booked on murder and attempted murder charges with special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty. The same day, police obtained a San Francisco warrant to search his home, his person and his cars. Police found his Chevrolet station wagon in Alameda County, and a paper bag in it held an unfired .38 bullet. His red Fiat had been left with an acquaintance in Marin County. UPI reported that the search of his home turned up maps of Northern California hiking trails.
Also on May 15, Steven Haertle and Leland Fritz identified him in a six-man lineup in which every man wore a beard. The gunman had been clean-shaven; Carpenter had started growing a beard after the Henry Cowell shooting. UPI reported that six of seven witnesses picked him out. Shoe prints cast in plaster at Henry Cowell matched a pair of Nike shoes he had bought the day before the shooting, and his former roommate testified that he had owned a jacket like the gold one the witnesses described.
The man who had buried the gun later led police to it. Ballistics tests matched the revolver to the shootings of Heather Scaggs, Ellen Hansen and Steven Haertle, and, the 1999 opinion records, to every one of the Marin County killings tried in San Diego. Police also learned from his parents the name of the family's optometrist. An employee of the optometrist's office testified that Carpenter came in on May 2, 1981, the day Heather Scaggs disappeared, to have his glasses repaired and to order a new pair. UPI reported in 1981 that a pair of prescription glasses found at one of the murder scenes helped link him to the Marin killings.
On the Monday after his arrest, Carpenter appeared in Santa Cruz County Municipal Court in an orange jail jumpsuit and was charged with the murder of Ellen Hansen. His stutter was so severe that Judge Richard McAdams let him answer by nodding, UPI reported. The judge ordered him held without bail and sealed the official records. The public defender, Larry Biggam, asked for time to review police reports from several jurisdictions and said he would seek a trial outside the county. "There's a lot of fear in this area and a lot of inflamed public outrage," he said. Danner said Santa Cruz County was charging him first because its case was the strongest. "We feel we have the best case to go first," he had said on the day of the arrest.
The Santa Cruz case was moved to Los Angeles County after the defense argued that publicity in the Bay Area would prevent a fair trial. The trial opened on May 23, 1984, before Superior Court Judge Dion G. Morrow. Two juries were seated at once: one to decide guilt and a second to decide the penalty if he was convicted of murder. The second jury sat through the guilt phase, which the California Supreme Court later held was not unfair to him. The court also upheld an order requiring him to shave for trial.
Art Danner prosecuted the case himself. In his opening statement he told the jurors that the same revolver had been used to kill both women and to wound Haertle, that a friend had bought the gun for Carpenter, and that Haertle would identify him. "I ask you to find the truth and if you do that the people will be satisfied," he said. Stephen Wright, one of three defense lawyers, called Danner's account "theories" and asked the jurors to wait for the evidence. Judge Morrow warned the jurors that the trial would run through the summer, with a recess for the Summer Olympics.
Evidence of the Marin County killings was admitted at the guilt phase on the questions of intent and premeditation. The California Supreme Court approved that ruling and held that a jury considering such evidence need only find by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant committed the other crimes.
Carpenter did not testify. His lawyers did not dispute that he was the gunman. A federal judge, reviewing the trial in 2023, quoted defense counsel as telling the jury that Carpenter "did have a gun in the park, no question about it." The defense argued instead that he had not lain in wait for Ellen Hansen and had not raped Heather Scaggs, and it asked the jury to return second-degree murder verdicts.
On July 6, 1984, the jury found him guilty of the first-degree murders of Ellen Hansen and Heather Scaggs, the attempted murder of Steven Haertle, the attempted rape of Ellen Hansen and the rape of Heather Scaggs. It found true the special circumstances of multiple murder and rape-murder for both killings, and lying in wait for the killing of Ellen Hansen, along with personal use of a firearm and great bodily injury on the attempted murder count.
The penalty phase opened in August 1984 before the second jury, which had two choices: life in prison without parole, or death. Danner promised the jurors a "time machine" tour of Carpenter's criminal past and argued that prison had not reformed him. He told them that Carpenter had learned from his earlier crimes that it was safer to kill than to leave a witness: "instead of letting his victims go, because they might turn up as witnesses, he eliminated them." The first prosecution witness was the woman he had attacked at the Presidio in 1960.
Biggam's case for mitigation rested on Carpenter's childhood, his stutter and his good conduct in prison. Childhood friends, teachers, his three adult children and prison staff testified for him, and psychologists described a personality disorder and the failure of institutions to treat him.
On October 5, 1984, the jury returned death verdicts for both murders. Judge Morrow denied the automatic motion to reduce the sentence and, on November 16, 1984, sentenced Carpenter to death. The state prison system received him on November 26, 1984, according to CDCR records.
The five Marin County murders were tried separately. At Carpenter's request, the case was moved from Marin County to San Diego County because of publicity in Northern California, where, UPI noted, news of the killings had kept many hikers off popular trails for months. The Associated Press reported in September 1986 that the trial would be held in San Diego. It began on January 5, 1988, before Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Hoffman, and produced nearly 16,000 pages of testimony.
This time Carpenter contested identity, and he testified. He denied the crimes and described his activities in detail. His lawyers, Frank Cox and Stephen Berlin, argued that he had been at work or caring for his ailing parents when a man who looked like him committed the killings. For October 11, 1980, the day of the Point Reyes shootings, he said he had been out with his parents at shops and a foot clinic; the clinic records showed signs that dates had been altered, and a podiatrist testified that the clinic was usually closed on Fridays. For October 13, an employer testified that he had worked with her until 5:30 or 6 p.m., which the California Supreme Court called weak, since Anne Alderson was last seen alive at about 5:30. For November 28 he said he had been fixing a toilet at his parents' house. The prosecution impeached him with telephone and employment records, and he admitted that one of his claims could not have been true. A defense expert said the comparison shoe could not have made the shoe prints, and another said the blood-type evidence was unreliable.
The jurors were not told that he had already been convicted and sentenced to death for the Santa Cruz killings. The Henry Cowell shooting was put before them as evidence of identity.
The Marin County prosecutor, John Posey, told the jury that Carpenter killed to satisfy a need for power, and he repeated a witness's account that Carpenter had told her nothing matched the power of a gun for getting what he wanted. His goal, Posey said, was "to commit murder and rape and get away with it."
On May 10, 1988, after about seven hours of deliberation, the jury of seven women and five men found Carpenter guilty of the first-degree murders of Cynthia Moreland, Richard Stowers, Anne Alderson, Diane O'Connell and Shauna May; of the rapes of Anne Alderson and Shauna May; and of the attempted rape of Diane O'Connell. It found true the multiple-murder special circumstance, the rape-murder special circumstance for the three women, and his personal use of a firearm in each crime. He showed no visible emotion as the verdicts were read. "I think the evidence really was overwhelming when you sit and think about it," Posey said. Cox said his client was "very disappointed" but "philosophical about it," and that he had "sincerely hoped for a verdict of not guilty and that hope has been dashed." None of the victims' relatives, some of whom had testified, were in court for the verdict.
The penalty phase began on May 17, 1988. The prosecution again presented his earlier crimes, the Henry Cowell shooting and the killing of Heather Scaggs, and called his first wife, a parole officer and a state rehabilitation counselor in rebuttal. The jury returned a death verdict, and Judge Hoffman sentenced him to death on July 19, 1988.
Partway through the San Diego guilt phase, the jury's foreperson learned of the Santa Cruz convictions and the death sentence, either from newspapers or through her husband. On March 26, 1988, at a resort in San Diego County, she talked about the case with two people who were not jurors and said, in substance, that the jurors were not supposed to know about the earlier convictions.
Carpenter's lawyers filed a petition for habeas corpus in the trial court on September 28, 1988. At a hearing, the foreperson denied the conversation; Judge Hoffman found her denial was perjury, found that her misconduct had prejudiced Carpenter, and vacated the death judgment. The state's director of corrections appealed directly to the California Supreme Court.
On March 6, 1995, in In re Carpenter, the court reversed by four votes to three. Justice Armand Arabian, writing for the majority, agreed that the foreperson had committed misconduct by receiving outside information and discussing the case, but held that the trial court was wrong to find prejudice: "before a unanimous verdict is set aside, the likelihood of bias under either test must be substantial." The petition was provisionally denied, leaving him free to raise the issue again on appeal. Justice Mosk, joined by Chief Justice Lucas and Justice Kennard, dissented and would have left the judgment vacated. Arabian said, as San Quentin News reported in 2013, that it was "virtually impossible to keep secrets in such cases."
The California Supreme Court affirmed the Los Angeles judgment on April 28, 1997, in People v. Carpenter, 15 Cal.4th 312, in an opinion by Justice Chin joined by the whole court. It rejected every claim, among them challenges to jury selection, the refusal to try the two Santa Cruz killings separately, the search warrants, the lineup, the use of the Marin County evidence and a remark by the trial judge during jury selection about the governor's power to commute sentences. The United States Supreme Court denied review on January 20, 1998.
The court affirmed the San Diego judgment on November 29, 1999, in People v. Carpenter, 21 Cal.4th 1016, again in an opinion by Justice Chin. Justice Mosk dissented: because "the jury foreperson was demonstrably biased against him at trial," he wrote, "I cannot now join in affirming the judgment of death on appeal." The court denied rehearing on January 19, 2000, and the United States Supreme Court denied review on October 2, 2000. State habeas petitions in both cases were denied between 1998 and 2002.
Carpenter then challenged both judgments in federal court, where the cases were assigned to Judge Maxine M. Chesney of the Northern District of California. In 2008, after his lawyers raised his long mental health history and claimed he was not competent to take part, the court ordered an evaluation. A psychologist chosen by both sides examined him over three days in September 2008 and found him competent, and on December 2, 2008, the court ruled that he could pursue his petitions. The Ninth Circuit dismissed his appeal of the competency orders in July 2009.
The court has since worked through his claims in groups. It denied the claims in several groups in orders from 2011 to 2023, including, on December 15, 2023, a set of claims about the conduct of jurors at the Los Angeles trial. In orders of September 2019 in the Marin case and December 2023 in the Santa Cruz case, further groups of claims remained to be briefed. No final federal ruling in either case was reported.
About 30 years after her death, the San Francisco Police Department's cold case team reviewed the killing of Mary Frances Bennett. Investigators sent preserved evidence for DNA testing and entered the profile in the state database. "We entered it into the state computer and we were informed that it came back to David Joseph Carpenter," Inspector Joe Toomey told ABC7 News. Toomey interviewed Carpenter at San Quentin. "He denied knowing her and he denied killing her," Toomey said.
Police told her family in Montana in early February and announced the match in February 2010. A sister told the Flathead Beacon, "I always knew who did it." A brother said he was glad the case had finally been proven. An Associated Press report carried by the Flathead Beacon said Carpenter, then 79, had long been suspected but never charged, and the AP reported that prosecutors had not decided whether to file a new charge. The Beacon reported that on the day she died Carpenter had gone to an emergency room with an injured thumb and said a dog had bitten him. No charge in her death was reported.
Carpenter has been on California's death row since 1984. When the DNA match was announced, the Flathead Beacon reported that he was the oldest of 621 condemned men at San Quentin. Boston Woodard, a prisoner who wrote for San Quentin News and the Fresno newspaper Community Alliance, interviewed him in June 2013, when he was 83 and still the oldest man on the row. He said he was "relatively healthy." He spent his days writing letters and working on his case, attended Catholic services each week, and had visits from friends about once a month. He was close to his sister and wrote her long letters. A San Quentin spokesman, Lieutenant Sam Robinson, said he had been "very compliant" and had "not been a problem."
He still denied the killings. "I was convicted by the media long before I was even found guilty of a crime," he told Woodard. He said he had been the "logical suspect" and that "everyone was convinced I was the trailside killer long before I was charged with any of those murders." He said he had produced credible alibis. Asked what he hoped would happen if the real Trailside Killer were ever caught, he said: "I hope he gets a fair trial."
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's condemned inmate list, updated October 2, 2026, lists David Carpenter three times, once for each set of convictions: two Los Angeles entries with a sentence date of November 16, 1984, and a San Diego entry with a sentence date of July 19, 1988. It gives his age as 96. He does not appear on CDCR's list of condemned people who have died since 1978, which was updated in September 2026. As of October 2026, then, he is listed among California's living condemned prisoners, under two sentences of death. The list does not say where he is held.
Proven by final judgment on direct appeal: the murders of Ellen Hansen and Heather Scaggs and the attempted murder of Steven Haertle (Los Angeles County, 1984), and the murders of Cynthia Moreland, Richard Stowers, Anne Alderson, Diane O'Connell and Shauna May (San Diego County, 1988), with the rape and attempted rape counts. The federal challenges to both judgments were still pending as of the 2019 and 2023 orders.
Attributed but never charged: the 1979 killing of Mary Frances Bennett, which San Francisco police tied to him by DNA in 2010. Linked by the Marin sheriff in 1980 to the same series, with no charge reported: the deaths of Edda Kane in August 1979 and Barbara Schwartz in March 1980. In May 1981 UPI also reported that investigators were looking at the 1979 deaths of two young women in Santa Cruz County; no later report connects him to them.
Points on which sources differ: Heather Scaggs's age (20 in UPI's 1984 report, 21 in its 1981 report) and her workplace (a trade school in Hayward, in the court record; a printing company, in UPI in 1981); Steven Haertle's wounds (shot in the neck and hand, in the court record; shot four times, in UPI in 1981); the date Anne Alderson was killed (October 13, 1980, in the 1999 opinion; UPI in 1980 dated her death October 15, which the court gives as the day she was found); the spelling of Diane O'Connell's first name; and the year of his last parole (February 1977 in UPI's 1981 report; 1979 according to Danner in 1984). A 1981 UPI report misspelled Anne Alderson's name as "Evelyn Anderson." Some later accounts say he was convicted of ten homicides; the court records show seven.
May 6, 1930: David Joseph Carpenter is born in San Francisco.
1947: the earliest entry on his criminal record, which includes sex offenses.
1960: attacks a woman at the Presidio of San Francisco with a knife and a hammer; felony conviction.
January 27 to February 3, 1970: a series of assaults, abductions and robberies in Santa Cruz County, Daly City, Calaveras County and Angels Camp; convicted, including of escape from the Calaveras County jail.
1970 to 1977: held at Folsom, San Quentin and the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.
February 1977: paroled (UPI); the prosecutor said in 1984 that his final parole came in 1979.
August 20, 1979: Edda Kane is killed on Mount Tamalpais (never charged).
October 21, 1979: Mary Frances Bennett is killed at Lands End, San Francisco (attributed by DNA in 2010; never charged).
March 8, 1980: Barbara Schwartz is killed on Mount Tamalpais (never charged).
Fall 1980: a friend buys the .38 Rossi revolver for him.
October 11, 1980: Cynthia Moreland and Richard Stowers are killed at Point Reyes.
October 13, 1980: Anne Alderson is killed on Mount Tamalpais.
November 28, 1980: Diane O'Connell and Shauna May are killed at Point Reyes.
November 29, 1980: searchers find all four Point Reyes victims.
November 30, 1980: the Marin sheriff links seven deaths and warns hikers.
March 29, 1981: Ellen Hansen is killed and Steven Haertle wounded at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.
May 2, 1981: Heather Scaggs disappears.
May 8, 1981: police interview Carpenter about her disappearance.
May 13, 1981: he gives the revolver to a bank robber.
May 15, 1981: arrested in San Francisco; picked out of a lineup by Haertle and Leland Fritz.
May 1981 (the Monday after his arrest): charged in Santa Cruz County with the murder of Ellen Hansen.
May 24, 1981: Heather Scaggs's body is found in Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
May 23, 1984: the Los Angeles trial opens before Judge Dion G. Morrow.
July 6, 1984: guilty verdicts on all counts.
October 5, 1984: penalty jury returns death verdicts.
November 16, 1984: sentenced to death; received by the state prison system on November 26.
January 5, 1988: the San Diego trial of the Marin County murders opens before Judge Herbert B. Hoffman.
March 26, 1988: the jury foreperson discusses the case with nonjurors.
May 10, 1988: guilty of five first-degree murders.
July 19, 1988: sentenced to death a second time.
September 28, 1988: habeas petition on juror misconduct filed; Judge Hoffman later vacates the death judgment.
March 6, 1995: the California Supreme Court reverses that ruling, 4 to 3 (In re Carpenter).
April 28, 1997: Los Angeles judgment affirmed.
November 29, 1999: San Diego judgment affirmed.
December 2, 2008: a federal court finds him competent to pursue his habeas petitions.
February 2010: San Francisco police announce a DNA match in the Bennett killing.
June 18, 2013: interviewed on death row at 83.
December 15, 2023: latest federal order in the Santa Cruz case; further claims remain to be briefed.
October 2, 2026: listed on CDCR's condemned list, age 96.