Ellen Marie Hansen was twenty and a student at the University of California, Davis, and on March 29, 1981, during spring break, she was walking a trail in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, in the mountains above Santa Cruz, with her friend Steven Haertle, also twenty. A man with a revolver stepped out in front of them and said he was going to rape her. Haertle offered him their money. In the account most often given, Hansen refused outright and told the man she would not let it happen; some versions give the refusal to Haertle. The gunman fired four times. Hansen died on the trail.
Haertle was shot in the neck and survived. He got himself to help, and the description he gave the police contained something no investigator on the trail killings had had before: the gunman stammered. Ballistics tied the revolver to the last several killings.
For nearly two years hikers had been dying on the trails of Marin County, north of the Golden Gate. Edda Kane, forty-four, was shot on Mount Tamalpais in August 1979. Barbara Schwartz, twenty-three, was stabbed there in March 1980, and Anne Evelyn Alderson, twenty-six, was raped and shot on a Mount Tam trail that October. In late November 1980 four more bodies were found near the Sky Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore, all shot with the same .38: Diana O'Connell, twenty-two; Shauna May, twenty-three; and Cynthia Moreland, eighteen, and her fiancé, Richard Stowers, nineteen. The newspapers named the killer for where he worked, the parks emptied, and hikers were warned not to walk the isolated trails alone.
Two more deaths are attributed to him without convictions. Mary Frances Bennett was killed at Lands End in San Francisco in October 1979. Anne Kelly Menjivar disappeared in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and her remains were found in Castle Rock State Park; he was suspected in her death, but prosecutors never had the evidence to charge it.
Heather Scaggs, twenty, knew him through work. On May 2, 1981, she told her boyfriend she was going to look at a car with a man from work called David, and she did not come back. She was found in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, shot in the head. Carpenter was arrested on May 14, and Haertle picked him out as the man on the trail.
He was fifty. Born in San Francisco on May 6, 1930, he had stammered so badly from early childhood that it shaped every dealing he had with other people. At seventeen, in 1947, he was charged with his first sex crime, the molestation of a three-year-old girl. In 1960 he offered a woman a ride, drove into the woods, and attacked her with a hammer and a knife; a military police officer came on the scene and shot him. Accounts give the woman's name as Lois DeAndrade or Lois Rinna. He served nine years for that attack and, after a 1970 conviction for robbery and kidnapping, seven more. He was on parole when the trail killings began.
Pretrial publicity drove both prosecutions out of the counties where the killings happened. A Los Angeles County jury convicted him in 1984 of the murders of Ellen Hansen and Heather Scaggs and the attempted murder of Steven Haertle, and he was sentenced to death on November 16 of that year. A San Diego County jury convicted him in 1988 of five of the Marin County murders, and he was sentenced to death again on July 19. The convictions also covered rape, attempted rape, robbery and kidnapping. Some accounts reverse which trial came first.
The first judgment wobbled before it held. In 1995 the Santa Cruz convictions were set aside over juror misconduct, a ruling later reversed, and the California Supreme Court upheld both death sentences.
Carpenter has never accepted the name. Asked in a prison interview what he hoped would happen if the authorities ever caught the real Trailside Killer, he said he hoped the man would get a fair trial. In emails with a true-crime writer in September 2021, at ninety-one, he said that if California worked like Texas he would have been executed years before.
It did not. Governor Gavin Newsom suspended executions in 2019, and Carpenter spent more than four decades on San Quentin's condemned row, where he became California's oldest condemned inmate. When the state closed the San Quentin unit and dispersed the men to other prisons, he was moved in May 2025 to the California Health Care Facility at Stockton, a medical prison. A report circulated in late 2024 that he had died at San Quentin that September; it gave two different dates within the same article and reversed the order of his trials, and reporting from 2025 and April 2026 described him as alive at ninety-five and still under sentence.
No execution date has been set.