David Joseph Carpenter was born in San Francisco on May 6, 1930, to a domineering mother, and had a stammer so severe from childhood that it defined how everyone dealt with him. He was convicted in 1960 of attacking a woman with a hammer and a knife, served nine years, and in 1970 was convicted of robbery and kidnapping and served another seven. He was on parole and working at a printing firm in Hayward when the trail killings began.
Those named in the record are Mary Frances Bennett, Edda Kane, Barbara Schwartz, Anne Alderson, Shauna May, Diana O'Connell, Richard Stowers, Cynthia Moreland, Anne Kelly Menjivar and Heather Scaggs. Cecelia Ann Sheppard was killed and Bryan Hartnell survived.
Between August 1979 and May 1981 he attacked walkers on the trails of Point Reyes National Seashore and Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County, and later in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park near Santa Cruz. He shot most of them with a .38 and stabbed others, and the bodies were found in isolated spots off the paths.
He was called the Trailside Killer and the parks emptied. One woman, Steven Haertle's companion Ellen Hansen, was killed in March 1981 in Santa Cruz and Haertle survived being shot in the neck and gave a description including the stutter. Heather Scaggs, the last victim, had told her boyfriend she was going to look at a car with a man from work called David.
He was convicted in Los Angeles in 1984 of the Santa Cruz murders and in San Diego in 1988 of five Marin County murders, and sentenced to death in both. He is one of the oldest men on California's death row and has been there for more than forty years. DNA testing in 2010 linked him to a 1979 killing in San Jose for which another man, Roger Dale Kibbe's contemporary Lucian Roman, had been suspected, and further old cases have been reviewed against him since.