A tip that helped identify the serial killer, The Trailside Killer, back in the early 1980's.
Forty years ago, the Bay Area's hiking trails were emptied out and terrorized by an...
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David Joseph Carpenter – on parole after a second long prison term for crimes against women – wasn’t on California’s sex-offender registry or the state’s list of recently released prisoners given to Marin County investigators, due to a maddening series of bureaucratic snafus.
It took a woman who had an unsettling encounter with Carpenter on a cruise 26 years earlier to first point him out to authorities.
Snip
The first tip to single out Carpenter as a match from the police composite came from a 69-year-old woman in Ben Lomond who recognized him from a cruise she took with her daughter 26 years earlier. She remembered being disturbed as Carpenter put his hands on her 14-year-old daughter’s shoulders.
“I just didn’t like that guy,” Roberta Patterson told the Chronicle.
Several years earlier, Patterson had reported Carpenter as the potential Zodiac Killer based on a composite, but he was ruled out because he was in prison.