Police Seek to Link Body to 4 Other Women’s Deaths

The strangulation death of a 23-year-old woman whose body was found in a burning trash dump Tuesday may be linked to the deaths of four other women found strangled in San Diego since October, police said Wednesday.

All five of the women were allegedly involved in prostitution and drug use, police said. There are no suspects in any of the slayings, but police have not ruled out the possibility that one person is responsible for all of the deaths, said Phil Jarvis, chief of the San Diego police homicide unit.

“We want to know what the similarities are between these deaths,” Jarvis said. “If there is someone out there who is preying on women, we want to know that. I am more inclined to believe that it is individuals preying on individuals but we are looking at the similarities in the cases.”

The nude body of Trina Carpenter, who police said was a transient, was discovered about 10:30 p.m. after firefighters were called to put out a fire in a dumpster behind an apartment building in the 4500 block of Altadena Street. The woman’s charred clothing was also found in the dumpster.

Jarvis said that the body had probably been placed in the dumpster about 20 minutes before the fire was discovered.

“A woman in a neighboring building heard a noise coming from the area . . . about 20 minutes before the fire was discovered,” Jarvis said. “The woman could not tell what the noise was but we speculate that this is when the body was placed in the trash dump.”

It has not been determined how long the woman had been dead, coroner’s deputies said Wednesday.

Authorities said the latest death bears some resemblance to an incident in August in which the body of a woman was found in a burning trash dump only blocks away from the Altadena location.

The body of Tara Simpson, 18, also a transient, was found in a burning dumpster behind a motel in the 5000 block of El Cajon Boulevard. The body was burned beyond recognition and it took months for investigators to determine the woman’s identity, homicide investigator Paul Olsen said.

Only in January did coroner’s deputies determine that the woman died of a “probable” overdose of cocaine and alcohol.

Homicide investigators closed the Simpson case and have not linked it to the other slayings, Olsen said.

“It (the similarity of the two cases) has raised eyebrows around here,” Olsen said. “We have been comparing notes today, but you don’t just reopen a case because of similarities.”

Olsen said that the case was closed, in part, because of the coroner’s report.

“We have to base our investigation on their findings and they have not told us that the death was at the hands of others,” Olsen said.

But San Diego County Deputy Coroner David Lodge said that the death was ruled a probable accident “in the absence of anything contrary that homicide was able to give us.”

Olsen said that, while the two cases may be similar, there have been other incidents in the last several years in which people have tried to dispose of bodies by burning them in trash dumpsters.

“Nobody wants to have a dead body on their hands after an overdose so they try and get rid of them in various ways, and this is one way,” Olsen said. “The problem comes in trying to compare these incidents to see whether they are related or not.”

Olsen said that investigators would look at the similarities in all of the cases and would keep an “open mind” about any possible links.

In the other cases:

- Police on Monday identified the body of a woman found strangled Feb. 5 in a parking lot at 30th Street and Polk Avenue as 24-year-old Deborah Ann Stanford.

- On Jan. 24, the body of Linda Kay Freebe, 30, was found in a parking lot in the 2200 block of Manya Street.

- On Jan. 4, the body of Linda Joyce Nelson, 27, was found dumped along an Interstate 805 off-ramp at 47th Street in National City.

- The body of 20-year-old Djuna Thomas was found Oct. 3 on a sidewalk in the 5000 block of Guyman Street.