‘Trailside Killer’ Ordered to Stand Trial in San Diego

A Santa Cruz County murderer has been ordered to stand trial in San Diego County in connection with five five killings that occurred in Marin County.

Dubbed the “trailside killer,” 56-year-old David Carpenter was convicted and sentenced to die in the San Quentin Prison gas chamber for the 1981 killings of two 20-year-old women along Santa Cruz County hiking trails.

In the Marin County charges, Carpenter is accused of stalking and lying in wait for his alleged victims along popular hiking trails. The killings left favorite trails north of San Francisco mostly empty of hikers for months.

The Southern California site for a new trial was ordered by Superior Court Judge Richard H. Breiner, who ordered a change of venue because of pretrial publicity in Marin County. The court where Carpenter will be tried will be chosen after the case gets to San Diego.

The burly printer, who has a criminal history that includes 17 years imprisonment for attempted murder, rape, robbery and kidnaping, is accused in Marin County of the 1980 killings of Cynthia Moreland, 18, of Cotati; Richard Stowers, 19, of Petaluma; Anne Alderson, 26, of San Rafael; Diane O’Connell, 22, of San Jose, and Shauna May, 25, of Idaho.

Moreland and Stowers were shot; Alderson was raped and shot; O’Connell was shot in a rape attempt, and May was shot. All the crimes took place in November of 1980.

In the Santa Cruz County murders, Carpenter was convicted in Los Angeles in 1984 of killing Ellen Marie Hansen and Heather Scaggs, both 20, in Big Basin State Park and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, respectively. It was also pretrial publicity that caused a venue change in that trial.