Man Awaits Death Sentence for Murders of 3 : Crime: Dean Philip Carter is accused of strangling five women in 18 days. He still faces trial in two of the cases.

“I intend to be at the execution,” the gentle, gray-haired woman said quietly. “I want to see him die.”

The tall, handsome, often charming man Sue Mills was talking about is Dean Philip Carter, 34, adopted son of a police chief, doting father of twins and skilled television cameraman who did commended work on a documentary about the heritage of Eskimos.

He is also the man accused of strangling five California women--one of them Sue Mills’ daughter--after raping at least two of them and two other women, all in the space of 18 days. Authorities say that in addition, he is a suspect in several other rapes.

Convicted last year in three of those 1984 murders--the slayings of Jillette Leonora Mills and Susan Knoll in Culver City and Bonnie Ann Guthrie in West Los Angeles--Carter is scheduled to be formally sentenced to death Tuesday. He still faces trial in the murders of Tok Chum Kim in Oakland and Janette Ann Cullins in San Diego.

During the complex legal proceedings that have dragged on for more than five years, Carter has never shown the slightest remorse, according to Marsh Goldstein, the Los Angeles deputy district attorney who won the three murder convictions.

“He never said that he was sorry. He never said anything,” Goldstein said. “He’s one of the most evil people I’ve ever seen--an absolutely awful, non-human being.

“If you believe society has the right to impose the death penalty . . . then this is the case where it should be applied.”

Helen Cullins, the mother of victim Janette Cullins, put it more succinctly:

“I think he should be strangled,” she said. “That’s the way he killed my daughter.”

Police say Carter knew all his victims, most of whom he had met in bars and restaurants.

“He’s a very smooth-talking individual,” said Richard Haas, an investigator in one of the rape cases. “He could meet somebody and sell himself in a very brief time.”

Searching for what may have prompted the brutal crimes for which Carter is blamed and convicted, prosecutors and probation officials can point only to his troubled childhood in Alaska and a marriage that ended in estrangement from the sons he loved.

Born the illegitimate son of a half-Eskimo woman in Nome, Alaska, on Aug. 30, 1955, Carter was later adopted by the man who married his mother and served as police chief, fire chief and justice of the peace in the remote community on the bleak, wind-swept shores of the Bering Sea.

Probation reports and testimony elicited by defense attorneys indicate the boy defied his strict and alcoholic parents at an early age. At one point, before he had reached the age of 10, his stepfather reportedly shackled him to his bed to keep him from wandering Nome’s streets at night.

When he was 12, Carter was declared a delinquent child and committed to a youth camp, from which he attempted to run away at least three times. He later was placed in a foster home. According to Goldstein, Carter’s crimes continued and “by the time he was 14 or 15, he was a fairly confirmed burglar.” He later served adult prison terms in Oregon for auto theft and in Alaska for burglary.

While in prison in Alaska, Carter was trained as a television cameraman and video technician. And for a while, it looked as though things might turn out all right for Dean Philip Carter.

After he was released in 1979, Carter landed a series of jobs with television stations in Alaska. While working as a cameraman in Nome, he was part of a team that won an award for a documentary on the Eskimo heritage.

Charlie Johnson, one of Carter’s bosses on the project, remembered Carter as “just a normal guy, very attractive, very handsome.”

“He was holding steady employment, getting involved in the community,” said Nome Police Sgt. Mike Murphy. “He spent quite a bit of time down in the bars, but everybody here spends time in the bars, especially in the winter.”

It was about that time that Carter met and married a woman--previously married, with a daughter--who lived in that area. Not long afterward, Carter’s wife gave birth to twin sons.

“He doted on those sons, but he was never around, moving all the time from job to job,” Goldstein said. “He romanticized his position as a husband and a father, but it was make-believe--all of the desire but none of the performance.”

After about three years, Carter’s wife divorced him.

“She got custody of the children and would not let him see them,” Goldstein said. “He told friends he was very angry, very bitter.”

Carter got more jobs as a cameraman, working briefly in Seattle before returning to Alaska. There, in the latter part of 1983, he met friends who offered to let him stay with them in Honolulu. In December, 1983, Carter flew to Hawaii, signing on about a month later as a deckhand on a yacht that was headed for San Diego.

In San Diego, he got a job as a deckhand on another boat and began dating Susan Loyland, a bartender at a cocktail lounge near the waterfront. Loyland said he visited her at her home in the Clairemont area several times in the days that followed. During those visits, Carter met and talked with the 45-year-old woman who shared Loyland’s apartment, according to police.

Investigators say Carter was frequently out of town during that period, often visiting friends in the Los Angeles and Ventura areas. Loyland said she had a date to go with him to Mexico on March 25, 1984, but due to a mix-up, she missed picking him up at a San Diego bus station that afternoon and left on the trip without him.

Later that night, police say, Carter--armed with a knife--entered Loyland’s home through an unlocked window.

“The bartender was out, so he raped the roommate,” Goldstein said.

Police say that after the sexual attack, Carter tied the woman hand and foot, stole some of her money and left.

About a day later, investigators say, Carter turned up in Ventura, where he had visited some friends a few weeks earlier. During those visits, Carter met and dated a 22-year-old waitress who lived in the same building as Carter’s friends.

“He wanted to make love to her,” said Jim Grunert, a deputy district attorney in Ventura. “She said no.”

The woman testified later that shortly after midnight March 29, she awoke to the sound of someone crawling through her kitchen window. Sitting up, she saw a man, masked with a bandanna and carrying a butcher knife, standing in her bedroom doorway. She said that despite the mask, she recognized the intruder immediately as Dean Philip Carter.

Over the next 5 1/2 hours, the woman said, Carter forced her to orally copulate him three times and raped her once. Twice, she said, Carter choked her into unconsciousness--the first time when she made a vain attempt to escape and the second time when she tried to scream for help.

At one point, she said, Carter took her car keys and led her to the front door.

“I felt he would carry me away and kill me,” the young woman testified.

Concluding that an escape attempt was futile, the woman resorted instead to conversation, hoping to save her life by persuading Carter that she wanted to help him, Grunert said.

“I took hold of his face and I talked to him,” the woman testified. “I told him to try to remember what he was doing and who he was and who I was and that he didn’t have to do this. . . . I was trying to reason with him.”

The woman said Carter didn’t respond--”he just had a blank look on his face.”

“But she kept his mind going,” said Haas, one of Grunert’s investigators. “She kept talking the whole time. That’s what saved her life.”

After the final sexual attack, “she hugged him, told him he was ‘beautiful,’ and said that she had to go to work,” Grunert said. “She got up, dressed very matter-of-factly, as though nothing was wrong, and told him how to get to the bus station. And he left.”

Moments later, the woman rushed to the apartment of a friend and telephoned police. But it was too late. Carter was nowhere to be found.

Offered Help

Three days later, on April 1, Carter turned up at a singles bar called the Rocking Horse in Lafayette, a residential community 10 miles northeast of Oakland, according to police. There, they say, he met a 36-year-old Korean woman, Tok Chum Kim, who was working as a hairdresser in the area.

Kim, who was divorced from the American serviceman she had met and married in her native land, left the bar but returned moments later, complaining of car trouble. Police say Carter offered to help, and the pair ended up at her apartment in Oakland, where they were seen together several times during the next week.

On April 12, after the woman’s supervisor became worried because Kim had failed to show up for work, police broke into her apartment to find her body, sprawled on the bedroom floor.

“She had been strangled with a curtain tie,” said Sgt. Bob Conner, an Oakland police detective. “Her body was too decomposed to determine whether she had been raped.”

Police say Carter, driving Kim’s car, next turned up in the Los Angeles area, where he had gotten to know Jillette Mills, Susan Knoll and Bonnie Guthrie during his frequent trips north while living in the San Diego area.

Guthrie, 24, and Knoll, 33, who had known each other in Wisconsin, had renewed their friendship when they both ended up in the Los Angeles area. Guthrie operated a sweater-knitting business out of her West Los Angeles home and Knoll worked in a bank. Guthrie lived alone, while Knoll roomed with Mills, a 25-year-old computer programmer, in an apartment in Culver City.

Police said Carter apparently had met the three women at a bar in Santa Monica. According to police and friends, Carter probably dated Knoll for a while, but later, apparently at Knoll’s instigation, their relationship cooled. Guthrie told friends she found Carter “strange.”

Bodies in Closet

From the evidence they were able to piece together, police believe Carter drove up to the apartment in Culver City on April 10. Knoll apparently was alone in the apartment at the time.

“We think it started out sort of friendly,” Goldstein said. “There were glasses of wine. I assume he made advances that were rejected. I believe he raped (Knoll) and killed her; then Mills walked in and he raped and strangled her too.”

The next day, concerned that they had not heard from her, Mills’ brother and a friend entered the apartment to find the bodies of Mills and Knoll crammed--one atop the other--in a bedroom closet. Kim’s car was parked in front of the building.

The same day, police say, Carter went to West Los Angeles, where he had an appointment to see Guthrie about having her make him a sweater.

Later that day, the manager of Guthrie’s apartment house entered her unit to make some repairs. Seeing his tenant apparently asleep on the bedroom floor, the manager left quietly. The next day, the manager re-entered the apartment and realized that Guthrie was dead. Police say she was raped before she was strangled.

On April 12, police say, Carter, driving a white Nissan 280-Z sports car with a license plate reading “PHNTM Z” that he had stolen from Mills, showed up in San Diego. There he reportedly stopped that afternoon at the apartment of 24-year-old Janette Cullins, who worked as a receptionist for a San Diego firm.

According to her friends and family, Carter had meet Cullins two months earlier at a bar in the Pacific Beach area. “Carter had kept trying to contact Janette, but she rejected him,” Cullins’ mother, Helen Cullins, said.

On the night of April 12, Janette Cullins attended a San Diego Symphony concert with a former roommate, Nancy Schick, who dropped Cullins off at her apartment about 11 p.m. Later that night, neighbors heard loud voices coming from the apartment.

The next morning, Schick returned to the apartment, didn’t see Cullins and was about to leave when a man drove up in a white 280-Z, according to Schick’s testimony. She said she told the man she hadn’t seen Cullins, and he asked, “Are you sure?”

The next day, Schick said, she returned to the apartment and found her friend’s body on the floor of a bedroom closet. Cullins had been strangled.

On April 13, police say, a security camera photographed Carter as he used Cullins’ bank card at an automatic teller machine to clean out her account.

Investigators say Carter then drove to Las Vegas, where he spent a couple of days before heading east through Arizona.

On April 17, about 10:50 p.m., Arizona Highway Patrolman Bob Dapster heard a trucker complain over a citizens band radio about an erratic driver in a white 280-Z. Moments later, Dapster said, Carter drove by.

“I had seen a black cat earlier in the night and sometimes you just get a feeling,” Dapster said. “Something told me things weren’t right with that car.”

Dapster said he pulled Carter over without incident. Moments later, the officer realized he had a serial murder suspect.

In the car, police said, were items belonging to Kim, Knoll, Mills, Guthrie and the rape victims in San Diego and Ventura.

Convicted of Rape

Carter’s trial for the rape in Ventura began in the fall of 1984. He declined to testify, with his defense built on an attempt to persuade a jury that the woman had consented to the sexual relations. In November, 1984, Carter was convicted of the rape and sentenced to 54 years in prison.

The other legal proceedings against him moved more slowly. Prosecutors say that was largely because of delays caused by the death of a judge, the appointment of one defense attorney to the bench and Carter’s decision to change attorneys twice.

The combined trials for the murders of Mills, Knoll and Guthrie dragged on for weeks. This time, attorneys presented no defense. Relying instead on an attempt to save him from the death penalty, defense attorney Howard Gillingham called 21 witnesses to testify about Carter’s troubled childhood.

On July 16, 1989, a jury convicted Carter of the three murders and two rapes (no evidence was presented as to whether Knoll was sexually assaulted). Three weeks later, the same jury recommended a death sentence.

Carter still faces trials for the murder of Cullins and the rape of the woman in San Diego. Prosecution in the Kim murder is still pending.

Once identified as a possible suspect in the so-called “Green River” murders of 24 women in Washington, Carter is said to have been out of the state when many of those crimes were committed and he has never been charged in connection with those cases.

However, officials say he has been identified as a “strong” suspect in some rapes in the Seattle area, and police say they plan to question him in connection with some sexual attacks in Honolulu.

On Tuesday, Santa Monica Superior Court Judge Robert W. Thomas is scheduled to formally impose the death penalty for the murders of Mills, Knoll and Guthrie.

“He murdered five people by strangulation,” Goldstein told the jury that recommended the gas chamber. “For someone who did what he did for the reasons that he did it, there is no other sentence possible but death. . . .

“This is not the conduct of a person who should be allowed to live.”