Opening Statements Heard in Rape and Murder Trial

Jurors heard opening statements Wednesday in the murder and rape trial of Dean Phillip Carter, a former television news cameraman who has already been sentenced to death for killing three women in Los Angeles County during a 1984 crime spree.

Carter, 36, faces is being tried in the strangulation death of Janette Cullins, a 24-year-old Pacific Beach woman whose body was found on the floor of her bedroom closet on April 14, 1984. He is also charged with rape and forced oral copulation in the attack on a Clairemont woman who owned a house in which one of Carter’s girlfriends lived.

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Eichler spent about three hours telling the seven-man, three-woman jury that Carter left “a path of destruction that went through the state of California.”

Eichler said Carter traversed the state, killing one woman in Oakland, three friends near Los Angeles and Cullins in San Diego, and raping two other victims during a three-week period in 1984.

In the San Diego case, Carter is linked to the Cullins crime by a videotape, which Eichler said shows the defendant using the woman’s automatic teller card to withdraw her last $60 on the night she was killed. Carter was also found to have a piece of paper that had been torn from a cash register receipt in Cullins’ apartment during a 15-hour period in which Cullins is known to have died.

Defense attorney Charles Bumer told jurors in his opening statement that the prosecution theory omits certain key facts, such as the fact that the “alleged rape” victim in San Diego, whom he referred to as “a drinking woman,” was unable to identify Carter for several months.

In addition to the major charges of murder and rape, Carter faces three special-circumstances allegations. If convicted of murder, and if the jury determines that he killed Cullins during the course of a robbery or a burglary or that he killed her while “lying in wait,” he could receive the death penalty.