Surviving a Killer’s Attack

Dean Phillip Carter, a convicted serial murderer and rapist, was sentenced Sept. 9 to die in San Quentin’s gas chamber for the brutal murder of Janette Anne Cullins, a smiling, outgoing woman with her whole life ahead of her. She was 24 in the spring of 1984 when Carter took her life.

This is not the first time Carter has received the death penalty. Since his arrest in 1984 after a three-week crime spree, he has been tried, convicted and sentenced in the murders of four California women and the rapes of two others and charged with the murder of a fifth woman. Three of the murders were consolidated into one trial in Los Angeles, where he received the death penalty in 1989.

I am one of the two known survivors of Carter’s rampage. I have had the unsavory task of describing to three juries in painful detail the kind of agony Carter meted out to his victims. His sentencing this month holds special significance for me. It marks the end of my role in the state’s case against him.

I was 22 years old when Carter appeared in my bedroom doorway in the early hours of March 29, 1984, a bandanna covering his features, a knife raised high as he leaped toward my bed. A week before, he had been a visitor in my home, passing the time during the week he stayed as the house guest of a neighbor.

Nothing I had ever seen or read could have prepared me for the viciousness I would experience in the following hours, reduced from a human being to an “it” in the mind and actions of this man. He dragged me around my house by the neck for several hours, forced me to do unspeakable things and twice strangled me into unconsciousness when I tried to escape from the apartment.

I fully expected to die before the night passed, hoping only to die with some dignity, to die trying. He is 14 inches taller than me and twice my weight. I began to fight him with my mind. It became critical that I show no fear because when I showed fear, he fed on it. I told him excuses for his behavior. Each time he hurt me, I chastised him almost cheerfully as though I was his friend. Later I managed to get him to untie my hands by asking him to kiss me.

Four and a half hours after it started, Carter walked away of his own accord. I had managed to convince him that he had nothing to fear from me. I waited another five minutes before fleeing to a neighbor for help, expecting to be caught, not believing it was over.

Just as nothing could have prepared me for Carter, nothing in my experience prepared me for the seven years ahead, in which I would keep alive these hideous memories for the appeasement of an overburdened and overindulgent criminal defense system.

I remember sitting disheveled and in shock in my living room being asked by a policeman--who had just completed recording my account of the last several hours--how committed I was to prosecuting my assailant.

Early morning light played softly on the macabre relics of the night’s struggle: broken glass, red wine splashed across a wall, the butcher knife laying incongruously on the floor next to the bed and pieces of red fingernails strewn over the living room carpet.

“Are you certain you want to press charges?” the officer asked. I looked at my hands, the ragged, red stubs of my fingernails, and said yes, definitely.

I told him that I would do whatever I had to do.

I could not have known, that morning so long ago, that it would be seven years before I would see my commitment through. I testified that December in his trial in Ventura for his assault on me. He was sentenced to 56 years. I described what I went through two more times, in the penalty phase of the trial in Los Angeles in 1989 where Carter was sentenced to death for the murders of Jillette Mills, Susan Lynn Knoll and Bonnie Ann Guthrie and at the trial for the murder of Janette Cullins in San Diego last May.

Despite my anger that the families of the victims and myself have been further victimized to this extent by a judicial system that gave Carter every reasonable--and unreasonable--concession and delay over the years, I do not regret my decision to testify.

The 6-foot-4 Carter, like most rapists and murderers, coldly represents much of what is most despicable in our world. He vented his self-hatred on people much smaller than himself; people incapable of defending themselves from him; people who, unlike him, could feel compassion and love.

When the murders were revealed to me two weeks after the attack on me, I broke down for the first time; these women I had never met were suddenly close to me. We had befriended this quiet stranger who seemed to need a friend. He used the friendship we offered to study our movements and vulnerabilities; then he struck. When I thought of what they went through at his hands I could hear their last, panicked breaths in my mind as though they were my own. Someone who has never had to listen to the animalistic noises of her own anticipated death cannot imagine the horror of it.

In court, I have never seen in his eyes even a shadow of remorse when faced with what his atrocities have done to the army of victims he created. As Superior Court Judge Melinda J. Lasater handed down this month’s sentence, he continued to doodle on a legal pad as he had done throughout these trials.

When I was on the witness stand, when no one else was looking, he would stare at me belligerently, or even smile at times, trying to frighten me, I suppose. I just stared back, wondering if there was anyone living behind those eyes anymore, if there possibly could be. It took me back to that night in my apartment when he seemed to think that domination of a woman half his size was proof of his manhood. Now as then I look at Carter and find him not like a man at all.

For me, these death sentences bring on a flood of memory and emotion, and a confusing, philosophical conflict. For as much as I believe Carter deserves to feel what it is like to have life taken from him, I learned the night he attacked me how unconscionable and hideous murder is. Period. I am not so sure that when murder is institutionalized it is all that different.

Yet, when I see the devastation he caused reflected in the eyes of the parents and sisters of his victims, I wonder what qualifications I have to question the death penalty--I who have lived to receive the gentle kiss of a lover, to feel the growing weight of my young nephews in my arms, to hear the laughter of my mother and father.

In the end, I can only mourn at the tragic waste Carter represents, not only in his victims--and I am no longer one of them--but in himself, too. However, I’m not so noble as to be able to keep some part of me from leaning back now in quiet wonderment and satisfaction that this random killer should find, in the end, that the blood on his hands is also his own.

Jillette Leonora Mills, Susan Lynn Knoll, Bonnie Ann Guthrie, Janette Anne Cullins. Rest in Peace, My Sisters.