From San Quentin, a ‘Dead Man’ Tells His Tale

In 1984, Dean Phillip Carter received a sentence of 56 years for the rape at knifepoint of a woman in Ventura.

In 1989, he got the death penalty for the murder of two Culver City women and a third in west Los Angeles.

In 1991, he got another death sentence, this time for the murder of a woman in Pacifica Beach.

In 1995, he got a home page.

“Dead Man Talkin’ ” is one of the most compelling and most frightening sites on the World Wide Web. Created by a San Francisco radio host, Alex Bennet, it contains several short essays by Carter written specifically for the site from his cell on San Quentin’s death row.

When I walked through the gates and entered the inner prison, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I felt a chill deep inside of me that wasn’t related to the weather. I felt as if I had stepped back in time 100 years.

Except to claim that he is innocent of the crimes that got him on death row, Carter does not write about his cases. Rather, the essays (10 have been posted so far) are mostly about day-to-day prison life. They are at their most powerful when they are simply descriptive.

As I made a few circuits around the compound, I noticed the concrete had a lot of holes in it. Later, I was leaning against the wall talking with one of the guys and I commented on the poor workmanship of the concrete. The guy looked at me as if I was drooling on myself. He snickered and said, “That’s not poor workmanship, it’s because of poor marksmanship.” It turns out that all the chips I had noticed were from the bullets fired into the yard during altercations.

Carter was born in Alaska in 1955. His mother later married a man who was the police chief, fire chief and justice of the peace of a remote community on the Bering Sea. According to probation reports and testimony, his parents were both strict and alcoholic. When Carter was 10, his stepfather reportedly chained him to his bed at night to keep him from wandering out of the house.

Carter first went to a “youth camp” detention center when he was 12, then spent time in prison for auto theft and burglary.

The prison gives you your meals, clean laundry (once a week), soap, tooth powder, typing paper (about 10 sheets), a pencil stub (exchanged for an old one) or an ink pen filler, and two rolls of toilet paper. These are issued every 1st and 15th of the month.

When he was pulled over by Arizona police during a routine traffic stop in 1984, the car he was driving turned out to be registered to a woman who had been found strangled in her Culver City apartment. Items in the car belonged to other victims.

He went to prison and has remained there during his subsequent trials. The rape and murders for which he was convicted all occurred, according to court records, during an 18-day crime spree.

Late at night, when it is a little quieter here on the row, I will lie here in the dark and think of my friends. I replay the good times that we have had, over and over in my mind. I wonder what is going on in their lives now, if they are happy, and if they think about me.

The intelligence and sensitivity of the writing make it all the more disturbing, because there is little doubt Carter is a monster. The evidence against him was so overwhelming that during one of his murder trials, his attorneys offered no defense until the penalty phase when they argued, unsuccessfully, that he should be given life without parole.

Carter was described during that trial as tall, handsome and charming. His victims, prosecutors said, all knew him.

We would all like to think we could identify evil when we meet it, whether in person or even on a Web page. That it would be so obvious. “Dead Man Talkin’ ” reminds us of that folly.

Another year bites the dust. The holiday season is always the hardest time to be in prison and I suspect that it is even more difficult here on death row. . . . I am always amused on New Year’s Eve. At the stroke of midnight a lot of the guys will start cheering and whistling. I could never figure out why. . . . To be fair, maybe they are cheering the fact that they have survived for another year, or the fact that the holiday season is over with. Whatever the reason, I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope that it will be good to all of us.

* “Dead Man Talkin’ ” can be found at https://monkey.hooked.net/monkey/m/hut/deadman/deadman.html.

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.