Lisa Rinna’s mother once survived a vicious attack by the notorious “Trailside Killer.”
In her new memoir, “You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It,” the soap opera star and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” alum pulls back the curtain on her whirlwind Hollywood life — and the terrifying chapter that nearly ended her story before it began. In it, the 62-year-old reveals how her mother came face-to-face with a serial predator who terrorized California and lived to tell the tale.
Candice DeLong, a retired FBI agent and host of the true crime podcast “Killer Psyche,” told Fox News Digital that David Carpenter, who targeted victims along hiking trails in Northern California during the ‘70s and ’80s, was known for his “blitz” attacks.
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“Many serial killers approach their victims by being cool, calm and collected,” DeLong said. “They try to lure victims to go with them. It’s a big part of the fantasy. As I recall, the ‘Trailside Killer’ didn’t do that.”
“I’m familiar with that area — those trails in the Mount Tamalpais region of Marin County where he operated,” DeLong said. “To think you could be out on a beautiful California day on a trail — sometimes you can even see the ocean — and it could be ruined by a serial killer working there.”
“I don’t know why he’s not as infamous as some of the others,” said DeLong. “I think maybe his criminal career or history was possibly eclipsed by Ted Bundy, who by the late ‘70s was, as I recall, getting most of the headlines. And also, we weren’t that much into true crime as we are today. And there are so many more mediums to deliver information to people, including exactly what we’re doing today.”
WATCH: CANDICE DELONG DETAILS DEADLY TACTICS OF TRAILSIDE KILLER
Rinna wrote that in 1960, a couple of years before she was born, her mother was kidnapped by Carpenter, her co-worker.
“He drove her down a deserted road where he stabbed her and hit her over the head with a hammer multiple times,” Rinna wrote. “Thank God, a military policeman had seen Carpenter turn off and thought it was odd. When Carpenter realized they’d been followed, he got out of his car to attack the policeman, who shot him in the stomach.”
“My mom had half of her head taken off, but she opened the car door and then her purse spilled,” Rinna wrote. “She was so in shock, all she could do was put the items back in her purse. She was in the hospital for three months. My mom and dad had started dating just six weeks earlier.”
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Rinna revealed that Carpenter served only seven years for attacking Lois Rinna. Then, “after getting sprung from prison,” he was convicted of murdering “at least seven more people” near San Francisco between 1970 and 1981.
At one point, investigators believed Carpenter might have been the Zodiac Killer, who carried out a series of attacks in Northern California between 1968 and 1969 — a theory that has since been disproved.
DeLong said she once worked with a fellow agent in San Francisco who encountered Carpenter while surveilling him.
“He actually went up and talked to her,” said DeLong. “Of course, he did not know she was an FBI agent keeping an eye on him. And one of the things she told me that happened, that I found remarkable, was that he was believed to have a stutter or a stammer. She was aware of that.
“And when he went up to talk to her, the stammer stopped. He was focused exactly on her face. God knows what he was thinking, but he was as calm and cool as a cucumber. The stutter went away.”
Rinna wrote that she didn’t learn the truth until she was 18, when Lois finally told her what had happened. Before that, her mother claimed she’d been “hit over the head with a hammer by kids down the street.”
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“… All I could think to say was, ‘Oh, that’s why you can’t smell or taste anything!’” Rinna recalled. “I wasn’t mad at her for lying to me my whole life, but she should have told me sooner. I told my ‘Housewives’ co-star Dorit Kemsley, after she was robbed at gunpoint in her own home, to tell her children sooner rather than later because they deserve to know why their mother is the way she is and what she went through.”
DeLong said that although the sentence Carpenter received for attacking Lois was hard to accept, it wasn’t unexpected for that time period.
“It was the era,” she said. “That does not happen anywhere near as often today as it did back then. There was a belief that prison or jail could rehabilitate a criminal. No, they can’t. No. We know that. Let me tell you what FBI profilers call prisons — universities of rape and homicide.”
“An offender goes in, they find each other, just like people on the outside find like-minded people to spend time with,” DeLong explained. “What happens is somebody gets into prison for the first time. They talk, and they learn how not to get caught. And unfortunately, one of the lessons that they learn is kill the victim, don’t leave a living witness. And a victim is a witness.”
“Prison now is to prevent someone from interacting in society because they have shown that they cannot be trusted,” she continued.
“That’s what prisons are for, to protect us from them. And therefore, the sentences are more realistic. I can’t even remember the last time I was aware of a murder conviction where the person received a light sentence or anything other than life. You’re not going to get the opportunity to leave. It just doesn’t happen anymore.”
Lois, who died in 2021 at age 93, survived what is believed to have been Carpenter’s first known adult attack.
For decades, Carpenter, now 95, was on death row at San Quentin State Prison. He has since been transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.
“My mom’s trauma made me cautious and untrusting of other people,” Rinna admitted. “But Lois always had a sense of humor about her ordeal. I mean, how many people do you know who not only survived a serial killer but can laugh about it?”
“. . . Here’s the thing. My mom never went to therapy,” Rinna wrote. “Well, she went once, and they gave her a Seconal; it made her too tired… She never went to therapy again…. My mom dealt with her trauma, not to mention metal plates in her head, totally on her own. She could have been a substance abuser and a f—ing mess. Instead, my mom chose to wake up every day, put on a cute outfit, do her makeup and go about her life. That’s the kind of strength I’m talking about.”
“Listen, I’m not trying to glamorize repressing trauma,” she continued. “… It was different back then, and women who went through the wringer like my mom and still ran a household are superheroes. They were experts at sweeping everything under the carpet.”
“My mom didn’t have a choice. She grew up in a time when you were supposed to be a good wife, cook for your husband and clean and fill a traditional female role, which I didn’t necessarily know how to do, but she did. She played those parts perfectly.”
