Almost 40 years ago, my father, Jay Ruskin, accepted a role on a legal team defending one of Marin County’s most notorious criminals. Only an infant at the time, I gradually came to learn that the first year-and-a-half of my life was spent largely apart from dad following a change-of-venue request that moved the trial from Marin to San Diego. The accused was a man named David Carpenter but today he is better known as the Trailside Killer.
Infamous for stalking and killing hikers on Mt. Tam before continuing his crime spree in Santa Cruz, Carpenter was active from 1979 to 1981. Today, he remains the longest tenured death row inmate in all of California. I collected my father’s experiences into a feature for Marin Magazine that ran back in 2019 — but once again, this story proved to have another chapter left to tell.
The latest incarnation comes courtesy of reality television star Lisa Rinna of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and The Traitors fame, who recently shared that her mother, Lois DeAndrade, was one of Carpenter’s earliest victims. Though she thankfully survived her ordeal, the attack would leave her with lasting injuries and lingering trauma.
It also led to an unexpected phone call for me back in April asking if my father and I would appear in a new episode of the ABC Nightline series “Impact” focused on the case.
Within a week, a film crew was dispatched to our home in San Anselmo to conduct a day’s worth of interviews with the two of us. They also grabbed “b-roll” footage of us walking around our neighborhood with our terrier-mutt, Scout. While Jay and I both knew our words were destined to be condensed, we nonetheless attempted to make the most of our moment in the spotlight to emphasize how crucial the role of public defenders can be to ensuring a just system of law.
Indeed, anyone who has devoted time to watching the television genre of true crime knows that the attorneys charged with defending the folks accused of heinous acts are rarely, if ever, afforded screen time. Thus, we hoped my story for Marin Magazine had inspired these producers to make an exception to their normal narrative structure. Alas, our dreams were not to be realized.
When the finished product aired — it’s currently available to view on-demand on Hulu — Jay was dismayed to find his role had been reduced to one of minimal narrative exposition. Used solely for brief clips to provide general context anyone with access to Wikipedia could offer, the choice to chop my father’s sage words (and fully omit my own) is a sobering reminder that what we watch on television is sadly often a sensationalized distortion of the truth.
Had the producers opted to allow us our moment in the sun, the result would have been a rare opportunity to hear a defense attorney for a serial killer explain why, despite a preponderance of evidence suggesting his client’s guilt, he knew his duty was to represent him to the full extent possible under the law.
The inclusion of John Alderson, whose sister (Anne Alderson) went hiking on Mt. Tam and became one of Carpenter’s victims, is inarguably poignant but the production’s choice to call on unknown true-crime podcasters to serve as the majority of the episode’s “expert” sources on the case when my father lived it for years reflects a lack of integrity that should give us pause when it comes to relying on programs like this to get the full story.
“Terror on the Trails” from ABC Nightline’s “Impact” series is currently available to stream on Hulu.
