Lisa Rinna shared more details about the time her late mother, Lois Rinna, had a near-fatal encounter with a man who went on to become a prolific serial killer.
Lisa, 61, opened up about the terrifying incident during the Friday, March 28, episode of her “Let’s Not Talk About the Husband” podcast with husband Harry Hamlin. “My mom, when she was 30 years old, was brutally attacked by a serial killer,” the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum recalled. “We didn’t know he was a serial killer at the time, but he turned out to be a serial killer.”
The reality star explained that she’d been thinking about the story again because her Pilates teacher recently told her that another one of his clients, a producer, is considering a project on David Carpenter, a.k.a. the Trailside Killer. Carpenter, 94, was convicted of seven murders and confirmed to be the killer in an eighth murder; he is also suspected in two additional killings.
Lisa’s mom encountered Carpenter in 1960 when she was 30 and living in San Francisco. (Lois died in November 2021 at age 93.)
“She worked with him,” Lisa explained. “He stuttered, so she felt sorry for him but was always nice to him. Here’s what happened. She was at the bus stop. They lived in San Francisco. She didn’t have a car so she took the bus, and she was going to the dentist in the morning, maybe before work. David Carpenter drives up and says, ‘Hi, Lois, can I give you a ride? I’d love for you to come see my new baby.’ He had a baby. He was married!”
Living their lives publicly. After Lisa Rinna joined The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2014, viewers were quickly introduced to her family and all of their individual struggles. Fans have gotten to know Rinna’s husband, Harry Hamlin, and their daughters, Amelia Gray Hamlin and Delilah Belle Hamlin, over the years, and as they watched […]
Lois initially declined, but Carpenter kept pushing until she accepted the ride. “They start driving, and all of a sudden, she’s starting to feel weird, of course, because it didn’t feel right, and all of a sudden, he’s talking to her and he’s not stuttering. That’s when she knew,” Lisa explained. “And she said, ‘David, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, Lois. Sometimes, something funny comes over me.’ And she knew she was f***ing cooked.”
David Carpenter aka ‘The Trailside Killer’ Marin County Sherrif’s office
Carpenter then drove Lois to a “deserted road in The Presidio” and began brutally attacking her. “He straddles my mom, my mom’s in the passenger seat, grabs a knife out of the glove box — all of a sudden he goes at her with a knife,” Lisa recalled. “She grabs it with her hand, so the knife’s coming at you and she grabs it, so she slices her two fingers, so they’re, like, dangling.”
At that point, a military policeman started coming up the road. Carpenter heard the car and then attacked Lois with a hammer. Had the MP not arrived when he did, Lois likely would have died.
“The military policeman shoots David Carpenter in the stomach,” Lisa said. “This is the creepiest, weirdest part of it all. [Lois is] in full-on shock. He hit her at least five times on the head with a hammer. Her fingers are dangling. Her purse spills out, she opens the car door somehow, her purse spills out and she’s so busy picking up the items to put back in her purse. Her head is, like, gushing blood. She’s totally in shock, but all she wants to do is put her things back into her purse.”
Lois ultimately spent three months in the hospital recovering from her injuries, while Carpenter was convicted for the attack and spent seven years in prison. After another prison stint for kidnapping, he began his killing spree in 1979. When he went on trial for those murders, Lois testified, and Lisa went to watch.
“[It] was freaky. I saw him!” Lisa recalled, noting she was 21 at the time of the trial. “She had to look at him. It was really f***ing trippy.”
RHOBH fans will remember that Lois spoke about the incident during a 2019 episode of the Bravo series. “That was a really bad thing. I knew him,” she recalled. “I thought that was it.”
Lisa noted on her podcast that Lois didn’t tell her about the encounter until she was 18, although she grew up knowing that her mom had metal plates in her head and didn’t have a sense of smell.
“[I asked], ‘Mom, how did you get the metal plates in your head?’” Lisa remembered. “She told me that a boy down the street when they were growing up had hit her over the head. She made up a story.”
The former soap star said that the incident understandably made Lois “overprotective” of her children, which Lisa now believes is one reason she’s never experienced anything so violent herself.
“I grew up in a very fear-based environment,” she explained. “That saved me from being attacked, I think. … I don’t trust anybody. How would I? But I think it has saved me [from] getting in my own situation that way.”
