A terrifying ordeal. Lisa Rinna shared an emotional story about her mom, Lois Rinna, on the Tuesday, April 16, episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
The Bravo star, 55, revealed that Lois was kidnapped and stabbed by David Carpenter, a.k.a the Trailside Killer, who terrorized Northern Californians during the 1970s and ‘80s, stalking and murdering many innocent people.
“A few years before I was born, my mom was attacked by a man that she worked with. He picked her up at the bus stop and then, all of a sudden, he started to drive her down this really deserted road,” Lisa said. “He tried to rape her. He tried to kill her. Luckily, a military policeman had seen them drive down this deserted road and he knew no one was supposed to be down there and he followed them down. My mom was saved that day by that military policeman.”
Lois, 90, also reflected on the traumatizing situation. “That was a really bad thing. I knew him. I thought that was it,” she recalled of Carpenter, who stabbed her hand and hit her head with a hammer several times. “He’s straddling me. He had a hammer in one hand and a knife in the other.”
After surviving the horrible incident, Lois helped put away Carpenter. “I was the first one he went to jail for,” she said of the serial killer, who was once believed to have been the Zodiac Killer. “They gave him seven and a half years.”
Lois told Lisa about the encounter when she was older. “When I finally learned the truth, I had such great sadness and empathy for my mom, knowing that, not only did this happen to her, but she basically just stuffed those feelings for how many years,” the reality star said of her mother, who has metal plates in her head and cannot smell due to the injuries she sustained in the attack. “She never dealt with it, she never talked about it, she never even told her daughter about it.”
Carpenter was imprisoned in 1960 and again in 1970. After his second release, he killed four more people within a six-week period in 1980. The following year, he killed two more victims. He was finally caught when another survivor identified him and, in 1984, received the death sentence. Carpenter is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco.
“It takes so much courage to come forward,” Lisa noted. “I think the least we can do is show these victims some compassion.”
