Lisa Rinna, 55, shared a frightening story during the April 16 episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, when she and her mom, Lois, 90, revealed that Lois was once kidnapped and stabbed by a man she was working with — someone who would go on to become known as the infamous “Trailside Killer”. Lisa said, “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 sudden he started to drive her down this really deserted road. 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.”
“That was a really bad thing,” Lois, who appeared in the episode, explained. “I knew him. I thought that was it. He’s straddling me. He had a hammer in one hand and a knife in another”. Lois was stabbed in the hand and hit in the head with the hammer several times before she was saved. “I was the first one he went to jail for,” Lisa’s mom said of Carpenter’s 1960 conviction. “They gave him seven and a half years.”
After Carpenter was released from prison, he shot and killed five people within a span of just six weeks in 1980, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. And the next year, he raped and shot his 20-year-old co-worker, Heather Scaggs. He then killed UC Davis Student Ellen Marie Hansen, 20. His eighth victim (Hansen’s boyfriend), however, survived his attack and was later able to identify him, according to The Mercury News. In 1984, Carpenter was convicted of two murders and received the death penalty. In 1985, he was convicted of five more murders, and he’s currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison.
“When you first hear about it you’re like that can’t be real — how [is] that real?” Lisa said.
When Lisa was a child, she was told that some kid hit her mother in the head with a hammer. It wasn’t until later in life that Lisa was told the truth. “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 that she basically just stuffed those feelings for how many years,” Rinna said. “She never dealt with it, she never talked about it — she never even told her daughter about it. It takes so much courage to come forward. I think the least we can do is show these victims some compassion.”