This podcast details true crime cases.

It contains adult themes and may contain descriptions of violence.

It is not intended for children.

Listener discretion is advised.

Thank you for joining me for today's episode of Once Upon a Crime.

This month, I'll be detailing a case of multiple murder over a three-part mini-series.

Over three years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Northern California residents were terrorized by a series of random murders that took place on hiking trails in state parks, national forests, and coastal lands, casting a dark shadow across what had formerly been some of the most serene, beautiful, and peaceful landmarks in the state.

One after another, bodies of women began turning up on hiking trails in secluded areas in and around San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Marin counties.

At first, no one suspected that the murders had been committed by just one person.

The term serial killer was still a foreign concept to most Americans.

The idea of one person committing a series of murders over a prolonged amount of time, which is how we now generally understand the term,

hadn't yet taken hold, but soon would.

In California, serial killers seemed to proliferate in the 1970s and 80s.

Reports about these murders were splashed across headlines, and the suspected killers were given names like the Coed Killer, the Night Stalker, and the Hillside Strangler, before they were identified and brought to justice.

Beginning in 1979, visitors to California's hiking trails began going missing.

When it was discovered that they'd been murdered and that these crimes may be linked, the suspect became known as the Trailside Killer.

Once popular hiking trails campsites and beaches emptied out, as visitors became fearful of becoming the killers next victims.

This is part one of this month's mini-series, the Trailside Killer.

Lowest DeAndrade was a petite, dark-haired woman in her early 30s in the year 1960. She worked as a secretary at a severed Cisco advertising firm and lived with three other single women who all shared an apartment in the city.

On July 12th of that year, she was on her way to the bus stop headed to her job. It was just after 8 a.m. A green sedan pulled over alongside her and slowed.

She heard someone calling to her and looked inside the car to see 30-year-old David Carpenter and acquaintance offering her a ride.

Lowest had known Carpenter for a couple of years. He had worked as a ship's purser and his company, Pacific Far East Lines, was a client of the advertising firm where Lowest worked as a secretary.

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