THE GENTLEMAN STRANGLER
DON’T MISS THIS SUNDAY’S MONSTERS OF DEATH ROW
RAPIST and strangler Dean Carter, dapper in his suit and trimmed moustache, protests his innocence to this day, even in the face of overwhelming and damning evidence.
To the man who secured his execution – Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Marsh Goldstein – this proves Carter isn’t even human.
Goldstein raged: “Dean Carter never even said he was sorry. He never said anything. He’s one of the most evil people I’ve ever seen – an awful, non-human being. If
VICTIMS: ( Janette Cullins, Jillette Mills and Susan Knoll you believe society has the right to impose the death penalty, this is where it should be applied.”
None of the families torn apart by Carter’s killing spree would argue with that sentiment.
They still wait patiently for the moment they can watch as Carter breathes his last.
One of the women who ensured Carter is doomed to die at the hands of the State is brave Rose Steward – one of Carter’s few surviving rape victims, having been attacked on March 29, 1984, just days after he slaughtered two other women.
It was Rose’s testimony in court that revealed the true barbarity of Carter’s deeds.
And a gut-wrenching article she later wrote for the LA Times gave a harrowing insight into her ordeal.
She wrote: “I was 22 when Dean Carter appeared in my bedroom doorway in the early hours of March 29, 1984 – a bandana covering his features, and a knife raised high as he leapt towards my bed.
“A week before, he had been a visitor in my home, passing the time during the week he stayed as a guest of a neighbour
“Nothing I had ever seen or read could have prepared me for the viciousness I would experience in the next few hours.
“I was reduced from a human being to an ‘it’ in the mind and actions of this man.
“He dragged me around my house by my neck for several hours and forced me to do unspeakable things.
“He twice strangled me into unconsciousness when I tried to escape. I
ON DEATH ROW: Execution chamber ( and killer Carter’s home San Quentin ( fully expected not to survive the night, hoping only to die with some dignity – to die trying.
“Someone who has never had to listen to the animalistic noises of her own anticipated death cannot imagine the horror of it.
“When I was on the witness stand, when no-one else was looking, he would stare at me belligerently. He even smiled at times, trying to frighten me, I suppose.
“I just stared back, wondering if there was anyone living behind those eyes any more, if there possibly could be.
“It took me back to that night in my flat when he seemed to believe that domination of a woman half his size was proof of his manhood.
“Now, as then, I look at Carter and find him not like a man at all.”
Rose knows how lucky she was not to have ended up like Carter’s other victims – Jillette Mills, 35, Susan Knoll, 33, Tok Chum Kim, 37, Bonnie Guthrie, 24, and Janette Cullins, 25.
Carter’s heart remains as barren and cold as the place he grew up – the frozen wastelands of Nome, Alaska.
Tall and charming and with Eskimo heritage in his veins, he went from being a delinquent child to a smooth-talking ladies’ man.
He ended up in prison aged 15, after committing a string of burglaries. And it was while behind bars that he trained as a television cameraman and video technician.
On his release in 1979, he found work as a filmmaker before he married a TV station receptionist and the pair had twin sons – boys he doted on, according to prosecutors, but who he rarely saw as he moved around with work.
In the end his marriage crumbled, and by 1983 he was divorced and his ex had custody of the two children. Carter was