San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
CONFESSION, 36 YEARS LATE
Inmate, in statement before parole hearing, admits that, at 16, he killed Pleasanton girl
It was a murder that shocked the once sleepy community of Pleasanton, spreading fear and suspicion. A 14yearold girl, walking home from school, was attacked in a grassy field, stabbed 44 times and left to die near a drainage culvert. There were no witnesses and few clues. When the case went cold, the mystery deepened: Who killed Foothill High freshman Tina Faelz on April 5, 1984, and why?
Detectives focused on the adults in Tina’s life and, finding few leads, eyed serial killers. On campus, students whispered about the strange boy who lived on Lemonwood Way, across from the crime scene, whose talk loosened at parties with cryptic words and sometimes outright boasts that he did it.
Years of torment passed for Tina’s family as the killing remained unsolved. But while investigators came and went, Pleasanton’s Police Department never gave up. And in 2011, as the science of DNA revolutionized police work, they got a break: Blood from Tina’s purse was matched to the DNA of a jail inmate in Santa Cruz.
State investigators looking into this year’s disastrous wildfire season found that a contract firefighter’s death in August and nearfatal injuries to an inmate firefighter this month stemmed from aggressive tactics that were intended to save lives and property but went tragically wrong, according to records obtained by The Chronicle.
In the first case, a volunteer firefighter hired on contract from Texas was helping to control a backfire that crews had intentionally set to burn away vegetation at the August Complex fires on Aug. 31. The winds shifted, investigators said, causing flames that towered as high as 75 feet to blow from a creek drainage toward Diana Jones, who backed her truck off a road and into a burning ravine.
In the second case, on Oct. 2 at the Zogg Fire near Redding, a firefighter who was part of a crew of state prison inmates was critically injured when a
His name was Steven Carlson. He’d spent roughly half his life in jail for statutory rape, drug charges and parole violations. In 1984, he was the 16yearold boy on Lemonwood, known around school as “Creepy Carlson.”
Still, even after Carlson went to trial in 2014, even after a jury convicted him, he appealed the verdict and proclaimed his innocence. A motive was never provided, and his attorney argued the prosecution failed to prove how his blood got on the purse during the stabbing. In a handwritten letter from state prison, he insisted in all capital letters: “I AM INNOCENT.”
Now, after 36 years of denials, Carlson has finally confessed to the horror he unleashed in his youth. In three handwritten letters, each penned on lined paper from the California state prison in Tehachapi ( Kern County) and filled with misspellings, Carlson admitted to grabbing a kitchen knife in a drunken rage, rushing across Lemonwood and repeatedly stabbing Tina.
“I don’t remember the stabbing motions,” Carlson wrote. “I just remember standing over her bloody body holding a bloody knife.”
The letters include a ninepage “insight” statement Carlson wrote for state parole commissioners in advance of a recent hearing. A second letter is to Tina’s loved ones, the third to Tina herself. Carlson allowed the letters to be shared with the victim’s relatives, who provided them to The Chronicle. Even now, it’s possible he isn’t telling the whole truth.
But his words, which seek to express the contrition that is part of earning parole in California, offer new details about the murder, which he said followed abuse he suffered at home and haunted him, contributing to his life of addiction and crime.
“This letter of my deepest apologies is way over due,” Carlson wrote. “I was living in denial for many years; not being able to believe or take responsibility for brutily murdering you on that day of April 5, 1984. I want you and your family to know you did absolutly nothing to deserve what I did to you. Thats what makes this murder so callous and horrific.”
The question now is how much meaning a confession can carry after more than 3 ½ decades. Carlson took a life as a boy, but eluded justice as a man.
The murder frightened a community for years and devastated Tina’s family and friends, with the grief compounded by the long wait for an arrest and the mystery over why the girl was targeted. Tina’s mother, Shirley, died of a sudden heart attack on Feb. 13, 2014, the day Carlson’s trial was originally scheduled to begin.
“It is nice knowing that he’s admitting it, it’s 100% him,” Drew Faelz, the victim’s younger brother, said in an interview. “That part makes me feel better to get confirmation, but it doesn’t resolve anything.”
Katie Kelly, who was Tina’s best friend, said after learning of the confession that the killing “held me captive” for decades, until therapy helped her “break free.”
“I’ve got a good life. Meanwhile, Steve Carlson was arrested, charged and convicted,” Kelly said. “This new development is meaningless to me. To give it meaning would give Steve Carlson a power over my emotions, and he can’t have it. My thoughts are on Tina and all the times she had me in hysterics. Those were good times.”
In 1984, Pleasanton was not the wealthy suburb it has become. The tech and biotech campuses of today were empty fields, the population was about half the current 82,000, and it would be another decade before the arrival of a BART extension.
The community had seen only five homicides since World War II. None of the previous victims was a child. So what happened to Tina Faelz captivated people, contributing to fears stirred in the 1980s and 1990s that predators were killing and kidnapping girls. But Tina’s case, it turned out, was something different.
Carlson wrote in his confession that his childhood had been troubled. He was whipped with a belt starting at 4, wet his bed past the age of 11, tried drugs at 13 and felt a “sick arousal” when he discovered pornography.
On the morning of April 5, 1984, he wrote, he woke up with no thoughts of murder. His parents were vacationing in Reno. He decided to throw a party during the school day, but the plan backfired when the friends he invited broke his father’s liquor cabinet and tossed around his mother’s underwear.
Returning to school drunk, Carlson wrote, he acted “stupid with a varsity football player” and was thrown into a dumpster full of food and garbage. The dumpster was locked and flipped over as students laughed. A wood shop teacher, Gary Hicklin, unlocked the dumpster, freeing Carlson, who stumbled home intoxicated and humiliated, passed out, then woke up and drank more alcohol.
Carlson’s account of what transpired on campus is similar to the testimonies of Hicklin at the 2014 trial and former classmate Todd Smith at a 2012 preliminary hearing, as well as other former students.
Carlson wrote that he remembered “looking out my window and seeing someone walking on the dirt pathway, in the field that was across the street from my house. I remember being full of rage at the way all my classmates were laughin at me, and the damage my parents room was in and how my dad was going to whip up on me after they found out about the party I threw.
“Everything happen so fast,” Carlson wrote. “I remember going to kitchen and grabed a butcher knife. I walked across the street into the field at the ‘ gully’ that’s where at the time was Tina Faelz.”
The crime scene was a field that would later be cleared for more houses in the developing neighborhood.
Tina had stopped riding the school bus after being bullied by a group of girls. On the fateful day, those girls had thrown rocks at her during lunch and had later threatened her with violence. It’s never been clear exactly what Tina did immediately after school ended at 2: 20 p. m. She was supposed to serve detention, due to tardiness, but skipped the extra period that started at 2: 30.
Tina was last seen alive a little before 3 p. m., taking a popular shortcut home from school, a makeshift trail that led to a drainage ditch and a culvert under Interstate 680. Faelz never reached that tunnel.
After the attack, Carlson wrote, he immediately threw the knife into the field.
Police searched the same field with a metal detector and combed it with a grid search, but never found the knife, casting doubt on Carlson’s claim. As the teenager headed