PLACERVILLE, Ca. (Noah Goldberg, Los Angeles Times.)
March 3, 2023 — DNA from 1994 WA sexual assault kit helps solve California cold case
For more than 35 years, she lay buried in a grave marked “Unidentified Female.”
And for more than 40 years, her alleged killer roamed free, an unidentified suspect in a brutal beating and strangling at a South Lake Tahoe campground in California.
Now they both have names: The victim, Patricia Carnahan, and the accused killer, Harold Carpenter.
Carpenter’s arrest Wednesday by the El Dorado County district attorney in the 1979 killing was the product of investigative genetic genealogy, with law enforcement in Washington state matching his DNA from a rape kit in a separate crime to the DNA recovered from Carnahan’s murder scene.
“DNA and genetic genealogy is a big deal,” said Vern Pierson, the El Dorado County district attorney.
Carpenter, 63, had been accused in 1994 of raping a woman in Washington. Police took his DNA — but it was never tested and charges were never filed.
“He was not charged in that. So his DNA sat in a warehouse almost 30 years,” Pierson said.
Without the connection of the two cases, prosecutors in California were left trying to match DNA taken from the unidentified woman’s body and crime scene to family tree databases such as 23andMe. They got close to solving the case in 2020, interviewing Carpenter’s uncle, whose DNA closely matched the DNA found at the crime scene, but the case remained cold and no arrests were made, according to Pierson.
This year, the sexual assault kit from the 1994 case was tested as part of the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative in the Washington state Attorney General’s Office, which began in 2017 when the state received a $3 million federal grant to try to eliminate its sexual assault kit backlog.
Though prosecutors in California have not charged Carpenter with sexually assaulting Carnahan, they said that a sexual assault kit was taken, which provided them with the suspect’s DNA.
The DNA from the Washington case was uploaded into CODIS — the FBI’s nationwide Combined DNA Index System — where it was linked to the Carnahan case.
“Cases like this illustrate the need to test every sexual assault kit and get their DNA profiles loaded into the federal database,” Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. “Every untested kit could be a potential break in a cold case.”
Carpenter’s arrest brought a measure of relief for Carnahan’s daughter, who knew that her mother had been missing for years but only discovered in 2015 that she had been killed.
Carnahan’s identity was determined after the El Dorado County district attorney’s cold case unit published photographs of her jewelry in a Jewish newspaper, after realizing she was wearing a religious pendant when they exhumed her body in 2015.
Carnahan’s daughter caught wind of the article, recognized the jewelry and reached out to authorities. Genetic testing revealed that the long-unidentified murder victim was her mother.
Carpenter was arrested in Spokane, Wash., where he lived, and is being held at Spokane County Jail, where he awaits extradition to California.
Noah Goldberg
