Police Department

SPD Sexual Assault Testing Results In Murder Arrest

Julie Humphreys, Public Safety Communication Manager, 509.625.5868

Wednesday, March 1, 2023 at 3:10 p.m.

SPD’s review of sexual assault kit results in arrest in California cold case murder

On February 27, 2023, Spokane Police, working with investigators from the El Dorado County Cold Case Task Force,  arrested a 63 year old Spokane man for a 1979 murder in the South Lake Tahoe area of California. SPD detectives located the man, Harold Carpenter, living in a downtown Spokane apartment and booked him into the Spokane County Jail on a fugitive charge, pending extradition to California on a murder warrant.

In April of 1994, Carpenter was arrested and booked into the Spokane County Jail on a 2^nd degree rape charge after a Spokane woman reported that Carpenter physically and sexually assaulted her. The case was suspended and charges were never formally filed.  The rape kit collected from the victim was placed in evidence where it remained until being submitted for testing in 2022 under a newly formed Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Project. The project grew out of a Washington State law requiring DNA testing of all SAKs in the state collected prior to July 24, 2015, which had not yet been tested. The Spokane Police Department had approximately 1,500 such kits dating back to 1981. Two specially trained SPD detectives facilitate the SAK processing and investigation, which includes submitting items to laboratories which are backlogged with tests.

In July of 2022, an SPD detective reviewed the victim’s SAK and submitted it for DNA testing in August of 2022. In early February 2023, SPD detectives were contacted by a forensic scientist with the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Cheney that the DNA from the alleged rape matched DNA in CODIS – the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. The DNA profile matched two cases, the 1994 reported rape in Spokane, and the September, 1979 murder of Patricia Carnahan in El Dorado County, California. Carnahan had been violently beaten and strangled and remained a Jane Doe until 2015 when she was identified through family.

Investigators from El Dorado County developed probable cause to arrest Carpenter for murder and traveled to Spokane to assist SPD in the arrest. At this juncture, the investigation into the Spokane rape case will not continue as the statute of limitations prevents charges from being filed and additionally, the victim is now deceased.

Since SPD began working on the SAK Project in 2021, detectives have successfully identified and charged several people in a number of cold case rapes.

According to the El Dorado County Cold Case Task Force, this is one of the oldest cold case murder in the country to be solved through a sexual assault DNA review run through CODIS. Until recently, law enforcement did not have the DNA testing tools available today to help solve rape and murder cases.

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