David Carter has served 34 years for a crime so horrifying that he avoided the gas chamber only by the skin of his teeth.
After subjecting her to a sickening ordeal, Gloria Black’s sadistic killer placed a cushion on her back and drove a knife through it with such force that the blade penetrated the 51-year-old’s heart.
Carter has never spoken to the press before, but has now broken his silence to send a letter to the Sunday Mercury newsdesk from High Desert State Prison, a pentitentiary notorious for violence and dubbed a cauldron of race hate.
“As an English citizen, born in Walsall, Birmingham, I do have family members in the UK. I have applied for transfer to the UK three times and been denied three times.”
And the evidence against Carter, who arrived in Pasadena only three weeks before the murder, is compelling, to say the least.
His fingerprints were found all over a whisky bottle at Mrs Black’s flat.
A cigarette stub found at the scene matched those at the suspect’s family home.
That, Carter admits, is because he DID break into the property – but he insists that did not brutally murder its owner.
The real mystery is what drove a quiet, shy individual with no history of violence to sink to such depths of depravity.
Carter’s parents, and his 17-year-old brother, moved into Mrs Black’s neighbourhood only weeks before the August 1982 murder.
While the victim’s husband was on a fishing trip, Carter pounced, the court heard.
Friends who visited the apartment the following day were greeted by a sickening scene.
Mrs Black’s body lay in a pool of blood on the bedroom floor, her wrists and ankles bound by electric cable harnessed to furniture.
The victim’s nightgown was torn and she had been sexually assaulted.
Carter’s defence team flew seven character witnesses from England for the trial and one told the local newspaper: “I have been around criminal cases for 20 years and I don’t think this kid is guilty.”
David Longland, who runs a successful import business in New Zealand, was not among the witnesses, but has kept in touch with Carter during his incarceration.
He paints a picture of an introverted, even troubled, individual.
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link to www.mirror.co.uk]
Seriously, WTF....I notice a pattern....whenever there's some really bad crime committed by a Brit in the U.S., they get caught, trial and conviction, you immediately get a huge amount of sympathy from folks in England who knew him/her, saying they couldn't possibly have done such and such a thing, American courts are a joke, American prisons are horrible and 'racist', etc., etc. They act like their shit doesn't stink. The man is guilty as sin and should have been executed long ago. I can think of at least half dozen other cases with the same pattern. One English guy living in the U.S. murdered his American wife and family because he was tired of them. clearly a psychopath, yet there was a long of people back in England saying he was innocent, nice Englishman, and the usual stuff about how bad America is, etc., etc.
United States
United Kingdom