How Lisa Rinna's Mother 'Survived' a Brutal Serial Killer Attack

The Traitors star Lisa Rinna, 62, recounted the horrifying story of how her mother, Lois Rinna (née DeAndrade), was attacked by serial killerDavid Carpenter in 1960 and survived. While chatting about her new memoir, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It, on Feb. 24, she told Howie Mandel how her mom nearly became the first of the Trailside Killer’s victims three years before she was born.

On Howie Mandel Does Stuff, the former Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star explained that her mom knew Carpenter from work while living in San Francisco, and “felt sorry” for him because he had a stutter. When he asked her to get in his car to visit his new baby, she agreed, but quickly noticed something was off.

“As they were driving he stopped stuttering and she was like, ‘Something’s not right.’ And she said, ‘David, what what’s going on? You’re not stuttering. What’s happening?'” Rinna shared. “He said, ‘I don’t know, Lois. Something just comes over me.'”

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Not long after, Carpenter drove into the Presidio National Park, which a military policeman thought was odd, so he followed them down. “That’s the only thing that saved her is this policeman followed this David Carpenters’s car down to this deserted area,” Rinna explained.

As soon as Carpenter stopped the car, he straddled her mother, who fought back. “He got a knife out of the glove box, went at her… and she grabbed it with her hand. So her two fingers were severed,” Rinna explained. As the officer approached, Carpenter grabbed a hammer from the backseat and starts “bashing her over the head.” The officer shot Carpenter in the stomach, which he survived.

Rinna’s mother spent three months in the hospital, got a metal plate in her head, and permanently lost her ability to smell and taste, while Carpenter went to jail. Due to a plea deal, he only spent six years behind bars for the attempted killing. “Then gets out, and that’s when he did all the [Trailside] murders,” said Rinna. “He’s he’s allegedly killed upwards of 25 people.”

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Carpenter was finally arrested in 1981 and was sentenced to death for seven of the murders. “Now that we’re not a death row state anymore, they’ve taken him off of death row,” Rinna explained. “But he’s still alive. He’s still in jail alive.”

Throughout her childhood, Rinna was told that her mom’s head injury was caused by some neighborhood kids who “hit her on the head with a hammer” while playing. “We were in the kitchen and I was going off to college… she literally tells me in the kitchen [and] I was like, ‘Well, that makes sense.’ I knew something was wrong. I knew it wasn’t just the boys down the street.”

Rinna lamented the fact that her mother didn’t have the opportunity to seek therapy following the attack, but celebrated her strength. “She was such a positive, beautiful, happy soul to have had that happen to her. She was a force to be reckoned with.” said Rinna. “She survived a serial killer and didn’t become suicidal and, you know, didn’t fall into her trauma.”

Lois Rinna died at age 93 on November 15, 2021 following a stroke.