SPOKANE, Wash. — Spokane police have arrested a 63-year-old man for a 1979 murder in the Lake Tahoe area of California.
In September 1979, Patricia Carnahan was violently beaten and strangled to death in El Dorado County, California.
Police arrested the suspect, Harold Carpenter, at a downtown Spokane apartment on February 27, according to a press release from the Spokane Police Department. He has been booked into the Spokane County Jail on a fugitive charge, pending extradition to California on a murder warrant
This isn't Carpenter's only offense. In April 1994, he was arrested and booked into Spokane County Jail for second-degree rape after a woman accused him of physical and sexual assault. SPD says the case was suspended, and charges were never formally filed.
Spokane police say a rape kit collected from the victim of the alleged assault in 1994 was placed in evidence until 2022, when it was submitted for testing.
Through the summer of 2022, an SPD detective reviewed the kit and submitted it for testing. In February 2023, a forensic scientist with the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Cheney contacted detectives, saying the DNA profile matched the 1979 murder and the 1994 sexual assault.
These details gave officers from El Dorado County probable cause to arrest Carpenter for murder. According to SPD, they traveled to Spokane to assist in the suspect's arrest.
SPD says the 1994 case will not continue according to the statute of limitations and the fact that the victim has passed away.
According to SPD, the El Dorado County Cold Case Task Force says this is one of the oldest cold case murders in the country to be solved through a sexual DNA review run through CODIS, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System.
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