Serial killer's lone survivor torn by conscience on death penalty

Rose Steward came to view Dean Carter's other victims as "sisters" and worried that their families would blame her for surviving her 1984 attack. Instead, the families were kind and warm. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / October 30, 2012)

Rose Steward woke up, certain someone else was in her bedroom. She saw a man, a red bandanna over his face and a knife in his hand, illuminated by a street light. She began to shake violently.

For the next five hours, the man raped and choked her, twice to the point she lost consciousness. She was certain she would die. She grieved she was too young, only 22, and that her murder would destroy her mother.

She struggled against panic and fought with her wits, pretending to like her attacker, cajoling him and sympathizing with him. When he finally left at dawn, she kissed him goodbye — then ran for help.

After leaving Steward, Dean Carter went on a killing rampage, strangling, raping and stacking bodies in closets. Police say he murdered five women, from San Diego to Oakland, within 18 days. Steward's testimony helped prosecutors win two death sentences against Carter.

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Twenty-eight years after the murders, Carter remains on death row, writing a blog and pressing his appeals. That he continues to live frustrates and angers families of some of his victims. They want to watch him die.

Steward, 50, sees it differently. She has endorsed the November ballot measure — Proposition 34 — to replace the death penalty with life without parole. She said she is tired of dreading the call that will inform her of the day he's to receive his lethal injection, and she's weary of seeing people who worked for his execution die before him.

She has long opposed the death penalty but kept her views to herself during Carter's murder trials. The wait for Carter's execution — and with no immediate end in sight for the appeal process — has merely reinforced her sentiments. She said she wants to move on.

But the wishes of Carter's other victims tug at her. During one of the murder trials, George Cullins, father of one of the murder victims, asked Steward for a favor. Cullins was approaching 70 and knew that Carter's appeals would drag on for decades.

Would she take his place at Carter's execution if he could not be there?

Steward was stunned and did not know how to respond.

"I will try," she said.

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After her assault, which took place in Ventura on March 29, 1984, Steward started sleeping on her living room floor. She kept a loaded gun under her pillow — even after Carter was arrested during a traffic stop a month later with his victims' belongings in his car.

Prosecutors decided to try him first for her rape and then call her to testify against him in the murder trials, scheduled for Los Angeles and San Diego.

During their first courtroom encounter months later in Ventura, Steward said she managed to stare down Carter and felt stronger as a result. But she couldn't put the attack behind her because she would have to testify about it at the murder trials.

She met Carter when he was staying at a neighbor's house. He was tall, handsome, quiet and "a little odd." Carter, then 28, tried to befriend her, but she went out of her way to avoid him.

Late one night, two weeks after meeting him, she found him in her bedroom. He sexually assaulted her throughout the night, his hand clutching her throat. When she showed fear, he became more violent. So she feigned casualness, telling him she had been attracted to him but had feared rejection.

When the sun came up, she told him she needed to go to work or her boss would come looking for her. Her voice was hoarse and gravelly from the choking. After walking him to the front door, she made him promise to call her.

Once alone, she ran to a neighbor, who summoned police. By the time they arrived, Carter had vanished.