.susanorlean remembers Russell Wayne Carpenter, who remained a tough guy until his final days in a memory-care facility, where he got into trouble for punching another patient in the nose.
In a lifetime of bad decisions, one of the worst ones that Russell Wayne Carpenter ever made was to go drinking on the night of December 27, 1957, with a man known as Jack the Barber. Carpenter was already a wayward sort. He was a brawler. He broke bottles over people’s heads. He bounced out of high school; he got kicked out of his uncle’s home, where he had landed after leaving his mother’s house when he was thirteen. He had an uneasy relationship with his stepfather.
Carpenter and Overton rushed out of town in Overton’s car. Near the Virginia border, they decided that they needed to dump the vehicle. Seeing a young couple parked in a Chevy convertible, they pulled over and carjacked them, and headed south, bringing the couple with them. The men had now committed murder, carjacking, and kidnapping; Overton also had begun to force himself on the young woman, Doris Mattingly, but Carpenter talked him out of it, and even let her go when Overton fell asleep.
Along the way, he renewed his acquaintance with Mattingly, former victim, former character witness, and married her. In an unpublished memoir, he explained that the minute he saw her during the kidnapping he noticed that she was beautiful and “well-built,” and he felt that they had a special connection, despite the situation. “I was thinking at the time, that it was too bad I didn’t have a chance to meet this girl under different circumstances,” he wrote.