He also later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Carpenter was arrested a few days later, by a rookie cop in West Palm Beach.Īt trial, Carpenter’s lawyers argued that he had been dominated by Overton, and was doing the older man’s bidding out of fear, but the jury still convicted him on multiple counts of kidnapping (a federal crime, since they had crossed state lines) and automobile theft, and the judge cited him for contempt of court. It probably saved his life, because Overton was caught in a car chase with police soon after, and died in a collision. (They let her out in South Carolina and kept the car.) After a day on the lam, they reached Miami, and Carpenter took off on his own after Overton ditched him. In Virginia, they abandoned the Chevy (leaving Mattingly’s boyfriend locked in the trunk) and carjacked a woman in a Buick. 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. Seeing a young couple parked in a Chevy convertible, they pulled over and carjacked them, and headed south, bringing the couple with them. Near the Virginia border, they decided that they needed to dump the vehicle. Kaldes and the combo’s guitarist were killed instantly the pianist died in the hospital later.Ĭarpenter and Overton rushed out of town in Overton’s car. The two men went to Overton’s car, got a shotgun and a pistol, and returned to the Jo Del, guns blazing. After Overton and Carpenter got into a shoving match with an egg salesman who came to Kaldes’s defense, Kaldes tossed them out. The owner, a young man named George Kaldes, disagreed.
m., Overton protested, saying that the tavern’s owner had offered to buy their drinks. When they were served the bill, at almost two a. Over the course of the evening, Overton and Carpenter made their way through two bottles of whiskey. Overton was a regular at the Jo Del, and he swaggered around, chatting with other patrons, while Carpenter persuaded the drummer to let him take a whack at the drums. On the aforementioned night, Overton and Carpenter went for a drink at the Jo Del Tavern, a cozy joint in a dodgy part of downtown Washington. He lived in the same Washington, D.C., apartment building as Carpenter’s mother, and she introduced them when Carpenter was in town visiting for Christmas. Jack, whose real name was Henry Clay Overton, was an affable ex-con given to rages when drinking. Perhaps that is why Carpenter, who was then twenty-one, gravitated to Jack the Barber, who was at least twice his age and equally inclined to getting into trouble, when he wasn’t cutting hair. His own father, a notorious safecracker with unusually large hands, spent most of his life in prison. He had an uneasy relationship with his stepfather. 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. Carpenter (1936-2021) was already a wayward sort. 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.
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