Lisa Rinna Reveals Dad Died by Assisted Suicide, Opens Up About Mom’s Assault by Serial Killer

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum opens up about the decision to help her father end his life in 2016, and her mother’s terrifying attack by the man who would later become known as the Trailside Killer.

Now, nearly a decade later, Rinna is opening up about that difficult chapter of her life, revealing for the first time that his passing at 94 years old was by his choice and the result of an assisted suicide.

Talking with her husband Harry Hamlin on Friday’s episode of their Let’s Not Talk About the Husband podcast, as detailed by People, she said that in Oregon, “you’re permitted to check out when you want to check out” because of the state’s Death with Dignity Act.

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“When they set their mind to this, they’re ready,” she said of her father’s decision, adding that his “quality of life had diminished” and he “was in pain” and “really unhappy.”

She said that her father was committed to the decision, and her mother “signed off on it,” so she and her sister had to come to terms with their decision and accept it.

“You want to support your loved ones,” said Rinna. “want to support what they want to do, but you’re going to watch your parent kill themselves.”

She talked a bit about the process, which she said can take up to six months as it requires two different doctors to sign off on there being a terminal illness. As for the moment itself, Rinna said it was like a “hospice situation,” with her father having a “death doula” present.

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She also said that it was up to her father to ingest the medical concoction designed to bring his life to an end. “You can’t administer it to somebody,” she said. “It has to be a willful act on their part.”

Frank Sinatra, who her father “loved,” set the soundtrack of his final moments, according to the reality star.

“It was like two o’clock in the afternoon, the light was coming in, there’s a lot of real beauty behind it,” she shared. “We were playing some beautiful, also some yoga type beautiful music.”

She said they mixed the concoction for him “and he drank it.” But, she added, there a part “nobody tells you and you don’t expect” about the whole experience.

“It doesn’t happen right away,” she said. “It took 45 minutes.” But, it’s peaceful, as “they just fall asleep.”

As for why she never opened up about her father’s assisted suicide during her time on RHOBH, Rinna said it was “just too painful at the time.”

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Mom’s Serial Killer Encounter

While she wasn’t keen to go into how her father died on Bravo, Rinna and Lois herself had previously talked about her late mother Lois’ brush with death on RHOBH, when she had a harrowing encounter with a serial killer.

On Friday, she again talked about it, as detailed by Us Weekly, offering more details of the brutal attack when her mom was just 30. “We didn’t know he was a serial killer at the time, but he turned out to be a serial killer,” she said.

“She worked with him,” Rinna said of her mother and the man who would nearly take her life. “He stuttered, so she felt sorry for him but was always nice to him.”

The incident went down in San Francisco in 1960 when Lois was 30 years old. Rinna said her mother was waiting at the bus stop to go to a dentist appointment when the man pulled up.

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“David Carpenter drives up and says, ‘Hi, Lois, can I give you a ride? I’d love for you to come see my new baby.’ He had a baby. He was married!” Rinna said.

She had found herself thinking about it again all these years later when her Pilates instructor told her a producer had been talking about a possible project about the Trailside Killer — who was later revealed to be Carpenter.

She said that her mother initially rejected the offer, but after some persistence, she acquiesced. “They start driving, and all of a sudden, she’s starting to feel weird, of course, because it didn’t feel right, and all of a sudden, he’s talking to her and he’s not stuttering,” Rinna told her listeners.

“That’s when she knew.”

Rinna continued, “She said, ‘David, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, Lois. Sometimes, something funny comes over me.’ And she knew she was f***ing cooked.”

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According to Rinna, her mother was taken to a “deserted road in The Presidio” and attacked by Carpenter, who “straddles my mom … in the passenger seat, grabs a knife out of the glove box.”

“All of a sudden he goes at her with a knife,” Rinna said. “She grabs it with her hand, so the knife’s coming at you and she grabs it, so she slices her two fingers, so they’re, like, dangling.”

At that moment, according to the story, a military policeman was coming up the road, and so Carpenter purportedly attacked Lois with a hammer. Thankfully, the policeman arrived and “shoots David Carpenter in the stomach.”

“This is the creepiest, weirdest part of it all,” Rinna said, noting that her mother was, at this point, in “fully-on shock.” She said, “He hit her at least five times on the head with a hammer. Her fingers are dangling,” but when she went to open the door, “her purse spills out.”

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“She’s so busy picking up the items to put back in her purse,” Rinna marvels of her mother. “Her head is, like, gushing blood. She’s totally in shock, but all she wants to do is put her things back into her purse.”

Rinna’s mother spent three months in the hospital, wound up with metal plates in her head and lost her sense of smell. Carpenter got seven years behind bars. It was after his release that he began his reign of terror as the Trailside Killer.

Rinna said that she didn’t even know anything about the attack until she was 18 years old. Three years later, when she was 21, she was with her mother in the courthouse when Lois testified against Carpenter years after her own attack and he went back to prison.

She said that despite knowing nothing about it, the attack did influence how Lois raised her children, saying that she “grew up in a very fear-based environment.”

“That saved me from being attacked, I think,” she said, admitting, “I don’t trust anybody. How would I?”