In 1979-80, “Trailside Killer” David Carpenter murdered one woman and possibly three others on Mount Tamalpais, as well as three women and a man in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Most of the women were also raped.

Carpenter’s arrest came the following year after he murdered two women in Santa Cruz County. He was caught when the companion of one Santa Cruz victim survived despite being wounded and was able to give lawmen a description of the assailant.

For years, Carpenter has also been a suspect in several other slayings, and this week San Francisco police announced DNA evidence has now tied him to the 1979 murder of Mary Frances Bennett, 23, of San Francisco. She had apparently been jogging near the Palace of the Legion of Honor when attacked.

Police said she had been stabbed at least 25 times in her chest, back, and neck. Bennett’s “butchered” corpse was found under a thin layer of dirt and leaves.

In 1984, a jury in San Diego County convicted Carpenter of the Santa Cruz murders, and he was sentenced to be executed. In 1988, a second jury convicted him of the National Seashore murders and one murder on Mount Tamalpais.

After he was placed on death row in San Quentin where he remains today, Carpenter (left) contacted me out of the blue, and this ultimately led to my interviewing him in the prison. Photo by Christopher Springmann

At the time of the interview in 1985, Carpenter, then 55, had spent more than 22 years in custody.

Carpenter was first incarcerated at the age of 17 for allegedly having oral sex with a three-year-old girl. He denied the charge but spent three months in Napa State Hospital.

Three years later, in 1950, he was arrested on charges of raping a 17-year-old girl, but the charges were dropped. Ten years later, he was arrested a third time. A military policeman shot and wounded Carpenter when the officer found him using a hammer to beat a secretary who had rebuffed his sexual advances. He went to federal prison for nine years.

In 1969, ten months after his release, Carpenter sexually attacked two women in Santa Cruz County, stole a car, and drove to the Sierra. In Calaveras County, he robbed two women, kidnapping one of them. He would later be charged with rape in connection with the Calaveras attacks, but that charge was eventually dropped.

A few days after the Calaveras attacks, Carpenter was arrested in Modesto. Convicted of robbery and kidnapping in Calaveras County (where he escaped from jail briefly) and of rape in Santa Cruz County, Carpenter went to state prison for seven years.

When he got out in 1977, he was returned to federal prison for violating his parole with the Calaveras and Santa Cruz attacks. In 1979, Carpenter was placed in a halfway house in San Francisco while awaiting parole. Three months later, the first trailside murder occurred. Here are the murders to which he had been previously linked:

Edda Kane, 44, of Mill Valley was shot in the back of the head Aug. 19, 1979, while hiking on Mount Tamalpais.

Barbara Schwartz, 23, of Mill Valley was stabbed to death while hiking on Mount Tamalpais March 8, 1980.

Anna Mejivas, a friend of Carpenter, was found slain in Mount Tamalpais State Park on June 4, 1980.

Cynthia Moreland, 18, of Cotati and Richard Stowers, 19, of Two Rock were shot to death Oct. 11, 1980, off Sky Trail in the National Seashore.

Anne Alderson, 26, of San Rafael was jogging at the edge of Mount Tamalpais State Park Oct. 15, 1980, when she was killed with three bullets to the head. Alderson’s murder was the only one on Mount Tamalpais for which Carpenter was prosecuted.

Diana O’Connell, 22, of Queens, N.Y., and Shauna May, 23, of Pullman, Wash., were shot to death Nov. 28, 1980, also off Sky Trail in the park. Their bodies, along with those of Moreland and Stowers, were found the following day.

Ellen Hansen, 20, a UC Davis graduate student, was shot to death while hiking near Santa Cruz March 29, 1981. Her companion, Steven Haertle, was shot four times but survived.

Heather Skaggs, 20, of San Jose disappeared the day she was scheduled to go shopping with Carpenter, May 2, 1981. Her body with one gunshot wound to the head was found in Santa Cruz May 24.

As it happened, KQED television in 1985 taped a debate between Synanon attorney Phil Bourdette and me. After watching the debate from inside San Quentin, Carpenter wrote me at The Point Reyes Light, and we began a correspondence.

Before it ended, Carpenter was answering questions from The Light and its readers. How common is homosexual rape of inmates by inmates? Most rapes occur in large jails operated by counties, not in state prisons, Carpenter answered.

With so much money being spent on prisons, how well is it used? “Pre-1976-77, everybody was under an indeterminate sentence, and you had to earn your way out of prison,” Carpenter replied. “There was very little trouble in the prison system  because the men knew they had to keep their noses clean to have any chance at parole.

“Back then most of the work that was done in prison was done by the inmates themselves. Rehabilitation is dead in this state….. Virtually all of the jobs that were done by the prisoners and cost the taxpayers practically nothing are now all being done by civilian personnel at a very high cost to taxpayers.”

When I managed to schedule an interview with Carpenter in San Quentin, I was intrigued by the prospect but didn’t know what to expect. Would he seem to be a monster, a sadist? Carpenter instead seemed rather charming.

While admitting “my record sucks,” Carpenter stammered that he was not responsible for the trailside murders. Carpenter’s stuttering was, in fact, so severe I felt an immediate sympathy.

Carpenter acknowledged experimenting with pot after he got out of prison in 1979, so I asked if marijuana gave him any relief from his stuttering. “Alas,” he replied, “it really didn’t do anything for me speechwise. My stuttering stayed the same, but my attitude toward my stuttering changed. The more I smoked, the less I cared or let it bother me.”

Years later in conversation with a former member of the San Quentin staff, I speculated that Carpenter’s stuttering was so disarming it may have made sympathetic women more vulnerable to an attack.

The former staffer, in turn, said he suspected that Carpenter murdered his rape victims because a middle-aged, bald man with an extreme stutter would be easy to identify. That does make sense.

A fundraiser at Cavallo Point Sunday for Haiti’s earthquake victims brought in $15,345. The restaurant and lodge are at Fort Baker in Sausalito, and 120 attendees from East and West Marin filled a second-floor dining room to capacity.

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck Haiti Jan. 12 was, as most of us realize, a disaster beyond comprehension. Virtually every multi-story building around the capital Port-au-Prince collapsed, and an estimated 200,000 people died. (By way of contrast, Hurricane Katrina, the worse natural disaster in US history, claimed 1,800 lives.)

So many hospitals fell down that the few remaining have been overwhelmed by thousands of seriously injured survivors. Food and water are scarce throughout much of the country. Public utilities and government facilities are in ruins.

All the money raised Sunday is going to two nonprofits, Partners in Health run by Dr. Paul Farmer and DG Educational Services Haiti project founded by Myriam Kaplan Pasternak of Nicasio.

Kevin and Nancy Lunny of Drakes Bay Oyster Company contributed oysters on the half shell to the fundraiser.

Myriam’s project teaches Haitians how to raise and breed rabbits for food, and she and her family happened to be in Haiti when the earthquake struck.

Luckily they were riding on a rural road. If they had been in the school where they were headed, they might well have died because the school collapsed, as can be seen in this photo by Myriam. Some students in the school were killed, she noted during the fundraiser.

Part of the West Marin contingent, Kay McMahon and Jim Campe of Inverness, chat before the dinner.

Myriam on Sunday told the gathering about the immediate aftermath of the quake, as well as about the days that followed.

The scenes on television of desperate Haitians in Port-au-Prince struggling with each other for food and water were not typical of the nation, she said.

In much of the country, the disaster brought people together.

How Sunday’s event came to be is a story in itself. It was the brainchild of reporter Andrea Blum, who worked for me at The Point Reyes Light six years ago and now reports for The West Marin Citizen.

Only two weeks earlier, she had decided to hold a Haitian fundraiser at the Muir Beach Community Center.

Andrea invited Myriam and her husband Mark Pasternak to attend, and Mark (right) used the Internet to encourage others to take part.

When Cavallo Point chef Joseph Humphrey received word of the fundraiser, he volunteered to host a larger event and provide food, a dining room, cooks, and formal serving staff.

Cavallo Point’s restaurant, by the way, is the only Michelin-rated restaurant in Marin County, and Sunday night’s elegant dinner showed why it got the rating.

Also contributing to the fundraiser were: La Tercera Farms, Star Route Farms, Rustic Bakery, Acme Bread, Della Fattoria Bakery, TCHO Chocolates, Straus Creamery, Tartine Bakery, Cakework, Good Earth Market, Whole Foods, Cow Girl Creamery, Gale Ranch, BN Ranch, Mariquita Farms, Kendric Vineyards, Schramsburg Winery, and (as emcee) Doug McConnell.

Children, some of them covered with cement dust, huddle in the aftermath of the earthquake in this photo by Myriam Pasternak.

Every seat in the dinning room was quickly reserved notwithstanding a minimum $50 donation, and Andrea sent out word that anyone who couldn’t attend should notify her because there was a waiting list.

The only “no show,” she later told me, “was Silvia Lange, the [77-year-old Nicasio] woman who disappeared at North Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore” Jan. 23.

Her disappearance came two weeks after Katherine Truitt, 37, of Alameda disappeared while also hiking alone in the park.

Andrea (right) said Lange “signed up for the dinner at 10:21 a.m. the day she disappeared.”

In short, Sunday evening was a rush of mixed emotions. It was an uplifting event organized to help Haitians recover from a disaster, and guests came away with a greater understanding of that island nation.

However, in the background was a missing guest who may have just died under mysterious circumstances here at home.

Whenever Nicasio Reservoir overflows at the end of a dry spell, I typically climb the cliff above the spillway to shoot a photo. It’s a difficult climb on unstable rock with only scattered Scotch broom for handholds much of the way. Today I did it for the fourth time and as usual got scratched up, but the view from a ledge high above the spillway made it all worthwhile.

Nicasio Reservoir officially overflowed at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, Libby Pischel, spokeswoman for Marin Municipal Water District, told me this afternoon. However, another 24 hours went by before the spill became substantial, nearby resident Chuck Gompertz of Nicasio later told me.

The reservoir is owned by MMWD, which serves the San Geronimo Valley and most of East Marin south of Novato. Pischel said six of MMWD’s seven reservoirs, Alpine, Bon Tempe, Lagunitas, Nicasio, Phoenix, and Soulajule, are now overflowing.

Kent Reservoir, the largest, is more than half full, she added. (By my calculations, it’s more than 56 percent full, which matters to three West Marin towns outside the water district, as I’ll explain in a moment.)

As of Sunday, MMWD’s total storage was at 82 percent of capacity compared with 54 percent at this time last year and and 79 percent in an average year.

Another 1.54 inches of rain fell on Point Reyes Station Monday, Weather Underground reported, and by noon Tuesday, 0.26 inches more had fallen.

In dry weather, Point Reyes Station, Olema, and Inverness Park depend almost entirely on releases from Kent Reservoir for their water. The releases flow down Papermill/Lagunitas Creek past Point Reyes Station, where North Marin Water District uses creekside wells to withdraw water for the three towns.

North Marin is based in Novato, and it compensates MMWD for a portion of the releases by providing MMWD with water from Novato’s primary source, Lake Sonoma in Sonoma County. On Tuesday morning, Lake Sonoma reached capacity for the first time in four years.

Before: Canada geese take flight from a dry cove on the east side of Nicasio Reservoir last November.

After: The same cove sans geese as it looked today.

With weathermen now saying there’s a chance of rain on Friday, Saturday, and Monday, MMWD’s Pischel today was looking forward to Kent Reservoir’s rising even closer to capacity, which is 32,895 acre-feet (10.7 billion gallons).

The oldest reservoir in MMWD’s system is Lagunitas built in 1872. It now provides only o.4 percent of the total capacity. Phoenix Reservoir was built in 1905 (now 0.5 percent of total capacity); Alpine in 1918 (11.2 percent); Bon Tempe in 1948 (5.1 percent); Kent in 1953 (41.3 percent); Nicasio in 1960 (28.2 percent); and Soulajule in 1979 (13.3 percent).

In other weather-related news, The Marin Independent Journal reported a rock slide just south of Stinson Beach closed Highway 1 in both directions for three hours this morning.

The start of an expected two weeks of storms is wreaking a bit of havoc in West Marin. In Point Reyes Station, a total of 6.76 inches fell Sunday through Wednesday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Highway 1 experienced light-to-moderate flooding (above) in several spots just south of town.

Flooding was worse on numerous other sections of roadway in East and West Marin. On Wednesday, Tomasini Creek flooded Mesa Road, just north of the erstwhile Red Barn in Point Reyes Station. Walker Creek flooded Highway, south of Tomales. The highway was also flooded near Point Reyes Vineyards north of Point Reyes Station.

That left residents of Marshall, who were caught between two flooded sections of Highway 1, unable to drive very far north or south for a day.

Out of fear that school buses could be blocked by flooding, Shoreline School District on Tuesday canceled classes at Tomales High but, oddly, not at nearby Tomales Elementary. On Wednesday, Shoreline canceled classes at all its schools except Tomales High. Bolinas-Stinson School District also canceled classes on Wednesday.

Around 7 a.m. Tuesday, a tree fell across Lucas Valley Road in Nicasio, blocking both lanes and bringing down powerlines. Countywide, the storm blacked out more than 1,000 homes and businesses during the day. More blackouts occurred Wednesday, and 500 homes and businesses were still without power at the end of the day.

Early Monday morning, a mudslide in the Sausalito area blocked two lanes of the Highway 101 freeway for a couple of hours. On Tuesday morning, another slide briefly closed one lane of Highway 1 south of Stinson Beach.

Ranchers and water districts here greatly need the rain, which was well below normal last fall. “In both rainfall and storage, we are now 90 percent of normal for this time of year,” Paul Helliker, general manager of Marin Municipal Water District, told The Marin Independent Journal today. “It’s good news.”

The National Weather Service had predicted today would be the height of the storm, and at day’s end, Weather Underground reported that more than 3 inches of rain had fallen in Point Reyes Station. The Independent Journal meanwhile reported that part of Nicasio had received 3 inches of ice and hail.

Atop coastal peaks, gusts reached 70 mph. On the Beaufort Scale, that’s just 3 mph short of hurricane force.

A near miss: Around 2 p.m. today I drove downtown to pick up my mail, and when I returned to my cabin half an hour later, I found a 35-foot-high pine had fallen where I park my car. No doubt high winds and saturated soil were to blame.

From the looks of things, my car wouldn’t have been totally crushed by the falling tree, but it would have been damaged. For once I was glad I wasn’t there when the news happened.

Seen on many vehicles in East and West Marin these days are bumper stickers that joke, “Fairfax, Mayberry on Acid.” The one above was photographed in Point Reyes Station. Neither the joke nor the bumper sticker is new, but helping popularize them was a brief video with that title, which was entered in the 2007 Fairfax Short Documentary Film Challenge.

Fairfax (pop. 7,000) is, of course, a swinging little place with its own head shop and a cannabis buyers’ club located next to the Little League ballfield. The documentary included some shots of baseball players, but its focus was on older members of the counterculture.

But unlike these aging bohos, most motorists I’ve seen with the bumper sticker have been young adults, and I question whether many of them are actually familiar with the Andy Griffith Show, which was set in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C.

The show aired from 1960 to 1968, and its sequel, Mayberry R.F.D. (Rural Free Delivery), aired from 1968 to 1971. Perhaps some younger folks have seen reruns.

The original Andy Griffith Show, in which he played a widowed sheriff in Mayberry, included Ron Howard as his son Opie (center), Frances Bavier as Aunt Bea, his spinster aunt and housekeeper (upper left), and Don Knotts as Barney Fife, his well-intentioned but bumbling deputy (lower right).

The one-stoplight town of Mayberry had no major crime, just a little moonshining and the like, along with an occasional wrongdoer showing up from elsewhere.

The sheriff often spent as much time going to The Fishin’ Hole as in upholding the law. (Those of you old enough to have ever seen the show need merely to click on the preceding link, and it should act like a taste of Proust’s madeleine.)

All this got me wondering: what in the world would the Andy Griffith Show have been like if the colorful characters of quaint little Mayberry were supposedly high on LSD?

As for Mayberry itself, the town is, after all, the creation of a 1960s sitcom about a couple of officers. “Fairfax, Mayberry on Acid” therefore raises the question: what if police in Fairfax were to drop acid? Is this how they might see the world? Or does the bumper sticker suggest this is how they already do?

Friends of Linda Petersen, the injured ad manager of The West Marin Citizen, will sponsor a major fundraiser from 4 to 6 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18, to help pay her medical bills. It’s being billed as a “CommUNITY FUN-Raising Event.”

Linda suffered 11 broken ribs, a tear in her diaphragm, a collapsed lung, a broken neck, two fractured vertebrae, a broken wrist, a shattered femur, a fractured kneecap, and two broken ankles when she fell asleep at the wheel June 13 in Inverness and hit a utility pole. Her popular Havanese dog Sebastian died in the crash.

The event at Toby’s Feed Barn will include performances by: Peter Asmus and Space Debris, Hog Island Howlers, Matt Love and Friends, Todd Plummer and Friends, Johnny and June of El Radio Fantastique, Agnes Burkleo, and Joyce Kaufman with Harmony Grisman.

Linda spent three months in hospitals, more than half of that wearing a medical halo screwed into her skull to immobilize her head and neck. Although she has Kaiser Permanente medical insurance through her job, Kaiser is refusing to pay for all her time in a convalescent hospital.

Emceeing Sunday’s event will be radio personalities Amanda Eichstaedt and Charlie Morgan of KWMR.

The fundraiser for Linda, who calls herself “a foodie,” will appropriately bring joy to both gourmets and gourmands.

One gastronomical celebrity on hand will be Anastacio Gonzalez (right), who will barbecue oysters with his “Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce.” The sauce is now being bottled, with retail sales having begun last July. Tomales Bay Oyster Company/the Marshall Store is donating oysters for the fundraiser.

There will be fare from notable dining spots such as Osteria Stellina, the Station House Café, the Farmhouse Restaurant-Point Reyes Seashore Lodge, and Café Reyes. Other notables donating food will be: the Bovine Bakery, Brickmaiden Bread, Chileno Valley Ranch, Marin Sun Farms, KT’s Kitchen, the Palace Market, the Mainstreet Moms, and the Tomales Delicatessen.

Susan Hayes Handwovens is organizing a raffle.

Co-sponsors of the fundraiser include: Point Reyes Books, West Marin Senior Services, The West Marin Citizen, Toby’s Feed Barn, the Community Event Library, and individual friends of Linda.

Wasn’t that one heck of a thunder-and-lightning storm that hit here at 5:45 a.m. Saturday? Around the San Francisco Bay Area, the lightning started at least 20 fires and blacked out nearly 50,000 homes and businesses, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

In West Marin, the lightning momentarily blacked out a few homes and turned on lights in others. Here on Campolindo Drive, PG&E service was unaffected, but several homes connected to the Horizon Cable system took coaxial hits.

Like other townspeople, I was awakened early Saturday by a thunderclap as loud as canon fire. Instantly wide-eyed, I saw a fireball exploding outside my window followed by lightning flashes further away. The explosion fried my television, as my nose quickly told me, and destroyed the modem to my computer.

My stepdaughter Shaili and I occupied our time with old-fashioned reading after my Internet service went down.

One of my neighbors also lost a television while a total of four of us on this hill had our modems fried, Horizon Cable’s office manager Andrea Clark later told me. She noted all the damage to the Horizon system was along Campolindo Drive although no one has found the exact spot the lightning struck.

The National Weather Service attributed the lightning storm to a coastal low-pressure system that had picked up more moisture than expected, The Chronicle reported. The bulk of the blackouts were in San Francisco although the lightning started fires as far east as Livermore and Mount Hamilton (east of San Jose).

It’s been a busy week around my cabin. My youngest stepdaughter from my last marriage, Shaili Zappa, 16, has been visiting from Guatemala. She’s a high school junior with top-notch grades, so Monday I drove her to my alma mater, Stanford University, hoping to get her interested in applying.

After taking the official tour of the campus and talking to admissions and financial-aid counselors, Shaili came away thoroughly impressed despite the cost. A financial-aid advisor told her a year at Stanford including room and board typically costs about $50,000 these days although the university might be able to cover all but $10,000 of that.

I received a bachelor’s degree in English from Stanford in 1965 and a master’s in Communications in 1967 (when the costs were a lot less), but I hadn’t been back to The Farm in recent years. The biggest change in the last 40 years that I could see were dozens of new and expanded buildings with many more under construction despite the recession.

The recession has cost Stanford, the third wealthiest university in the US, 30 percent of its endowment, which has fallen to $12 billion from $17 billion. Harvard, the wealthiest university, has also lost 30 percent while Yale, the second wealthiest, has lost 25 percent.

Stanford reports it now has an enrollment of 17,833, but students studying for graduate and professional degrees greatly outnumber undergraduates, accounting for more than 63 percent of the studentbody.

Meanwhile, my middle stepdaughter, Kristeli Zappa, 20, has just begun college in Taiwan. Kristeli is also a good student, and the Taiwanese government offered to pay for four years of college in English following a year spent studying Mandarin. The government in Taipei is also picking up her food, lodging, and transportation costs.

Emphasizing the significance of this scholarship, the Taiwanese ambassador on Aug. 12 presented it to Kristeli in Guatemala’s National Palace at a ceremony attended by Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom and Foreign Minister Alfredo Trinidad.

The following day, Kristeli was featured in a Page 1 story of the daily newspaper El Diario de Centro America as one of four young people trying to make life better in Guatemala. Less than a week before that, she was the cover model for a society magazine, Overnight, which is geared to Guatemalan young people.

As regular readers of this blog know, my eldest stepdaughter, Anika Zappa, 22, visited me in late May and took the opportunity to shoot a whimsical series of photos using a purple couch that had been abandoned beside Novato Boulevard in Hicks Valley.

Anika a week ago began attending the University of Minnesota after studying for two years at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. To pay her way through college, she’s been working for Best Buy stores and steadily rising through the ranks.

I’m obviously proud of my studious stepdaughters. To me, a lightning bolt outside the window seems less striking.

West Marin Citizen ad manager Linda Petersen, who has been hospitalized since June 13, is scheduled to return to West Marin Saturday. She’s excited to be coming home, and many of us are quite happy for her.

Linda in the courtyard of the Rafael Convalescent Hospital this week.

Making possible Linda’s return is her rapid progress since the beginning of August when she got out of a steel-and-carbon halo that had immobilized her head and neck and then had casts taken off her right leg and left arm. She can now get in and out of a wheelchair on her own.

Linda suffered 11 broken ribs, two broken vertebrae, two broken ankles, a broken leg, a broken kneecap, a broken arm, and a punctured lung when she fell asleep at the wheel June 13 and hit a utility pole in Inverness.

Ever since then she’s been in a series of hospitals: Marin General, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, and (for a month and a half) the Rafael Convalescent Hospital in San Rafael.

Linda still cannot put any weight on her left leg, having shattered her left ankle and broken the left femur, which now has a permanent metal plate on it. She was already carrying a metal plate from a hip replacement in 2006, and today I happened to be present today when a Kaiser doctor looked over Linda’s x-rays and told her she will certainly trigger airport metal detectors from now on.

I had driven Linda from the convalescent hospital to Kaiser’s Terra Linda hospital for a CAT scan. It was the first time in two months Linda had been outside a hospital in an automobile and not an ambulance.

Because the procedure was brief and the day was warm, I suggested we stop for lunch at Sol Food, a Puerto Rican café, since Linda had lived in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years. Sol Food has two locations a block apart in San Rafael, and we chose the smaller one, which has a bit of a garden. It was Linda’s first chance in two months to enjoy the outside world, and she was as giddy as a prisoner just freed from Guantanamo.

And as of Saturday, Linda will be at home in the Old Point Reyes School House Compound across Highway 1 from West Marin School.

It will be a few weeks before Linda can cook for herself, and a number of her friends are volunteering to bring meals. West Marin Senior Services, which will provide dinners Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, has asked me to make up the schedule.

If any readers of this blog would like to also help out, they can email me at davemi@horizoncable.com giving a first, second, and third choice for which meal(s), which day(s), they could provide. I’ll get back to them. Linda’s only request, by the way, is that the meals not be as bland as hospital food.

A pair of thieves in their late 20s or early 30s cleaned out the cash drawer of Point Reyes Gifts shortly before 3 p.m. today. The shop is relatively small, however, and owner Barbara McClellan told sheriff’s deputies the loss was not large.

Shop owner Barbara McClellan told deputy Rick Johnson the couple used a ruse to distract her while the theft occurred.

Deputies said a woman, who was described as having shoulder-length brown hair and wearing a white t-shirt, asked Barbara about some clothing in the back of the shop. While Barbara attended to her, a man who was with the woman stayed in the front of the shop near the cash register, talking on a cell phone.

The man was wearing a baseball cap that may have said San Diego on it, Barbara told deputies. Eventually he ended his phone call and said his children were fighting and that he and the woman had to leave. Not long afterward, Barbara looked in the cash register and discovered all the folding money was gone.

The theft brought numerous deputies to Point Reyes Station. They fanned out around town but without a description of the getaway car, officers were unable to find the couple.

Deputy Johnson tried dusting for fingerprints but unfortunately found only smudges.

Barbara is the daughter of the late Jack Mason, West Marin’s well-known historian. Her daughter Patty Collins is a former manager of the town’s bank and now works in East Marin.

In his documentary Sicko, director Michael Moore includes a “confession” by a long-time Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) physician, who was speaking before Congress.

“My name is Linda Peeno,” she began. “I am here primarily today to make a public confession: In the Spring of 1987, as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would have saved his life, and thus caused his death.

“No person and no group has held me accountable for this because, in fact, what I did was I saved a company a half a million dollars… And furthermore, this particular act secured my reputation as a good medical director, and it insured my continued advancement in the healthcare field. I went from making a few hundred dollars a week as a medical reviewer to an escalating six-figure income as a physician executive.

“In all my work, I had one primary duty, and that was to use my medical expertise for the financial benefit of the organization for which I worked. And I was told repeatedly that I was not denying care; I was simply denying payment.”

Throughout the United States, as Moore’s film reveals, such stratagems pervade  health insurers’ medical decisions and are evident in the way health-insurance policies are written. Here’s one patient’s experience with Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit health plan insuring 8.6 million members. Its website reports revenues last year topped $40 billion.

Linda Petersen, ad manager of The West Marin Citizen, suffered 11 broken ribs, two broken vertebrae, two broken ankles, a broken leg, a broken kneecap, a broken arm, and a punctured lung when she fell asleep at the wheel June 13 and hit a utility pole in Inverness. This week she had another disastrous collision, this time with her Kaiser Permanente medical-insurance policy.

“It’s kind of insane,” she told me Thursday when I visited her at The Rafael: Assistance for Living, a convalescent hospital in San Rafael. “Having health insurance doesn’t mean you’ll be covered.”

Linda, as can be seen in the photo, still wears casts on both legs and her left arm. Her head and neck are immobilized by a steel-and-carbon “halo.” Although she remains physically helpless, Kaiser told her yesterday her hospitalization costs will not be covered after next week until she’s ready for more-advanced physical therapy.

What’s the rationale for stopping coverage? “A Kaiser representative said I was fulfilling the physical-therapy goals by being able to transfer to a wheelchair,” Linda explained. “They’re looking for all these bureaucratic excuses.”

It’s not that she can get into a wheelchair on her own, mind you. It takes a physical therapist to carefully lift her to the edge of the bed, help her balance and pivot on her right foot (which isn’t as badly broken as her left), and then seat her in the chair. Once she’s in it, all she can do is sit, which she does for an hour a day.

Kaiser yesterday told Linda that next week the lower-paid staff at The Rafael will be trained so that one of them can take over from the two therapists who have been moving her.

This may be penny wise and pound foolish since moving her requires expertise; on Friday, after this posting originally went online, a skilled therapist lost his grip while moving her, and she had to catch herself by standing on her broken left leg and shattered ankle. Now she can barely move the leg, which had begun to heal.

The Rafael, Linda explained, is one of three hospitals in Marin County with which Kaiser has convalescent-care contracts. “I have no option to go anywhere else,” Linda said, and “I can’t be kicked out.” But starting a week from now, she’ll have to pay The Rafael $1,750 per week for at least the next month.

Linda with her elderly dog Sebastian who died in the crash.

“After next week,” Linda said, “Kaiser won’t cover anything until the doctor says I can put more weight on my weight-bearing extremities [e.g. the foot the physical therapist dropped her on]. It’s a matter of what the fine print says in the insurance contract.” Linda, who got her Kaiser policy through her job, noted, “You don’t sit down and read all of it.” Nor would it make any difference if you did.

“I felt shocked that they could stand there, when I’m totally helpless, and say I’m not going to be covered,” Linda remarked. “But it’s become general knowledge that’s how healthcare works in this country. It’s mind boggling to me that anyone would vote against universal healthcare.

“As a patient, you’re confronted in a very vulnerable situation. It’s horrible. I was crying this morning. They threw me into turmoil. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here. I don’t know how much it will cost.”

“But I can’t sit here and agonize over it,” she added, and, putting on a smile, began poring over today’s issue of The Citizen.