Beaten Boy's Pleading Haunts Killer State Baby Farmer Waits Arraignment Kalamazoo. Mich., March 14-Lester Carpenter, 26-year-old proprietor of a state-approved boarding home for children, will be tortured to his dying day by the last words of the four year old ward he beat to death with a heavy machine belt. "Whipping me a little bit, because what I did was little." But Carpenter, 200-pound, 6 foot, apple cheeked farmer who loved children so much he took two youngsters into his home, slashed and beat frail Davie Gabriel Pierman so unmercifully Wednesday that not a spot on the little body was without bruises. Placed in jail - Carpenter was remained to the Kalamazoo County jail yesterday after pleading guilty to a double charge of murder and manslaughter. A hearing was set for Mach 19 at 10:00 a.m. "I don't know what happened," Carpenter said, with tears in his eyes. "I started to give him a whipping-I hit him a couple of times and then something happened,: "A week ago David soiled his clothes and I spanked him with my hand for the first time since he come to us last September. I told him he would get a good whipping if he did it again." Wednesday morning at breakfast he did it. I went out the back door and got the strap. David pleaded with me and I was just going to teach him a lesson. Then - I don't know what happened.." Tried to stop him - Two 10-year-old girls in the Carpenter home and Carpenter/s wife, Betty Mae, 23, were witnesses. "I tried to get Les to stop but I couldn't," Mrs. Carpenter said. "He was like he was possesses I can't understand it, Les has never so much as raised his voice to our boy, Gyler, 3, or the girls, Dawn Granger and Georgia Lee Solomon. Mrs. Carpenter said here husband took the David up stairs to bed after the beating and that she administered to him. After lunch, she said she returned to the boys room and found him dead. "Lester was completely upset," Mrs. Carpenter said. He drove to the next town and called County Agent John Zeedyk, who had placed David with us. Wanted Children- We wanted more children so badly, but that was impossible according to my doctor, so that's why we took the children." The little girls, Dawn and a niece of Carpenters, and Georgia, a ward , are held in juvenile home as witnesses. "They told Undersheriff Charles D. Spencer, that Carpenter knocked David's face against the open damper of the stove, and that during the beating stuffed a sock into the boy's mouth." Carpenter is a veteran of 19 months service as a carpenter's mate 2/c in the Navy and received a medical discharge following an injury in the Aleutian Islands. Mom scrapbook