After turning the two locks, Gladden opened the door and stepped out into the crisp morning air. He looked around and saw the folded newspaper on the sidewalk in front of the apartment next door. No lights were on behind the apartment’s doors. Gladden quickly walked to the newspaper, picked it up and returned to the apartment he had come from.
On the couch he quickly went to the Metro section of the paper and flipped through the eight pages. There was no story. Nothing on the maid. He tossed the section aside and picked up the front section.
He turned the section over and there it was at last, his own photo at the bottom right corner of the front page. It was the mug shot from the Santa Monica arrest. He pulled his eyes away from his own image and started reading the story. He was overjoyed. He had made the front page again. After so many years. His face flushed as he read.
MOTEL MURDER SUSPECT ESCAPED THE LAW IN FLORIDA
By Keisha Russell
Times Staff Writer
A Florida man who authorities said escaped justice as a child molester in Florida has been identified as the suspect in the brutal mutilation murder of a Hollywood motel maid, Los Angeles police said Friday.
William Gladden, 29, is being sought in the death of Evangeline Crowder, whose body was found in Gladden’s room at the Hollywood Star Motel. The 19-year- old victim’s body had been cut into pieces and placed in three drawers of a bureau in the room.
The body was discovered after Gladden checked out of the motel. A motel employee who was looking for the missing maid entered the room and saw blood seeping from the bureau, police said. Crowder was the mother of an infant boy.
Gladden was registered at the hotel under the name Bryce Kidder, but police said that analysis of a fingerprint found in the room identified the suspect as Gladden.
Gladden was sentenced to 70 years in prison after a highly publicized child molestation trial in Tampa, Fla., seven years ago.
However, after serving only two years in prison, he was released when his conviction was overturned on appeal. Key evidence—photos of nude children—was ruled illegally obtained by authorities. After the legal setback, prosecutors allowed Gladden to plead guilty to lesser charges. He was released on probation for time already served in prison.
In another irony, police have also learned that Gladden was arrested in Santa Monica three days before the motel murder was discovered. He was taken into custody on a variety of minor charges stemming from a complaint that he was taking photos of children being washed at beach showers and at the carousel on the pier. However, he was arraigned and released on bail before his true identity was learned.
—Continued, page 14A
Gladden had to open the section and follow the story to an inside page. There he saw another photograph of himself staring out at the reader. This was of the thin-faced and red-haired twenty-one-year-old he had been before the persecution had begun in Florida. And there was another story about him as well. He quickly finished reading the first story.
—Continued from 1A
Police said they have not determined a motive for Crowder’s slaying. Though the motel room where Gladden had stayed for nearly a week had been meticulously wiped clean of fingerprints, LAPD detective Ed Thomas said Gladden made one mistake that led to his identification. That was leaving a single fingerprint behind on the underside of the toilet’s flush handle.
“It was a lucky break,” Thomas said. “That one print was all we needed.”
The print was fed into the department’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, part of a nationwide computer network of fingerprint data. A match was found to Gladden’s fingerprints, which were on file with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer.
According to Thomas, Gladden has been wanted on probation violation for nearly four years. The violation was filed when he stopped regular visits to a probation officer in Florida and disappeared.
In the Santa Monica case, detectives arrested Gladden on Sunday after a chase from the carousel at the pier where they observed him watching young children on the popular ride.
While attempting to run from police, he threw a trash can off the pier into the bay. He was finally captured in a restaurant on the Third Street Promenade.
Gladden, who had used the name Harold Brisbane when arrested, was charged with pollution of public waterways, vandalism of city property and evading a police officer. However, the district attorney’s office declined to file any charges relating to his alleged photographing of children, citing insufficient evidence of a crime.
SMPD detective Constance Delpy said she and her partner began watching the carousel ride after receiving a complaint from an employee who had described Gladden as loitering near children and taking pictures out on the beach of nude children being washed at the showers by their parents.
Though Gladden was fingerprinted upon his arrest, Santa Monica does not have its own fingerprint computer and relies on use of a Department of Justice computer and other departments, including the LAPD, to run prints on the AFIS network. The process usually takes days because departments run their own prints as priorities.
In this case, the Santa Monica prints taken of the man originally identified as Brisbane were not run by the LAPD until Tuesday. By then, Gladden—who had spent Sunday night in the county jail—had bailed out by posting a $50,000 bond.
The LAPD then also identified Gladden late Thursday through the print taken from the motel room.
Detectives involved in the two cases were left to wonder about the sequence of events and how they allegedly took a murderous turn.
“There is always second-guessing when things like this happen,” said Delpy of the SMPD Exploited Child Unit. “What could we have done better to keep him locked up? I don’t know. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.”
Thomas said the real crime was in Florida where Gladden was allowed to go free.
“Here you have a man, an obvious pedophile, and the system lets him go,” Thomas said. “When the system doesn’t work, it always seems to be a case like this, where somebody innocent pays the price.”
Gladden quickly went on to the other story. He felt a weird sense of elation as he read about himself. He reveled in the glory of it.
SUSPECT DID AN ‘END RUN AROUND JUSTICE’ IN FLORIDA
By Keisha Russell
Times Staff Writer
A gifted jailhouse lawyer, according to authorities, William Gladden used his prison-learned wiles to subvert the justice system and then disappear—until this week.
Gladden worked at the Little Ducks Childcare Center in Tampa eight years ago when he was arrested and charged with molesting as many as 11 children over a three-year period.
The arrest spawned a highly publicized trial resulting in his conviction on twenty-eight of the charges two years later. By all accounts, the key evidence leading to the convictions was a cache of Polaroid pictures of nine of the young victims. In the photos, the children were seen in various stages of undress in a closet at the now defunct childcare center.
The telling thing about the pictures, however, was not that some of the children were nude, but the looks on their faces, according to Charles Hounchell, the former Hillsborough County prosecutor who was assigned to the case.
“All the kids were scared,” Hounchell said Friday in a telephone interview from Tampa where he is now in private practice. “These kids didn’t like what was being done and it showed. It really went to the truth of the case. What their faces said in the photos matched the things they told the counselors.”