L.A. Officer Gets Lucky at Slots, Bags a Suspect
Los Angeles Police Officer Carmen Johnson was enjoying a day off in Las Vegas, playing a slot machine at the Circus Circus Hotel-Casino, when she chanced to look up.
There, a few machines away, oblivious to her presence, stood the suspect in a murder that had occurred more than a month earlier in Los Angeles, more than 250 miles away.
“What were the odds?” fellow officer Jerry Martin mused later.
Investigators said Johnson got the attention of her boyfriend--another LAPD officer, Jerry Moya--and the two notified hotel security guards, who promptly grabbed Rudolph (Rudy) Harris.
Harris, 44, manager of a home for the mentally retarded in South-Central Los Angeles, had been sought since Oct. 4, when the decomposed body of a patient, Ray Walker, 31, had been found in a boarded-up closet at the facility at 334 West 41st St.
Martin said Johnson recognized Harris because she had participated in the murder investigation and because she had taken a crime report from him before the murder.
Following his Nov. 16 arrest in Las Vegas, Harris was transferred to the custody of Los Angeles police.
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