INS Arrests Briton Once Accused in 2 Crime Cases

Harvey Rader, a British citizen once accused in the unsolved disappearances and suspected slayings of two immigrant families in 1982, was arrested Monday by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

INS agents arrested the 44-year-old Granada Hills man just before noon at Rader’s Car Rental on Reseda Boulevard, saying that he had failed to inform the INS of a 1977 robbery conviction in England.

“This makes him excludable,” INS spokesman Joe Flanders said.

Flanders said Rader will be arraigned before an immigration judge to show cause why he should not be deported.

Case Open

Los Angeles Police Lt. Ed Henderson said Monday that an investigation into the disappearance of two families in 1982 and Rader’s possible involvement in their alleged slayings was “active, open and ongoing.”

Rader and his cousin, Ashley Paul, a London cab driver, were arrested after the disappearance of Peter and Joan Davis, a British couple, from their Granada Hills home in March, 1982, and the October, 1982, disappearance of Shlomo Salomon, an Israeli immigrant; his wife, Elaine, and their two children, Michalle, 15, and Mitchell, 9, from their Northridge home.

No bodies were ever recovered, but police are investigating the disappearances as murders.

Rader, linked to Davis and Salomon through a mutual interest in buying and selling expensive automobiles, was never charged in the murders because of insufficient evidence.

Paul, 45, was charged in the slayings, but the charges were dismissed in 1984 by a judge who suppressed incriminating statements made while Paul was under a limited grant of immunity.

Rader, who came to the United States in 1980, married an American in July of that year and reapplied to the INS to update his status for residency the next year, Flanders said.

At that time, he failed to report that he had been convicted of conspiracy to rob and robbery in January, 1977, in Maidenstone, England, Flanders said. He said he knew no details of that conviction.

Flanders said no arraignment date for Rader has been set.