Ex-Convict’s Car Combed for Clues in Wendy Osborn’s Murder

Authorities Tuesday began scouring a car believed stolen last month by murder suspect Warren James Bland, hoping to find evidence that might link the convicted sex offender to the kidnap-slaying of a 14-year-old Placentia girl.

San Bernardino County Sheriff Floyd Tidwell described Bland, 50, as “the only suspect we have” in the unsolved killing of Wendy Rachelle Osborn, but he added that evidence gathered so far against Bland is not conclusive enough to charge him in the case.

Bland was captured Monday night in San Diego after being confronted at a taco stand and wounded by a police detective who had recognized the 1970 Toyota Corolla that Bland is suspected of stealing from a 73-year-old Long Beach woman who reportedly was Bland’s pen pal while he was in prison.

Bland also is believed to have stolen the woman’s .32-caliber pistol and fled in her car in early January, four days after he was initially questioned and then released by Riverside County Sheriff’s Department officers investigating the death of 7-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena. Her body was found Dec. 18 in a field in the Glen Avon area.

Last week, based in large measure on physical and circumstantial evidence gathered in the case, Bland was charged with the Ho girl’s death and a manhunt for him was begun.

San Bernardino detectives investigating Wendy Osborn’s death hope to collect from the Toyota bits of evidence, including carpet fibers and microscopic paint chips, similar to those that investigators from Riverside discovered on Phoebe Ho’s body and later matched to a van that had been driven by Bland.

Jim Bryant, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, said the Toyota is going to be examined for “trace evidence such as hairs, fibers of clothing--anything indicating that Wendy Osborn was ever in that car.”

She was abducted Jan. 20, less than two weeks after the alleged auto theft, and her body was found Feb. 1 in the Chino Hills in San Bernardino County.

Investigators believe that because of similarities in the two homicides, the deaths of Phoebe Ho and Wendy Osborn may be the work of one killer.

Both girls vanished while walking to school; both were sexually assaulted, apparently tortured with pliers or other clamping devices and then strangled. Their bodies were found dumped miles from their homes.

At the time of Phoebe Ho’s disappearance, Bland was on parole, working as a painter at a 20-unit apartment complex less than two blocks from where she was last seen.

On Tuesday, the owner of that apartment complex, real estate agent Dan Bryant of San Marino, described Bland as “very polite, very accommodating in dealing with myself and my wife. We would have never had any idea . . . we were absolutely shocked when we found out that he was the one.”

Bryant said that he first met Bland last September and that he was unaware of his extensive criminal past.

“He said he was a former alcoholic and had been in the Korean War and had seen a lot of his buddies get killed and had a lot of nightmares about it,” Bryant recalled. “But he never talked much about himself other than that.”

Authorities said it may be several days before Bland is well enough to be moved from San Diego to Riverside County, where he has already been charged with Phoebe Ho’s slaying.

Bland’s wound was in the buttocks, and the bullet severed a femoral artery, causing considerable blood loss, doctors said. After undergoing two operations, the suspect was recuperating Tuesday in the jail ward at UC San Diego Medical Center, where he was listed in good condition.

Detectives said that because of his wound, they have yet to question Bland in depth about the girls’ deaths.

They also said they are anxious to interrogate Bland about the disappearance of April Ann Cooper, a 7-year-old girl last seen playing at Woodchuck Camping Resort in southeastern Riverside County. She was reported missing Dec. 13 by her mother.

“We have no specific information that would lead us to think he is responsible for the April Cooper mysterious disappearance . . . but we are certainly going to look at it,” said Riverside County Sheriff Cois M. Byrd.

Jack Osborn, whose daughter was buried on Saturday, met with reporters Tuesday to emphasize that Bland has not officially been linked to Wendy’s death.

He did, however, admit that he felt relief Monday night when a relative and then police telephoned with news that Bland had been captured.

“I do not espouse a view of hatred because I believe that hatred destroys the person who hates more than it destroys the person who is hated,” Osborn said. “Our daughter has been murdered by somebody. And for me to hate her murderer is only going to continue to destroy our family.”

“The thing that I focus on,” Osborn said, measuring his words carefully, “is the problem . . . of parole violators who have shown a history of violent crime against the society in which they live and continue to be free . . . continue to be let out of prison to come and prey again on society.”

Osborn, a service manager for a photo-processing equipment manufacturer, said he intends to speak out publicly to help ensure that violent criminals are kept behind bars.

“I don’t know much, in fact, about the . . . laws of the State of California,” said Osborn, who moved to Placentia from Oregon about 1 1/2 years ago. “But I intend to find out.

“I intend to become a voice . . . for those concerned that our prisons not become a rotating hotel for criminals, but a place where men and women who are dangerous in society are kept so . . . that our cities can be free and . . . we can enjoy the things that God has given us.”

“It seems,” Osborn told reporters, “that a person who has demonstrated . . . a propensity for violence against their fellow man needs to be kept somewhere that that doesn’t happen.”

Osborn said that though he doesn’t oppose the death penalty “I do not propose that anyone should be executed.”

“I don’t like to see anybody killed. I believe there are proper punishments for crimes, but I believe the state is very capable of determining those proper punishments.”

Osborn also cautioned that “it would be wrong for a parent to let their guard down at any time.”

“It’s a mistake for a parent to think that because one man is taken out of society or captured and put in custody that all danger is past,” he said. “Parents should take care of their children. By the same token, I don’t think parents need to be overwhelmingly afraid. They just need to take sensible measures to protect their children.”

As for the lingering effects of his daughter’s death, Osborn said: “I don’t suppose it will ever be over until I’m dead.

“I had a daughter that I loved very much and I will remember her as long as I live.”

San Diego police had been looking for Bland since Jan. 23, when they were notified by authorities in Riverside and San Bernardino that Bland might be hiding out there with friends.

Sgt. Gordon Redding said Tuesday that San Diego police pinpointed Bland’s whereabouts in the Pacific Beach area of the city with the aid of informants and information provided by the FBI, which is also investigating the two murders.

According to Redding, Bland was living near Mission Bay High School, occasionally staying in friends’ apartments and also sleeping in the Toyota he had allegedly stolen. The taco shop where Bland was wounded by police is within walking distance of the high school.

Redding said San Diego police were notified Monday that FBI agents in Washington had arrested a friend of Bland. Although police did not identify the acquaintance or give reasons for the arrest, Redding said the friend had information linking Bland to a Pacific Beach address.

The address is about a block from the restaurant where Bland was shot by Detective Patrick Birse. The officer went to the residence at 6:50 p.m. Monday and recognized a blue Toyota in the taco shop parking lot as the vehicle reportedly stolen by Bland in Long Beach.

Birse, alone at the time, approached the suspect, identified himself as a police officer and tried to arrest him. The officer had his weapon drawn, but Bland turned and ran. Birse fired once and hit Bland in the buttocks.

Police found a loaded .32-caliber revolver in the Toyota, Redding said.

Bland’s court records paint a portrait of a troubled loser with a string of bad marriages, a weakness for alcohol and a near-30-year penchant for physical violence, particularly against women and girls.

He was born in Los Angeles on Jan. 21, 1937, the only child of Carl and Hava Grover Bland. His father died when he was 14; his mother died eight years ago in Long Beach.

Bland left Culver City High School at the beginning of his senior year in 1954, telling friends that he had grown tired of attending class. He married a high school sweetheart and went to work at a floral nursery. The marriage was annulled three weeks later on grounds of incompatibility.

Within weeks, he joined the Marine Corps, but that too would end in failure. In July, 1956, he was arrested at his mother’s home in Culver City on suspicion of desertion. Marine commanders concluded that he had been absent without leave for 114 days and booted him out of the corps in 1957 with a bad-conduct discharge.

That same year, Bland spent his first time in jail. He took a car on a test drive from a Los Angeles auto dealer and never came back. He was captured weeks later, given a 30-day jail term and placed on three years’ probation.

By 1958, Bland had married again, this time in Las Vegas, and his wife gave birth to a daughter in March of the next year. While his wife was pregnant, he stabbed a man who he said had directed an obscene remark toward her. Bland was fined $250 and placed on five years’ probation.

That marriage fell apart in 1959. Bland told authorities that he had discovered his wife in bed with another man, then took his anger out on her best friend; he drove her to a vacant field and raped her. He was sentenced to Atascadero State Hospital as a mentally disturbed sex offender.

Over the next 27 years, he would be convicted of one sexual assault charge after another. In all, he served prison sentences for three rapes in the 1960s and sexual assaults on two girls and a boy between 1976 and 1981.

Sometimes, he served the sentences at the state hospital; other terms were spent in prison. Once inside the prison walls or hospital ward, he became the model inmate, filled with penance. It was in prison that he completed his high school diploma and told probation officials of his desire to become a waste-water engineer. It was there that he told them of his membership in the Christian Life Church.

Still, his parole agent in 1977, David Joplin, warned that Bland was “somewhat of a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde personality” who had no business on the streets.

But by statute, the courts could only hold him so long. Bland would invariably finish his sentence and be paroled--most recently in January, 1986. He had served less than five years of a nine-year sentence for sexually torturing an 11-year-old Torrance boy with a pair of pliers.

In January, 1977, between jail terms, Bland found time to take a third wife. Records do not indicate whether the marriage remains intact.

For the past 11 months, Bland lived alone in Alhambra, in a modest home in the 400 block of South 1st Street where he rented a back bedroom from retired real estate agent M. E. Thayer.

Thayer said he knew his boarder was an ex-convict and a convicted rapist--in fact, he had met Bland during a prison visitation program at the California Institution for Men at Chino--but did not know the details of his crimes.

“All I knew (was) he was in prison,” Thayer said Tuesday, “and I was asked if I would help him get on his feet when he got out. If I’d known his whole bad past background, I probably would not have let him in. But on the other hand, I was trying to help the guy, and until he’s actually convicted we don’t know he actually did it.”

Thayer said that in the time Bland had lived in the back room of his house, he was a “perfect gentleman.”

A neighbor, Sofien Yasuhara, 33, a divorced mother of three young children, said Bland--who called himself “Jim”--was always friendly.

“Once when I sent one of my kids over to his place to borrow some sugar, he sent a lot of groceries back--eggs and sugar,” she said.

She recalled that detectives had questioned her about Bland “about a week before Christmas” and that the next morning Bland had come over to apologize.

She said she had some idea then what Bland was suspected of doing and told him: “There’s a lot of women out there.”

By that, she said, she was trying to tell Bland that if he was molesting little girls, he should leave them alone and try to find mature women to date.

“He didn’t say yes or no. . . . He just was very sad (looking). . . . There were tears in his eyes. . . . I still can’t believe it. We still don’t know for sure he did it. . . . It’s still not proved. I wish I could talk to him and tell him to be honest. . . . I would tell him to tell the truth about that little girl. . . . After they started looking for him, I prayed that Jim would turn himself in.”

Times staff writers Jerry Belcher, Cathleen Decker, Mark Landsbaum in Orange County and H. G. Reza in San Diego contributed to this story.