Car Used by Suspect Combed for Clues in Second Girl’s Death

Authorities Tuesday began examining a car believed stolen last month by murder suspect Warren James Bland, hoping to find trace 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 said evidence gathered so far against Bland is not conclusive enough to charge him.

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 was suspected of having stolen from a 73-year-old Long Beach woman, who reportedly was Bland’s pen pal while he was in prison.

Bland 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 investigators probing 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 girl’s death and a manhunt began.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s 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.

Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Bryant said the Toyota was 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.

Bland, who has a long criminal record, was paroled most recently in January, 1986, after serving less than five years on a nine-year sentence for sexually torturing an 11-year-old Torrance boy with pliers.

At the time of Phoebe Ho’s disappearance, Bland was 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, real estate agent Dan Bryant of San Marino, described Bland as “very polite, very accommodating in dealing with myself and my wife. . . . We were absolutely shocked when we found out that he was the one.”

Bryant said he first met Bland last September and 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 to Riverside County. The bullet, which struck Bland in a buttock, also severed a femoral artery, causing considerable blood loss, doctors said. After undergoing two operations, he was reported in good condition Tuesday in the jail ward at the University of California, San Diego, Medical Center.

Detectives said that because of his wound, they had yet to question Bland about the two deaths.

San Diego police had been looking for Bland since Jan. 23, when they were notified that he might be hiding out with friends.

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

According to Redding, Bland was living near Mission Bay High School, sleeping in his car and occasionally staying in a friend’s apartment about a block from the restaurant where he was shot by Detective Patrick Birse.

Birse, while en route to the residence, recognized a blue Toyota in the taco shop parking lot as the car reportedly stolen by Bland. The detective approached Bland, identified himself and attempted to arrest him. Birse had his gun drawn, but Bland ran. The detective fired once, wounding Bland.

Police later recovered a fully loaded .32-caliber revolver from the Toyota, Redding said.

Before fleeing to San Diego, Bland had lived for almost a year in Alhambra, renting a room in a modest home in the 400 block of South 1st Street. The house is owned by retired real estate agent M. E. Thayer.

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

“All I knew 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 his house, he was a “perfect gentlemen.”

A neighbor, Sofien Yasuhara, 33, the 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 the next morning Bland visited her 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.”

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 small 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 had joined the Marine Corps, but that too, would end in failure. In July, 1956, he was arrested on suspicion of desertion. Marine commanders concluded that he had been absent without leave for 114 days and gave him a bad conduct discharge in 1957.

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 went back. He was captured weeks later, given a 30-day jail term and placed on three years’ probation.

By 1958, Bland 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 and he vented his anger on her best friend. He took 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 was convicted on one sexual assault charge after another. In January, 1977, between jail terms, Bland found time to take a third wife. Records do not indicate whether he remains married.

In all, Bland 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 state hospitals; 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 work on his high school diploma and told probation officials of his dream to become a waste water engineer. Still, his parole agent in 1977, David Joplin, warned that Bland was “somewhat of a Doctor Jekyll-Mr. Hyde personality” who had no business on the streets.

Times Staff Writers Jerry Belcher and Cathleen Decker in Los Angeles, Mark Landsbaum in Orange County and H.G. Reza in San Diego contributed to this article.