‘Cooker’ Should Have Kept Shopping List of Ingredients a Secret

A man who police said was going from store to store over the weekend with a shopping list of materials to make a bomb was in jail Monday after being arrested outside a gun shop in Costa Mesa.

Police said the man volunteered to a gun store clerk Saturday afternoon that he needed black powder to make a bomb. Arrested almost immediately outside the store, he told officers he needed the bomb to discourage drug gangsters who were out to kill him, police said.

Investigators from the San Bernardino County sheriff’s office traveled to Costa Mesa to interview the suspect, identified as Charles Hoyt Bealmer, 38, whose last known address was in Norwalk.

Information on Murders

Bealmer was being “very cooperative,” and the San Bernardino investigators hoped that he had information concerning as many as eight unsolved murders in that county, local officers said.

A spokesman for the San Bernardino sheriff declined to comment Monday afternoon.

Police identified Bealmer as a “cooker,” a chemist who synthesizes illicit methamphetamines or “speed.” They said Bealmer led them to “several thousand dollars worth of lab equipment, electronic and mechanical,” which was used to make speed.

“It’s like this: They (Bealmer’s drug-making associates) apparently ripped him off for some money, and so he ripped them off for all their brand-new lab equipment,” said Costa Mesa Officer Garth Wilson, one of the officers who arrested Bealmer.

“He’s on the run. Apparently the people he was making it for are after him. Then he decided to go onto the offensive, and he was going to torch a couple of their cars and motorcycles--a message to them to leave him alone.”

Wilson described Bealmer as “probably leaning more toward a small-timer.” He said that Bealmer is “the survivalist type” and that officers found two handguns, a rifle, a shotgun and “several thousand” rounds of ammunition in his possession.

Bealmer was being held on concealed-weapons charges pending further investigation, Wilson said.

Wilson said Bealmer was in Grants for Guns, a gun store on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa, when Wilson and his partner arrived on routine patrol. The officers like to keep an eye on the store, he said, because “it’s a pretty big gun store, and a lot of flakes go in there.”

He said Bealmer left as soon as he saw the uniformed policemen, but a clerk told the officers that Bealmer had mentioned wanting black powder to make a bomb.

The officers followed Bealmer to a service station next door, where a driver was waiting for him in a car.

Wilson said he asked the men for identification, and when Bealmer opened a case to get his, he revealed two handguns.

The driver, Stephen David Farr, also was arrested, Wilson said, but “we’re getting the feeling he didn’t have any idea what was going on.” Wilson identified the driver as merely a friend of Bealmer who thought he was driving him on a shopping tour.

Wilson said Bealmer had a shopping list of what items to buy at what stores. In his trunk he already had chemicals, a fuse and glass containers for the explosive. “His next stop was going to be a hardware store to buy pipe and roofing nails,” Wilson said. The roofing nails were for shrapnel, he said. “He was going to make a fragmentation device.”

Wilson said that Bealmer “freely admitted” his intention to make a bomb and that bomb experts from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that the materials could have been used to make a “low-yield bomb.”

On Sunday, Bealmer took officers to a self-storage yard in Westminster where most of the drug-making equipment was hidden, Wilson said.

He also took officers to a motel room in Westminster where he had been staying for two days, and more equipment and firearms were found there, Wilson said.

Bealmer remained in Costa Mesa City Jail Monday awaiting arraignment later this week.