‘Everybody Knew’ About the Young Girls : Alleged Brothel Described as ‘Dungeon’ in Huntington Beach

The woman next door knew. So did the kid who sold surfboards in the shop across the street. The hair stylists, too.

William Scott Taylor’s alleged brothel amid the greasy spoons, T-shirt and bikini shops of Main Street in Huntington Beach was no neighborhood secret.

“Everybody knew--it was only obvious,” said Paul Evans, 20, sitting outside his place of employment, the Chuck Dent Surf Center. “These girls would come out all sleazed out, they’d be running around naked upstairs, you could see them in the window. . . . They’re all really young; that’s what’s so sickening about it.”

Taylor, 49, a former California Highway Patrol officer, was arrested last week at the second-floor flophouse he rented in the 200 block of Main Street, near the city’s pier.

Police believe that he used the apartment to run a prostitution business with girls as young as 14. He was arraigned Tuesday on 15 felony counts involving pandering and pimping charges, and is being held in Orange County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.

When he worked for the CHP, Taylor used another name--James E. Sutton. CHP spokesman Steve Kohler in Sacramento confirmed that a James E. Sutton took disability retirement in February, 1979, after 14 years of service. He retired as a sergeant in the Highway Patrol’s Indio station.

Taylor had told people in Huntington Beach that he had retired as a CHP officer 10 years ago for medical reasons, according to police.

The door leading from the sidewalk up a flight of stairs to the eight rooms rented by Taylor was locked Wednesday. Through a window above the door, a closed-circuit television camera, positioned so that it could pick up visitors as they walked in, could be seen.

Susan Tully, a city environmental officer who was inside Taylor’s apartment several weeks ago to inspect the building, said about 20 paintings of nude women hang on the staircase walls.

“It was kind of like a dungeon,” Tully said. “There were wires running everywhere, for the cable TV and video equipment. Cassette tapes covered one whole wall, from floor to ceiling. The whole place was shabby.”

Shabby, too, is much of Main Street, although not unrelentingly so.

The two short blocks between Pacific Coast Highway and Olive Avenue are part Hollywood, part Laguna Beach. There are shops that sell expensive bikinis, steaming espresso and frozen yogurt; there are others that sell short, black leather skirts and erotic underwear. Several stores are vacant, and the alley walls behind the shops are filled with graffiti.

Teen-agers wheel down the street on skateboards and beach cruisers, many of them clutching surfboards under one arm. At night, large numbers of youths--some of them runaways--gather on street corners. It was among these youths, acquaintances of Taylor say, that he may have found his adolescent prostitutes.

How CHP Sgt. Sutton became an alleged pimp and procurer known around town as “Scotty” Taylor is still unclear.

“I think he started back in Vegas,” said Betty Freed, wearing a red baseball jacket and sipping coffee while sitting outside Taylor’s apartment on an ocean-breezy afternoon. Freed lives in an apartment next to Taylor’s, and she used to work for Taylor when he owned a pawn and novelty shop across the street.

“He was into porno--you know, taking pictures of young girls,” said Freed, 35, who moved to California from Oklahoma City with her husband about five years ago. She had never seen the ocean before and always wanted to live near the beach, she said.

“One day I was in there (the pawn shop), and a girl came in and told me to tell him that she didn’t do ‘that kind of work,’ ” Freed said. “I’d see young girls go up to his place, guys go up there. . . . He was always going around putting hits on girls, especially if they looked real young.”

Huntington Beach Police Sgt. Luis Ochoa, supervisor of the department’s vice unit, said police confiscated photography equipment and “a couple hundred” videotapes at Taylor’s apartment. Investigators have not yet viewed all the tapes, he said, but “strongly suspect” that Taylor was involved in pornography, possibly involving minors.

Investigators Wednesday searched a storage shed in Fountain Valley that belonged to Taylor and found “a number of weapons”--mostly pistols that police believe were stolen--and some narcotics, Ochoa said.

He declined to provide more details about the search, saying the investigation into Taylor’s activities is not over.

Taylor has not been charged with narcotics violations, but police suspect that he was dealing drugs out of the flophouse and providing cocaine to some of the girls who worked for him.

Several people in the neighborhood said Taylor was arrested a few months ago on drug charges, but the charges were dropped.

Police also arrested Sandra Mae Johnson, 27, on suspicion of helping Taylor operate the alleged prostitution business. But Ochoa said that police now believe that she was simply one of Taylor’s prostitutes and that she will not be charged with pimping and pandering, but rather with oral copulation with a minor. Her arraignment is scheduled for today.

Johnson is being held in Huntington Beach City Jail; her bail is set at $25,000.

A 14-year-old runaway girl who also lived in Taylor’s flophouse and whose arrest and subsequent statements to police led to the discovery of what they say is a brothel has been returned to her parents in San Bernardino County, Ochoa said.

No other minors were found to be living in the apartment at the time of Taylor’s arrest, Ochoa said. But police believe that as many as five juveniles, in addition to an adult female prostitute, were involved in Taylor’s business, Police Lt. Michael Biggs said.