Suspected Obscene Caller Held in 28-Year Reign of Terror

A San Bernardino man was in custody Monday after he told police he had made “literally tens of thousands of obscene and lewd phone calls to women” over the last 28 years and “terrorized” them into performing lewd acts on themselves, Fontana police said.

Bobby Gene Stice, 54, was arrested after police made an exhaustive study of the patterns of the calls, throughout the Inland Empire. Finally after 18 months “detectives figured who his next victims would be and set electronic traps on their phones and it paid off,” Police Lt. Frank Scialdone said.

Eighteen calls were traced to Stice’s work or home phone numbers, Scialdone said. He was arrested Friday. The furniture company employee remained jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail after his arraignment Monday on charges of making lewd and annoying calls.

Scialdone said tape recordings of some calls Stice made under the name of “Dr. Gillespie,” a name he copied from the television series “Dr. Kildare,” were found in his home along with other evidence.

Stice told police he started making the lewd calls in 1960 in Oklahoma and kept making them when he moved to San Bernardino in 1965. Police reported receiving thousands of complaints a year.

Briefly, Scialdone said, Stice would “cleverly” learn information about daughters or relatives of the victims and their whereabouts during his calls, then tell the women he was calling from a hospital, where the relative was and threaten some dire consequence unless they performed a sexual act upon themselves.

“Most of them hung up, but enough of them did not and were absolutely terrorized to make it one of the toughest police problems we ever had in this area,” Scialdone said.