How Police Got Lewd Caller’s Number

For months Lt. Mickey Carns, 46, a 15-year Fontana Police Department veteran, had been trying to find a key to solving the case.

The perpetrator of the crimes, who had eluded local law enforcement agencies for 23 years, had allegedly made tens of thousands of obscene phone calls, inflicting what Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Petersen calls a reign of “psychological terror” on women throughout San Bernardino County.

But the Inland Empire’s most notorious lewd caller was more than the typical heavy breather seeking sexual thrills. He would first identify himself to victims as a doctor calling from a local hospital and suggest that a loved one had met with a terrible accident.

Claimed He Held Relative

After anxious victims unwittingly volunteered names and other information about daughters or sisters or husbands, the caller, whose aliases included Dr. Felton, Dr. Gillespie, Dr. Feldon and Dr. Feldman, would admit that he was not a doctor. Then he would say he had the relative in custody and planned to injure or kill that person unless the victims would perform certain sexual acts on themselves.

A statement taken by police from a Fontana woman who was called about 7 p.m. on May 13, one of numerous victims called that day, shows the caller’s modus operandi: Identifying himself only as a doctor, Gillespie-Felton-Feldon-Feldman stated, “We have your sister at the San Bernardino County Hospital.” Without hesitation, the woman asked, “Who, Tammy?” At that point the caller wanted to know, “Is there anyone there to comfort you?” thus determining that she was alone.

He then told her: “I’m not a doctor . . . but I do have your sister. . . . I’m going to hurt her really bad if you don’t do what I ask.” But the woman became suspicious when he asked what she was wearing, and whether her shorts buttoned down the front. Angrily calling her a name, he hung up.

For years the “doctor” had been too slippery to catch, seldom calling a victim more than once, making it virtually impossible for police to trace the calls.

Then, one day early last November, Carns reported about 11 p.m. to begin his watch on the “knockout” shift (alternate swing and graveyard).

“He (the “doctor”) had been calling that day,” Carns recalls. “When my shift started he was still making phone calls,” about a dozen of which were reported that night by victims. Data in the Police Department’s “Dr. Felton file” convinced Carns that their man had resurfaced.

Then, as Carns studied the names, addresses and telephone numbers of that day’s victims, a pattern emerged. As he put it, everything suddenly “lit up.” Carns called security at Pacific Bell, asking to have electronic traps placed on certain numbers to log the number of the person calling. He then contacted those subscribers and got their permission.

That same night, there was a near-miss. One of those Carns had pinpointed as a potential victim received a call, but the trap was not yet in place. Nevertheless, Carns was elated--”I knew the system was going to work.” Before shift’s end, he wrote an interdepartmental memo saying he had hit upon the formula.

(Police will not divulge details of that formula, but they say it involved combinations of the first letter of the victims’ surnames, the sequence of digits in their telephone numbers and the areas in which they live.)

Over the next weeks, there were more near-misses.

Detective Larry Clark, 31, assigned to investigations, had not been actively involved in the case. But when he reported for work about 3 p.m. on Friday, May 6, he says, “Sherry Pierson, one of our dispatchers, called me and said our doctor was making his phone calls.” Immediately, Clark contacted about 17 women who had been identified by the formula as potential victims, then called Pacific Bell and had the traps set. Then, he said, “It was just wait and see.”

By about 5 p.m., Clark says, “nothing had happened so I went home.” But five minutes later “one of the potential victims had become a victim,” Pierson reported. To Clark’s chagrin, this call had been made from a General Telephone line in San Bernardino. Clark called GTE and within minutes obtained approval to have traps set on seven or eight GTE subscriber lines.

“Then we waited again,” he said. In 30 minutes, a victim call came in, from Rialto. Clark was crestfallen. “The pattern we had established had changed.”

Quickly, Clark placed calls to about 75 potential victims, using this new pattern as the model, instructing them to “call me right away” if they received a call. After two victims called, Clark knew his revised pattern was valid and he arranged for traps on lines of five potential victims he had pinpointed.

Within 15 minutes, bingo--one of these called. Later that night, three others called. It was, Clark says, a “monumental” evening. All of the calls to victims had come from the same number. “I knew,” he says, “that we’d done something we’d never done before.”

On Monday, May 9, Fontana police obtained a search warrant enabling them to place a register on the suspect’s home telephone to monitor outgoing calls. At the same time, Clark and detective Jeffrey Decker set about finding out everything they could about the suspect, 54-year-old San Bernardino furniture salesman Bobby Gene Stice. They learned that he is divorced, a father, and, they say, that he has a criminal record.

In the week that followed, Stice made more than 1,000 phone calls.

“We suspect that almost all of them were that kind of phone call,” said Sgt. Tim Ousley, who coordinated the investigative unit’s efforts. Fontana police received 18 victim complaints and were able, through GTE, to trace 17 of these to Stice’s residence. The 18th was placed from a telephone at the California Furniture showroom in San Bernardino, where salesman Bobby Gene Stice sold discount-priced lounge chairs and faux- Victorian tufted damask sofas.

Clark and Decker, who had had Stice’s home and workplace under surveillance for several weeks during a stakeout, had been posing as furniture customers that day and, Clark says, “we were watching Mr. Stice” as he made a call.

At 9 a.m. May 20, a team that included Clark and Ousley arrived at the home where Stice lived alone, a small white stucco house with barred windows that sits behind a chain-link fence with a tractor and trailer rental lot as its next-door neighbor.

“He was making an obscene phone call when we arrested him,” Clark said.

During interrogation, police said, Stice confessed to having made “tens of thousands” of such calls, explaining that it started in 1958 when he lived in Oklahoma and continued after he moved to California in 1965. Asked why he did it, Stice told police, “I don’t know.”

Clark added, “I said, ‘Well, at least it’s all over now.’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ He was very composed.”

When Fontana police started investigating this case, Chief Ben Abernathy was a young patrolman. Other officers who worked on it through the years have long since retired. Over 23 years, Carns observed, “the number of man-hours put in on this would be staggering.”

Bobby Gene Stice, arraigned on Monday, is in San Bernardino County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail, awaiting trial. At his arraignment he told the judge he wished to plead not guilty until he could consult an attorney. A public defender has been assigned and his pretrial conference is set for June 10.

He has been charged with 15 counts of making “lewd and annoying” phone calls, an offense which, Clark said, “unfortunately is a misdemeanor,” carrying a maximum jail sentence of six months and a $1,000 fine.