Serial-Killer Task Force Makes Arrest in One Case

A transient living in a van in San Marcos was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of one count of murder by a law enforcement task force that is investigating the possible serial murders of more than 3 dozen women whose bodies have been found in remote parts of San Diego County.

Alan Michael Stevens was named in an arrest warrant in connection with the November slaying of Cynthia Lou McVey, 26, who was last seen in a Carlsbad tavern and whose nude body was found Nov. 29 in a field off California 76 near Pala.

Although Stevens has not been linked by police to any of the other 39 killings, task force officials said they will investigate that possibility.

Ruled Out in Seattle

Officials in the Seattle area, where a similar series of unsolved killings involved 40 victims and eight disappearances, have already ruled out Stevens as a suspect in those cases.

Stevens, 46, was arrested about 6:30 a.m. Tuesday after being under surveillance by the three-agency task force for an unspecified period. Seattle authorities were notified Dec. 5 that he was a suspect.

Sgt. Liz Foster, spokeswoman for the city-county Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, said Stevens is a suspect only in the slaying of McVey, who became the 40th victim in the apparent series of similar killings.

Foster said that San Diego police and San Diego County sheriff’s deputies are investigating Stevens for possible links to the slayings of the other women, many of whom have been described as living a street life of prostitution and drugs.

Dave Reichert, the lead investigator with the Green River Task Force in Seattle, said Stevens has used many aliases but that none has produced evidence showing he has been in the Seattle area.

Authorities in Seattle and San Diego said Stevens’ arrest was not the result of a tip from a viewer of a recent, internationally broadcast television show seeking clues in the Green River and San Diego cases.

‘Nothing to Do With It’

“He was not identified as a result of any tips or leads or information obtained from that TV program,” Foster said. “In other words, it had nothing to do with it.”

Police sources said law enforcement officials focused on Stevens based on statements made by people inside the tavern where McVey was last seen.

A bartender at the Carlsbad tavern, Ralph & Eddies, said Tuesday that she remembers seeing McVey and Stevens there, but never together. She said McVey was there the night before her body was found and Stevens came by several times afterward to drink beer and play pool. She said he was always alone and seemed very quiet.

“I remember him,” said the bartender, who identified herself only as Donna. “He was pretty good-sized. He had tattoos on both arms. He wore T-shirts, and had dark hair and a Fu Manchu (mustache).”

But Foster said Stevens was connected to the McVey case not because of witness statements, but from “physical evidence,” which she declined to divulge.

No photographs were provided, because officials want witnesses in the other cases to view Stevens in lineups in an effort to establish a connection to the other slayings.

Stevens was described as a bearded white man who is 6 feet, 5 inches tall and weighs about 300 pounds. One police source described him as “huge, a mountain of a man.”

Stevens was living in an old yellow van that parked in a commercial area of Grand Avenue in San Marcos.

“We got there about 6:30 in the morning,” Foster said. “Task force members and support deputies from the Vista station served a search warrant on the vehicle. We detained him and subsequently arrested him without incident.”

She declined to discuss what was found inside the van except to say that it was clear Stevens lived inside. She declined to say how long the vehicle had been parked on Grand Avenue.

Foster also declined to say how many more cases are being reviewed for ties to Stevens. But she said the task force has no plans to disband because Stevens was arrested.

“We have got one guy in one case,” she said. “The fact that we’ve arrested this suspect does not mean the task force will disown this case.

Died of Asphyxiation

“The task force now will look at the possibility that he could or might be related to one or more other cases.”

But she said he is not a suspect in any other cases at this time.

Police sources said Stevens will be looked at in connection with as many as four or six of the other slayings, but no more.

McVey, of Livermore, Calif., died of asphyxiation caused by strangulation, according to the coroner’s report. She was a transient and a drug user who was not “above turning a trick” for prostitution if she was desperate for money, her husband reportedly told police.

Foster said McVey’s death was included with the other slayings because of similarities with the pattern in other cases.

She pointed out that McVey, like many of the other victims, was found nude, manually strangled and dumped in an isolated area of the county. McVey’s body was found near the spot where another of the victims, who remains unidentified, was found two years ago, Foster said.

‘Strip’ Akin to Boulevard

The discovery of bodies in San Diego began in June, 1985. From 1982 to 1984, the so-called Green River killer terrorized Seattle prostitutes who worked an area called “The Strip” near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The first five Seattle victims were found floating in the Green River, which runs south from Seattle to the mouth of Puget Sound in Tacoma about 60 miles away.

The Strip is much like San Diego’s El Cajon Boulevard, where prostitutes have worked for years. Detectives here believe many of the local victims disappeared after soliciting customers on the boulevard.

Other similarities prompted some officials to speculate that the killings here might be tied to those in Seattle. This fall, the local Homicide Task Force was formed to investigate the deaths and any possible tie to the Green River slayings.

Reichert said Tuesday that he still believes the Green River killer might be roaming San Diego County. If investigators here tie Stevens to only two or three of the San Diego County deaths, Reichert said, it could be that a serial killer is still loose.

Reichert said he thought he had found the Green River killer several times during the past six years, only to come up with a suspect in someone else’s murder.

That was the case in the fall of 1987, when police in Molalla, Ore., found the bodies of seven women, all prostitutes, dumped in the dense brush of a timber farm.

“When I heard that, I thought, ‘This is it!’ ” Reichert said.

But the suspect turned out to be connected only to those seven deaths.

Catherine M. Spearnak contributed to this report.