Lawmen Pay Tribute to Man They Often Chased

For a man who excelled at picking locks, stealing cars and breaking-and-entering, Donald Bledsoe made quite a few friends in law enforcement.

On Thursday, several of them gathered to honor the reformed criminal during a memorial service at the Church of the Recessional in Forest Lawn. A career auto thief and burglar who used his talents to fashion a new life as a security consultant, Bledsoe, 63, died of a heart attack in Fullerton last week while at the wheel of his Corvette--the car he had most preferred to steal.

Among those invited to the service were some of the police officers who had taken Bledsoe in over the years. The former deputy district attorney who had prosecuted him sat with mourners in the old chapel. And Harry Peetris, the former presiding judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court who once sentenced Bledsoe, delivered the eulogy. Peetris, one of several officials instrumental in helping Bledsoe go straight, described him as “the most intelligent and unusual criminal who ever stood before me.”

Bledsoe’s son, David, expected a few of his father’s former accomplices to show up, too. But he invited only a few.

“I didn’t want too many of his prison friends,” David Bledsoe said. “We wouldn’t have any cars left to come home in.”

Over long years of recurring crime and punishment--Bledsoe spent more than half his life behind bars--a curious relationship developed between the veteran burglar and the lawmen who kept putting him away. Despite Bledsoe’s impulse to create trouble, he impressed many of the detectives who hunted him as a sophisticated man with his own code and an abhorrence of violence and drugs. In return, Bledsoe admired the detectives and lawyers who jailed him--once refusing to testify on his own behalf because he did not want to accuse the officers who had arrested him of lying.

“Don knew what he was doing was wrong and he knew the chances he was taking every time he committed a crime,” said Ira Seltzer, the former prosecutor who twice won convictions against Bledsoe, then later went into business with him. “He never held it against us for what we had to do to him. He knew it went with the territory.”

A beefy, snub-nosed man with a jeweler’s delicate mastery of tools, Bledsoe boasted that he had done time at every prison in California--and a few more in Colorado and Oklahoma. But in the mid-1970s, Bledsoe suddenly put his criminal ways behind him and found work as a car repossessor--a job that allowed him to steal cars legally.

“Down deep, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body,” Peetris said.

‘Respectful and Friendly’

Other lawmen were never quite sure that he had made a complete reversal. “He felt he was smarter than the officers trying to catch him and he always told us so,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Glenn Higgins, who heads an auto theft task force in Van Nuys. But Higgins acknowledged that “when he dealt with officers, he was respectful and friendly.”

Bledsoe was born on the right side of law. His father was a ballistics expert on the Police Department in Phoenix. His first theft, at age 7, was $27 from a woman’s purse. Bledsoe later told friends that as a teen-ager, he would steal bicycles, wait until complaints were reported to police and then wheel them in to the police station.

“I don’t drink, smoke, lie, cheat, gamble or chase other men’s wives,” Bledsoe told The Times in 1977. “But I’ve cleaned out a couple of towns in my day.”

After a three-year stint in reform school, Bledsoe embarked on a criminal career in which, by his own estimation, he committed 2,000 burglaries and 750 car thefts--a haul of at least $3 million. Along with the money, he told friends, he enjoyed the thrill of outwitting the authorities.

Investigators say that Bledsoe’s forte was car theft. During a demonstration Bledsoe gave after he became a security consultant for Alpine Electronics, Detective Higgins watched him break into a car, hot wire it and drive it off--in a span of 11 seconds. “He was astounding,” Higgins said.

Once, when he was under pressure from investigators with the California Highway Patrol’s vehicle theft unit, Bledsoe broke into their offices and stole his own criminal file from a locked desk.

“We knew it was him because only his file was missing,” said CHP Sgt. Fritz Grimsley. Yet despite being victimized so boldly, Grimsley said that the CHP squad could never hold a grudge.

By the mid-1970s, Bledsoe had tired of shuttling in and out of prison. After he served several years of a sentence for car theft at the state prison at Chino, Peetris and Seltzer began their efforts to persuade him to go straight.

“I’ve sentenced thousands of defendants, but Don stuck out because he was clear-eyed, direct, respectful,” Peetris said. “He didn’t fight his sentence . . . we just redirected him.”

After six years as a car repossessor, he branched out into the security consulting business, lecturing police trainees and discussing his car theft career on radio and television talk shows.

At home in Fullerton, Bledsoe took apart and rebuilt Corvettes. He worked in a race pit crew and designed a Corvette chassis used in the “Miami Vice” television show. He spent hours trekking to local jails, where he counseled inmates against returning to crime.

But as David Bledsoe joined his sister in greeting mourners outside the stone-walled chapel Thursday, he admitted that his father planned one final crime before he died.

Ashes in Desert

A lifelong lover of California’s deserts, Donald Bledsoe wanted his cremated ashes to be scattered in “a barren stretch” of dunes. Disposing of cremated remains in the desert is illegal in California.

Even so, David Bledsoe said he would fulfill his father’s wishes.

“Maybe I’ll just take a drive out to the desert,” he said, “and I’ll forget to bring his ashes back. I’m not going to deny him his last act of defiance.”