Officials Want to Lock Up ‘Plague on Society’ Forever

Five times, Warren James Bland has been released from prison. Fives times, he has been rearrested for terrorizing women and children in a series of sexual assaults in Southern California. He last walked out of prison three years ago, but was soon back behind bars, charged with the torture-murder of a 7-year-old South Pasadena girl and held as a prime suspect in the slayings of a 14-year-old Placentia girl and an 81-year-old San Diego woman.

Now, after crimes that have spanned the last three decades, the government is saying, enough. The 53-year-old Bland was convicted this spring under a relatively new federal statute that targets incorrigible, repeat offenders and removes them from society. And, if prosecutors get their wish next month, Bland

will become the first person in California, and only the fourth in the nation, toreceive the harshest punishment possible under the Armed Career Criminal Act.

The government is asking that Bland spend the rest of his natural life in prison, with no chance of parole. Ever.

“He’s got gray hair. He’s got a cherub-like face. He wears glasses,” said Assistant U. S. Atty. Larry Burns in San Diego, describing the Jekyll-and-Hyde demeanor of Bland, who adapts well to prison life but, outside prison, has repeatedly attacked women and children. “He looks like somebody’s grandfather or uncle. He doesn’t look menacing at all. He looks like any other John Doe you’d pass on the street.”

Bland has spent 23 of the last 28 years in prison. During those few years out, he has been unable to resist the urge to hurt others.

‘Belongs in Prison’

“I think he belongs in prison,” said Jack Osborn of Placentia, whose only daughter was murdered at the age of 14 in a case in which Bland was a prime suspect but was never formally charged.

“He behaves himself in prison,” Osborn said. “He probably doesn’t like it there. But I don’t suppose the people he abuses when he gets out like it any more.”

Bland declined a request to be interviewed inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown San Diego.

His defense attorney, Judy Clarke, also declined to discuss the case. In legal papers filed with the court, she contended that the case against Bland is “selective and vindictive prosecution.”

“It is inconceivable that Mr. Bland is the first such individual in the Southern District of California whose prior record meets the elements for a prosecution under the Armed Career Criminal statute,” she said in the court papers.

Under the Armed Career Criminal Act, adopted by Congress in 1986, a defendant faces 15 years to life in prison, with the maximum sentence including the proviso that “such person shall not be eligible for parole.” The aim of the law is to remove from society those hard-core repeat offenders who spend a lifetime committing crimes and reap the benefits of a judicial system that opens the prison doors again and again.

A Certain Type

In testimony before the House subcommittee on crime, Assistant Atty. Gen. Stephen Trott described the kind of people the Armed Career Criminal Act was designed to put away.

“These are people who have demonstrated by virtue of their definition that locking them up and letting them go doesn’t do any good,” Trott said. “They go on again, you lock them up, you let them go, it doesn’t do any good, they are back for a third time.

“At that juncture, we should say, ‘That’s it, time out, it is all over. We, as responsible people, will never give you the opportunity to do this again.’ ”

Burns, the federal prosecutor who is requesting the natural-life sentence for Bland, cited the three other cases in the country that have drawn life sentences with no parole. He said none of the other cases involved such a high degree of violence and disrespect for fellow human beings. He said one of the cases involved a three-time bank robber from the Midwest who, on the day he was released from prison, robbed another bank.

Another 300 people convicted under the statute have received more than 4,500 years in prison.

But Burns contends that the past cases appear relatively minor when placed next to Bland’s criminal record.

“By any measure,” he said, “Warren Bland is a worse criminal.”

Second of 2 Children

Bland grew up in Culver City, the second of two children of a maintenance man and a cleaning woman. He would have graduated from high school but dropped out just weeks before the end of the school year.

He once told a probation officer that his father, Carl O’Dell Bland, beat him “excessively as a youngster” and then was closer to him as a teen-ager and young adult.

About his mother, Hava K. Bland, and his string of problems with the law, Bland told a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge:

“It was nothing more than really rebellion, and against what I call a mother image. I was a very confused young man, very aggressive, and I had no pattern of life whatsoever to really base myself on.”

Bland grew to manhood, 6 feet tall and 190 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes. He joined the Marine Corps, but was tossed out for bad conduct after going AWOL. He worked as a painter and a machinist. He married three times.

Bland remained in Southern California. He picked up a distinctive tattoo, an 8-inch dagger and a rose, on his forearm. And he developed an inclination to harm others.

It began in 1958 when he was convicted of felony assault in Los Angeles for stabbing a man in the stomach. The man was drunk and talking to Bland’s wife, and Bland took offense. He was given no prison time, getting five years’ probation instead, a break that would repeat itself in years to come.

“I don’t think the interest of justice, or society’s interest, would be served by sending you to jail on this case,” Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Leroy Dawson then told the defendant. “So you have a chance to stay out of jail.”

That chance was short-lived. In 1960, he was convicted of rape and kidnaping in a series of sexual assaults on women in Los Angeles County.

‘Nerves Got Bad’

In explaining his criminal tendency, Bland told a probation officer that his “nerves got quite bad” after his wife had a baby and then left him. But the probation officer was unimpressed, and in his report he recommended a lengthy incarceration.

“It would appear that the defendant has failed completely to live by the rules of society and that for some unknown reason the defendant has committed a number of sexual offenses upon women,” the report said. “It is believed that this defendant is in need of a long period of institutionalism and treatment.”

Bland was sent to a state hospital, where he was examined, studied, psychoanalyzed and deemed a “sexual psychopath.” The hospital warned that, if Bland were “released to society, he would be assaultive and/or homicidal toward women.”

But Bland promised a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge in 1966 that, if released, “I don’t feel I would have any further trouble.” A 1967 probation report recommended he be given another chance, “in view of the defendant’s complete change and attitude toward his problem.”

After seven years of treatment, he was back on the streets of Los Angeles.

More Attacks

Less than a year later, another series of sexual attacks occurred. A schoolteacher was raped at knifepoint. A 31-year-old woman was awakened when a man’s gloved hand reached through her bedroom window and covered her mouth. Another woman was ambushed while walking along a street in the Belmont Shores area of Long Beach.

Bland was once again before the bar of justice. He was convicted of rape, kidnaping and burglary. At his sentencing, a probation report was filed that said: “The defendant is clearly a dangerous individual who warrants segregation from society for the longest time that is possible under existing laws.”

He served seven years. He was paroled. And he struck again.

The victims this time were an 11-year-old girl and her mother, accosted while walking down the street of a Los Angeles suburb. Both were molested; the girl was tortured.

Bland pleaded guilty to kidnaping and assault with intent to commit rape. He was sentenced to an indeterminate term in the California state prison. He served three of those years and was paroled.

The crimes continued, and Bland was back in jail within eight months, this time convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old Torrance boy. The boy had been tortured with wire, clothespins, pliers and Vise grips. Bland pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years.

A 1981 California Department of Corrections summary on Bland noted his problems while free, as opposed to his congenial attitude while in prison.

“While in free society, Bland is always locked in mortal combat with his id, and the id invariably emerges victorious,” the summary said. “While incarcerated, he no longer has to contend, and he leaves the supervision of the id to others.”

Bland accumulated good-time and work-time credits in prison, which reduced the length of the sentence. After serving fewer than five of the nine years, he was paroled in January, 1986.

Grave Consequences

The crimes in which he would next be implicated would have consequences far graver than anything before.

Seven-year-old Phoebe Ho of South Pasadena disappeared while walking to school in December, 1986; her body was later found in a Riverside County ditch. Fourteen-year-old Wendy Osborn of Placentia in Orange County was found dead in the Chino Hills in February, 1987. Both girls had been sexually assaulted, and apparently tortured with pliers or some other type of clamping tool.

Bland’s probation officer, John Blum, advised law enforcement authorities that Bland might be a suspect because he “has an extensive sex-crimes background, which includes the molestation of children.”

A statewide manhunt was organized. Bland was found in San Diego, using an alias of James Sterling and working at a McDonald’s restaurant in Pacific Beach. He was cornered by a San Diego police officer and shot in the buttocks when he attempted to flee.

It was also learned at the time of his arrest that Bland was a prime suspect in the murder of 81-year-old Ruth M. Ost in San Diego, who was found nude and strangled, with her hands tied behind her back.

Prosecutors in Riverside say they will seek the death penalty if Bland is convicted in the murder of Phoebe Ho. Police consider him the primary suspect in the Ost and Osborn slayings, but no charges have been filed in those cases.

Even if Bland gets life with no parole in San Diego, Brian McCarville, a deputy Riverside County district attorney, said he will still try Bland on the Phoebe Ho murder.

“It’s an extra insurance policy to keep him in prison,” McCarville said.

Burns, the federal prosecutor in San Diego, won an indictment against Bland on the Armed Career Criminal Act. That was last September, when it became obvious that the Riverside County case was moving slowly and that Bland might not be tried for years for the Phoebe Ho murder.

A federal jury in San Diego last March weighed the evidence of whether Bland was indeed a career criminal. Burns said the jury deliberated only 30 minutes and found Bland guilty.

On Thursday, U. S. District Judge J. Lawrence Irving set sentencing for Aug. 9, the day it will be decided whether the prison door will slam for good on Bland.

In his sentencing memorandum asking the judge to order Bland to prison for the rest of his life, Burns noted that the U. S. Probation Department concurred in that recommendation. The prosecutor wrote that “Bland has been like a plague on our free society for too long.”

“In at least a symbolic sense, if not in a real sense, Bland represents a failure on the part of the criminal justice system during the past three decades,” Burns said.

“For such a person, a sentence that is symbolic of a battered society’s refusal to be victimized further is entirely fitting.”