Jail Suicide Sought Redemption and Got It--a Little Too Late

Early in the morning of May 7, while most of Los Angeles County Jail was still asleep, Arthur James Crespin sat in the dark of Cell D-17 and methodically braided his bedsheet into a noose.

The former La Puente construction worker, who by his own count had been arrested 32 times, was once again behind bars--this time for trying to procure $4,000 in cash with the help of a stolen American Express card.

Twenty-nine years old, he was distraught, confused and headed back to state prison to serve a two-year sentence for forgery. When guards passed at 5:20 a.m., they found him hanging from a piece of iron jutting out of the ceiling.

His suicide did not make the newspapers. There was no obituary and no funeral. In many ways, Crespin, a slim, red-headed man with gold aviator-frame glasses, was just another career criminal who had met a sorry end.

But those who knew him were left wondering what might have been. They say his life had taken a dramatic turn in the preceding weeks, with the spiritual strength that had long eluded him finally within grasp.

As he sat in jail awaiting sentencing, Crespin had been placing ads in The Times appealing for fellowship and forgiveness. He feverishly read the Bible, completing long lesson plans in which he proclaimed himself reborn. And every day he telephoned declarations of love to a 21-year-old Amtrak dining car attendant from Hesperia whom he hoped one day to marry.

“I felt so much compassion for him,” said his fiancee’s mother, Regina Maggio. “All the recognition he had ever got was negative. Now, for the first time in his life, I think he was feeling a lot more inner peace.”

While it’s not rare for a convict--much less a con man--to say anything he believes might help his case, Crespin did take some unusual steps in his quest for salvation. For four consecutive days in April, he placed a classified ad in The Times announcing that he had found God.

“I’ve prayed to the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus for a second chance,” he wrote, urging members of the Christian community to correspond with him in jail. “I need your guidance and prayers.”

More than 30 ministers and church folk responded, their letters wrapped in a bundle with other religious texts later found in his cell. He wrote back in neat, tiny strokes on yellow, legal-size paper.

The beautiful penmanship was the first thing that the Rev. Dale Scott noticed about the letter, which he read several times before running to share his joy with colleagues at the Church at Rocky Peak in Chatsworth.

“I was so pleased because it really seemed like he had found forgiveness in his own heart and peace from the Lord,” said Scott, associate pastor of the church. “He even asked to come speak to our congregation when he got out.”

As Crespin’s May 3 sentencing neared, a friend placed another ad in The Times. Under the classification of “Personal Messages,” it urged Christians everywhere to attend his 9 a.m. hearing in Pasadena Superior Court.

“If you believe in Jesus . . . and the forgiveness of sins and the eternal life we receive from Christ, then your presence is needed. Come one, come all.”

Although only a couple of believers showed up, Crespin’s fiancee, Lisa Wheeler, was there in the second row of the courtroom. She had met met him two years ago through yet another ad that he placed in The Times while serving a federal prison term for counterfeiting.

Even after Pasadena Superior Judge Harold E. Shabo denied his request for probation, Crespin called Wheeler and her mother collect from jail every day to report his spiritual progress.

“He’s one of the most romantic, caring people you could ever imagine,” Wheeler said at the time. “I love him and he knows I’ll support him as long as he helps himself.”

But Crespin’s demons had been at work too long for redemption to come easily.

In a letter to Maggio after his sentencing, he attributed most of his troubles to abuse he suffered as a child, when he lived on a U.S. military base in Europe with his Army father and German mother.

At 12, he said, he beat up a neighbor boy who made fun of the way he talked, thinking this would make his dad proud. Instead, he was arrested and placed in a mental hospital.

“I did everything I could to make him say he loved me,” Crespin wrote of his father, who Maggio said died 10 years ago. “All I ever wanted from life was love.”

The family later moved to the San Gabriel Valley, where Crespin attended La Puente High School and as a teen-ager found work at a construction company in Azusa.

At times, his life seemed remarkably average: swimming, bowling, back-yard barbecues and miniature golf. At others, he would sink into depression, doing drugs or turning up drunk and penniless on the doorstep of a friend.

“The troubles he had came when he was lonely and didn’t really know where his life was headed,” said Jose Amaya, 33, an Industry warehouse worker who is one the few friends who stood by Crespin over the years. “Then he’d start spending most of his time figuring out a scheme to make a quick dollar. He had caviar wishes on a dime budget.”

One of his first schemes entailed breaking into the home of a La Puente couple in 1980, making off with a wedding ring and an antique pearl-handled pistol. Later, he robbed a college administrator in Hacienda Heights and a pipe company in South El Monte. Then, while working for a Covina-based carpet-cleaning company, he filched jewelry while shampooing rugs for three customers at their homes in Walnut and Hacienda Heights.

In those cases and others detailed in court files, Crespin--whose many aliases included A. J. Wheeler and Maurice J. Tost--confessed to the crimes almost as soon as he was confronted.

“By the time he got to me, there wasn’t anything I could do--he had told everybody everything,” said Richard E. Orozco, a Montebello lawyer appointed to defend him on the carpet-cleaning case. “He seemed almost submissive. I kind of felt sorry for the guy.”

After several stints behind bars, he eventually drew a three-year sentence at Terminal Island for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury checks. There, he came to know Wheeler, who said she was feeling low and answered his pen-pal ad in search of companionship. She found his letters witty and sincere.

“He was real intriguing,” she said. “I thought if he could just apply his intelligence to something positive he would be OK.”

At first her mother burned Crespin’s letters as soon as they arrived, but Wheeler persuaded her that he could be reformed. When Crespin was released last December, he went to live with them in their one-story brick home in the high desert of San Bernardino County.

He was a meticulous housekeeper and spent long days working in the flower bed and making plans to build an extra room for him and his future bride. But, as in times past, the lure of the bottle and easy money sabotaged the tranquillity.

On March 23, just three months out of prison, he fought with Wheeler and left. The next she and her mother heard, he had been arrested by Pasadena police after American Express security personnel discovered that he was trying to get cash with a stolen credit card at one of their branch offices.

“The only reason he got caught was because he got real sloppy, and he got real sloppy because he wanted to get caught,” Maggio said. “He really thinks the Lord had him arrested just to save his life.”

Behind bars again, Crespin found a copy of the New Testament and began his apparent conversion. At his sentencing, however, he kept quiet about the details of his new-found faith. He made only a plea to be placed in a drug diversion program.

“It’s a shame he didn’t tell the judge he was having some emotional problems,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Nancy D. Aronson said. “Unfortunately, he was just a career criminal as far as I could tell.”

In his last letter to Wheeler, Crespin said that she and her mother gave him the love he had always searched for but that it had came too late in his troubled life. He said he no longer wanted to lie to them, yet was afraid they would not stand by him if he revealed more details of his past. Without their love, he wrote, he believed he could not survive.

“I want you to be happy, but with me in jail, you’re only in pain and so am I,” his letter said. “Please pray I make it to heaven.”