Fugitive Teacher Found, Will Face Molesting Charges

A former fifth-grade schoolteacher who jumped bail nearly three years ago, vanishing on the day he was to be charged with 21 felony counts of molesting students at a Los Angeles public school, was brought back to the city in handcuffs on Friday after he was found living in a Ventura County homeless camp.

Don Ray Moore, 56, faces 50 misdemeanor and felony counts and was being held on $500,000 bail. The felony charges allege that between 1981 to 1984 Moore fondled three sixth-grade girls at 97th Street School, the inner-city school where he taught for 16 of his 20 years with the Los Angeles Unified School District. One felony charge alleges that Moore had intercourse with a 12-year-old girl in his Redondo Beach home after she was graduated from the school.

When he disappeared in August, 1987, with little more than the clothes he wore, skipping out on $25,000 bail, Moore was less than two weeks away from trial on the misdemeanor counts ranging from battery--for illegally paddling four boys--to molesting 10 girls, over a period from 1984 to 1986. Warrants were also issued for attempting to dissuade a witness, calling a girl he allegedly molested to try to intimidate her into not reporting the offense.

Evidence that prompted the felony charges included telephone records and a note to an alleged victim, which corroborated students’ accounts, prosecutors said then.

Moore was driven into Parker Center downtown about 11:30 a.m. Friday. He had shaved off his distinctive goatee and wore his hair partly dyed auburn--in part, he told police, because his pale gray hair was so hard to keep clean in the homeless camp, known in Ventura County as the Hobo Jungle, where he had lived for about a year.

A Ventura gas company employee who had struck up a conversation with Moore last December while working near the riverbed homeless camp reported him to police after seeing him last Sunday on a rerun segment of the television program “America’s Most Wanted.”

“I’m glad it’s over, and I think he is too,” said Detective Ralph W. Bennett, who heads the Police Department’s sexually exploited child unit and directed the police investigation from the outset. “The three-year lapse of time doesn’t make the case any easier,” Bennett said. The gap “is going to make (the prosecution) somewhat more difficult . . . to get (witnesses and victims) all together and go forward.”

Vanessa Place was the deputy city attorney who filed the misdemeanors after the district attorney’s office rejected the initial complaints. Place, now in private practice, said Friday: “I think (the prosecution) is important particularly because the victims here were really underprivileged, and we spend so much attention on the middle-class victims, it’s really great that kind of attention was expended on the poor children.”

At one point in a 90-minute drive Friday from Ventura, Bennett pulled off the freeway so Moore could purchase some cigarettes and a Coke. And from the back seat of the air-conditioned brown Ford LTD, he told them something of his years among the down-and-out--years, he said, when he felt that he was the only one who wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict, when he told himself that even prison could be no worse than this hardscrabble life. He never left Southern California’s balmy climate, but the middle-aged schoolteacher appears to have been ill-suited to life on the lam.

“It was a very difficult time . . . he said it was a very big transition, that he never did get used to it,” Bennett said.

Moore called himself John Anderson and lived as a loner, a fugitive and a homeless wanderer, foraging for bottles and cans to keep himself fed, bedding down under freeway overpasses to keep himself sheltered. Some days, he made as much as $15 from finding recyclable bottles and cans; he was good at it, he told Bennett. He had traded another homeless man two packs of cigarettes for an old bicycle, and that expanded his range.

For one week, he worked as a cook on an offshore oil platform off Santa Maria, but found it “just too taxing, 12 hours on, 12 hours off,” Bennett said. Some Saturdays, he tended a booth at a swap meet.

Police had tracked those leads about the oil rig and homeless camp, but had never caught up to Moore.

Something else did. Three years of roughing it didn’t obliterate the 20 years when Moore had been a man who read books, sat at a desk, taught school. It was his well-spoken manner, as much as his obvious loneliness, that led a Southern California Gas Co. district supervisor to remember him out of all the homeless men at the Hobo Jungle.

Marty de los Cobos, 48, regarded the gray-haired man with pity last December, when he met him. But the emotion shifted abruptly to disbelief last Sunday, when Cobos saw that the articulate man who had called himself John Anderson was an accused child molester named Don Ray Moore.

In late December, the gas company had released pressure from a line in order to work on a pipeline. The release sprayed a fine mist of oil over the Hobo Jungle, a settlement that was scattered on Friday with garbage and camping materials, remnants of a campfire, a ragged piece of brown carpet, and an old green truck bed partitioned with pink and white plastic.

The spray destroyed most of the transient workers’ possessions, and de los Cobos assured them they would be reimbursed. He met “John Anderson” a few weeks later under a bridge in Ventura to pay him $30 for damage to his clothes and camping gear. Moore had set up a two-man tent under the bridge. Towels and clear plastic bags holding his food hung from bushes.

“He made a point to tell me he was an ex-engineer and had lost his wife,” de los Cobos said. “I thought it was unusual to see an engineer homeless. I felt sorry for him.” Yet it was Moore’s fine speech that caught de los Cobos’ attention. “He was well spoken and articulate,” de los Cobos said.

Seven months later, de los Cobos casually turned on “America’s Most Wanted” and saw John Anderson’s face. “And I looked over at my wife and said, ‘I know him,’ and she said ‘You’re kidding.’ ”

He drove to his office that night, double-checked his notes, and called police.

At the 97th Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, Principal Charles Barrett recalled on Friday that day in March, 1986, when he found five grim-faced fifth-graders in his office.

The students had been brought in by a woman who taught third grade. The students allegedly had told her Moore had been fondling them and doing other suspicious things, Barrett said.

“I talked to the teacher, then I questioned the students one by one. They all told similar stories, so I called the police. I had no choice,” he said. He also confronted Moore, who said the children’s stories were not true.

Moore was transferred to a non-teaching post during the investigation, and in February, 1987, was put on unpaid administrative leave. He was fired in absentia in April, 1988, records show, for “immoral and unlawful conduct.”

After a seven-month review, the district attorney’s office said it found insufficient evidence to warrant felony charges, and the case was turned over to the city attorney’s office, which filed the 29 misdemeanor complaints.

Bennett said at the time he thought the case was rejected for “political” reasons. It came in the wake of the controversial McMartin Pre-school molestation case. Bennett quoted a prosecutor telling police investigators: “We don’t want another McMartin monstrosity.”

People in the district attorney’s office denied the McMartin case was mentioned, and said they simply had insufficient grounds for filing. One deputy district attorney called pupils’ statements vague, inconsistent and uncorroborated, and noted that two children had recanted their complaints.

As new interviews were conducted, police turned up six more alleged victims, as well as what were described as incriminating notes, telephone records and corroboration from parents. On Aug. 3, 1987, Moore was charged with 21 felonies. Three days later, police said, he disappeared.

“He wasn’t maintaining contact with anybody from his previous lifestyle,” said Bennett of the man who left his wife, children and grandchildren. “He . . . just wanted to stay out of public view.”

Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this report