Burglary Try Led Police to Troubled Suspect : Suspect: Cleophus Prince Jr. is characterized as a troubled child who became an equally troubled man.

A day after his arrest, the picture of the Alabama man suspected of killing five women in Clairemont and University City was that of a troubled child who became a troubled man frequently in conflict with the law.

Three months after his court-martial and discharge from the Navy for larceny, Cleophus Prince Jr. is believed to have stabbed to death Tiffany Paige Schultz, a 20-year-old student at San Diego State University.

Police said the 23-year-old man--arrested Sunday in his native Birmingham, Ala.--moved into the Buena Vista Gardens apartments in Clairemont two blocks from where Schultz lived less than a month before her body was found on Jan. 12, 1990.

Records show that Prince lived at 3341 Clairemont Drive, a few doors from Janene Marie Weinhold, who was killed Feb. 16 last year. Weinhold was a Buena Vista Gardens tenant who lived at 3301 Clairemont Drive.

Her father, Raymond Weinhold, told The Times Monday that police believe the killer followed his daughter from the laundry room to her apartment, where he stabbed her more than 30 times.

Police believe the killer saw Schultz sunbathing, Weinhold said, and followed her home to the nearby Canyon Ridge complex, where she was stabbed more than 50 times.

Weinhold said police told him the killer saw 18-year-old Holly Suzanne Tarr swimming in the Buena Vista Gardens pool and then followed her to her brother’s apartment, where, she, too, was stabbed to death.

The deaths of the three women in Clairemont appear to be more crimes of opportunity than carefully planned slayings. James Alan Fox, a Boston-based expert on serial killings, said the Clairemont slayings--and those of 42-year-old Pamela Gail Clark and her 18-year-old daughter, Amber, in University City on Sept. 13--appear to be the work of a “disorganized” killer.

Disorganized serial killers, he said, are characterized by random, impulsive behavior.

The suspect in the San Diego case, Cleophus Prince Jr., was 3 years old when his father was sent to prison for the first time. His parents later divorced.

Cleophus Prince Sr. spent 14 years of a 40-year sentence in Alabama state prison for second-degree murder and grand larceny, authorities in Birmingham said Monday. Although he was never convicted, the father was arraigned in 1984 on a charge of raping an 18-year-old woman. His wife at the time--the stepmother of Cleophus Prince Jr.--was also arrested in the case.

The elder Prince is now being supervised by parole officers after a first-degree charge of receiving stolen property, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles said Monday.

His son, Cleophus Jr., grew up in the impoverished Gate City area of Birmingham, which high school administrator Elbert Morrow described Monday as “a pretty rough neighborhood. How rough is rough? Deadly.”

Morrow was the assistant principal at the now-defunct Banks High School, where he said Cleophus Prince Jr. attended class but never graduated. He remembers him as an excellent basketball player and “a jovial-type fellow. Real short for his age, though.”

Morrow said Prince never created “any major problems” in school and “was not a hostile kid.” He said he remembered “paddling him a few times, but he wasn’t as bad a disciplinary case as some of the others.”

Prince entered the Navy in Montgomery, Ala., in 1987 and received his training at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, Navy spokeswoman Bobbie Carleton said Monday. He went to San Diego in July, 1987, Carleton said, and was stationed at Miramar Naval Air Station, where he worked as an aviation structural mechanic.

Carleton said his duties consisted mainly of chalking wheels and “carrying tie-down chains, general flight-line duties.” But his time in the Navy was characterized by disciplinary problems, and he was court-martialed in October, 1989, Carleton said.

He was convicted of larceny and spent 27 days in the brig at the 32nd Street Naval Station, she added, after which he was recommended for discharge. The discharge came after the court-martial, and two months later, Prince moved into the Buena Vista Gardens apartments.

April Weyh, who rented Prince his two-bedroom unit on Clairemont Drive, said “he seemed like a friendly kind of guy, like the guy next door, kind of. He would always say hello.”

She said he moved out of the apartment complex shortly after Tarr’s death. He told her he was tired of police harassing him and others in the neighborhood just because they were black.

The assistant manager of the Top of the Hill apartments on Orange Avenue in East San Diego told The Times on Monday that Prince rented a unit from her in early May, shortly after leaving Buena Vista Gardens. She said he gave 30 days’ notice in late January and moved out Feb. 24.

The assistant manager, who asked not to be identified, described Prince as “a very nice person,” an assessment with which a male and female tenant agreed.

The couple, who asked not to be quoted by name, said they had known Prince only a short time but described him as a friend whose humor and generosity they appreciated.

“My truck got stranded one night,” the man said. “I couldn’t start it for nothing. It was dark, and I didn’t have a flashlight. He went over there, and in 30 seconds got it started. He told me he used to be a mechanic back in Alabama and said he knew a lot about cars. He was constantly fixing my brother’s car for him.

“There ain’t many people you could call in the middle of the night and ask for a jump, especially if they had to work the next day.”

The man said he thought Prince worked as a construction worker, but state records show that he was unemployed for his last 10 months in San Diego, drawing a monthly benefits check from the state of $495.

The couple said Prince lived with a woman for part of his stay at Top of the Hill. They said they didn’t know her name, “but he definitely had a girlfriend,” the woman said.

The San Diego Tribune on Monday quoted the apartment manager as identifying the girlfriend and roommate as 18-year-old Charla M. Lewis. The paper quoted the manager as saying that, on a rental application, Lewis wrote that she and Prince left the Clairemont Drive address because of “The murders in (the) area.”

Asked if Prince exhibited a dark side, the male friend and fellow tenant said, “He was cool. He was a compulsive liar, but he was cool. Anything you said, he had a story to top it.”

The couple said the widely circulated composite drawing of the serial killer looked “nothing like” Prince. Roger Appell, Prince’s Birmingham attorney, said Monday that he was “astonished” Prince looked so different from the drawing in the composite.

“If you asked somebody to draw up two different people, the composite and a sketch of my client is what you would draw,” Appell said. “The guy in the composite looks to be about 16 years old, thin, with bushy hair. My client is 23 and is stocky with short hair. The composite looks like a boy. My client is a man.”

Appell said he was not a court-appointed attorney, that he had been hired--and paid--by Prince’s father, Cleophus Prince Sr., and his mother, Dorothy Prince, who are now divorced. Appell said he expected Prince to be extradited to San Diego but could not say when. He said he would hire a San Diego attorney to represent Prince, but he had no name.

Appell said he was a friend of Prince’s father, whose second-degree murder conviction and prison sentence were, he noted, the byproduct of self-defense. He said the father’s 1984 arrest for rape was “a totally bogus charge,” from which he was cleared.

Appell said the younger Prince is innocent and that he would be cleared of all charges.

“He’s holding up fairly well,” Appell said. “Considering that he’s charged with being a serial killer, he’s doing great. That would be quite upsetting to anyone.”

Times staff writer Russell Ben-Ali contributed to this article.