Santa Ana Man Held as Obscene Phone Caller : Crime: The suspect is accused of conducting a reign of terror after as many as 100 women at preschools, hospitals, shopping malls, churches and homes got calls.

A 27-year-old convicted felon from Santa Ana has been arrested for allegedly making as many as 100 bomb threats and obscene phone calls to women at area preschools, churches, shopping malls, hospitals and homes, police said Wednesday.

Joseph Rocha Valenzuela was arrested without incident at his 6th Street home on Friday. He was arraigned Tuesday in Municipal Court in Santa Ana on charges relating to 10 of the phone calls and faces a preliminary hearing on March 26, officials said.

Police did not disclose the arrest until Wednesday.

Valenzuela allegedly conducted a reign of terror against women by using the yellow pages to pick out institutions where it was likely that a woman would answer the phone, police said. Documents used as evidence against Valenzuela were confiscated at his home, but police declined to specify what those documents are.

Investigators were led to Valenzuela by a call made from his home to a tapped line at Doctors Hospital of Santa Ana two weeks ago, Santa Ana police spokeswoman Maureen Haacker said.

Beginning in August and continuing until Feb. 28, when Pacific Bell tracked down Valenzuela’s home phone, police said Valenzuela made scores of obscene phone calls that began with a bomb threat.

He appeared to be taking advantage of the growing number of bomb threats occurring in Orange County after Iraq invaded Kuwait, police said.

Valenzuela allegedly told women that he would blow them up if they didn’t answer his questions. Ninety-nine percent of the questions were sexually explicit, police investigator Linda Faust said.

“I don’t think he’s insane,” Faust said. “I think he knows exactly what he was doing. He wanted to control somebody.”

Indeed, the phone calls, made while law enforcement officials throughout the county were inundated with false bomb threats, forced many schools to evacuate their students.

“The women here were absolutely devastated, and trembled in tears,” said the Rev. Albert Vaters, pastor of the First Assembly of God Church in Santa Ana, which runs a preschool for 105 children.

He said his church and preschool had received almost 20 phone calls from the same man.

During one call, church administrators kept the caller talking until police could arrange to record what was being said.

The recording will be used as evidence in court, Faust said.

Faust said it was on the day after the Iraqi invasion that the Police Department received the first of what would be dozens of complaints from local preschools and churches.

The caller, when hearing a woman’s voice, would claim that a bomb had been planted on the premises and that it was connected to a remote detonator.

The man said he would detonate the bomb if the woman did not answer all his questions. After asking the woman’s age and name, he began asking obscene questions, Faust said.

“It was like he had a script,” Faust said of the predictability of the questions that the caller asked women.

As the bomb threat complaints began adding up, investigators noticed striking similarities.

By autumn, phone calls were also being received by women in hospitals and shopping malls, including MainPlace in Santa Ana, South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa and the Mission Viejo Mall, Faust said.

Faust said the caller used the bomb-threat ploy “as a way to get their attention, to say ‘listen to me.’ They had to listen to what he had to say.”

Valenzuela, who may face additional charges in other cities, was denied bail because he was on parole at the time of his arrest, Sheriff’s Lt. Richard J. Olson said.

Court records show that Valenzuela was first taken into custody on Oct. 14, 1985, after he tried to steal a purse from one woman, molested two others and attacked a fourth with a screwdriver.

He pleaded guilty to those crimes and was sentenced to a year in Orange County Jail but was released early on probation, records show.

In June, 1986, after he violated probation by assaulting a woman who was helping him jump-start his car, probation authorities recommended that he serve time in state prison.

“The defendant appears to represent a very serious threat to the safety of the community,” probation officer Hugh Murphy wrote. “He has established a behavior pattern of prowling parking lots and attempting to sexually assault and rob female victims.”

Valenzuela subsequently served time in Folsom Prison near Sacramento, the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo and the California Institute for Men at Chino, a state Department of Corrections official said.

He was first paroled in May, 1988, but was returned to prison for an unspecified parole violation. He was paroled a second time on April, 2, 1990.

Times staff writer Lily Eng contributed to this report.