Con Accused in Killings of 2 Women : Crime: Ronald Porter of Escondido is charged on eve of release from state prison. Slayings are part of a series of 45 being probed by a task force.

Ronald Elliot Porter, an Escondido man whom authorities considered so dangerous that they kept him under 24-hour surveillance for 2 1/2 months this year, was charged Monday in the slayings of two women and the attempted murder of five others.

On the eve of his release from state prison in Corcoran for violating parole, Porter, 44, was charged with the murders, murder attempts and three counts of rape with a foreign object in a series of attacks on women in East County dating to 1986.

The announcement concerning Porter, issued by the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force that is investigating the series of crimes, came as no surprise.

Ever since he was sentenced in 1989 to four years in state prison for an attack on 30-year-old prostitute Annette Russell, task force investigators have identified Porter as a suspect in the 1988 slaying of Sandra Cwik.

Porter, a former Escondido auto mechanic, was formally charged Monday in the rape and murder of Cwik, 43, a transient from Florida whose body, like Russell’s, was dumped in the remote East County area of Buckman Springs. Law enforcement authorities concluded that she was assaulted and beaten about a mile from where she was dumped and died of blood loss while trying to reach help after walking barefoot down a rugged road.

He is also charged in the 1986 death of Carol Jane Gushrowski, 26, an El Cajon mother of two who disappeared in June of that year and whose body was found one month later near Old Highway 80 in East County. Gushrowski was on medication and had been suffering from depression. The cause of death was not determined.

The task force announced in 1989 that Porter might be connected to Gushrowski’s death.

Porter also faces attempted-murder charges in the cases of five women described as transients or hitchhikers: Kecia Betts, in November, 1986; Robin Brown and Donna Abbott, on the same day in February, 1988; Betty Bass, in March, 1988; and Maria Weidmark, in May, 1988.

Besides Cwik’s rape, Porter is charged in two others, each of which involved the use of a foreign object.

“For the most part, these women were transients or hitchhikers who were picked up and assaulted,” said Richard Lewis, a task force spokesman and deputy district attorney. “These were all crimes of opportunity, where people would get into his car voluntarily, whether it be a prostitute, hitchhiker, transient or friend. Mr. Porter liked to drive a lot.”

Porter has a history of sexual offenses, including a 1976 conviction for kidnaping and sexual assault involving a 16-year-old male hitchhiker and another conviction for indecent exposure.

In October, 1988, Annette Russell, a prostitute who worked El Cajon Boulevard, was picked up and driven to Buckman Springs, where she was choked until she became unconscious and left on the side of the road. Porter was arrested a short time later after a sheriff’s deputy found Russell and broadcast a description of his car.

Charged with six felony counts--including assault, battery and oral copulation of an unconcious person--Porter pleaded guilty a week before trial to two counts: assault and sexual battery. Prosecutors dropped the four other charges.

Porter entered state prison in April, 1989, and was released 20 months later, still classified as a dangerous felon. While in prison, Porter was interviewed by task force investigators about some of the serial killings.

After his release from prison, task force authorities immediately began around-the-clock surveillance of his Escondido apartment, which Porter shared with a girlfriend.

In an interview at his front door with The Times in February, Porter, a man with spectacles and snow-white hair, said he was being followed by authorities wherever he went. He said he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Because of media publicity surrounding the surveillance and the possibility that he would be charged in one or more killings, Porter lost his job as an automotive mechanic in Escondido.

In late February, he tried to shake the surveillance team by driving against traffic. He was charged with reckless driving and sent back to prison, according to his state probation agent, Suzanne Pelayo.

Porter’s attorney, Terry Kolkey, did not return a telephone call to his office Monday. Family members have said that Porter is being made a scapegoat for the crimes of others.

Although Porter’s arrest is considered a major breakthrough for the task force, which has only one murder conviction to date in a series of 45 slayings that began in 1985, the multiagency investigative group downplayed the news Monday.

The task force, which has held detailed press conferences in the past simply to ask the public’s help in finding witnesses in some of its cases, oddly decided that Porter’s arrest did not merit more than a two-page press release.

Alan (Buzzard) Stevens, 48, an ex-biker who weighs more than 300 pounds and has 196 tattoos, was convicted in October of killing Cynthia McVey, 26, whose body was discovered in 1988 near an isolated part of the Pala Indian Reservation. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Lewis said Stevens may be responsible for three or four more killings, and that he would not rule out the possibility that Porter may be charged with more killings.

“Porter operated in the heart of the district we’re looking at: in East County along the I-8 corridor,” he said. “He is the one we’re charging right now, but we’re looking at other people too.”

Porter is to be arraigned on the two murder charges and other counts later in the week, after he is brought back to San Diego from state prison in Corcoran, near Fresno.

Lewis could not say when the task force--a group of investigators from the San Diego Police Department, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office--would finish its work or how many cases might be solved.

San Diego police are especially interested in solving the murder of Donna Gentile, a police informant and prostitute slain in 1985, shortly after she testified in a Civil Service Commission hearing against two officers. Gentile’s body was found in rural East County, about two miles north of I-8 near Sunrise Highway.