Sleeping Intruder Is an Eye-Opener for Burbank Woman

She heard the intruder first--heard him breathing.

Then, Sunday morning, the Burbank woman opened her eyes and saw him--sound asleep beside her in bed.

The 32-year-old woman, whose husband was away on business, quietly gathered up her year-old daughter, asleep next to her, crept from the bedroom and called police. When officers arrived, the man, apparently intoxicated, was still asleep.

Robert Charles Waddell, 41, of Los Angeles was wearing underpants and a blue button-down shirt when he was arrested on suspicion of burglary and trespassing, police said. He told officers he had been drinking and had no idea how he had come to be in the home or wind up in bed upstairs.

“He just remembers drinking somewhere, and that’s the last thing he remembers,” said Sgt. Edward B. Skvarna. “This lady is probably very lucky.”

He declined to discuss Waddell’s past, but said “officers had reasonable cause to believe he may have been there to commit a felony.”

Waddell apparently came in through the front door, which had swelled during the rains and had not been shut tightly by the last person entering the house, said the woman, who was not identified by police. She talked to The Times on condition that she not be identified.

She and her daughter were alone upstairs in the rented house; another renter lives on the ground floor. The woman noticed nothing amiss when she got up to change her daughter’s diaper about 12:30 a.m., Skvarna said.

But during the early morning, the renter downstairs saw someone peer into his bedroom then close the door. He assumed it was the woman or her husband.

The woman awoke around 6 a.m. and found herself staring at the back of a man tucked under the covers in the king-sized bed. “Because I had the baby, I think I kept myself sane,” she said. “I just got up quietly and got out.”

She alerted the other renter. “I said: ‘Quick, there’s somebody in my bed, and I don’t think it’s my husband,’ ” she recalled.

To make sure, they went upstairs and took another look. “Who are you?” the renter asked. But the man only mumbled.

The pair returned downstairs and called police.

“If you step back objectively,” the woman said, “you think: ‘This is the craziest thing I ever heard, waking up and finding someone in bed.’ ”