TV Reporter Cleared Path for Surrender : Media: KTLA’s Warren Wilson negotiated with mother of the man wanted for questioning in the slayings of two Compton police officers. Although it was tense, the veteran newsman got his scoop.

Nearly 16 hours before the Compton Police Department held a news conference Friday to identify an “armed and dangerous” parolee wanted for questioning in the slayings of two Compton officers, the man’s surrender was being negotiated--by his mother and a local newsman.

The stage was set for the negotiations Thursday, when police went to search the Compton home of Catherine Robinson, 46, in search of her son, Keith Terris Caldwell, 27, who was being sought in connection with the Feb. 22 murders of Officers Kevin Michael Burrell and James Wayne MacDonald.

In an interview Saturday, Robinson said she wanted her son to surrender for questioning because she was afraid he might be killed in a police confrontation if he remained a fugitive.

Yet she was also afraid of “what police would do to him if he turned himself in,” she said. When she expressed fears for her son’s safety to Compton Sgt. Reginald White, he suggested calling KTLA’s Warren Wilson, 58, who may be America’s most-surrendered-to newsman.

She knew Wilson’s name. An African-American journalist with 30 years in local print, radio and television news, Wilson had negotiated the surrender of five other black fugitives who were afraid that they would be brutalized in police custody. Four were murder suspects who have been convicted.

Finding her son was another matter, she said, because he dropped out of sight in October after being implicated in the murder of a cousin. As Compton police began a noon news conference Friday in which they described her son as “armed and dangerous,” Robinson was sending out word to relatives and friends to ask her son to call.

When her son called late Friday, she pleaded with him.

“If you’re in jail, I can visit you there,” she told him. “I don’t like cemeteries.”

But, she said, he had already made up his mind to turn himself in.

“I’ve gotta do it,” he told her over the phone. “I’m afraid to look out any door because they might shoot me.”

It was 8 Friday night--just as “America’s Most Wanted” was showing Keith Caldwell’s face to the nation--that Wilson’s beeper went off as he was having a cocktail with his girlfriend.

When he called Robinson back, she was in tears and her son was on an extension phone.

“Oh God, man, I don’t know if I want to do this,” Wilson said Caldwell told him.

“Look, I have your mother going on air in two hours pleading with you to turn yourself in,” Wilson told him, adding that police had an all-points bulletin out on him.

The details were worked out.

Wilson, long ago decided that he did not want to be in the position of knowing the address of a fugitive if one of these planned surrenders fell through. He told Caldwell to give him just the city--not the location--he was calling from.

Anaheim.

Wilson called for a news crew, phoned Compton police and got a guarantee that Caldwell would not be harmed once in custody. He said police also vowed that they would not intervene. Then Wilson headed south through traffic.

When he arrived in Anaheim, he called Caldwell’s number, only to have Caldwell shout betrayal.

“This is a trap!” Caldwell told him. “There’s a cop outside.”

Wilson feared that Caldwell would run. Moreover, he also felt betrayed until he called Compton police and learned that the officers, who were investigating an unrelated neighborhood dispute, were not from their department.

When he arrived at an Anaheim address to meet Caldwell, the suspect and his mother were at the curb hugging, the mother in tears. (“I knew it would be a long time before I could hug my baby again,” Robinson said later.)

Nervous about the nearby police, Wilson quickly separated the two, checked to make sure Caldwell was not armed, and pushed the man into the Channel 5 TV van.

Cameras were running.

On the way to Compton, the surrender almost went awry for another reason, Wilson said. He called Compton police to arrange the details, and police told him they wanted to call “America’s Most Wanted” because they had an arrangement with the TV show to air the case.

But the show is on the Fox network, and KTLA’s closest competition is Fox affiliate Channel 11 just across the street in Hollywood. In his mind’s eye, he saw the surrender--a noteworthy local scoop--splayed across the Channel 11 news.

“No way,” Wilson said he told them. “This is mine. This is an exclusive. I’m not sharing this with anybody.”

If police insisted on calling the show, Wilson told them, he would turn in Caldwell elsewhere. Police agreed to come to KTLA’s private lot in Hollywood for the surrender, Wilson said. Only CNN, with which KTLA is affiliated, had access to the footage Friday.

It showed a young man in a Raiders cap getting out of a television van as Wilson vouched for his physical health. The man denied repeatedly that he knew anything about the officers’ slayings.

Then a Compton police officer put handcuffs on Caldwell and arrested him on suspicion of murdering his pregnant cousin. One of Robinson’s three other sons is in jail in connection with that murder. Caldwell is on parole after serving a six-year prison term for rape.

“Mama, I know I’m going to jail for what happened to (the cousin), but I don’t want to go to jail for what I didn’t do,” Robinson said Caldwell told her.

With her son in jail, Robinson said, her fear is that he will be framed for a murder he did not commit. “I’m just hoping and praying to God that they investigate and find out who’s responsible for these murders and not put any of it on Keith,” she said.

On Saturday, Compton police continued to say only that Caldwell was wanted for questioning in the police slayings, and declined to label him a suspect. “We’re still pursuing other leads,” said Sgt. Robert J. Baker.

For Wilson, this was a repeat performance.

The first time a suspect surrendered to him, a decade ago, a minister had led him to the man, who had been hiding under a table in a church. The second time, he received an address of a murder suspect from police, knocked on the man’s door, and told him: “Man, you’d better surrender because they consider you armed and dangerous.”

Two other fugitives were wanted for killing cops. One refused to be arrested by a police officer, so Wilson worked out his surrender with the district attorney. Another surrendered after his mother saw him identified on “America’s Most Wanted.”

Wilson once worried whether the public would see him as an arm of police rather than a journalist. But that fear has passed.

“It’s a good feeling to know that people trust you,” he said Saturday. “I guess I can identify with the underdog because of what I’ve had to go through as a black man working in a white world. . . . I guess I take some pride in thinking that maybe someone--a suspect or a police officer--stayed alive because of all this.”