Volunteers Hit Streets in Hunt for Molester : Crime: Hundreds distribute composite drawings of the suspect around elementary schools throughout the Valley. Most are recruited from Neighborhood Watch programs.

Braving a cold and rainy morning, hundreds of volunteers fanned into neighborhoods around the San Fernando Valley’s elementary schools Saturday, handing out composite drawings of the suspected serial child molester who has been stalking schoolchildren since February.

The volunteers, mostly recruited from Neighborhood Watch programs, assembled between 8 and 10 a.m. at the Los Angeles Police Department’s five Valley divisions. There, they picked up stacks of the leaflets and broke into small groups, each assigned to a different elementary school.

Walking the neighborhoods around Serrania Avenue Elementary School in Woodland Hills, Lucy and Frans Verschoor came face to face with snarling Dobermans and suspicious homeowners who peeked out from windows demanding to know who they were. But, as soon as they mentioned the molester, doors opened.

“People seemed to like it,” said Verschoor, who had never walked door-to-door before. “They all made positive comments.”

Lt. John Dunkin, officer in charge of press relations for the Valley Bureau’s molester task force, said about 400 volunteers distributed most of the Police Department’s 100,000 leaflets. All of the Valley’s approximately 130 public elementary schools were targeted, Dunkin said. Police plan to distribute more of the leaflets this week at public and private schools.

By midday Saturday, the task force had received 50 phone tips prompted by the leaflets, Dunkin said. “People are seeing this and we’re getting calls.”

Dunkin said a small number of the calls were from tipsters who said they had just seen someone who matched the drawings. None of those led to an arrest, he said.

More of the calls were from people who knew someone who matched the drawings. The investigation of those tips would begin with records searches and could take several days, Dunkin said.

“We can eliminate or narrow down the possibilities substantially by doing some basic investigative work here,” he said.

The leaflets contained three composite drawings of the suspected molester, who police have concluded has stalked 32 girls and boys across the Valley, molesting many of them and raping a 9-year-old Canoga Park girl.

Dunkin conceded that the process of identification will be complicated because the three drawings, representing different victims’ perception of the man, exhibit considerable differences in facial features. One, for instance, has wider cheeks and a broader forehead than the others, one has a longer chin, and yet another has wider eyes.

“That is the problem you have any time you have an investigation like this,” Dunkin said. “It is compounded when you have a lot of victims.”

He said the final identification of a suspect would be drawn from a pattern of characteristics, including scars, speech and behavior.

In spite of the discrepancies in the drawings, Dunkin said, police believe one man will eventually be tied by identification to most--though probably not all--of the attacks.

“What we’re going to find is that some of these cases we’ve identified and believe he’s involved in, we’re going to find out he’s not, and some we haven’t linked him to we’ll find he is involved in,” Dunkin said.

The investigation of the molestations, first made public in mid-November, has grown into one of the largest deployments of officers since the notorious Night Stalker and Hillside Strangler murder cases. More than 100 officers and dozens of detectives have been assigned to the task force.

When police decided to call on the public for help, the Neighborhood Watch system provided a large and reasonably well-organized force that could be quickly mobilized.

At each of the five divisions, senior lead officers who work with the Neighborhood Watch groups placed calls to their liaisons, setting in motion telephone chains that reached hundreds of people in hours.

By 7:45 a.m. Saturday about 100 people had gathered behind the municipal building on Vanowen Street in Reseda where West Valley officers randomly handed out 36 packets, each containing 380 flyers and a map of streets around one of the division’s elementary schools.

Although they were instructed only to drop the leaflets on doorsteps, most rang every doorbell along their routes. “It’s a marvelous idea,” Frans Verschoor said after one homeowner commended him for doing his part to capture the molester.