Serial Child Molester’s Rampage Ends With Arrest, Indiana Police Say : Abductions: Suspect confessed to at least eight cases in five states. He sought victims in small towns.

Once, in the course of his cunning rampage through small-town America, one of the young girls David Lee Thompson molested made him cry.

He assaulted the 5-year-old several times along the 100-mile drive from her Illinois home. At one point that night, before releasing her with enough cash to call her parents, Thompson told the girl to get some sleep.

Before she did, she asked God to help Thompson, and she told him he could help himself by throwing away pornographic magazines that were in the van.

“He talked about how he even sat up front and cried,” said Detective Barry Story of the Wells County sheriff’s office. “But what happened after she fell asleep? He went back and did it again.”

And that was not the only time.

Thompson has confessed in explicit detail to at least eight child molestation cases in five states, though the full extent of his spree may never be known.

Thompson’s job was delivering vans. He plotted his interstate routes, he told police, by picking out-of-the-way towns where he could seek victims.

And throughout 1991, he called a missing children’s hot line in San Francisco from pay phones, telling savage stories of children he said he had molested and killed. He called himself “the Child Cannibal.”

There is no evidence that the 40-year-old Thompson killed anyone; later, when he led police to a place in the Arizona desert where he claimed to have buried more than a dozen dismembered girls, there were no bodies.

But there is plenty of evidence of Thompson’s other crimes. He has given precise directions to houses where girls were molested, and his accounts of the crimes--he is accused of forcing the girls to engage in oral sex--has been nearly identical to those of the victims.

“He certainly has a world of problems,” said Thompson’s court-appointed attorney in Wells County, Linda Wagoner. She would not comment further.

Thompson is accused of crimes in five Indiana counties. He pleaded guilty in one Indiana case on Dec. 17, and faces a maximum of 86 years prison when he is sentenced on Feb. 2.

He has been charged in Mt. Vernon, Mo., and Palmer, Mass., and charges are expected in Marshall, Ill. Officials in Half Moon, N.Y., have declined to pursue allegations that involve a 2-year-old girl; the other girls were between the ages of 4 and 8.

After his arrest in Waco, Tex., on July 1, Thompson confessed to only one attack. He often told police he had “done so many bad things in his life” and wanted to talk about them, but he refused until late October.

“He was getting ready to go to court one day and he said, ‘Barry, I’ve got to talk, I’ve got to get this off my chest,’ ” Story recalled.

In a corner of Bluffton Detective Scott Gilliam’s tiny, cluttered office is a cardboard box that holds Thompson’s files. Inside are more than a dozen cassette tapes of Thompson’s confessions; he has hinted there is more to tell.

“If you just sat and talked to him about anything, you’d probably like him,” Gilliam said. “Then you talk to him about the details of what he’s done. . . . “

Born in Georgetown, Ky., Thompson moved to Indiana when he was 11. He has told police he was molested as a child, which he claims pushed him toward a youthful fascination with pornography.

He read detective novels in which children were raped and killed. “He began fantasizing about that,” Story said.

Thompson was charged in 1973 with felony assault in a case involving a young Ohio girl, and in 1982, he was charged with phone harassment, a misdemeanor, in a case involving a young Indiana girl.

Three years later, Thompson was accused of molesting his stepson and stepdaughter. He spent four years in prison after pleading guilty to the attack on the girl.

In December, 1991, he was arrested on an attempted burglary charge in Hewitt, Tex., and spent eight months in the county jail. He since has told police he broke into the home to molest a 5-year-old girl.

By that time, he had been at work delivering vans for a year and a half. He was roving the countryside, looking for victims.

With fewer than 9,000 residents, Bluffton is the largest town in which Thompson is accused. In each case, Thompson would walk through neighborhoods until he spotted two or three possible victims. He would find out where they lived, return late at night and sneak through an unlocked window or door.

Sometimes he would molest the girls in the house, other times he would take them out. In Bluffton, last May, he returned the 5-year-old girl to her home after molesting her.

Wherever he struck, fear followed. Story’s 6-year-old daughter is close friends with the victim in Bluffton. “She kept asking me, ‘Are we going to be safe in our house?’ ” Story said.

He began locking his windows and doors for the first time. His three children still pray each night that God will protect them while they sleep.

“It has taken away some of that small-town, hometown effect,” said Gilliam.

In his repeated calls to the San Francisco hot line, Thompson claimed responsibility for the April, 1991, disappearance of a 4-year-old girl in Tyler, Tex.; police say he had no connection to it.

In fact, Thompson’s first call to San Francisco led to his downfall--he used his sister’s phone in Indiana, and within seconds he realized his mistake.

“It was a 10-second phone call, and then he realized we could trace that call to his sister’s house and he hung up almost immediately,” Story said.

“He made that one fatal mistake. If it hadn’t been for that, he may still be out there.”

As it turned out, he was not in jail for good--on Nov. 16, he escaped briefly from a Ft. Wayne psychiatrist’s office. He was arrested without incident in Valparaiso, 100 miles away, and faces kidnaping and other charges.

He told police he escaped just for the excitement.

“He said he just wanted to run down the road one more time,” Story said.