Victims View Photos of 160 Valley Molester Suspects : Crime: Police now say that as many as six of the 32 assaults may be the work of a copycat.

Los Angeles police detectives, pushing on with the long hunt for the Valley Molester, Friday began showing photographs of 160 suspects to victims of the molester, who is blamed for attacks on at least 32 children near Valley schools.

Deputy Police Chief Martin H. Pomeroy said the decision to show the photographs to the victims is a turning point in the exhaustive serial child molestation investigation; after more than three months of expanding their probe and interviewing several hundred suspects, police have winnowed the list to 160, ranked in a general descending order of suspicion.

Now they want to identify prime suspects and zero in on them, said Pomeroy, who commands all San Fernando Valley police divisions.

“We hope to have a positive identification from a number of victims,” he said.

Pomeroy and the four remaining detectives working the case--down from 23 following a rash of more than a dozen attacks in November and December--also said that showing the photos to the victims may help police determine if one man is indeed responsible for all of them. They said Friday that, contrary to previous statements, as many as six of the assaults may be the work of a copycat, with a different modus operandi and getaway car.

Authorities also said most of the 160 suspects, especially those at the top of the list, have either been charged or suspected of sex crimes in the past.

Detectives compiled the collection of 160 photographs from booking mug shots, driver’s license photos and images voluntarily turned over by suspects. “Whatever we can get,” Rhudy said.

But even if a copycat were responsible for several of the assaults, police still believe most of the incidents are the work of one African American male. The victims described him as 35 to 45 years old, about 6 feet tall, weighing between 185 and 210 pounds, with close-cropped hair and perhaps a few days growth of beard, police said.

“We are pretty confident he is among the 160,” LAPD Detective Craig Rhudy said of the molester, “but we don’t know which one he is.”

Police cautioned that even if several of the victims identify one of the men, they will need more than that to charge or convict him, especially because so many of the victims were children who did not get a clear look at their assailant. But detectives said it would help their investigation greatly if the victims can point to one or even several suspects.

“We don’t have any real solid direction to go in,” said Rhudy, who heads a special task force set up three months ago to find the molester, who has struck throughout the Valley in the past year, groping young boys and girls and raping a 9-year-old as she made her way to school in November.

“We’re still looking in a haystack,” Rhudy said. “It’s a smaller haystack than it was before, but it’s still a haystack.”

Police patrol units are still on the lookout for the molester, as are officers assigned to schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District police. Police reiterated Friday that as school routines get back to normal after the earthquake, parents should remain vigilant, walking their children to school or sending them off in groups for safety’s sake.

Even if the molester has halted his activities because he already has been interviewed by police--as some authorities suspect--there are other sexual predators to worry about, Rhudy said. He said one other molester, for instance, is suspected of at least two attempts to get children into his car in recent months, and that the Valley molester was just one of many troubled men who lurk along the pathways that children take to school.

“If a guy is interested in young children,” Rhudy said, “that is a common method, getting them on their way to school.”

Police said they believe a copycat may be at work in the Valley molester case because six of the more recent cases involved an African American driving a burgundy sedan who sometimes struck in the afternoon--in one case in a car with three passengers in it. In the original cases, which began last February, police said, the suspect almost always struck in the mornings and he drove a pickup truck.

In early December, when six additional incidents were disclosed by police, they were considering all the cases to be the work of one man “to err on the side of caution,” Cmdr. John Moran said at the time.

On Friday, Rhudy said: “We think there is a possibility there are two. The m.o. (modus operandi) changed, and so did the vehicle used.”

So far, police have not brought any of the molester suspects into a police station so victims can view them in a lineup. And although a few of the victims already have been shown police composite sketches of the molester and perhaps photos of a suspect or two, detectives stopped circulating images of the suspects early in the investigation, police said.

“We discontinued that because we didn’t want to confuse them by constantly showing them new photographs,” Pomeroy said.

“I must admit there is some frustration mixed in with our optimism,” Pomeroy said. “These cases take a long time sometimes. But I’m still very hopeful there will be an arrest in this case.”