‘Tip Sheets’ Try to Ferret Out Fugitives

The long days started when Grandma didn’t bring Zackaree home as she was supposed to. Michelle Hatch knew that her mother-in-law blamed her for the recent suicide of Hatch’s husband. Now, Barbara Mann had taken a $300 advance on her paycheck, said mysterious farewells to friends--and slipped into nowhere with her 4-year-old grandson.

For 1 1/2 years, Hatch searched for them. She contacted police and missing-children’s groups. She passed out pictures. She waited for the phone to ring.

Then, a few months ago, Hatch posted photos of her son and mother-in-law in a local tabloid, Crime Report.

Within days, two calls came in. A man had seen a boy who looked like Zackaree in the back seat of a car. A woman called and said she’d seen the pair at a local mall.

Then, late in January, a third tip led police to a home in Indiana, where Mann was arrested and Zackaree was found safe. Mann pleaded guilty to custodial interference and is scheduled for sentencing next week.

Stories like these are becoming more common across the country as law enforcement and missing-persons organizations, fed up with milk cartons and the post office bulletin board, turn to a feisty new army of community crime tabloids to finger criminals on the lam.

Handed out in supermarkets, convenience stores and police stations, these tabloids pick up where television’s “America’s Most Wanted” leaves off: the suspected small-time check forgers, child-stealers, rapists, liquor-store robbers and carjackers who could fill up police fugitive lists for years.

The theory, say publishers of papers like Crime Report, is that the criminals who plague communities most are likely to live within those very neighborhoods; you might see them at the dry cleaner; they might come into your coffee shop; they probably go to the mall.

Crime Report has been responsible for 284 felony fugitive arrests and the location of 29 missing children since it started in September 1992. Other tabloids in communities like Tampa Bay, Fla.; Minneapolis; Scottsdale, Ariz. and Alexandria, Va., claim similar successes.

Seattle’s Crime Report goes a step further by publishing the names, photos and addresses of repeat sex offenders, raising a host of troubling new journalistic issues about privacy, rehabilitation and potential vigilantism.

But community groups and civil rights organizations have embraced the idea of placing the names and photographs of fugitives before the public. The tabloids have been the darlings of the police, earning letters of commendation from local departments and the FBI.

“The very first issue of Crime Report that hit the streets, we had our first arrest within about 10 minutes,” said Seattle Police Detective Myrle Carner, coordinator of a local law enforcement group that tracks wanted felons.

“I couldn’t even guess the number of people we’ve arrested as a result of putting them in that magazine,” added FBI Special Agent David Burroughs, head of the Seattle region’s Fugitive Task Force. Publishers say these tabloids empower communities that have felt helpless to act against the growing toll of crime.

“All too often, we’ve asked people to take a stand, to do something. But we never give them the tools with which to do it,” said Caroline Jett-Donovan, co-publisher of the Crusader in Tampa Bay. “With the Crusader, we’re hopefully providing a safe tool with which concerned citizens can take their communities back.”

Fears Intensify

In Seattle, Valerie Vavrick, a graphic designer, and Bruce Dunlap, a Boeing Co. technical instructor, found themselves overwhelmed by a city that seemed to be getting more dangerous every year. Dunlap grew up in the small Washington coastal town of Forks; it wasn’t a place where a known criminal was likely to be able to hide. “But around the city, it seemed like everybody was just anonymous,” he said. “It seemed like I was becoming more concerned than I’d ever been. I was thinking: Should I go to downtown Seattle? And if I do, I want to get out by dark.”

Vavrick had some friends who went Christmas shopping and had about $1,400 worth of gifts stolen from the back of the car. “Their whole Christmas was gone.” She began doing research on crime and learned there were estimated to be more than 6,000 fugitives living in Seattle’s King County, “and nobody knew how to look for them. We figured they were living next door to someone.”

The two of them hit on the idea of a free tabloid--a local equivalent of “America’s Most Wanted,” the Fox Television program that premiered in 1988. But Crime Report and the other tabloids have the benefit of a printed page, a face readers could go back to if they saw a guy who looked familiar.

Fifteen minutes after one issue hit the street, a phone tip led to the arrest of a serial arsonist in Tacoma.

In several cases, fugitives have turned themselves in after being featured in Crime Report or in TV spots sponsored by the tabloid’s publishers and a local law enforcement group. In November, Lexi Kayleen Brunette, wanted on several counts of forgery, theft and narcotics, walked up to a Seattle Police Department desk officer and said, “I don’t know if you know who I am, but I’ve just been on TV and I just thought I better turn myself in.”

Burroughs of the FBI recalls a phone tip that a wanted felon featured in Crime Report was staying at a hotel near the airport. The manager did not recognize the tabloid picture. But a man walking by saw it and hurried away. Agents stopped him. “He looks sort of like the guy in the picture, but not exactly,” Burroughs said. The man denied he was the person in the photo. But, finally, he directed them to another page.

“He was [not the man we came for, but he was] in the same magazine, it turned out. I guess he figured we were going to pick him up, one way or another.”

Mike Kelso, who runs a printing shop in downtown Seattle, recalls a day last August when a Seattle bicycle patrol officer walked into his shop and picked up a copy of Crime Report.

“He’s looking through the pages, and he says, ‘Jeez, this guy’s right around the corner.’ So he hopped on his bike and went around the corner and arrested the guy.”

The Tampa Bay-based Crusader is attempting to set up a national network through which 34 community tabloids may be launched throughout the country in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, Denver and Houston. Jett-Donovan and her husband, both unemployed actors, provide start-up kits for a small fee.

She says the couple make enough money to keep publishing and pay themselves a small salary, an assertion greeted with skepticism by other publishers, many of whom have sought nonprofit status and sunk thousands of dollars of their own into the enterprises.

Little Profit

Crime-solving, it seems, doesn’t pay. Dunlap has put $25,000 in savings into Crime Report; Keith Hammond, publisher of a bulletin on released sex offenders in Minnesota, figures he’s spent $60,000. Some of it is recouped in advertising. Nintendo sponsors a page in Crime Report with tips for parents on how to recognize drug use by their children.

A few companies occasionally take out sponsorship ads. But paid subscriptions are few (the papers are available free), and most tabloids survive on donations.

The publishers say it’s less of a business than a mission.

“We were very naive,” Jett-Donovan said. “We figured if there was a warrant out for somebody’s arrest, the cops went out and got him. We found out in our area there were 125,000 outstanding warrants. How do you know who these people are? They can live next door to you; how many times have you seen on the news where the neighbor said, ‘I had no idea; he seemed like a really nice guy’ ”?

Since it started three years ago, the Crusader claims to have produced tips leading to 577 arrests and the location of 87 missing children, although it is likely some of those arrests came from other sources. A robber who held up the patrons in a local restaurant was picked up within 48 hours. A swindler who had defrauded Floridians out of about $22 million was arrested at the airport after his mug shot appeared in the Crusader.

“What we’re doing is, we’re taking the wanted posters off the walls of the post office and putting them in the hands of the citizens,” Jett-Donovan said. “When I talk to people across the country, people say, ‘I’m fed up with this. Law enforcement is overwhelmed; we’ve got to be able to do something.’ . . .The U.S. Justice Department says this year, one out of four of us will be a victim of crime. In Florida three years ago, people were calling us the ‘Gunshine State.’ We were overwhelmed, and people just said, ‘That’s Florida’s problem.’ We said, ‘No, it’s the country’s problem, and they may not have it yet, but they will.’ ”

It is a venture not without personal risk. John Johansen, a merger and acquisitions consultant who publishes Crime Prevention Bulletin in Alexandria, Va., received a telephone threat shortly after launching the publication. “You’re going to die,” said the caller.

“I’m not a victim in a usual sense,” Johansen said. “I’ve never had my house broken into. I never had a radio stolen from my car. But I’m a victim in the sense we all are. I have to take precautions whenever I go out. I have to pay more at the cash register because of crime.”

In the convenience stores and supermarkets of White Center, a southern suburb of Seattle that is home to several of the area’s largest federal housing projects, Crime Report usually disappears on the same day it’s distributed.

“We love that magazine. We love it! We’ve seen a couple of people in there that have actually been in this store,” said a checker at the local Albertson’s, who asked not to be identified. “What I always say is, ‘Look in there to see who your neighbor really is.’ ”

Another woman credited Crime Report with helping her learn what had happened to her brother, who disappeared in West Seattle in 1986. The news was bad--he was dead--but it was the first news the family had gleaned in nearly a decade.

Little Follow-Up

Some civil rights groups have complained that the publications don’t do enough follow-up; they place someone’s name and face before the public, but they never report, for example, when a suspect is acquitted.

And the American Civil Liberties Union and the King County public defender are critical of Crime Report and other publications that list identities and addresses of recently released sex offenders whom law enforcement consider likely to repeat their crimes.

Washington is one of only a few states that have mandatory registration and community notification of released sex offenders.

Civil rights groups say publishing the addresses of released sex offenders raises the potential for vigilantism and makes it harder to achieve the goal of integrating offenders who have served their time into society.

Doug Honig of the American Civil Liberties Union recalled the case of convicted child molester Joseph Gallardo, whose Lynwood, Wash., house was burned down in 1993 after neighbors were notified he was about to return.

The local sheriff’s department had issued a notice that Gallardo had “sadistic and deviant sexual fantasies, which include torture, sexual assault, human sacrifice, bondage and the murder of young children” and had “a strong likelihood of re-offense.”

Rouse Anxiety

Publishing warnings and addresses makes it more likely the offender will go someplace else, or be unable to get the help--a job and a place to live--needed for rehabilitation, Honig said.

“The other possibility is, you simply rouse an anxiety in the community without doing anything about it. What does deal with [crime] more effectively are community block-watch programs,” he said.

California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren aroused controversy last month when he released a photo directory of 912 people deemed to be California’s most serious convicted child molesters.

Vavrick said notifying communities about potentially dangerous offenders in their midst helps neighborhoods police themselves. In some cases, she said, Crime Report readers have found sex offenders pictured in the tabloid loitering around schools and parks and have telephoned police.

“We’ve been very careful. We put in a large notice about the importance of not engaging in any vigilantism. We stress the importance of people acting responsibly with this information,” she said.

Hammond, who began publishing a sex offender tabloid in Minnesota after his wife was raped in 1991, told of the long years of pain his family endured as his wife struggled to recover. That, he said, is why he doesn’t flinch at the money he sunk into the enterprise. “My wife was raped. Period.”

Hammond said he takes precautions. He doesn’t print the address of listed offenders. He doesn’t include juveniles. But, in the end, he said, “It’s basically common sense: Who are you going to protect, the offender or the people? It’s an open-and-shut question, and I think it needs to be asked more around this country.”