The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 102

CALIFORNIA B3 LOSANGELESTIMES Aman suspected of being part of a ring that stole about 100,000 doses of the drug Oxy- Contin in as many as 30 Southern California pharmacy burglaries has been arrested, Orange County authorities said Thursday. DNA evidence gathered from blood left at the scene of an August theft at a Walgreens in Mission Viejo led police to Brian Allen Richard, 26, of Long Beach, said Orange County Department spokesman Jim Amormino. investigators suspect that Richard was of awell-organized ring of Amormino said. knew exactly where the stuff was, and were in and out in less than two OxyContin, a prescription pain medication, has become a popular street drug in recent years. Authorities recovered none of the pills stolen in the thefts in which Richard is suspected of playing a part.

Most of the stolen pills probably sold for $35 to $40 each with some more powerful dosages going for $100 each, Amormino said. At $35 a pill, the haul would have been worth arrest will definitely put a dent in the supply of Oxy- Contin on the Amormino said. The pharmacy burglaries began in June and continued into September. They included six in Orange County and others in Fontana, Long Beach, Palm Springs and San Bernardino. Richard was arrested Wednesday night at his San Bernardino-area home.

He was being held without bail at the Orange County Jail. mike.anton@latimes.com Man is arrested in OxyContin thefts O.C. officials suspect he is part of a ring behind up to 30 pharmacy burglaries. By Mike Anton Times Staff Writer SUSPECT: Brian Allen Richard, 26, of Long Beach. Orange County Department QUITE THE WEB SIGHT Allen J.

Schaben Los Angeles Times A spider dangles from a tree overlooking scenic Main Beach in Laguna Beach. Visit www.latimes to see a photo gallery of one of Southern greatest assets: its beaches. had died in his sleep. She recalled thinking at the time that at least he would be free of the torment been feeling since losing much of his memory and independence to a severe stroke a year earlier. But the day after her husband was buried she received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as Kittower said the woman told her that a fellow Silverado employee had punched her husband in the eye and wrapped a towel around his head as if he were trying to suffocate him shortly before he died.

The woman also made an anonymous call to the Lost Hills station and sent an anonymous letter to a nearby fire station. Investigators were not able to identify the tipster but interviewed nearly 80 employees, family members and others. Sgt. Bill Cotter of the homicide bureau declined to provide details about the type of abuse or number of alleged victims because prosecutors in the district office were still considering which charges to file against various defendants in the case. Rita Kittower said she was familiar with someof the employees who were arrested.

know those she said, adding that she had no inkling that they may have been mistreating her husband. would never come to my mind to think about it, not in a place like she said. nephew, Paul Zwerdling, said the family has become deeply disillusioned with Silverado, which Rita Kittower paid about $75,000 a year to care for her husband. Despite the circumstances surrounding death, Zwerdling said Silverado sent his widow two questionnaires asking how enjoyed his stay at the facility. He said that officials from the home have been less than forthcoming with the family and that thefa- investigationconcluded that staff had done nothing improper in connection with death.

Zwerdling said the family is planning to offer a $10,000 reward for more information regarding treatment at the facility. In addition to Ulloa, those arrested were Luis Arrelleano, 21, of Winnetka, Juan Soto, 21, of Winnetka and Maria Gomez, 34, of Oxnard. Cotters said detectives are still hoping to speak with the initial informant and asked that that person or anyone with information about that person call the homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500. scott.glover@latimes.com Four former employees of an upscale Calabasas assisted- living facility were arrested Thursday on suspicion of elder abuse stemming from the suspicious death of an 80-year-old resident last year, authorities said. The four are suspected of abusing Elmore Kittower, a retired engineer whose body was exhumed in November after an anonymous whistle-blower from Silverado Senior Living told family and authorities that he was the victim of foul play.

Afteran 11-month investigation, Los Angeles County Department homicide detectives said they have evidence that 20-year-old Cesar Ulloa physically assaulted Kittower in the minutes before his death and had been tormenting him for months beforehand. Ulloa, who faces potential charges of elder abuse and torture, is being held on $1-million bail. Detectives described Ulloa as the alleged ringleader of a group of former Silverado employees who routinely harassed and abused Kittower and several other residents of the hillside facility, which specializes in caring for and other memory-impaired patients. The L.A. County office ultimately determined that Kittower died of a blood clot in his lung, but indicated he had suffered blunt force trauma though it was not an immediate cause of death, according to a source familiar with the findings.

is something that saddens us very much. We are outraged at the possibility that these allegations are possibly said Mark Mostow, a spokesman for Silverado. company has zero tolerance for any mistreatment of our 84-year-old widow, Rita, said she was grateful to detectives for pursuing the case but was devastated by their findings. I heard what they did to him it just about killed she said of her husband of 49 years. get it out of my mind.

a sore that Rita Kittower said she was initially told by a staff member at Silverado that her husband Four jailed in alleged elder abuse Coroner finds signs of abuse on a man, 80, who died at Calabasas assisted-living home. Ex-workers are held. By Scott Glover Times Staff Writer part of it. It was essential to his Flores would not divulge the location of the planned excavation or say when it would begin. But she did describe the site as acompaction hole.

Freeway engineers use compaction holes during construction to determine if the underlying soil can support the structures being built above them. The description Edwards initially gave detectives was so broad it fit most parts of the freeway, which connects Thousand Oaks andSimi Valley. But after police went public with the long-forgotten cases last year, tips came in that helped them narrow the field considerably, Flores said. Aretired Caltrans engineer contributed a personal log containing notes with precise descriptions of the progress of the freewayconstruction. had weather, the phase of construction and their Flores said.

helped us correlate the time period when Roger went missing on Dec. 14, 1968, to what was going withthe construction. It also helped confirm details of killing and verified details that Edwards had mentioned, like getting his truck stuck in the mud as he buried the boy. logs showed it was raining for the entire week before the murder, which would mean nobody was around at the Flores said. also helped us pinpoint a location where construction was taking The next step was to use cadaver dogs.

Two sets of search dogs brought in at different times homed in on the same patch of ground next to the freeway, Flores said. Investigators on the trail of anotorious serial killer say they are close to locating the remains of yet another child victim, who disappeared four decades ago. Authorities plan to excavate asite in Ventura County in hopes of finding the remains of Roger Dale Madison, a 16-year- old boy whom Mack Ray Edwards confessed to stabbing. In 1970, Edwards, a 51-year- oldheavy-equipment operator, told Los Angeles police that he had killed six boys and girls over a 15-year period. He later told a Los Angeles County jailer that the real number of victims was closer to 18.

Police believe he buried the children near the freeway construction sites where he worked during freeway-building boom of the 1950s and Each body they find gives them more information about his methods, which could link him to other crimes. Edwards hanged himself in aSan Quentin State Prison cell in 1971. But before his death, he provided key details that led investigators to the site where he disposed of his first victim, 8- year-old Stella Darlene Nolan, who disappeared in 1953. Her remains were discovered in Downey, under 8 feet of earth, near a bridge abutment under the 5Freeway. Mack, who moved to Los Angeles from Arkansas, also described killing Madison, a friend and classmate of his teenage son.

He told detectives he used a bulldozer to dispose of the youth somewhere along the 23 Freeway in Thousand Oaks when the roadway was under construction. was his intimate knowledge of these often desolate sites, where it was easy to dispose of a body with little danger of discovery, that I think allowed him to kill said Det. Vivian Flores of the Los Angeles Police Department. work was a huge Detectives also got positive readings when they tested soil in a machine that identifies chemicals found in decomposing human remains. They also used ground-penetrating radar, which showed an anomaly adjacent to the locations where the dogs had reacted.

The upcoming operation may take more than a week and is likely to include several dozen law enforcement and forensics personnel from agencies including the LAPD, Pasadena police, Los Angeles County and Ventura County departments, Caltrans and the FBI. Forensic scientists from as far away as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee also will be on hand. The effort to reconstruct what happened on the 23 Freeway began several years ago, prompted by the determined and enterprising work of Pasadena author Weston DeWalt. He was researching the 1957 disappearance of 8-year-old Tommy Bowman in the Arroyo Seco when he made the link between a sketch in a police file of aman seen following the boy to anewspaper photo he had seen of Edwards being led into a courtroom in handcuffs. In 2006, DeWalt interviewed widow and other relatives.

A family member showed him a letter from Edwards to his wife, Mary, written whileon death row. was going to add one more to the first to police, he wrote, that was the Tommy Bowman boy that disappeared in Pasadena. But I felt I would really make a mess of that one so Ileft him out of Last year, the LAPD, Pasadena and Torrance police, the state Department of Justice and the Los Angeles County Department went public with their investigation into the decades-old child murders. The first of the six killings Edwards confessed to was in 1953. He snatched her from a Norwalk refreshment stand where her mother worked.

Days after he confessed, police found the remains near the freeway abutment in Downey. Edwards told police that three years later he killed his 11-year-old sister-in- law and her 13-year-old friend. He said he did not kill again until the late 1960s, when he moved to Sylmar with his wife, son and daughter. In December 1968, he said, he broke into aGranada Hills home, planning to kidnap a 13-year-old girl, but ended up shooting her 16-year-old brother, Gary Rocha, instead. That same month, Madison vanished.

Edwards also confessed to killing Donald Allen Todd, another neighborhood boy who was found shot and sexually abused in May 1969. Detectives believe Edwards may be responsible for the deaths of three more children: Bruce Kremen, 7, who disappeared in July 1960 from a YMCA camp in the Angeles National Forest and was never found; and two 11-year-old girls from Torrance, Karen Lynn Tompkins and Dorothy Gale Brown. Both girls vanished within a year of each other. Although Tompkins was never seen again, strangled body was found by recreational divers off Corona del Mar on July 4, 1962. Edwards told police he decided to go to the hill Divisionstation and confess after he made a mistake.

On March 6, 1970, he said, he and a 15-year-old accomplice kidnapped three sisters, ages 12 to 14, from their Sylmar home. Edwards forced the girls to write a note telling their parents that they were running away from home before he took them to a remote area near Newhall. The girls were former neighbors of and they recognized him. Two of them escaped and a third girl was rescued; none was assaulted. Fearing he would be identified, Edwards said he decided to tell his story to police.

andrew.blankstein Unearthing serial past KILLER, VICTIM: Mack Ray Edwards, left, confessed to killing Roger Dale Madison, a friend and classmate of his son. Investigators plan to excavate site along the 23 Freeway where they believe boy, 16, was buried 40 years ago. By Andrew Blankstein Times Staff Writer It was supposed to be the largest mass lawn-sign planting in the history of California politics: A million signs in a million yards across the state, all stuck into the ground at the same moment in a show of support for Proposition 8. Except it never happened. It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, all arrive in time for the September event.

And many still supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage. takes longer to get a million than we said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition. Brown said the campaign purchased its signs from COGS Signs, a Northern California company she described as manufacturer of political Representatives from COGS did not respond to calls or e-mails requesting com- ment. Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in most unprecedented and largest grassroots effort ever attempted in Some supporters of Proposition 8 who were planning to participate in the sign planting were unaware of the glitch. One said, though, that he was wondering what had happened to his sign.

still waiting for them to said Sione Tuiasoa, 48, a Mormon truck driver from Hawthorne. He added fa- cetiously that he had been wondering whether opponents of the proposition played a role in the delay. Opponents of Proposition 8 said they had nothing to do with the sign snafu, but they were nevertheless amused by it. Ali Bay, spokeswoman for Equality California, which is coordinating the No on 8 campaign, said that her side has so far distributed about 60,000 lawn signs, all purchased aunion shop in She hada hard time not sounding pleased. our materials were made in the U.S,” she said.

jessica.garrison@latimes.com Proposition 8 supporters push for yardage But an effort to put placards in a million lawns simultaneously is delayed by a production glitch. By Jessica Garrison Times Staff Writer.