Fear Clutches Valley as the Molester Stalks

His face is everywhere. On flyers tacked to telephone poles. Stuck under the windshield wipers of parked cars. Pinned to bulletin boards in elementary and junior high school offices. In newspapers and on TV.

Even in dreams.

“Yes, I saw him,” said 13-year-old Miguel, standing outside Pacoima’s Maclay Middle School before class. “He chased me, but I woke up before he could get me. I don’t want to see him in real life.”

The face causing these bad dreams belongs to a man accused of raping a 9-year-old girl and fondling, clutching or grabbing at some 31 others, mostly young boys and girls across the San Fernando Valley since February.

Despite the largest manhunt since the Hillside Strangler and the Night Stalker terrorized much of the city in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, the molester--a television station dubbed him the Valley Molester--has eluded authorities.

The area around Maclay, where about 1,278 students attend the seventh through ninth grades, is where police say he struck most recently.

On Dec. 8, a man grabbed a 15-year-old girl from behind as she sat at a bus stop at Van Nuys Boulevard and Dronfield Avenue, several blocks from the school. The girl escaped by running into a local business.

Crime is no abstraction in the neighborhood around the middle school, one of the most densely populated areas in the Valley. Students have been shot and stabbed over the years, and many parents have always walked their children to and from school.

“This has never been the best neighborhood to raise kids,” said Carmen Perez, after walking her seventh-grade daughter to school. “But with this crazy guy out there, it makes me even more paranoid.”

For his part, the molester has remained a shadowy figure--a face without a name. And police are not even sure about the face. Currently, there are three composite drawings of the man, each slightly different.

Authorities have described him as a black man, 35 to 45 years old, 5 feet, 11 inches to 6 feet, 1 inch tall with short hair, and possibly a beard. One composite shows him with a bushy mustache, another with none. In one he has an almost boyish face, in another he looks like the stereotypical hardened criminal.

Civilian volunteers have handed out 100,000 flyers bearing the three composites. Investigators have received more than 300 tips and arrested at least four suspects for questioning, but released all of them as innocent.

“He’s got everyone so gripped with fear,” said Sandy Grimm, walking her seventh- and eighth-grade daughters to school one recent morning. “Children can’t really be expected to concentrate . . . and I’ve been late getting to work lately because I’ve been escorting them to school every day. It just disrupts everything.”

“And we don’t like our mom walking with us to school either, it just . . . isn’t done,” said her eighth-grade daughter, too embarrassed at being seen with her mother to give her name.

Adds another parent: “If they don’t catch him soon, we’re all going to go crazy.”

For the area around Maclay Middle School, there is a touch of deja vu to all this. In October, Robert Lee Donaldson, a 34-year-old paroled sex offender, was arrested for raping three children near Broadous Elementary School, a feeder campus just a few miles to the north.

“We’ve sent letters home with kids; we’ve reminded teachers to talk to students on a daily basis about precautions they need to take; we urge them to walk home in groups,” says Maclay Principal Cecilia Costas.

And then there are the quiet casualties, like Will, a 41-year-old father whose face reflects weeks of frustration and fear and slights.

“I don’t want to give out my full name,” he says. “It could only lead to trouble.”

As he speaks, his 13-year-old daughter tightens her grip on his hand.

“The parents of her friends, they look at me with fear in their eyes,” he says. “It hurts.”

Will is a black man, 5-feet-10, with short hair and a grizzled beard.

“It didn’t use to be like this.”