was found to Gladden’s fingerprints, which were on file with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer.
According to Thomas, Gladden has been wanted on probation violation for nearly four years. The violation was filed when he stopped regular visits to a probation officer in Florida and disappeared.
In the Santa Monica case, detectives arrested Gladden on Sunday after a chase from the carousel at the pier where they observed him watching young children on the popular ride.
While attempting to run from police, he threw a trash can off the pier into the bay. He was finally captured in a restaurant on the Third Street Promenade.
Gladden, who had used the name Harold Brisbane when arrested, was charged with pollution of public waterways, vandalism of city property and evading a police officer. However, the district attorney’s office declined to file any charges relating to his alleged photographing of children, citing insufficient evidence of a crime.
SMPD detective Constance Delpy said she and her partner began watching the carousel ride after receiving a complaint from an employee who had described Gladden as loitering near children and taking pictures out on the beach of nude children being washed at the showers by their parents.
Though Gladden was fingerprinted upon his arrest, Santa Monica does not have its own fingerprint computer and relies on use of a Department of Justice computer and other departments, including the LAPD, to run prints on the AFIS network. The process usually takes days because departments run their own prints as priorities.
In this case, the Santa Monica prints taken of the man originally identified as Brisbane were not run by the LAPD until Tuesday. By then, Gladden—who had spent Sunday night in the county jail—had bailed out by posting a $50,000 bond.
The LAPD then also identified Gladden late Thursday through the print taken from the motel room.
Detectives involved in the two cases were left to wonder about the sequence of events and how they allegedly took a murderous turn.
“There is always second-guessing when things like this happen,” said Delpy of the SMPD Exploited Child Unit. “What could we have done better to keep him locked up? I don’t know. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.”
Thomas said the real crime was in Florida where Gladden was allowed to go free.
“Here you have a man, an obvious pedophile, and the system lets him go,” Thomas said. “When the system doesn’t work, it always seems to be a case like this, where somebody innocent pays the price.”
Gladden quickly went on to the other story. He felt a weird sense of elation as he read about himself. He reveled in the glory of it.
SUSPECT DID AN ‘END RUN AROUND JUSTICE’ IN FLORIDA
By Keisha Russell
Times Staff Writer
A gifted jailhouse lawyer, according to authorities, William Gladden used his prison-learned wiles to subvert the justice system and then disappear—until this week.
Gladden worked at the Little Ducks Childcare Center in Tampa eight years ago when he was arrested and charged with molesting as many as 11 children over a three-year period.
The arrest spawned a highly publicized trial resulting in his conviction on twenty-eight of the charges two years later. By all accounts, the key evidence leading to the convictions was a cache of Polaroid pictures of nine of the young victims. In the photos, the children were seen in various stages of undress in a closet at the now defunct childcare center.
The telling thing about the pictures, however, was not that some of the children were nude, but the looks on their faces, according to Charles Hounchell, the former Hillsborough County prosecutor who was assigned to the case.
“All the kids were scared,” Hounchell said Friday in a telephone interview from Tampa where he is now in private practice. “These kids didn’t like what was being done and it showed. It really went to the truth of the case. What their faces said in the photos matched the things they told the counselors.”
But at trial, the photos were more important than the counselors and what the children had told them. Despite objections from Gladden that the photos had been discovered during an illegal search of his apartment by a police officer whose son was one of the alleged molestation victims, the judge allowed the photos into evidence.
Jurors said afterward that they relied almost exclusively on the photos to convict Gladden because the two counselors who dealt with the children had been discredited by the attorney representing Gladden for their alleged methods of leading the children into voicing accusations against Gladden.
After his