The Happy Hour alibi

The attorney for John Laurence Whitaker — a convicted rapist and child molester who posed as a medical student and later as a decorated Vietnam veteran under the name of John Whitaker Betances while running a volunteer program in Pasadena schools — said his client was at home drinking the night Santa Monica/Malibu Unified School District clerk Bodil Rasmussen was strangled nearly 34 years ago, one of two cold-case murders Whitaker is charged with.

“Whitaker was having drinks with two doctors at about the time when the [Rasmussen murder] was supposed to have been taking place that evening,” Orange County Assistant Public Defender Lewis Clapp said without elaborating.
Further, “Witnesses saw Bodil Rasmussen within an hour of her death in the company of a tall, white male who used a lot of foul language,” Clapp said, again without specifying who saw the other man or who at the time of the killing was with Whitaker. [Whitaker is African-American.]

“The problem is that many people had given the police statements, but over time some people have died and memories have faded,” Clapp said.

In addition to the murder of Rasmussen, investigators believe Whitaker is also responsible for the 1983 killing of Patricia Ann Carpenter in Laguna Beach. Both cases hinge largely on the results of DNA testing done with evidence obtained at the crime scenes.

Whitaker, who even ran for a junior college board seat under the Betances persona and frequently visited the Pasadena Weekly office dressed in a beret and military fatigues, left town abruptly in early 2004. That July, he was picked up by authorities in Oregon, where he had moved. Registered as a sex offender in Pasadena under his real name — all the while publicly going as Betances — Whitaker failed to register in Oregon, and was arrested. Also on hand for the arrest were Orange County homicide investigators.

If convicted, the 61-year-old Whitaker, who has been incarcerated in an Orange County jail without bail since his return from Oregon more than four years ago, faces life in prison.

In the case of Rasmussen, her pantyhose were tied around her neck and it was later determined that she had been raped. Witnesses, Clapp said, had seen Whitaker and the victim together hours before her death on June 25, 1975.
Whitaker emerged as a suspect almost immediately and was questioned by investigators. Pasadena Police Chief Bernard Melekian, who was a patrol sergeant in the Santa Monica Police Department when the gruesome crime occurred, recalls the murder, but not Whitaker’s involvement. Whitaker allegedly claimed he was a medical student — although police now say they know he was not — and was eventually released due to a lack of evidence.

Multnomah County prosecutor Chuck French told the Weekly in 2005 that while on the witness stand in Oregon for failing to register as a sex offender, Whitaker said he left California the day before Carpenter was murdered, claiming to be in New York City planning to visit relatives in Virginia.

Carpenter’s body was found Dec. 17, 1983, lying on the side of a dark road in Laguna Beach. For years detectives said that Carpenter did not fight back the night she was murdered, but her sister, Cynthia, said she knew all along that her sister put up a struggle.

“I said the only way she didn’t fight is if she was completely out of it,” Cynthia told the Weekly in 2007. “I found out 23 years later that she did fight and that his skin was under her fingernails. She was no pushover.”

Shortly after DNA from the Carpenter crime scene was tied to Whitaker, detectives in Santa Monica matched his DNA to the Rasmussen murder scene.

Police had Whitaker’s DNA profile on file following a 10-year prison sentence in California for rape, beginning in 1987. In the early 1970s, he served three years in his home state of New York for sodomizing a 14-year-old boy.

Whitaker is now being held without bail at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach pending trial, which has been delayed 17 times due to requests for continuances by both prosecutors and defense attorneys. His next court appearance is set for March 23.

“These continuances have all been agreed upon by both sides because there is so much info involved in this case,” said Clapp, who on Jan. 12 requested and received the latest one.

“They waited 30 years before they filed this case. I needed to find out everything I could about my client’s life and collect witnesses,” he said. “Witnesses have told the police who investigated the case that Rasmussen and Whitaker had known each other and socialized. This same witness said she knew Rasmussen and the [other] person she was with.”

At one point, prosecutors feared that they would not be able to prosecute Whitaker for both crimes because of jurisdictional conflicts between Santa Monica and Orange County. But a state Supreme Court ruling clearing the way for counties to try suspects for multiple homicides, even if they took place in different counties, allowed prosecutors in Orange County to charge him with both crimes, said Orange County Assistant District Attorney Matt Murphy.

“In the next three months, we’re probably going to see a motion by the defense team for a speedy trial. Hopefully, we will be able to get that.” Murphy said. “We’re confident that we may have this finished by the end of this year.”

After being released from prison on the rape conviction in 1997, Whitaker moved to Pasadena, assumed the name John Whitaker Betances and claimed that he was a highly trained military veteran who once escaped from a prison camp by chewing through a Viet Cong guard’s neck.

Quoting the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, the Pasadena Star-News reported shortly after Whitaker’s arrest that there is no record of anyone using Whitaker’s Social Security number serving in the Army. And officials at Georgetown University and State University of New York at Albany say they have no record of Whitaker studying medicine at either college.

In 2001 Whitaker lost an election for a seat on the Pasadena City College board of trustees. Around the same time, he became one of the leaders of the PUSD’s DADS (Dads Are Doing Something) program, which advocated fathers playing larger roles in the lives of their school-age children.

Whitaker had no children in the district and, although the district did not perform any background checks on him, former Superintendent Percy Clark gave Whitaker keys to offices in the district administration building and access to district files and computers.

During that time, Whitaker lived in an apartment in the 500 block of East Washington Boulevard in Pasadena. While there, he married teacher’s aide Eloise Crichton, another tenant in the building. According to a restraining order filed by Crichton in 2003, Whitaker threatened to kill her.

“[He] would often stare at me in the dark while I was trying to sleep, he blocked my path when I tried to leave the apartment, he threw a cup of soda in my face, and he said he should just kill me and get it over with,” she wrote.