Sex Offender Once Convicted of Murder

NEWPORT BEACH — A convicted sex offender who is being questioned after finding the skeletal remains of a missing 13-year-old Costa Mesa boy was convicted 14 years ago of murdering an Arizona boy, but that decision was later overturned, according to court records.

James Lee Crummel, the third sex offender in Orange County whose whereabouts have been disclosed to neighbors under “Megan’s Law,” committed a string of violent crimes involving minors that spanned decades and spread over four states, according to law enforcement officials and court records.

Reached at his home Wednesday, Crummel said he has already paid for those crimes and has been living quietly in the upscale Newport Crest condominium complex. Appearing thin and weary with dark circles under his eyes, Crummel said he has had no problems while at the complex, where he has lived on and off since the 1970s.

“There’s been no problems for years and now, all of a sudden, I can hardly go outside. . . . I’m afraid I’m going to get hurt,” he said, chain-smoking in the entrance of the two-bedroom apartment he shares with a “dear, dear friend.”

Crummel, 53, was convicted in 1983 of killing a 9-year-old boy and leaving his body in a desert area half a mile from the boy’s home, said Judge Michael J. Brown, who presided over the case in Pima County, Arizona. A belt was tied around the boy’s neck and his pants were undone when the body was found in 1967, according to court records.

About 15 years after the slaying, a man who was Crummel’s cellmate in California told detectives that Crummel had confessed to the murder while in jail.

The cellmate said Crummel told him he “was trying to quiet the boy” so he could not call for help while a search party was seeking him in the desert, according to Ken Peasley, who prosecuted the case.

A jury convicted Crummel of the killing, but Brown, citing “ineffective” defense by Crummel’s attorney, granted a new trial, court documents show. In a plea agreement before the retrial date, Crummel pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges and was granted probation for five years, according to court records.

“I thought then and I think now that the judge was simply wrong,” prosecutor Peasley said Wednesday. “This guy got out and has had an opportunity to harm other children.”

Crummel was convicted of a series of sex-related crimes in Wisconsin, Missouri and California from 1962 to 1968. The first conviction was for a lewd act with a minor in Missouri, and he was imprisoned from October 1962 to May 1966.

Next, Crummel was convicted of kidnapping and molesting a teenage boy in Los Angeles, officials said. In 1968, he was convicted in Wisconsin of abducting a 13-year-old boy, molesting him and then trying to beat him to death with a tree limb, Judge Brown said.

At a Halloween party in Costa Mesa in 1982, Crummel was arrested after a 10-year-old boy told police he was awakened in his room by a man dressed as a Martian. The victim, whose parents hosted the party, said Crummel fondled him under the sheets, officials said Wednesday.

Crummel told the jury he was intoxicated at the party and accidentally walked into the boy’s bedroom. He was acquitted of the molestation charge but convicted of failing to register as a sex offender.

In 1990, Crummel told Riverside County sheriff’s deputies he had found human remains while on a hike off Ortega Highway. The bones were later identified as those of James “Jamie” Trotter, a junior high school student who disappeared on the way to school in 1979.

Riverside County authorities said they found out only recently that the man who contacted them about the bones was a convicted sex offender.

Crummel is being questioned along with a couple of other people, and there is no suspect in the boy’s death, Riverside County sheriff’s spokesman Mark Lohman said.

In a brief interview Wednesday, Trotter’s brother, John Trotter Jr., said: “The fact that this guy found my brother’s remains . . . and that he lives just a block and a half away from me. That’s just a little too ironic.”