Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993                   TAG: 9310170046
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HE CAN'T BE KEPT FROM HIS CALLING

Sometimes it doesn't matter if they do.

Clary, 29, has a long and varied history of run-ins with the law. He is no stranger to the inside of a jail cell.

Det. Tim Lisk of the Roanoke County Police Department has a file as thick as his forearm on Clary. The men have become well acquainted in the past three years, since the time Clary made an obscene phone call to a 10-year-old girl.

Since then, Clary's favorite activity has been plucking the names of women from the newspaper and calling their parents or their husbands.

Often, he identifies himself as a police officer and explains that the woman is in some trouble. She's been caught in some fantastic, always public, sexual misconduct, usually involving many men and sodomy.

An avid reader of the newspaper, Clary gleans important details to legitimize his story. He knows where the women might be on campus, or on their honeymoons, or at high school.

Sometimes, he threatens to harm the women. Other times, Clary offers to forget all about the lascivious behavior in exchange for some sexual favors for himself.

It's a deranged crime, setting us up with a pitch for trust and then preying on victims' darkest fears of rape and the violation of sexual privacy.

Clary has been caught and convicted and sentenced for making the calls.

But from jail, he's continued. When your weapon's a telephone, you can ply your crime from behind bars - but with more privacy than a free man.

He has called from the Campbell County Jail. From the Bland Correctional Unit. From the Roanoke County Jail.

He's identified himself as a cop from Los Angeles and from Roanoke County and from Appomattox. He's called himself a federal park ranger and a college security guard and has afflicted victims in every corner of the valley.

Forty-four times Clary has been charged with making threatening phone calls or impersonating a police officer on the telephone. Twenty times he has been convicted.

The very day in September 1992 he was convicted of a series of the calls, he called a woman whose name he gleaned from the lost and found.

But prison inmates are among the most litigious members of our society; arguing fine legal points is as good a way to while away the time as lifting weights or watching the tube.

Jailers are wary of setting off a flurry of lawsuits.

"Our biggest problem is that all the jails and prisons are reluctant to take away his phone privileges for fear of violating his rights," says Lisk, exasperated. "So he keeps on calling."

"Just because these guys are in jail doesn't mean they can't make a lot of money in a lawsuit before a jury of 12," said Capt. Barry Tayloe from the Roanoke County Jail.

"I try to do everything I can, within legal bounds, to protect against civil liability and to keep the public from harassing phone calls."

"I don't think you can eliminate access to a phone," said Tayloe.

And so Clary this week will be led to a van at the Buckingham Correctional Center in Central Virginia, and driven to Roanoke County General District Court.

He'll be arraigned on six charges of impersonating a police officer on the telephone and two charges of making threatening calls. Six of the calls were to Roanoke County, one to Botetourt. Each charge could mean a year in prison.

But what difference does that make?

All of the calls were made last month, from the prison in Buckingham.