THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9411240668
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: NEWS & OBSERVER
LENGTH: Long : 113 lines
James Stromer's four-month run from the law ended in an Orlando, Fla., trailer park Monday, where investigators tracked the convicted rapist who was part of the first escape ever from North Carolina's maximum-security prison.
His comrade in the escape was Thomas Lee Bonney, a former auto salvage dealer from Chesapeake who killed his daughter in 1988.
About a dozen FBI agents and local law enforcement officers surrounded a mobile home on the outskirts of the city about 11 p.m., and sent in a police dog when Stromer, a former college teacher, refused to surrender.
The dog attacked Stromer when he ignored a police officer's commands to lower his hands, and he was taken to a hospital for bites on his arm, thigh and ankles, FBI Agent Eddie Bodigheimer said in Orlando.
Authorities arrested the fugitive without further incident, Bodig-heimer said, as a police helicopter hovered overhead with officers carrying rifles at the Conway Shores Mobile Village.
Stromer had become one of ``America's Most Wanted'' or at least a spotlighted figure in the television show of that name.
The show aired two segments about him after he and Chesapeake Bonney slipped out of Raleigh's Central Prison in a garbage truck in July.
Theirs was the first successful escape from the 12-year-old prison and set off a furious nationwide manhunt. Bonney, who is mentally unstable, was quickly corralled in Norfolk.
Bonney was convicted in the death of his 19-year-old daughter, whom he shot 27 times. He had been sentenced to death, but the sentence was later commuted to life in prison.
Authorities openly worried about Stromer, whom they described as cunning, elusive and capable of carrying out his threat to kill everyone on a hit list he drew up while behind bars.
Within the past couple of weeks, Florida investigators had closed in on their target as tips streamed in from South Florida and led eventually to Orlando.
They learned that, using an alias, Stromer had spent four days last week panhandling for a charitable group at the Orlando airport.
Word of his capture pleased prison officials, law enforcement authorities and Stromer's own family when they learned of it Tuesday.
``We were very concerned with this one,'' said John Vasquez, the supervising agent at the FBI's Raleigh office. ``He's a strange one, and he had a history of violent crimes.''
Stromer, formerly a lecturer at East Carolina University, was convicted in April 1993 of raping a 20-year-old ECU student in 1989, and he admitted raping an 18-year-old high school student in Greenville seven months earlier.
While awaiting trial, Stromer offered an inmate $10,000 to inject heroin and battery acid into the 18-year-old before she could testify. He admitted the crime of soliciting to murder and was serving a life sentence on those convictions.
Stromer's last victim said he told her he had raped five other women. Two juries in Iowa, his home state, deadlocked on an attempted rape charge; police there said he was also the prime suspect in a rape that was never prosecuted.
After his escape, relatives in Iowa feared he would return to seek revenge on his former wife and relatives who testified against him.
Those relatives and the rape victims in Greenville were under police protection.
``We were worried. We're a lot relieved,'' said Vicky Dusenberry, wife of one of Stromer's cousins in Iowa.
Stromer had tried to call her husband, Glenn Dusenberry, the day after the escape, but Vicky refused the collect call. ``We'll have a good holiday now.''
Residents of the mobile home park in Bell Isle, a suburb of Orlando, were still shaken from Monday night's arrest.
The 40-home park of blue-collar workers near Lake Conway has always been a sleepy retreat from big-city crime, according to owner Dee Deimund.
``We've never ever - ever, ever - had anything like that before,'' Deimund said. ``Everyone is shocked. Goodness gracious, this was something. I didn't even know there was such a person out there. We're going back to counting our blessings today - we certainly would rather have had Santa Claus visit us.''
Tips had picked up since ``America's Most Wanted'' aired segments about Stromer on Nov. 5 and Nov. 12, Vasquez said.
By last week, the tips led to a boarding house in West Palm Beach, Fla., where a man who resembled Stromer was renting a room under the name Joe Howard.
Investigators found that he had checked out two weeks earlier, but they lifted fingerprints from the room. The prints, it turned out, were those of escaped convict Stromer.
Vasquez said West Palm Beach police tracked Stromer to Orlando, where he was seen soliciting for charitable donations at the airport.
Solicitors are required to register with the airport, and investigators found that Joe Howard was on a list of solicitors for a group called the Florida Outreach Program.
Mike Mannix, assistant director of airport operations, said records showed ``Howard'' had panhandled every day last week.
FBI agents used that information to track Stromer to an apartment in Orlando, where he was living with a traveling companion.
But again he had fled one step ahead of the posse.
The hunt continued to the trailer park where Stromer had just moved in with a tenant.
The friend wasn't around when Stromer was arrested, and Bodigheimer said agents don't think either the operator of the charity or the tenant knew that Stromer was an escaped convict.
Stromer still had a car that he had stolen in West Virginia, with a stolen Florida license plate, and had obtained a Florida driver's license under the name Joe Howard, according to the Orange County (Fla.) Sheriff's Department.
Vasquez said agents don't know where Stromer was between the time he stopped at a Beckley, W.Va., grocery store, four days after the escape, and last week.
He went to the store to pick up a money order his brother had wired to him as part of an unsuccessful plan by SBI and Iowa investigators to trap him.
Stromer will be taken before a judge for an extradition hearing in Orlando this morning. by CNB