Fugitive Sex Offender Sought in Times Square Hotel Homicide
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Police are searching for a fugitive sex offender who checked out of a run-down Times Square hotel on Wednesday and may have left a woman's dead body behind in his room.
The corpse, wrapped in plastic bags, was discovered Thursday by a chambermaid at the Hotel Carter who reached beneath a bed and felt a foot.
Investigators were still trying to learn the woman's identity. Police described her as a white female, nearly 6 feet tall and very thin — about 130 pounds.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}The woman was missing her right index finger, but police said it was an old injury. She was beaten and strangled, and her death was ruled a homicide, said Ellen Borakove, city medical examiner's office spokeswoman.
Police officials announced that they were looking for the room's last registered occupant, Clarence Dean, who departed abruptly Wednesday afternoon after a nearly two-week stay.
Dean, 35, is no stranger to police. He was required to register as a sex offender at his last known address, a motel in Alabaster, Ala., because of an attempted lewd act involving a child under age 12, committed in the mid-1990s in Palm Beach, Florida.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}He's been a wanted man in Shelby County, Ala., since March, when sheriff's deputies performed a check and realized he had moved out without informing officials. He also failed to appear in court in a property theft case, according to sheriff's department Capt. Chris Corbell.
Police Department spokesmen in New York did not name Dean as a suspect in the woman's death but said he was wanted for questioning.
The death wasn't a first for the Hotel Carter, a threadbare accommodation that stands as a throwback to Times Square's seedy past.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A clerk at the Carter was charged in 1999 with killing a co-worker with a knife and a hammer during a brawl at the front desk. A half-undressed woman with her hands tied behind her back was pushed out a window and fell to her death in 1987.
Over the years there have been small fires and arrests. A building engineer was killed during a freak elevator accident in 2005. FBI agents once went to the hotel to rescue a 4-year-old boy who had been kidnapped from a day care center in Connecticut as part of a ransom plot.
The Carter was closed abruptly by the city 1998 for safety code violations but later reopened.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Still, it remains an option for budget travelers who don't mind insects, grimy bathrooms, stained furniture and broken telephones.
And there is at least some celebrity cache; the ground floors of the hotel once held the nightclub that Sean Combs and Jennifer Lopez famously fled after a shooting in 1999.
Attempts to reach the hotel's owner were unsuccessful Friday. The Carter's business phone rang unanswered.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}