Born Again Too Late, Inmate Finds a Sad Escape

Early in the morning of May 7, while most of Los Angeles County Jail was still asleep, Arthur James Crespin sat in the dark of Cell D-17 and methodically braided his bedsheet into a noose.

The former La Puente construction worker, who by his own count had been arrested 32 times, was once again behind bars--this time for trying to get $4,000 in cash with a stolen American Express card.

He was 29, distraught, confused and headed back to state prison to serve a two-year sentence for forgery. When guards passed at 5:20 a.m., they found him hanging from a piece of iron jutting out of the ceiling.

His suicide did not make the newspapers. There was no obituary and no funeral. In many ways, Crespin--a slim, red-haired man who wore gold aviator-frame eyeglasses--was just another career criminal who had met a sorry end.

But those who knew him were left wondering what might have been. They say his life had taken a dramatic turn in the preceding weeks, with the spiritual strength that had long eluded him finally within grasp.

As he sat in jail awaiting sentencing, Crespin had been placing ads in The Times appealing for fellowship and forgiveness. He feverishly read the Bible, completing long lesson plans in which he proclaimed himself reborn. And every day he telephoned declarations of love to a 21-year-old Amtrak dining car attendant from Hesperia whom he hoped one day to marry.

“I felt so much compassion for him,” said his fiancee’s mother, Regina Maggio. “All the recognition he had ever got was negative. Now, for the first time in his life, I think he was feeling a lot more inner peace.”

While it’s not rare for a convict--much less a con man--to say anything that he believes might help his case, Crespin did take some unusual steps in his quest for salvation. For four consecutive days in April, he placed a classified ad in The Times announcing that he had found God.

“I’ve prayed to the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus for a second chance,” he wrote, urging members of the Christian community to correspond with him in jail. “I need your guidance and prayers.”

More than 30 ministers and church folk responded, their letters wrapped in a bundle with other religious texts later found in his cell. He wrote back in neat, tiny strokes on yellow, legal-size paper.

As Crespin’s May 3 sentencing neared, a friend placed another ad in The Times. Under the classification of “Personal Messages,” it urged Christians everywhere to attend his 9 a.m. hearing in Pasadena Superior Court.

Although only a couple of believers showed up, Crespin’s fiancee, Lisa Wheeler, was there in the second row. She had met met him two years ago through yet another ad that he placed in The Times while serving a federal prison term for counterfeiting.

Even after Pasadena Superior Court Judge Harold E. Shabo denied his request for probation, Crespin called Wheeler and her mother collect from jail every day to report his spiritual progress.

But Crespin’s demons had been at work too long for redemption to come easily.

In a letter to Maggio after his sentencing, he attributed most of his troubles to abuse he suffered as a child, when he lived on a U.S. military base in Europe with his Army father and German mother.

The family later moved to the San Gabriel Valley, where Crespin attended La Puente High School and as a teen-ager found work at a construction company in Azusa.

At times, his life seemed remarkably average: swimming, bowling, back-yard barbecues and miniature golf. At others, he would sink into depression, doing drugs or turning up drunk and penniless on the doorstep of a friend.

One of his first schemes entailed breaking into the home of a La Puente couple in 1980, making off with a wedding ring and an antique pearl-handled pistol. Later, he robbed a college administrator in Hacienda Heights and a pipe company in South El Monte. Then, while working for a Covina-based carpet-cleaning company, he filched jewelry while shampooing rugs for three customers at their homes in Walnut and Hacienda Heights.

In those cases and others detailed in court files, Crespin--whose many aliases included A. J. Wheeler and Maurice J. Tost--confessed to the crimes almost as soon as he was confronted.

After several stints behind bars, he eventually drew a three-year sentence at Terminal Island for counterfeiting U.S. Treasury checks. There, he came to know Wheeler, who said she was feeling low and answered his pen-pal ad in search of companionship.

She found his letters witty and sincere. “He was real intriguing,” she said. “I thought if he could just apply his intelligence to something positive, he would be OK.”

At first her mother burned Crespin’s letters as soon as they arrived, but Wheeler convinced her that he could be reformed. When Crespin was released in December, he went to live with them in their one-story brick home in the high desert of San Bernardino County.

He was a meticulous housekeeper and spent long days working in the flower bed and making plans to build an extra room for his future bride. But, as in times past, the lure of the bottle and easy money sabotaged the tranquillity.

On March 23, just three months out of prison, he fought with Wheeler and left. The next she and her mother heard, he had been arrested by Pasadena police after American Express security personnel discovered that he was trying to get cash with a stolen credit card at a branch office.

Behind bars again, Crespin found a copy of the New Testament and began his apparent conversion. At his sentencing, however, he kept quiet about the details of his new-found faith. His only plea was to be placed in a drug diversion program.

In his last letter to Wheeler, Crespin said that she and her mother had given him the love he had always searched for but that it had come too late in his troubled life. He said he no longer wanted to lie to them yet was afraid they would not stand by him if he revealed more details of his past.

Without their love, he wrote, he believed he could not survive.