Third Suspect in Shevawn Geoghegan Killing To Be Extradited To Santa Monica

By Anne La Jeunesse

Friday, July 23--Santa Monica Police investigators will travel next week to Birmingham, Ala. to escort a fugitive suspected murderer back to this seaside city. Tips from viewers of the popular "America's Most Wanted" television program led to the arrest this week of a man suspected of being one of three people involved in the murder of 14-year-old Shevawn Geoghegan, who was bound, gagged and strangled in the basement of an abandoned mental health clinic 18 months ago.

The drifter that Santa Monica police knew as Jimmy Ronald Turner, and who went by the street name "Linus," had been at large for 18 months before he was arrested Monday in Alabama after viewers of the television show and its Internet web site gave police there tips to his whereabouts, according to authorities.

Turner was going by the name "Dennis Ronald Scott" when he was taken into custody about 12:30 p.m. by Birmingham, police, who had been in touch with local authorities, according to Lt. Gary F. Gallinot of the Santa Monica Police Department.

"Santa Monica police received a tip generated by the television show America's Most Wanted and that information was forwarded to the Birmingham police," Gallinot said.

According to the television show, Turner, a.k.a. Scott, was arrested in a well-known eclectic and affluent Birmingham area known as the Fountain. Police, aware of the fugitive drifter's penchant for fleeing, surrounded him and took him into custody without incident.

When asked his name, the suspect identified himself as "Jimmy Turner," and tattoos of a band around one arm and a dagger on the other as well as another tattoo of eyes on his chest revealed when his sleeves were rolled up and shirt opened matched the description of the gaunt drifter dissemenated nationwide by Santa Monica police just after Shevawn's Feb. 26, 1998 murder, according to America's Most Wanted information.

A fingerprint comparison confirmed that the Birmingham police had finally captured Turner, according to a narrative of the show.

Gallinot said that Turner agreed to extradition and is expected to be escorted back to Santa Monica next week.

Two other acquaintances of Turner, who were arrested as police were still looking for the missing girl, have been convicted in connection with her death.

Glen Ballis Mason, 23, who witnesses said was a devout follower of Satan, was convicted by a Santa Monica Superior Court jury last week of first degree murder in Shevawn's death and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. Mason's defense attorney, Marc S. Lewinstein, told jurors that it was Turner who actually strangled Shevawn in the basement of the mental health clinic at 1525 Euclid Street, not his client.

Elizabeth Ann Mangham, 17, arrested with Mason, pleaded no contest Monday to a charge of voluntary manslaughter reached in a plea bargain with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. She will be sentenced to 11 years in state prison when she is sentenced in mid-October.

Shevawn became acquainted with Mason, Turner and Mangham through a network of squatters -- teenagers who adopted the punk lifestyle, runaways, criminals, drifters and homeless who take residence in the shadowy and often fetid apartments and houses abandoned in he wake of the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

Shevawn, an artistic girl who had run away before, but who was living at home with her parents when she was killed, met her killers on the Third Street Promenade, which has proved a magnet for a cross-section of society often shunned by the mainstream.