1974 slaying suspect likely knew police were closing in
Authorities: Crawford drafted suicide note 2 years ago after interrogation
SAN JOSE >> Stephen Blake Crawford, the main suspect in the grisly 1974 killing of Arlis Perry at the Stanford Memorial Church who shot and killed himself Thursday as detectives approached his home, wrote a suicide note two years ago after he was last interrogated over the infamous slaying, authorities said.
It’s the latest piece of evidence suggesting that Crawford knew that the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, working with the District Attorney’s Office cold-case unit, was finally closing in on him after over four decades of eluding arrest.
“We went there to serve a search warrant with the intent to arrest him,” Sheriff Laurie Smith said Friday. “I think he might have believed his time was up.”
But Smith was also quick to note that the presumed suicide note “did not reference anything about the murder” of Perry.
Other items discovered in the ensuing hours by Santa Clara County Sheriff’s deputies serving a search warrant at his studio apartment in South San Jose included a torn-off cover of the book “The Ultimate Evil,” a book about the Satanic cult killer Son of Sam that mentions the Perry killing, and what appeared to be a Stanford diploma doctored to have his name on it. He did not graduate from the school.
Crawford’s car, a silver Saturn sedan, has also been impounded and is being examined by forensic specialists.
The drafting of the purported suicide note coincides with the last significant contact he had with cold-case detectives working on the long-unsolved murder. Authorities say that was when he
went to the Sheriff’s headquarters to talk to investigators who had been keeping tabs on him periodically since Perry died.
Smith said DNA found on Perry’s clothing re-tested in 2016, along with other investigative work, led them to more firmly implicate Crawford. Sources confirmed that the DNA most recently tested came from semen found on the Levi’s bluejeans Perry had worn to the church, and that were removed and draped on her body when she was found.
In the subsequent years, investigators from the Sheriff’s Office and DA’s coldcase unit “re-contacted everybody that had been in the church that night 43 years ago” to eliminate their DNA and fingerprint profiles from suspicion.
“Everything was a culmination of all the investigation they had done since the time we discovered the DNA,” Smith said. “We look at this as closure and we believe we had solid evidence to arrest and even convict Stephen Crawford for the murder of Arlis Perry.”
The night of Perry’s death, she and her new husband, a pre-med student at Stanford, were walking to a campus mailbox at 11:30 p.m. and quarreled over checking the tire pressure on their car. Upset, she told her husband she was going to pray at the church. When she didn’t return by 3:30 a.m., Bruce Perry called police, who checked the church and found the doors locked. Crawford, the security guard, told police he had locked the church around midnight and found her partially hidden by a pew at 5:40 a.m.
An ice pick was driven into the back of Perry’s skull and her body had been violated with church candles. Semen was found on a church kneeler and a partial palm print was lifted from one of the candles, but neither were enough at the time to catch the killer. Crawford left Stanford two years later, and went on to live a nondescript life as a security guard elsewhere and later as an insurance adjuster.
When detectives went to his Camden Avenue apartment Thursday to serve their search warrant, he reportedly tried to delay their entry with a request to get dressed.
But they already had a key to his unit, and after a few minutes of waiting — Smith said deputies “thought he was stalling” — they opened the door and caught the sight of Crawford, sitting on his bed, holding a handgun. The deputies immediately backed out of the apartment and soon after heard a gunshot. Moments later, after first checking whether any of them had been shot, they re-entered and discovered that Crawford had shot himself in the head.
Crawford’s brother, a retired Mountain View police officer who appeared at the Camden Avenue complex soon after the shooting, has declined to comment on the shocking revelations.
Crawford’s only other known run-in with the law came via his 1992 arrest for crimes that occurred nearly two decades before, when he was still working at Stanford. Authorities say he methodically stole numerous American Indian artifacts including art objects and sculptures, as well as about 200 rare books, from the Stanford University department of anthropology and campus libraries.
According to court records, Crawford pleaded no contest to a felony charge of receiving stolen property — raised to a felony because the value of the items climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — and was given a six-month suspended sentence that he fulfilled through a work furlough program and two years probation.
It remains unclear whether the university fully recovered all of its missing property: Neighbors described glancing inside his apartment and seeing western artwork as well as “nice bronze statues of horses with Indians on them.”
That conviction, however, does not appear to have been the source of a DNA reference sample used in the most recent test. Smith said Crawford’s DNA was obtained passively from discarded items that investigators collected.
In light of Crawford’s implication in the Perry death, speculation has simmered over whether he might be responsible for any of a string of unsolved murders that plagued the campus in the preceding 18 months.
That includes Leslie Marie Perlov, a 21-year-old Palo Alto law clerk and a Stanford graduate found strangled in the nearby foothills on Feb. 16, 1973, with pantyhose stuffed in her mouth and her skirt pulled up around her waist. On Sept. 11, 1973, 19-year-old junior David Levine was found stabbed 15 times next to Meyer Library. On March 24, 1974, the body of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, daughter of a former Stanford athletic director and football legend Chuck Taylor, and was found strangled in a ditch on Sand Hill Road.
“We’re always looking at that,” Smith said. “I know there’s a lot more work to do on this case even though the suspect that I believe is the killer is dead.”