STUPIDITY IX

Golden Gate Bridge suicide was discovered to be phony

A rental car in the name of Michael Patrick Manning was found abandoned at San Francisco's iconic bridge, but police didn't buy the suicide note left inside the car by this particular man.

Years later, a tripped alarm triggered a call to police. It was 0n May 3^rd 2019 around 1:30 a.m., just outside Key West, Florida that deputies from the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office pulled onto Shrimp Road, a sweaty strip of broken concrete on Stock Island where a large hangar-like industrial building was across from a canal.

As the sheriff’s office deputies were moving about the vacant property, they discovered an unlocked storage trailer sitting off to the side of the main building. A man whose short light hair and messed up, his face charred red from the sun and dotted with small cuts was living inside the trailer.

He told the Monroe deputies his name was William Wallace Littlejohn. He said he had no identification. No record came back when the deputies punched his name into the system. They were dealing with a mystery man. That made them very suspicious.

While searching through the trailer, the deputies discovered a military contractor ID card in the name William W. Littlejohn. They also found checks written out in that name, as well as a U.S. passport in that name. The deputies, however, felt that the documentation was fake.  If the documents were legitimate, there would have been a record of their existence somewhere in the system especially if they were stolen. This meant that they were created as phony documents.   The fact that he told the police a lie that he didn’t have any ID at all, convinced them that there was something amiss.  

The individual from the trailer refused explain to deputies the discrepancy, so he was arrested and was booked into the local jail as “John Doe,” and held on suspicion of giving the police a false name.

Palm-shaded and joyfully beer-sloshed, Key West’s debauched reputation as a Tommy Bahama-clad vacation destination runs parallel to another fugitive running from the police  as the perfect place to lay low. As the southernmost point in the continental United States, the Florida Keys have been long-time safe havens for drifters, burnouts, fugitives and anyone eager to live as far off the grid as possible. This man fit the role of a fugitive like a glove.

However, the man from the trailer did not remain a John Doe for long. Running his fingerprints in the system, the  Monroe County deputies learned he had been wanted by the U.S. Marshals Service for the last three years because  in reality, he was 58-year-old Michael Patrick Manning who was a child molester  and  a child pornographer wanted by the police in California. 

Documents relating to Residences, storage facilities, and vehicles tied to Manning's associate were frequently found full of information pertaining to personal property, and hastily abandoned.

In 2015, Manning had been charged in California with both sexually abusing a minor under the age of 14 and creating child pornography. But he had slipped away from authorities the next year after elaborately staging a phony suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge, more than 5,100 kilometres from the trailer where he was recently discovered.

Manning’s problems with the law began when he was living in Chico, California, in a Central Valley city of around 112,000 residents that was north of Sacramento. In 2015, the local police department began investigating him after a young woman said she had been sexually assaulted by Manning in 2008 and 2009, when she was between 12 to 14 years old, according to a recent news release from the Chico Police Department.

On September 3^rd , 2015, Manning was arrested on multiple counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor under the age of 14,” the Chico Enterprise-Record  reported at the time.

During his arrest, the police searched his home. According to the Enterprise-Record, the investigators discovered more than 600 images of child pornography at his residence. He was later charged with possessing and manufacturing child pornography, the Chico police news release said. He posted a $215,000 bail and was released from jail.

More than a year later, in June 2016, Manning pleaded no contest to the charges he faced, including oral copulation of a child under 14, possession of more than 600 images of child/youth pornography, and two counts of solicitation of a minor to engage in the preparation of sexual images, the Enterprise-Record reported. His sentencing date in Butte County Superior Court was scheduled for October 6^th, 2016. Manning was a no-show on his court date.

The next day, about a three-hour drive south of Chico in San Francisco, members of the National Park Service discovered an abandoned car near the Golden Gate Bridge, according to the Chico police release. The car was a rental taken out in Manning’s name. Inside, they discovered the suicide note in the wanted man’s handwriting.

As I said earlier, the police did not buy the scenario. That is because the   search turned up no body.  When a body hits water, it doesn’t immediately sink, It can float for days. So the police contacted the FBI and the Marshals Service Fugitive Task Force to help track down Manning. According to the release from Chico law enforcement, the hunt hopscotched across California – Yuba City, Sacramento, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland and Alameda with no luck in capturing him.

Investigators believed a “close associate” of Manning was helping the fugitive slip away. This same associate “was involved in international travel,” according to the release. Investigators seemed always to just miss Manning when closing in on him.

“Residences, storage facilities, and vehicles tied to Manning’s associate were frequently found full of Manning’s personal property, and hastily abandoned. Authorities believe they once almost caught up to him at a marina in Alameda, California.

Since his 2016 disappearance, it is unclear why or how Manning traveled to Florida, or much less his final destination that was in a storage trailer in Key West. After his arrest in Florida in May 2019, he was charged locally with giving law enforcement a false name and identification.

At the time of this article being published in my blog, he was sent back to California to face his sentencing that he previously skipped out of attending. Further, since a bailsman put up the money, ten percent of the bail money was paid to the bondsman that was for naught considering that he was eventually caught.  No doubt, he will be in prison for a very, very long time.

When he lied about having no ID, that prompted the police to make a further search. His lie was a sign that something was definitely amiss which required a more thorough inquiry.   

Carrying an ID of a Military contractor is really stupid because if it is a fake document, that fact will become obvious to the police when they make enquires especially when  nothing shows up to validate the document.

                                                  

When a criminal is trying to hide from the police, he should never hang out in places that the police generally look at.

Further, if he had any real common sense, he would have gone to a cemetery in another state and looked for a grave in which a small child had died and was buried in the cemetery. Then he would apply for the child’s birth certificate and used that certificate to obtain a driver’s licence and other documents such as a US passport. If he began working with that new name, he wouldn’t have lived in an abandoned trailer that would draw attention to him by inquisitive police.

This criminal was caught because he was outright stupid.