By Michael J. Tittinger
and Carolyn Sackariason
Daily Press Staff Writers

NEWPORT BEACH — More than 30 years after the body of 36-year-old Bodil Rasmussen was found strangled and dumped in a Santa Monica parking lot, the man long thought to be her assailant will finally stand before a judge today and answer to murder charges.

John Whitaker Betances, of Pasadena, was arrested in Oregon and extradited to Orange County in 2004 after DNA samples linked him to the 1975 murder of Rasmussen and another female victim eight years later in Laguna Canyon.

Betances, 57, will enter a plea at his arraignment this morning at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach.

Betances lived in the same apartment complex as Rasmussen and was a suspect at the time of her murder, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office, but there was insufficient evidence to charge him for the crime.

The Santa Monica Police Department left the unsolved case open for investigation and preserved evidence for more than three decades.

“The Santa Monica and Laguna Beach police departments should be commended for having the forethought to preserve the evidence and never giving up on getting justice for two young women whose lives were cut tragically short,” said Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy of the Homicide Unit, who is prosecuting the case.

“Technology will continue to make getting away with these types of crimes more difficult,” added Murphy.

Betances, who was also known as John Laurence Whitaker, was said to have been living a double life in Pasadena, according to a story first reported in the Pasadena Star-News in November of 2004. Betances reportedly was a well-respected civic leader, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Pasadena City College board of trustees in 2001. He was also involved in the local school district as a recruiter for a program that trained fathers to volunteer in schools.

But Betances’ seemingly normal life was turned upside down when Laguna Beach Police Detective Paul Litchenberg began sifting through the evidence room, gathering DNA samples from the 1983 murder scene of 26-year-old Patricia Carpenter and matching them up with the Department of Justice’s database of convicted felons.

On May 3, 2004, the evidence linked Betances to both of the killings. A DNA sample from underneath the fingernails of Carpenter, whose partially nude body was found dumped along the road in Laguna Beach, and a semen sample found on Rasmussen led to the arrest and subsequent murder charges.

Betances’ DNA had been in law enforcement databases since 1994, when he was released from a California prison after serving 10 years for rape, according to Litchenberg. He was discharged from parole in 1997 and moved to Pasadena a year later. Through an Internet search, the detective found Betances in Gresham, Ore. in July of 2004, after having apparently left Pasadena in 2003 following a separation from his wife, who was unaware of his previous life.

In Oregon, Betances moved in with a woman he met over the Internet. But because he failed to register aas a sex offender, he was placed under arrest, denying any involvement in the two women’s murders.

Police records later showed that Betances had been questioned by Santa Monica police nearly three decades before that time, so he contacted detectives here.

In September, Santa Monica investigators got a hit on one of their cold cases — this time Betances’ DNA matched up to evidence taken from the body of Rasmussen, of Carson, who was found dead in the parking lot of the old Sea Castle at 1725 Appian Way.

Betances had been with Rasmussen the night before her death. He told Santa Monica detectives that he was a medical student and had a legal background, according to the Star-News. What he failed to tell them was that he was a parolee who had been convicted of sodomy in 1964 and served three years in a New York state prison, or of the rape he served time for in the ’80s and early ’90s.