Man questioned in hotel body case

(Midtown-WABC, August 31, 2007) (WABC) -- Police in Manhattan are questioning a man in connection with the murder of a young woman at a hotel in Midtown.

Authorities are talking to Clarence Dean, an Alabama man who was staying at the Hotel Carter when the murder happened earlier this week.

Police say the woman, who was not carrying any identification, was found by a housekeeper in Room 608 at the Hotel Carter on West 43rd Street yesterday afternoon. She was wrapped in two plastic garbage bags and stuffed under the room's bed.

On Friday night, the medical examiner connfirmed the unidentified victim was choked and suffered blunt force trauma to the head and body.

Investigators were still trying to learn the woman's identity. Police described her as a white female, nearly six feet tall and very thin - about 130 pounds. The woman was missing her right index finger, but police said it was an old injury.

Clarence Dean is no stranger to police. He was required to register as a sex offender at his last known address, a motel in Alabaster, Ala., because of an attempted lewd act involving a child under age 12, committed in the mid 1990s in Palm Beach, Florida.

He's been a wanted man in Shelby County, Ala. since March, when sheriff's deputies performed a check and realized he had moved out without informing officials. He also failed to appear in court in a property theft case, according to sheriff's department Capt. Chris Corbell.

The death wasn't a first for the Hotel Carter, a threadbare accommodation that stands as a throwback to Times Square's seedy past.

A clerk at the Carter was charged in 1999 with killing a co-worker with a knife and a hammer during a brawl at the hotel's front desk. A half-undressed woman with her hands tied behind her back was pushed out a window and fell to her death in 1987.

Over the years there have been small fires and arrests. A building engineer was killed during a freak elevator accident in 2005. FBI agents once went to the hotel to rescue a 4-year-old boy who had been kidnapped from a day care center in Connecticut as part of a ransom plot.

The Carter was closed abruptly by the city 1998 for safety code violations, but later reopened. Still, it remains an option for budget travelers who don't mind insects, grimy bathrooms, stained furniture and broken telephones.

And there is at least some celebrity cache; The ground floors of the hotel once held the nightclub that Sean Combs and Jennifer Lopez famously fled after a shooting in 1999.

Guests at the hotel are fearful due to a lack of communication between guests and hotel management.

"I was scheduled to check out tomorrow but I'm going to leave today. I guess those things happen, but when it happens in the same place you're staying and the details of it, you kind of get concerned," said Marc Jackson.

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