Couple Sought In Calif. Man's Dismemberment

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A manhunt was under way Wednesday for a Pennsylvania couple accused of killing a man, cutting up his body and stashing the pieces in a backpack and under a bed in their Skid Row hotel room.

Edward Garcia Jr., 36, and Melissa Hope Garcia, 25, who also goes by the name of Melissa Turner, are considered armed and dangerous, Detective Richard Arciniega said.

The couple from York, Pa., had several previous arrests for robbery in that state, and investigators believe they were trying to rob Herbert Tracy White on Thanksgiving weekend when the Good Samaritan who had befriended the couple was killed at the Continental Hotel, Arciniega said.

White's family asked for the public's help in finding the Garcias.

"Get these monsters off the streets," said a brother, Anthony DeMarco White, 51, of Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office charged the couple Tuesday with murder with the special circumstance of torture.

White, who would have turned 50 Wednesday, was cut into five pieces with a knife and his limbs were stuffed into a backpack, the detective said. His torso was found wrapped in a blanket under the bed.

A maid discovered the grisly evidence on the morning of Nov. 29.

The couple had tried to wipe up the blood in their hotel room, and investigators suspect they were going to take away the body but were interrupted, Arciniega said.

Investigators believe White, from Hollywood, met the couple a day or two earlier.

"He befriended them, helped them out, gave them money, maybe a place to stay, and they ended up killing him," Arciniega said.

At a news conference, weeping relatives said White, who had battled alcoholism but was clean for 15 years, went out of his way to help the unfortunate. He felt it was a way of paying back the help he had been given.

White would get up in the middle of the night to drive home friends who had been drinking, they said.

He hired homeless people off the street to help him on odd jobs, made up plates of food to hand out, and doled out cash -- sometimes $20 at a time -- that he kept in his pocket, said another brother, David White, 49, of Los Angeles.

When he last talked to his brother less than two weeks before his death, White said it was his "busy time of year" for helping people, David White said.

Family members sometimes worried about White's penchant for helping strangers without a second thought, but he was "a man who did what he wanted to do," his wife said.

White mentioned that after Thanksgiving, he had met a "lovely young couple" at an ATM and had given them a couple of cigarettes and a couple of dollars, said his mother, Elizabeth White.

Around 2 a.m. Nov. 28, White got a telephone call and told his wife that he had to go and give someone a ride, she said.

She thought it was someone who had gotten tipsy because White hated drunken driving and made himself available as a driver if people had been partying too much, said his wife, Annie Coty-White, 72.

"He said, 'I'll see you tomorrow.' That's the last I saw of him," she said.

Her husband borrowed her car, which was found outside the hotel where he was killed. His keys were missing, she said.

The hotel room was rented by the Garcias, Arciniega said.

The night before White's body was discovered, a security guard received a report of a noisy commotion in the room. He knocked on the door and told them to "stop with the noise."

"They talked to him through the door and said ... that they would quiet down," he said.

Family members said it was likely their brother, an athletically built man who stood 6-foot-5 and knew martial arts, was ambushed. He may have been struck while sitting down or bending over, relatives said.

"He befriended someone and let his guard down," David White said. "He would accept you first and run your resume later."

Investigators planned to contact Pennsylvania authorities about a similar case in that state in which the victim wasn't killed, Arciniega said.

Arciniega declined to provide details, but the York Dispatch newspaper said that on Feb. 22 the couple lured convicted drug dealer Charlton Anderson to their home, bound him with shackles and rope, and stole an ounce of crack cocaine from him, according to charging documents.

When Anderson's associates arrived to get him, Garcia attacked one of them with a knife, and the same man returned later and fired on the Garcias' car, the documents said. The Garcias were arrested as they fled, later pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and were sentenced to time served, the newspaper said. Kidnapping and other charges were dropped.

"Ed Garcia is an intelligent person when he's clean, but he has the potential for violence when he's under the influence of drugs," York City Detective First Class Jeff Spence, who worked on the case, told the newspaper. "When he's in the throes of his addiction, he's a monster."

A message left by The Associated Press with detectives in York was not immediately returned Wednesday.

Drugs were not immediately suspected as a motive in White's killing, Arciniega said.

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