North Island Employee Being Questioned in Prostitutes’ Slayings

A young public works employee at North Island Naval Air Station was arrested Thursday on suspicion of assaulting a prostitute, and authorities are questioning the man in the slayings of dozens of other prostitutes in San Diego County.

Sgt. Jim Cooke of the county Sheriff’s Department said after the morning arrest at the base that “we’re not saying yet” that James Morris Jackson, 23, is a suspect in the string of 40 slayings of young street women, most of them prostitutes and drug addicts.

“But naturally, because of the nature of the crime, we’re going to look at him and see if there’s any possible connection,” Cooke said. “He may have been involved in the other cases, but we don’t know yet.”

The special Metropolitan Homicide Task Force investigating the slaying first became interested in Jackson when it was reviewing routine San Diego police cases involving prostitutes, Cooke said.

It learned of a case in which a female prostitute was abducted in San Diego early Monday morning and assaulted. Investigators identified Jackson as a suspect, then began trailing him, Cooke said.

On Thursday morning, they arrested him after he drove over the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge about 6 a.m. on his way to work at the air station, where he is a civilian employee. Cooke said Jackson did not resist arrest, and he was taken to police headquarters for questioning.

Police declined to release a photograph of Jackson; Cooke said detectives plan to have him appear in a lineup.

Meanwhile, Jackson was taken to County Jail and booked on suspicion of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, false imprisonment and forcible oral copulation in the Monday assault.

The arrest is the seventh made by the task force since it was formed in 1988. Five of the cases have resulted in convictions. Cooke said the remaining case goes to trial later this month. In that case, Alan Michael Stevens is charged with murder in a November, 1988, slaying near Pala-Temecula Road in North County.

The task force, composed of city police and sheriff’s deputies, was created after intense publicity about the series of prostitute slayings. Most of the women were abducted in the city and their bodies found in remote parts of the county.

The killings began in 1985, just after a similar set of slayings ended in the so-called Green River series of prostitute murders in the Seattle area. Those slayings also remain unsolved.