‘Saturn Bandit’ Seemed Driven to Steal Cars at LAX

The thief struck silently but brazenly. Even after twice being caught and sent to prison, David Kelley returned to parking lots at Los Angeles International Airport.

Day after day, he checked out Saturns, Toyotas, and Hondas that lacked alarms or other anti-theft devices, Los Angeles police said. He unlocked the doors using master keys he had filed down himself and drove away.

Sometimes, he was lucky enough to find the parking lot’s ticket tucked inside the glove compartment. If not, he would tell the cashier that he had lost his ticket and paid the maximum parking fee, a small price for a car worth thousands of dollars.

Police arrested him for the third time in February 1999. Only six weeks into the year, Kelley, 29, was already responsible for more than half of the 104 cars stolen from the airport in all of 1999, said Bernard Wilson, the airport police chief, who released the airport’s crime statistics this week.

With Kelley still in prison, cars are more secure, police say, but they still don’t know what to make of the man they call the “Saturn bandit.”

“He was by far the dumbest criminal I’ve ever arrested,” said Det. Harold Davis, who once nabbed Kelley when he visited the LAPD’s Pacific station in a stolen Saturn.

Det. Jesse Ortiz, who arrested Kelley the third time, said he acquired a grudging respect for the transient, who was a master at filing down keys and, at times, lived in the cars he stole.

“He used the cars to sleep in--they were just a place for him to live,” Ortiz said. “He’s poor, and he had a tough upbringing.”

Kelley told Ortiz that he came from a broken family and that he hung out at the airport as a teenager. He would steal cars for a joy ride and sell computers, clothes or other items that he took from the vehicles, Ortiz said.

But he also confessed that he was “addicted to stealing cars and I realize I have a problem,” Ortiz said.

Airport police did not become aware of Kelley until Saturns--of the early 1990s vintage--began disappearing from airport parking lots in October 1996. Police were mystified. No broken glass or chipped metal was left as scores of cars were vanishing without a trace.

Officers on bicycles began to cruise the parking areas, staking out Saturns to see if they could catch the criminal in the act. To their surprise, police found Kelley curled up inside a Saturn. When police searched him, they found a number of car keys that had been shaved to fit car locks, said airport Police Officer Claudio Cruz.

“We didn’t know you could shave a key the way he did and steal cars,” said Cruz.

The technique, which became popular among thieves during the late 1980s, seems to work best on late 1980s and early ‘90s cars, before auto makers changed their lock systems to combat the thefts, Ortiz said.

Kelley sold some of the Saturns for parts, Ortiz said, but many more were recovered intact.

The thief pleaded guilty to grand theft auto, and was sent to jail in January 1997.

Five months later, on May 6, he was released.

On May 14, he walked into the Pacific station, whose officers handle airport crimes, and asked police to return some car keys that had been taken as evidence the first time he was arrested.

Kelley told Det. Davis that a friend had brought him down to the police station.

Davis didn’t believe him and asked Kelley to take a seat.

Then, Davis recalled, “just to satisfy my own curiosity, I went out to the front of the police station.”

He soon saw what he was looking for: Parked right there was a Saturn.

Davis ran the plates. The car had not been reported stolen, but it clearly did not belong to Kelley, who had been forbidden to drive Saturns as one condition of his parole.

When Davis called the registered owner’s residence, he learned that the owner was in Hawaii and had left his car at the airport.

Police found Kelley’s booking slip on the front seat of the car, and later determined that Kelley had stolen at least three other Saturns during the eight days he had been out of prison. Kelley was arrested and by June was once again serving time, police said.

In November 1998, Saturns again began to disappear from the airport, along with Toyotas and Hondas.

Airport authorities called prison officials, and learned that Kelley had recently been released. Airport police quickly circulated a photo of Kelley to all officers.

It took three months to catch Kelley, during which time at least 40 more cars were reported stolen, police said. Many of the cars later turned up in other parts of the airport.

Apparently having learned a lesson from his two stints in prison, Kelley decided it was too risky to drive the cars past the airport security cameras, Ortiz said. Instead, he drove them to a different parking space, and rifled through the cars’ contents.

He looked for cars that contained cellular phones, computers, dry cleaning, electronic equipment or anything else he could wear or sell, Ortiz said.

On Feb. 11, an officer on patrol saw Kelley walking into a metered parking lot across from Southwest Airlines at Terminal 1.

Kelley began to run and an officer pursued him. Kelley, with shaved keys in his pockets, was caught.

Thanks to Kelley’s one-man crime rampage, auto theft at the airport in 1999 rose more than 100% over 1998, but most other major felonies, including robbery and burglary, declined.

Ortiz says Kelley sees auto theft as his job. “He’s determined to steal cars,” Ortiz said. “And when he gets out, he’ll probably do it again.”