Update, December 20, 5:40 p.m.: Retired Huntington Park Police Chief Paul Lawrence Wadley pleaded not guilty today to misdemeanor indecent exposure charges.
The 56-year-old Anaheim resident had previously turned himself in to authorities after returning from an overseas trip.
While Wadley was away, Anaheim Police identified him as the suspect wanted for allegedly leaving nude photos of male and female body parts on one Anaheim Hills
trail, exposing his junk and butt to a woman on another and placing male
penis pictures in car windshields in a park's lot.
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Original Post, December 16, 8:07 a.m.: Police believe one of their own
left nude photos of male and female body parts on one Anaheim Hills
trail, exposed his junk and butt to a woman on another and placed male
penis pictures in car windshields in a park's lot.
An arrest warrant has been issued for retired Huntington Park Police Chief Paul Lawrence Wadley, who is thought to be out of the country.
It all began as a mystery: a woman kept finding photos of male and female genitalia on a trail near Oak Canyon Road in east Anaheim. She destroyed the photos and threw them away until Nov. 4, when the sight of one more picture of a man's junk prompted her to call the cops.
Then, on Nov. 25, a different woman on a hiking trail near Toyon Park was passed by a man who lowered his pants to his knees to expose his bare essentials. Four days later, around 6:15 a.m., a group of nine women who exercised in the same park returned to their vehicles in the parking lot to find photos of a man's junk on the windshields of their cars.
The women from both those cases contacted Anaheim Police, but none could recall seeing anyone suspicious at the time of their creepy discoveries. Officers patrolled the park and found similar photos.
The prints are what cracked the case. The forensics team was able to link them to 56-year-old Wadley, who resides in Anaheim.
Police fear there may be other victims; call Detective Matt Adrian at 714.765.1960 if you believe you may be one or know someone else who is.
Huntington Park cops might want to check the archives to see if there are any unsolved cases involving flashers and lewd photos from Wadley's 30 years with the department.
He joined the police agency in 1980 after five years as a recreation supervisor for the city of about 60,000 located 6.5 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. He rose through the ranks, serving in every department except the bike patrol and canine unit, before being named assistant chief in 2007. He was promoted to chief two years ago.
When he announced in February he would retire when his contract ended on June 30, Huntington Park City Manager Greg Korduner, who had previously worked as an administrator in several cities, told the Los Angeles Wave community newspaper that Wadley was the best police chief he had ever worked with.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.