Richard Raymond Tuite is a troubled street survivor, a 33-year-old man with a string of arrests who has spent the past decade battling drug abuse and mental illness, court records show.
Tuite was born in San Diego, one of four siblings, and attended local schools. His father was a tile setter, his mother a secretary. They divorced when he was in middle school.
He dropped out of high school, telling a psychologist later, "I didn't want to be there and the people bugged me." He went to work instead and held various jobs: machinist, carpenter, landscaper, construction worker.
Tuite once told a county doctor he began using marijuana and cocaine at age 16. Later he turned to methamphetamine.
One of his sisters told court officials in 1990 that when Tuite began using meth, "he lost a part of his little mind." A psychologist quoted Tuite as saying that when high, he thinks the radio and television are sending him subliminal messages.
"I'm not really close to anyone," Tuite told a doctor. "I just kind of drift around."
Tuite has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and psychotic disorders. One psychologist wrote, "His desires to meet his own needs are unfettered by the complications of society's norms and standards, resulting in his behaving in an unacceptable fashion frequently."
His criminal record includes convictions for attempted burglary, auto theft, drug use, vandalism and annoying children. He has been arrested several other times, including once in 1993 on suspicion of stabbing another transient with a steak knife. That charge was dropped.
On Jan. 20, 1998, the night before 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was found dead, Tuite was in the neighborhood, knocking on doors and peering in windows while searching for a friend named Tracy. Police were called but didn't find him.
Police stopped Tuite three times on the day the killing was reported, including once after he followed two women to their apartment doors. Just before 7 p.m., he was located panhandling near a supermarket and taken in for questioning. Tuite denied any involvement in the killing. His clothes were confiscated, he was photographed, hair and fingernail samples were taken, and then he was released.
Detectives and prosecutors later said they considered Tuite a bull in a china shop, incapable of killing Stephanie without waking others in the house and leaving any obvious traces behind.
Five days after the slaying, police were called to a Best Western hotel in Escondido and found Tuite looking for "the family of the kid who got killed." He was told to leave.
The next month, he was arrested after following two girls, ages 12 and 13, while they rode a bus home from a nearby mall. He tracked them to an Escondido apartment complex, where they quoted him as saying, "Tracy, all I want to do is have sex with you." He was convicted of a misdemeanor.
In March 1998, he was arrested for attempted burglary. He was convicted and sent to prison for three years. Released in February 2000 to the first in a series of halfway houses, he violated his parole five times, officials said. Once he escaped and made it 90 miles from Ontario to Escondido before he was caught. In November, he was found in possession of a knife.
Tuite had been scheduled to be released from prison Friday.
In the years since Stephanie's death, Tuite has declined interview requests, or was in prison and unavailable for comment. Attempts yesterday to reach his family and friends were unsuccessful.
In an e-mail to the Union-Tribune two years ago, a woman who identified herself as a close friend of one of Tuite's sisters wrote, "Richard's family and friends are here to support him, and believe in his innocence."
