By Cindi Lash
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
WHEELING, W.Va. — Police, U.S. marshals and FBI agents continued to search last night for the escaped suspect in the abduction and sexual assault of a Wheeling, W.Va., girl.
Investigators said they believed Joshua Michael Ridings, 28, was hiding in or near his hometown of Owensboro, Ky., where they found the car that was stolen after he fled Sunday night with his cellmate from the Warrick County Jail in southern Indiana.
He has family and friends there, and investigators do not believe he has any ties or reason to return to Wheeling, where he’d been working when the Wheeling girl was attacked last February, FBI spokesman William Crowley said.
But authorities met yesterday with the girl and her family. They also alerted other women who are believed to have been attacked or accosted by Mr. Ridings, who escaped with cellmate Larry Miller by climbing onto a roof and jumping over a razor-wire fence at the jail in Boonville, Ind.
Mr. Miller, 22, of Boonville, was arrested at 12:45 a.m. yesterday, after he was found hiding in a crawl space inside an abandoned house, said Lt. Paul Weinzapfel of the Warrick County Sheriff’s Department. He had been jailed on a charge of sexual misconduct with a minor.
Mr. Ridings apparently stole a green Ford Escape from outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Boonville, about a half-mile from the jail. The car’s owner had started the car but was waiting for it to warm up before driving home, Lt. Weinzapfel said.
“They were cellmates. This was a planned event,” he said. "[Mr. Ridings] got lucky and found a running vehicle.”
The car was found later outside Daviess County High School in Owensboro, about a 30-minute drive away, Lt. Weinzapfel said. Police searched the school and activated a reverse 911 system to alert about 900 residents nearby but found no sign of Mr. Ridings.
A federal grand jury in West Virginia indicted Mr. Ridings last month on a charge of snatching the 11-year-old girl from a North Wheeling street, driving her across the Ohio River and assaulting her behind a church in St. Clairsville, Ohio. He has been linked by DNA evidence to that attack and another in Leitchfield, Ky., on Aug. 23, 2006; both cases involved a nearly naked assailant.
Mr. Ridings also is considered a suspect in the attempted abduction of a woman from Martins Ferry, Ohio, and faces charges or is considered a suspect in incidents involving a naked man in Indiana and Kentucky. He was jailed in Indiana in one of those cases.
“Obviously, this man is a predator. We believe he’s very dangerous and the investigation is being very aggressively pursued” around Owensboro and in Calhoun, about 16 miles away, Mr. Crowley said.
Investigators are checking everyone who visited or contacted Mr. Ridings in jail and have “splashed his picture all over the place,” Lt. Weinzapfel said.
Jail workers discovered that Mr. Ridings and Mr. Miller had escaped from a recreation area, which they entered through a door that should have been locked, around 9 p.m. Sunday, he said.
They believe the men boosted each other and used a bedsheet to scale a wall to the roof, then maneuvered through razor wire and spikes to jump to the ground.
The sheriff’s department is investigating the circumstances of the escape, he said.
Copyright 2008 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette