A Denver Public Library staffer who tipped police to the license plate number of a suspicious-acting man led to the January 9 arrest of a convicted sex offender suspected of a series of indecent exposures at several area libraries and a bookstore.
Gary Alan Hatcher, 52, of Denver faces three charges of indecent exposure and one count of failing to register as a sex offender, according to the Denver Police Department. After reading news accounts about the incidents, the DPL worker, who was not identified by the January 11 Denver Post, recalled the license plate number she took down several months ago after a woman reported that a man was acting suspiciously around her daughter.
Police suspect Hatcher in five reports during the past year of indecent exposure to girls in the children’s departments of two Denver Public Library branches, and in two more complaints at the Tattered Cover Book Store in Cherry Creek.
“Because he’s been convicted in the past and one of the cases involves a child, he can be charged with a felony,” Lt. Gary Lauricella, commander of the sex crimes unit, said in the January 10 Post. Hatcher was convicted for indecent exposure twice in Boulder—in 1994 and 1999—with arrests there and in three other Colorado communities dating back to 1976. Following the second conviction Hatcher was required to register with police as a sex offender, but did not.
Posted January 15, 2001.