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Body Found In Offender's Hotel Room

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By DAVID B. CARUSO, The Associated Press

Published: September 2, 2007

NEW YORK - A fugitive sex offender wanted in two states was charged Saturday with strangling a woman and leaving her body under a bed at a Times Square hotel.

Police detained 35-year-old Clarence Dean on Friday night after announcing he was wanted for questioning.

The unemployed drifter abruptly checked out of his room at the Hotel Carter on Wednesday after a stay of nearly two weeks. A maid cleaning the room the next morning found the rigid corpse, wrapped in plastic under a bed.

Investigators were trying to determine the woman's identity Saturday, but some details emerged about the man now charged with second-degree murder.

Dean has been in and out of trouble with the law for years and was required to register as a sex offender because of a lewd act involving a child in the mid-1990s in Palm Beach.

Sheriff's deputies in Alabama issued a warrant for his arrest in the spring after learning that he had moved out of a motel in Alabaster, Ala., without informing authorities.

Police in Clarksville, Tenn., began looking for Dean, too, last month after a woman he met online reported that he took her car, emptied her bank account and disappeared.

The Montgomery County Sheriff's Department in Tennessee confirmed that a warrant was issued for his arrest on theft charges on Aug. 23..

An autopsy concluded that the woman found in Dean's hotel room was beaten and strangled. Police said she didn't appear to have been a registered guest at the hotel.

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