San Diego Manhunt Continues Three Days After Convicted Child Rapist Cut Off His Court-Ordered GPS Monitor

Merle Wakefield's GPS ankle monitor switched to "Tamper Mode" at about 3:30 a.m. Friday, September 25, while he was at a worksite in Rancho Bernardo, according to the San Diego County Sheriff's Office. Liberty Healthcare, the state contractor responsible for supervising him, sent staff to the location. They found the device removed and Wakefield gone. Liberty Healthcare notified the sheriff's office and San Diego police.

As of Monday, September 28, he remains at large. That's more than three days on the run.

"We have been working diligently to locate him," the sheriff's office said Sunday, adding that it "shares the community's concerns." San Diego County Sheriff's Watch Commander Lt. Joe Berry told City News Service, as reported by Times of San Diego, that the Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement Task Force and the sheriff's Fugitive Task Force have been searching since Wakefield disappeared. "If you see something, say something," Berry said.

Who He Is

Wakefield, 69, was convicted of lewd or lascivious acts with a child under 14 in 1980 or 1981 (sources give both years) and rape by force in 1990 or 1991. After his prison release in 1998, the state designated him a sexually violent predator. He was civilly committed to Coalinga State Hospital and placed on conditional release in November 2024 under California's Conditional Release Program, known as CONREP, which operates under the state's Sexually Violent Predator Act.

He stands 5-foot-10, weighs about 230 pounds, and has brown eyes, according to the sheriff's office.

The Placement Fight Nobody Wanted

This wasn't a quiet release. It was the third attempt to place Wakefield in San Diego County, according to Fox 5/KUSI reporting cited by the New York Post and WRGA News. An earlier plan would have housed him in a Poway home near a school and a park, and residents rallied against it. Poway Mayor Steve Vaus opposed that placement and warned that housing Wakefield without a fixed address would make it harder for the public to track him. "It's a shell game that puts a community at risk," Vaus told Fox 5/KUSI at the time.

The San Diego County District Attorney's Office made the same argument through a different door. Spokesperson Tanya Sierra told Fox 5/KUSI that the Department of State Hospitals and Liberty Healthcare needed to find suitable, monitorable housing before releasing someone like Wakefield. A San Diego judge granted him transient release in October 2024 anyway, meaning no fixed address, according to that reporting.

San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond has been the loudest public voice since the disappearance. "It's been more than 48 hours since Merle Wakefield took off his GPS monitor and walked away. He's still out there," Desmond wrote Sunday on Facebook, calling Wakefield "a convicted child molester and violent rapist" and accusing the state of staying silent. In an earlier post, Desmond wrote: "The state released him into our community in November 2024 and promised he'd be monitored and supervised. Less than two years later, he's missing and wanted."

The Other Side of the Argument

California's Sexually Violent Predator Act doesn't let the state hold someone indefinitely just because a jury once found them dangerous. Once treatment providers and a court determine an individual's risk has been sufficiently reduced, the law requires a path toward conditional release in the least restrictive setting that still allows supervision. The constitutional bargain behind civil commitment means critics of scrapping conditional release altogether would argue that permanently warehousing people who've completed treatment and met legal thresholds raises its own due-process problems, separate from whether any specific placement decision was sound.

The mechanism that failed here wasn't the legal standard for release. It was the monitoring. A transient placement without a fixed address is inherently harder to secure than a supervised residence, exactly the flaw Vaus and the DA's office flagged nearly a year before Wakefield vanished. Yahoo News reported that a California state senator has called for an audit of the state's sexually violent predator program in the wake of the disappearance, though the outlet did not identify which lawmaker.

What's Unresolved

Wakefield is wanted for violating the terms of his conditional release, according to the sheriff's office. No new criminal charges tied to his disappearance have been reported. The California Department of State Hospitals, which oversees CONREP statewide, has not issued its own public statement in any of the reporting reviewed here, leaving Desmond's claim of state silence unanswered on the record.

The sheriff's office is asking anyone with information to call 911 and not approach Wakefield. Whether the state changes how it handles transient placements for sexually violent predators, or simply reviews this single case, remains an open question heading into the next legislative session.