White gave neighbors 'creepy vibe'

MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. (WOOD) - Michelle Earl said when she first met her neighbor "he gave us a creepy, eerie type of vibe." But she and Kelvin Patterson found nothing sinister when they typed " John White" into Google.

White, a 55-year-old pastor, allegedly admitted killing 24-year-old Rebekah Gay , first hitting her over the head with a rubber mallet and then strangling her while her 3-year-old son was in the mobile home where she lived. Her body was found naked and dumped in a wooded ditch.

The couple said a Target 8 report on the teenager he stabbed in Battle Creek led them to start an online petition for a violent offender registry, similar to the sex offender list. Several other states, including Indiana, have such a list.

If this registry happens, they said they want it to be called Rebekah's Law.

Earl told Target 8, "The more you knew him, the more he kind of grew on you. You just kind of got used to his personality."

At some point, though, they learned about his conviction for involuntary manslaughter.

"He told us that he had sold drugs to a young woman and she had overdosed and he left her there," Earl said.

What he didn't say was that his victim was a woman with whom he'd been having an affair, and that her body was found so long after she disappeared that police couldn't determine how she died.

He spent 12 years in prison for that crime.

"He was like, 'You would not have wanted to know me back then. I was Charles Manson ,'" Patterson told Target 8. "That was in our kitchen he told us that."

But he told them he found God and changed.

They knew nothing of his 1981 conviction for stabbing a teenage girl 15 times in the basement of his Battle Creek home. That woman survived.

White spent two years in prison for that crime.

If Earl and Patterson had known about that crime, "He would not have been around my family," Patterson said. "I would have made sure that he was not even in this park living right beside us. I would have done everything in my power to make sure of that."

Instead, White grew close to the couple and their six children. They went to the church where he was the pastor.

"He was so nice," she said. "We had barbecues with him almost every Sunday. We had holidays. He came to our children's birthday parties. He babysat for our children."

Still, they were leery of his behavior -- heavy drinking and cursing that seemed to get worse in recent weeks.

And White also exhibited a recent obsession with his girlfriend's 24-year-old daughter, Rebekah Gay.

"He would just talk about her a lot," Earl said. "There were some obsessions, she was a beautiful girl and that kind of thing."

They want the Violent Offender Registry list "so that people can be aware of the people around them, to maybe realize that the people that you trust are maybe not the people you should be trusting."

On the Net:

Petition for Violent Offender Registry