Aug 07, 2008 - 04:35 AM

By Paola Loriggio and Daniel Dale, Torstar news services

When 15-year-old North York girl Sharmini Anandavel disappeared nine years ago, 23-year-old Stanley Tippett was a prime suspect.

Police questioned him at least three times. They searched his car and his apartment, interviewed his friends, and followed him for days. But Tippett, Anandavel’s former neighbour, vigourously maintained his innocence: “They’re just wasting their time and wasting taxpayers’ money,’’ he said in a Star interview he gave to “set the record straight.”

When Anandavel’s skeletal remains were found four months later, police said she had been murdered. No one was never charged.

In subsequent years, Tippett began to amass a rap sheet. First, he was convicted of criminally harassing his 25-year-old female next-door neighbour in a Barrie subsidized housing unit. He was given a suspended sentence in June 2005.

In December 2005, he was convicted of criminal harassment once more after an alleged attempt to kidnap a 21-year-old woman. Upon sentencing him to two years in prison, a judge called him a “stalker” and a “predator.”

Yesterday morning, Tippett, now 32, was arrested and charged with the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old Peterborough girl.

Tippett, who a Peterborough neighbour says is married with five children, allegedly abducted the 12-year-old after she left a birthday party around 1:30 a.m. with friends.

The friends were approached by a minivan, and the girl who was assaulted ended up inside. Her grandmother, with whom she had planned to spend the night, reported her missing.

About an hour after the abduction, a resident of Oshawa-area Courtice, more than 60 kilometres away, reported hearing a girl scream behind Courtice Secondary School. When Durham police arrived at the scene, the minivan sped off.

Police gave chase, but they abandoned pursuit because of “the unknown nature of the call and the high speeds involved.” They found the girl behind the high school when they returned.

Police do not believe Tippett knew the girl, who is recovering in an Oshawa hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

“It was a very traumatizing incident,” said Peterborough-Lakefield police Sgt. Walter DiClemente.

After police found the van abandoned in Oshawa, they linked Tippett to the vehicle. Provincial records show he owns a Ford Windstar, and his next-door neighbour said she believed the van found by police was his.

He was arrested “without incident” at about 8:20 a.m. in a vehicle in Manvers Township, about 30 kilometres southwest of Peterborough, and will appear in court today. Thurs.

It is not known how much of the two-year December 2005 sentence Tippett actually served. In an August 2007 Peterborough Examiner story about the Peterborough Exhibition, a man named Stanley Tippett, attending the event with a wife named Natalie and four children, is quoted — as an everyday exhibition visitor — saying the 2007 event was “a lot better than last year.”

Tippett’s Peterborough next-door neighbour, Norma-Lynn Pringle, said yesterday she hasn’t had the opportunity to learn much about Tippett and his wife Natalie since they moved in to their house in April.

"He’s hardly actually even here," Pringle said. "Sometimes he shows up at one o’clock in the morning and does odd things like washing the van."

Pringle, who has six children of her own, said her family was over at the Tippett residence yesterday, helping Natalie with her 3-month-old baby.

“By the sounds of it, she doesn’t have much support herself, and is in really need of support at this time,” Pringle said.

“She’s just shocked herself. That’s all. She doesn’t know what’s going on. She just doesn’t know what to do with herself right now.”

In the case for which Tippett received the two-year sentence, he was originally charged with attempted kidnapping. His guilty plea reduced the offence to criminal harassment.

According to court testimony and the statement of facts Tippett agreed to upon his plea, he approached the 21-year-old woman, an immigrant, in line at a Wal-Mart job fair and offered her a job at the local YMCA, saying it paid $8 an hour with benefits.

The next day, he called the woman at her home and asked him to come to his house to pick up a job application. She refused. When the woman was in a Taco Bell applying for a legitimate job, Tippett walked in and berated her for seeking work there when he had already promised her employment.

He gave her a phony YMCA job application, then left a birthday card at her front door. When she learned from the YMCA that there were no jobs being offered and that Tippett did not work there, she called police.

Police found duct tape, rope, a hammer, long plastic ties, and a jackknife in his van. Before his sentencing, Tippett told the judge he had the rope to tie down a futon, the knife to cut the rope, the hammer to bang in loose trim on the vehicle, and the ties to hold down van headrests his children repeatedly jarred loose.

But he apologized for deceiving the woman. "I’d like to say I’m sorry," he told the court. “I’m sorry for the pain I caused.”

In the 1999 Star interview, he said he had “nothing to hide” in the Anandavel case.

“The last time I saw (Anandavel) was a week prior to moving out. I didn’t see her the day she went missing. I wish I had because then I would’ve been able to help,” Tippett said in late June, three weeks after the Grade 9 girl’s disappearance.

On the day Anandavel disappeared, she had told her parents she was going to a job answering phones. Her parents later said she had told them Tippett, who had moved out of their building two weeks earlier, had arranged the job for her.

When Sharmini didn’t arrive home as expected, her mother rushed to the apartment he had vacated, then called police.

After investigating Tippett intensely, police told the Star that his alibi was satisfactory, even though he told investigators he had been in several of the same places Anandavel had been.

“There have been people interviewed, requesting that they account for their whereabouts on that day and to date all the people that we’ve spoken to have adequately accounted for their whereabouts,’’ Det. Al Riddell said.

Anandavel’s skeletal remains were found by hikers in October 1999 in the East Don Parklands. Nobody has ever been charged in the case.

With files from Laura Stone