Police last night were questioning the Alabama fugitive sex offender who checked out of a Times Square hotel before the naked body of a beaten and strangled woman was found in his room, authorities said.
Detectives picked up Clarence Dean, 35, after spotting him near Park Avenue and East 55th Street at about 7:45 p.m., police sources said.
He was not charged with any crime last night, but remains the main suspect in the murder of the woman found Thursday.
A hotel doorman was brought into the Midtown South Precinct early today in an effort to identify Dean. Cops also brought two suitcases belonging to Dean into the precinct as evidence.
A housekeeper found the body in two black garbage bags stuffed under the bed in Dean’s sixth-floor room at the run-down Hotel Carter on West 43rd Street.
Authorities yesterday were still trying to learn the woman’s identity.
Police described her as a white female, 5-foot-11 and about 130 pounds.
The victim was missing her right index finger, but police said that was from a previous accident.
City Medical Examiner spokeswoman Ellen Borokove said the woman died of “compression of the neck and blunt impact to the head and torso” – she was strangled and beaten.
Police believe the woman died shortly before she was found.
Surveillance tapes showed Dean entering and leaving the hotel but have not revealed when the mystery woman surfaced. He had checked in on Aug. 17 and checked out Wednesday.
Dean, listed as a sex offender in Florida and Alabama, has been wanted in Shelby County, Ala., since March when sheriff’s deputies realized he had moved out of the county without informing officials.
In 1994 Dean was convicted in Florida for a Palm Beach County case of lewd and lascivious abuse involving a youngster under age 12, records show.
He was sentenced to three years in 1997 in the case, which also involved charges of passing bad checks.
The death wasn’t a first for the Hotel Carter. In 1999 a clerk was charged with killing a co-worker with a knife and a hammer in a brawl at the front desk.