Death of a Model by Clifford L. Linedecker

Author:Clifford L. Linedecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466874831
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

EIGHT

More Vanished Girls

Could Charles Rathbun be a serial slayer?

That was the question being posed by Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, who referred to the suspected murderer of the model as a “possible serial killer.” Block said Rathbun was a suspect in the murder of Kimberly Pandelios and added that investigators were told she and the photographer were acquainted with each other.

“We are now including the Pandelios case as a formal part of this investigation,” he announced at a news conference.

The sheriff also mentioned, rather ominously, that since Rathbun’s arrest, several women had told about brushes with the photographer when he made “overtures for sexual favors … sometimes on photo shoots, sometimes in other relationships.” Block characterized Rathbun as having been “pushy.”

It wasn’t the first time women complained of sexually aggressive behavior by the photographer, and the onetime undercover vice cop turned administrator wasn’t the first to use the word pushy to describe his never-say-die attitude when he was rejected by a desirable woman.

The feisty veteran lawman was outspoken and attracted national publicity a few months earlier when he publicly criticized Superior Court Judge Lance Ito for removing three white deputies from bailiff duty with the O. J. Simpson jury after a single black juror complained they were biased. Block remarked that the bailiffs were following the judge’s own orders, which were very specific about how the sequestered jurors were to be treated.

The blunt-speaking sheriff’s latest remarks about the new case rattling the Southland plunged him back in the spotlight, and although they would come back to haunt him, nevertheless he had posed a question pondered at least briefly in one way or another by a rapidly burgeoning number of homicide investigators in jurisdictions from suburban Los Angeles to the Midwest.

Widespread publicity over the search for Linda, Rathbun’s arrest, and discovery of her body, sparked a flurry of activity across the country as well as in California, by police detectives investigating unsolved murders and mysterious vanishings of attractive young women.

In communities where the gangly photographer with the thinning rust-colored hair was known to have traveled or settled for a time, and in some areas where it was only suspected he may have visited, investigators began taking close new looks at cold cases and dusting off old files to check out the possibilities he might have the answers they were seeking.

They were looking for similarities in such matters as the victim profile and the methods in which the murders were carried out—even such details as how bodies were disposed of. The unsolved cases of missing and murdered models, or especially attractive college coeds and other women and girls who fit or came close to resembling Linda Sobek and Kim Pandelios in physical appearance, interests, and activities, were being given particularly close scrutiny.

The hundreds of telephone calls made to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the HBPD with tips or suspicions from private citizens played a big part in the decision to assemble the task force working on the Sobek case. The

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.