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 group varied in number but at times as many as twenty detectives were assigned to it and several of them were kept busy checking out information and queries from the flood of telephone calls. A Sheriff’s Department spokesman pointed out it was better to assign a large team of detectives to check out the leads promptly than to put a couple of people on the case and wait a year for them to plow through the mass of work.

There was nothing unusual about looking for a connection with other possible crimes. It’s standard operational procedure when suspects are named or arrested in serial murders or high-profile cases such as the Sobek case. That can be true even when the suspect doesn’t show the classic signs that so many serial killers exhibit. There was no indication Rathbun was enjoying his notoriety and looking to carve out a special niche for himself as one of the enduring ogres in modern American criminal history like Manson or serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

Rathbun didn’t leap at the opportunity to impress interrogators with any self-perceived brilliance in getting away with repeated murders by reciting a list of victims, dates, places, and locations. He didn’t deliberately court the press. And he didn’t form any early relationships with groupies attracted by his sudden dark celebrity. Even so, California police were deeply interested in his central Ohio ties, and within a couple of days of his arrest in Hollywood, a pair of homicide investigators from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department walked off a passenger jetliner at the Port Columbus International Airport where they were met by local officers. The visitors were in town to work on their profile of Rathbun’s background, on a timeline sequence of his activities, and to look over and discuss carefully selected unsolved homicides in the area.

Sheriff Block had disclosed during one of the news conferences that he was sending detectives “out of state … to look at some unresolved cases in areas where we know Rathbun has been and there are possibilities that he may have been involved in homicide cases in those areas. One in particular that we are looking at is a homicide in Ohio, in close proximity to where Rathbun’s father lives and where Rathbun has visited,” he declared.

While the LASD homicide detectives were in Columbus they met with the photographer’s former girlfriend, Karen Masullo. Details of the conversation, held on Friday morning, December 1, weren’t publicly revealed. But Mrs. Masullo disclosed to reporters before the meeting that she planned to tell them about disturbing changes in his personality she noticed a few years earlier. She told the Dispatch that initially she was pleased that someone cared enough to pay so much attention to her, but her old friend’s continued obsession with her soon became tiring. “My husband loves me,” she said, “but Charlie coveted me.”

The Los Angeles detectives also talked with Rathbun’s relatives in the Columbus area before moving on to Lansing, where they had more conversations with local police and former associates or friends of the murder suspect.

Lansing homicide investigator John Hersman had previously telephoned California and told police probing the Rathbun case that the photographer had local ties. The Michigan detective also advised his West Coast colleagues about the mysterious vanishing of a young Lansing woman who had lived less than one mile from a trailer park Rathbun formerly listed as his address. After filling the California sleuths in on the local probe during the phone call, Hersman put together a package of information collected while investigating the disappearance of Rose Larner, and mailed it to them. The information was ultimately shared with members of the California task force, along with data on other cases of homicides or vanishings of women Rathbun could have possibly been involved with during his cross-country travels.

Another homicide task force composed of investigators from law enforcement agencies in the Lansing area, including Ingham, Eaton, and Clinton counties, took over the Larner probe. Officers from the Michigan State Police Department, East Lansing, and Meridian township were also part of the team effort. Members of the multiagency police team sent photos of Ms. Larner and of two other area women, whose mystifying disappearances were under investigation, to their colleagues in California. The pictures of Ms. Larner, Paige Marie Renkoski, and of Christine O’Brien were to be checked against the photos of women that were seized by investigators from Rathbun’s Hollywood apartment.

According to the data rounded up by the veteran Michigan law officers, Rathbun continued to maintain a mailing address at the Stonegate trailer park just south of Lansing in Delhi township into at least 1993, the year his pretty teenage neighbor vanished as suddenly and completely as if she were whisked aboard a passing UFO.

The eighteen-year-old girl, whose friends and family usually called by her nickname, “Rosie,” was last seen by her mother, Rose Markey, on December 7, 1993. Before stepping out of a friend’s house on Midwood Street on Lansing’s south side into the prewinter chill at about 2:30 A.M., the teenager pulled a warm brown coat over her sweater and blue jeans and snuggled a gray and white hat over her shoulder-length brown hair. She was such a confirmed night person that family members affectionately joked about the girl who slept the day away then boogied from sundown to sunup. They called her “the vampire.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Markey didn’t like the idea of the pretty, petite, five foot one inch, 110-pound girl walking into the night by herself and urged her to drive the family van. But she was in the mood to walk.

“Rosie, I love you,” her mother called. “I love you too,” the girl called back. Then the self-confident, chatty teenager walked off into the darkness, planning to hike several blocks to her boyfriend’s house on nearby Jolly Road. Mrs. Markey never again saw her daughter, or heard the voice of the talkative girl who was known for spending hours on the telephone and for dreamily discussing plans of some day becoming a police officer like a favorite uncle in Wisconsin—or of going into modeling.

Rosie loved the telephone so much that some of her acquaintances changed the numbers on their pagers to keep her from bothering them. Sometimes she made as many as 1,200 calls in a single month. But the motor-mouthed teenager never called her mother or anyone else after the dark, gloomy night she walked out of the house in Lansing for the last time.

Months later her mother told a reporter that she realized on Christmas Day when her daughter’s brightly wrapped presents were left unopened, that she would never again see the brash, hazel-eyed girl. Rosie loved holidays and presents and if she had a choice in the matter she wouldn’t have missed sharing the occasion with her mother and other family members.

Police took Rosie’s ominous disappearance seriously from the very beginning, and officers carefully retraced the route it was believed she would have taken to her boyfriend’s home, meticulously combing the streets, sidewalks, and frozen lawns for clues. Shortly after Rosie vanished, a neighbor who lived only one block from Midland told police she had looked through her window and noticed a young woman walking nearby about the time the irrepressible teenager set out on foot for her boyfriend’s house. The neighbor said a car was cruising slowly in the street beside the girl and it seemed someone was trying to coax her into accepting a ride.

During the next two years Lansing police, county sheriff’s officers, and investigators from the Michigan State Police Department searched more than fifty different locations looking for Rosie’s body.

Investigators believed she was murdered, and they scoured city parks and tramped through dense tracts of woods on private land. Divers from the Michigan State Police Department slowly coasted along the cluttered bottoms of isolated ponds and abandoned gravel pits fruitlessly peering through the murky waters looking for a body.

Police even used specially trained dogs to sniff for the poisonous gasses produced by decaying human bodies, and dug through four-inch concrete under the basement stairway of a big house in East Lansing. The Montie House was a cooperative primarily tenanted by students enrolled at Michigan State University, but after police chopped up the cement floor the lawmen and their canine sniffers found nothing more ominous than another layer of older wooden flooring under the newly created rubble.

Another time a Michigan State Police helicopter skimmed low over the muddy waters of the Grand River after a tipster indicated Rosie’s body was dumped there. If the tip was legitimate the body had floated away, was moved by somone, or something else happened to it. The search of the river was as fruitless and disappointing as earlier efforts focused on other locations.

The girl was missing nearly two years when several tips led police to a rugged tract of state-owned property in Northeast Michigan’s Gladwin County about eighty-five miles from the capital city. The reports raised a flurry of excitement over the possibility that the puzzle was at long last about to be solved, but investigators once more came up empty-handed.

Police and members of the missing girl’s family even talked with psychics, and three of the sensitives, without being advised about the conclusions of their clairvoyant brethren, came up with the same determinations: Rosie’s remains were secreted away near a group of earthen mounds in the Lansing area. A scatter of bones was eventually uncovered in the area of the mounds, but after inspection by experts they were quickly ruled out as having nothing to do with the mystery. They were the remains of a dog or some other canine.

Despite the massive police search, law enforcement authorities were unable to turn up any trace of the missing girl. But the case was kept open and every new tip and possibility was faithfully followed up by Detective Hersman and his colleagues.

A task force spokesman indicated they were continuing to take a good look at Rathbun in the Larner case even though other developments appeared to be more promising. The state police sergeant added that the possibility Rathbun had something to do with the disappearance was “remote.” Neither family members nor friends of the missing girl were aware of any acquaintance between her and the photographer.

Yet, certain facts couldn’t be ignored. Investigators confirmed that Rathbun was in Lansing in June 1993 and during the following spring. He had friends who lived in a mobile home in Delhi township. Rosie was young, pretty, and was toying with the idea of trying to become a professional model. She was exactly the kind of impressionable teenager whose trust conceivably could be won by an experienced photographer with a portfolio full of glamour pictures of lovely models about her age, a thick list of magazine, calendar, and advertising credits, and a glib spiel.

By the time Rathbun came to the attention of Michigan police, local and state homicide investigators were up to their ears in probes of missing or murdered young women. One of the most baffling was tied to a five-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance of thirty-year-old Paige Renkoski.

Paige was a statuesque five foot seven inch, blue-eyed blonde with a model’s figure, who disappeared after stopping her car at the side of busy Interstate 96 near the Fowlerville exit a few miles east of Lansing on May 24, 1990. The substitute schoolteacher’s silver 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais sat undisturbed on the westbound shoulder of the busy highway for five hours before police stopped in the late afternoon to investigate after being alerted by a passing motorist. The driver side door was open, the engine was still running, and the headlights were on. The woman’s purse and shoes were inside, and there was no damage to the vehicle or any traces of blood.

Earlier in the day Paige had driven her mother, Ardis Renkoski, to the Detroit Metro-Wayne County Airport, and after stopping to visit a girlfriend, she was returning to her home in the upscale northeast Lansing suburb of Okemos when she vanished. Her car was abandoned along a busy stretch of the interstate between Lansing and Detroit about twenty miles from her exit.

Police quickly broadcast a description of the missing woman detailing her appearance down to her shoulder-length hairstyle and surgical scars on her right arm. She was described as wearing a long-sleeve, white turtleneck shirt, multicolored baggy silk slacks and a green and gold beaded necklace. Five-thousand flyers with her photo and a typewritten description were printed and distributed, and within a few days a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for information leading to her safe return or the arrest and conviction of her abductor was also posted.

Investigators brought in nine tracker dogs to help them comb through a densely wooded area near the highway exit, while a helicopter crisscrossed the skies a few hundred feet overhead without any success.

Among the most promising of hundreds of leads developed by investigators, were reports from several motorists who said they saw the woman standing in front of her car talking to a man with a maroon minivan. The van carried Michigan license plates and was either a Chrysler or a GMC, they said.

Livingston County Sheriff’s Detectives and other law enforcement agencies were still hoping to solve the puzzle of the missing teacher when Rathbun was arrested in California and they learned of his local connection. Paige shared many of the same physical characteristics as Linda, including the color of their hair and eyes. The two women were also close to the same age when they vanished.

The third missing Michigan woman whose photo was sent to Los Angeles to be compared with pictures found in the photographer’s house was tied to a much more recent disappearance. Twenty-four-year-old Christine O’Brien vanished in Livingston County in circumstances eerily similar to the disappearance of Paige Renkoski.

The five foot one inch, 100-pound woman was last seen early Tuesday evening, July 18, 1995, when she paid a bill at a health spa in the industrial city of Flint a few miles northeast of Lansing. She was an enthusiastic equestrienne and told an employee at the spa that she was in a hurry because she planned to meet someone who was building horse stables.

Christine lived in Fenton with her parents, Dan and Brenda O’Brien, a machine repairman for General Motors Corporation and a homemaker. The small town is only a few minutes drive south of Flint along U.S. Road 23, but Christine never returned home that night. And she never telephoned, although she always made sure to let her parents know if she was going to be late.

The O’Briens began searching for their missing daughter that evening, but no trace of her was turned up until the following morning. Her sister, Laura, found the missing woman’s silver 1987 Chevy Nova parked at the Tyrone Hills Golf Club. The public golf course was only a short walk from a horse auction in Fenton, which Christine often visited. The car was properly parked, locked, and the keys and her purse were missing.

Family members posted a five thousand dollar reward for information about the whereabouts of the attractive young woman with the brown eyes and long brown hair; helicopters and tracking dogs were used in two massive searches; and police investigated hundreds of leads without success. Many of the same officers who helped comb area fields and woods for Paige Renkoski also participated in the fruitless search for Christine O’Brien.

Michigan investigators also checked briefly for a possible link between Rathbun and one of the state’s most notorious unsolved murders in recent years, the sex slaying of a pretty Northwest Airlines stewardess who was raped, tortured, and butchered minutes after walking into her hotel room at the edge of the Detroit Metro-Wayne County Airport in Romulus.

Forty-one-year-old Nancy Jean Ludwig was a fifteen-year-veteran stewardess, when her plane landed at the airport at 7:51 P.M., on February 17, 1991, at the end of a flight from Las Vegas. A few minutes later she and another stewardess left their shuttle van and checked into the 268-room Hilton Airport Inn which contracted to provide housing for air crews on layovers. The last time her colleague saw her was about 9 P.M. when they parted on the third floor, and Nancy began walking down the hallway toward Room 354 near a stairwell, pulling her luggage cart behind her.

A few minutes before 1 P.M. the next day a housekeeper at last disregarded the DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the front of the door, slipped a plastic key into the lock, and entered the room. The naked body of the five-foot, 105-pound stewardess from suburban Minneapolis was lying facedown on one of the beds covered with a bedspread. A gag was still in her mouth, her throat was slit, and her head and upper body were drenched with blood. Her hands were scarred with deep slashes either from a very sharp knife or a razor, indicating the terrified woman had thrown them up in a vain effort to defend herself. She had been bound with a rope and raped twice, apparently once on each bed.

The woman’s underpants, brassiere, panty hose, uniform, jewelry, billfold, and luggage were missing, and police and experts in abnormal psychology later speculated they were kept by the killer as grisly trophies of his crime.

Despite a massive police search for the killer, the promotional efforts of her husband, Art Ludwig, a recently retired program director and vice president with a Minneapolis television station, and a huge eighty thousand dollar reward the case bogged down. Investigators followed up more than two thousand leads and suspected that the killer of the stewardess was lurking in the stairwell and pounced on her as she opened her door and turned or stooped to pull her luggage inside.

Like their colleagues seeking to clear up unsolved slayings in other jurisdictions, investigators from the Romulus Police Department and the Michigan State Police took a close look at the possibility the photographer might have been involved in the case. But Rathbun was not a good match for the psychological profile of Mrs. Ludwig’s killer that was developed by Michigan State Police. According to the profile, the sex slayer was white, in his thirties, probably had been released from a psychiatric hospital shortly before the killing, worked in or near the hotel, and knew beforehand that stewardesses stayed there on their layovers. Rathbun is white and was in his early thirties when the stewardess was slain, but that is about as close as he came to matching the profile.

There were other more solidly scientific reasons to eliminate him as a suspect, as well. The killer left samples of his DNA code behind in the blood splattered hotel room with the mutilated body of his petite victim. The FBI ran a DNA profile on tissue believed to have come from the killer, and subsequently more than two hundred men were eliminated as possible suspects through blood and saliva comparisons.

Early in December after Rathbun’s arrest, Romulus police announced that he, too, was eliminated as a suspect in the savage sex slaying of the stewardess. Laboratory analysts compared samples of his blood and DNA with the tissue believed to belong to the killer, and the unique genetic codes did not match.

Even though Rathbun was eliminated as a possible suspect in the Ludwig slaying, he hadn’t yet been ruled out as a possible serial killer. Homicide detectives across the country probing other murders were just as devoted as their colleagues in Romulus were to solving their own baffling cases.

In Columbus police were taking a close look at Rathbun and at an accused serial killer arrested after an alleged cross-country murder spree, as possible suspects in the slaying of an Ohio State University coed, eighteen-year-old Stephanie L. Hummer, in 1994.

Coincidentally, hard-drinking drifter and occasional carnival roustabout Glen Rogers was nabbed following a wild high-speed state police chase through the hills of rural Kentucky on November 13, only nine days before Rathbun was picked up as a suspect in the Sobek killing. Rogers was accused of committing a string of homicides including the slaying of a Southern California woman. Like Rathbun, Rogers grew to adulthood in Ohio then trekked west to California.

Both Rathbun and Rogers were men who had uniquely tempting backgrounds, and techniques or abilities that could have potentially been used to attract shapely women. Spur-of-the-moment killers as well as conniving serial slayers who sometimes plan their crimes beforehand in great detail, often use props to lure their victims. Ted Bundy, who was a classic serial killer of young women, typically lulled the natural suspicions of his victims by wearing an arm sling or hobbling about on crutches and asking for help with some light physical task such as loading a surfboard onto the roof of his parked VW Bug.

Rogers allegedly depended on nothing more than his rugged good looks and a rough-hewn, backwoods charm to lure sexy females into his clutches. He didn’t bother with inanimate props. But Rathbun had his camera and an impressive portfolio as possible bait, if he chose to use them for sinister purposes. The prospect of sudden riches and fame could be a powerful lure for naively trusting young women with visions of being “discovered” by a big-time photographer and launching exciting careers in modeling. Rathbun, of course, was a frequent visitor to Columbus and to Worthington, and he returned to his old stomping grounds at least four or five times a year.

The victim of the baffling murder that had puzzled homicide investigators in Columbus for nearly two years, was young and had the fresh-faced beauty and sleek, firm body that could have qualified her for the fling at modeling, which she is said to have had aspirations of undertaking. Detectives, however, were apparently unable to locate anyone who could place Rathbun and the pretty college girl together or confirm that they were acquaintances.

A freshman honors student from Cincinnati, Stephanie was selected as an Evans Scholar, one of the young women and men who have worked as golf caddies and are helped with college tuition as part of a program to help promote and support their higher education. Scholars are nominated by their country clubs during the junior year of high school and must graduate in the top 20 percent of their classes to qualify.

The scholarship winner was enjoying an informal reunion on campus with former high school friends, when she was abducted between 3:30 and 4:30 Sunday morning, March 6. Early Saturday, Stephanie’s parents, both OSU graduates, visited and treated her and her chums to lunch. Later, after Daniel and Susan Hummer left, the young people watched movies and played cards throughout Saturday evening and into the wee hours of the next morning before leaving Stephanie’s residence at the Evans Scholars House on their way to a party over a campus bar.

One of the boys in the group slashed his hand trying to vault a chain-link fence and he and his male roommate left to run cold water over the cut. Amie Nelson, a Northwestern University student and the other member of the quartet, decided she wanted to return to the Evans Scholars House and left after Stephanie gave her room key to her. Investigators later surmised that Stephanie was abducted while she was cutting through Pearl Alley, a well-lighted route just east of the campus and about a block from the Evans Scholars House.

About nine or ten hours later her body was found lying facedown in an isolated brush filled field west of the main business area of the city, two and a half miles from the alley. Authorities were tipped off after the corpse was spotted by a sharp-eyed crewman on a passing Conrail freight train. The body was naked except for a bra, tennis shoes, and socks. The rest of her clothes, including a blue nylon windbreaker with a hood and a front logo printed in green letters, “Evans Scholars, Winter Formal 1994,” black denim slacks, a blue denim shirt, and a black body suit, were missing.

Detectives theorized she was abducted by a stranger and stripped before being forced to walk from a car through a heavy stand of brambles to a clearing near the railroad tracks a short distance from the Scioto River. She was smashed on the back of the head with a heavy object and strangled at the same location where the body was found. The girl from Cincinnati, who only a few months before urged her high school classmates to blaze new paths in their lives and “leave a trail,” was the victim of an incredibly brutal murder. The ambitiously optimistic advice from the girl whose teachers described as an overachiever was printed in the 1993 high school yearbook. Stephanie was the editor.

Although the autopsy indicated she was involved in sexual activity shortly before her slaying, questions developed over whether or not she was raped. Dr. Cyril Wecht, a former coroner and one of the most famous forensic pathologists in the nation, advised that the autopsy didn’t support a conclusion of rape. There were no signs of struggle and no traces of blood or other foreign tissue under her fingernails indicating she scratched or hit at an assailant, according to the autopsy report.

After Sheriff Block announced that authorities in Ohio were interested in the photographer as a possible suspect in a murder there, Columbus, police responded cautiously to the disclosure. They played it close to the vest with the local press, but the city’s media quickly revealed investigators were checking out Rathbun to determine if he could have been involved in the unsolved Hummer slaying. Homicide Detective Pat Barr refused to definitely identify Rathbun as a suspect but indicated he was one of various people who were being looked at in the case. Since the coed’s murder, Columbus police had already checked out more than sixty suspects.

The key to the possibility of Rathbun’s involvement was linked to whether or not he was in Columbus on the weekend of the slaying. The same weekend Stephanie was killed, a bodybuilding competition for men and women called the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic, was being held in the city. Rathbun was known to be fond of photographing male and female bodybuilders during workouts, but a records check failed to disclose his name among reporters or photographers with media credentials for the show named after the famous bodybuilder and Hollywood film hero.

The bodybuilding event at the Veterans’ Memorial was staged only one week after the Columbus International Auto Show, a production that would also have been of considerable interest to the gallivanting photographer. The auto show is one of the largest such events in the nation and provides an extraordinarily attractive showcase where professionals from every area of the industry can view the latest advances in automotive design and technology. For a highly skilled automotive photographer such as Rathbun, the event could also offer an excellent opportunity to strengthen and renew personal contacts with professionals in the fields of promotion, advertising, and publishing. It was an event he could have been expected to do his best to attend.

Early in December, however, Columbus police announced their determination: Rathbun was not involved in the murder of the local coed. Furthermore, Police Lieutenant Dan Wood told reporters authorities did not believe he was involved in any other unsolved slayings in the area.

But police in the nearby central Ohio city of Lancaster also briefly looked into the possibility that a solution to the community’s most baffling and longest unsolved murder might somehow have a connection to the former Columbus resident who was charged with a grisly slaying halfway across the country. The victim in Lancaster was a high school student with the same kind of youthful beauty and zestful appearance that fit in with the faces and figures of teenage models appearing on covers of major national magazines aimed at young girls like Seventeen and Teen Beat.

The case files on the shocking murder of seventeen-year-old Stacey Fairchild almost seven years earlier were yellowing with age, but there was no crime in the history of the quiet community of about thirty-five thousand people, thirty-eight miles southeast of Columbus, that homicide investigators were more determined to solve.

The high school girl had a part-time job at the Fairfield Mall. On the night of February 2, 1989, she left work, climbed into her car, and drove into eternity. She never reached her home. A massive search for the missing teenager didn’t end until three days later when her body was discovered caught in a tangle of branches and driftwood in the icy Hocking River that runs through Fairfield County, the core of the city, and behind the mall. Her burned-out car was found a few miles upstream. An autopsy disclosed that although she was beaten on the back of the head, her death was caused by drowning. The brutal murder sent shockwaves through the placid community, where people were used to leaving the keys in their cars and often didn’t bother to lock their doors at night. The slaying of an innocent high school girl was the kind of crime that more often occurred in larger, more rowdy communities like Columbus, Cleveland, or Cincinnati. It was definitely not typical of a friendly town like Lancaster.

For a long time after the teenager’s pitiful frozen corpse was pulled from the river, grown women and girls didn’t move around outside their homes at night unless they were accompanied by an adult male companion—often armed with a gun. People also began locking their doors at night and taking their keys with them when they left their cars. The fright eventually died down, but despite the best efforts of homicide detectives, who interviewed scores of people and followed up hundreds of leads, the puzzle over the identity of the mysterious killer was never solved. Like others before him, Rathbun was also ultimately eliminated as a possible suspect in the Fairchild murder.

News of the developments in the Midwest, where police in two states indicated they were no longer looking at Rathbun as a serious suspect in unsolved slayings or disappearances, drew sharp criticism of the Los Angeles County Sheriff from the photographer’s legal counsel. The sheriff was accused of behaving irresponsibly by labeling the photographer as a possible serial killer before developing any evidence to support the accusations.

At this writing, Rathbun had not been linked or charged in any murders or disappearances outside California. In California, while Rathbun has not been officially eliminated as one of the possible suspects in the Pandelios case—which remains open and unsolved—authorities have said that they do not have any evidence that would warrant bringing any charges against him. The only charges pending against Rathbun, as of this writing, are in connection with the Sobek case.