A Closing

Early Monday morning, September 16, 1996, exactly ten months after Linda walked out of her home in Hermosa Beach for the last time, the jury selection process began for the trial of her accused killer. Two weeks later, attorneys for the prosecution and the defense began delivering their opening statements before Superior Court Judge Donald F. Pitts at the courthouse in downtown Torrance.

The front-row seats in the spectator section were occupied by members of the families of the defendant and of the dead model. Rathbun’s family was seated on one side of the aisle. Linda’s family occupied seats on the other side, joined by Willette, their civil attorney.

During the fiercely contested trial, the prosecution developed a grisly word picture of the defendant as “a human monster” who carried a black nylon equipment bag outfitted as a rape kit when he drove the model into the isolated desert, sexually assaulted her, then murdered her to keep her from reporting the crime.

The defense sketched a far different picture for the jury, depicting a spat between the model and photographer that accidently turned deadly after a day of heavy drinking and consensual sex.

Much of the public interest before and during the screening of potential jurors focused on the possibility that Rathbun would testify in his own defense. Although the move is unusual in felony cases, Rathbun had successfully testified in his own behalf once before when he was cleared of the rape charges in Ohio. And if he wanted to fully relate his version of exactly what he wanted to convince the jury actually occurred between him and the model on the last day of her life, he would have to take the witness stand—then submit to cross-examination

In his opening statement, Werksman quickly ended the speculation. “When it’s our turn, you will hear from Mr. Rathbun,” the lawyer promised. “You will hear hour by hour, sometimes minute-by-minute, details of what happened between him and Ms. Sobek.” The defense lawyer told the jury that on the day Linda died she guzzled tequila, undressed for the photographer, and seduced him. Photographs would be produced to back up the story, he added.

“She drank almost an entire bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila. We will show you photographs of her undressing, of her naked and touching herself in a very sensual way,” the defense attorney declared.

Discovery of the photos accounted for one of the more curious developments in the case. Robert Rathbun drove to a remote area near Palmdale with his girlfriend shortly after his younger brother’s preliminary hearing and recovered five rolls of undeveloped film. The defendant told him where they were buried. Like other men in his family, the Washington, D.C., area lawyer was an amateur photographer, and instead of immediately turning the film over to police, he took it back to his home in Virginia and developed it in a basement darkroom.

Some of the photos were double exposures of female genitalia and the interior of the new Lexus and, along with the pictures of Linda modeling the sheer dresses, they were entered into evidence by the defense. The double exposures did not show the face of the woman, and experts differed over whether or not the photos were of Linda.

In Kay’s opening statement, he branded Rathbun as a predator who acted out “perverted fantasies for sexual purposes.” In a booming voice, crackling with emotion, the prosecutor promised the jury: “Linda Sobek, figuratively speaking will come out of the grave and into this courtroom to tell you exactly what happened. She will tell you of the pain and degradation and humiliation she suffered.” Kay said the young woman’s ankles were bound and her legs pulled apart while Rathbun forced “an unknown object up her anus and pounded it and pounded it.”

Dressed neatly in a dark blue suit and tie, Rathbun sat quietly beside his attorneys, occasionally scribbling on a yellow legal pad, but showing little emotion during the opening arguments. His behavior remained much the same during the testimony of witnesses for the prosecution.

The prosecution team called friends of the model, Linda’s mother, and a parade of homicide detectives and criminalists and technicians from the Sheriff’s Department Crime Laboratory to testify.

Heidi Robbins, the senior criminalist with the Crime Laboratory, told the jury that Linda’s clothing and her body appeared to have been cleaned up before burial. Robbins also said she found traces of blood under the model’s fingernails, and a speck discovered on Rathbun’s Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol tested “presumptive” positive for blood. The witness also said however that none of the blood found under Linda’s nails matched the defendant’s blood type.

The 1927 Argentine Army pistol, which prosecutors believed may have been used to sodomize the model, was the same weapon that discharged at Rathbun’s Hollywood home and slightly injured his friend, Deputy Meyer on the day of his arrest. The weapon has a four-inch barrel.

During cross-examination by Werksman, Robbins admitted that the test for blood also could have shown positive results if the speck was from a potato, a radish, or a flake of potassium cyanide—a chemical photographers use to develop film.

The prosecution team also produced its own color slides and photographs for the jury, including pictures shot while investigators were gently brushing away dirt from Linda’s fully clothed corpse at the gravesite. Other photos, taken during the autopsy, showed raw scrapes and cuts on her ankles, as well as the rips, lacerations, and bruises to her buttocks, anus, one wrist, and her throat. The photographs were turned away from spectators while they were shown to the jury, but witnesses’ descriptions of Linda’s injuries had her mother in tears and once the anguished woman had to be helped out of the courtroom.

The star witness in the case was at last sworn in on Friday, October 18, after the defense took over, and the lanky photographer accused of murdering the golden girl began relating his version of the tragic events that occurred at the El Mirage dry lake bed. It was a different story than the account given to Detectives Saldana and Bice during his interrogation at the LAPD station in Hollywood. Some elements of the original statement were retained, and others were discarded or significantly altered. Much of the testimony was shockingly graphic.

The witness described a day of shooting sexy photographs, heavy drinking, of rough consensual sex, and of a bungled driving stunt that led to a quarrel and horrible mishap. According to his courtroom account, when he and Linda arrived at the remote desert location for the shoot they were faced with a long wait before the light would be right for the photos. Rathbun said he had a couple of Diet Cokes in the car, but Linda didn’t want the soft drinks.

Rummaging around in his equipment bag, he found a half-pint of tequila and tossed the bottle toward her. It landed at her feet, and he offered her twenty dollars to take a drink. Then he hiked the offer to forty dollars, and finally to sixty. She could add the cost to her modeling bill, he told her.

While they waited for perfect light conditions, Linda continued sipping at the tequila until half of it was gone. They also agreed to kill some time by taking photographs of her for her portfolio and for his collection of stock images, he told the jurors. Linda modelled for him, wearing two different see-through dresses that buttoned up the front, apparently with no underwear.

“She laughed and said, ‘All photographers are the same,’” Rathbun recounted of the impromptu photo session. “She said, ‘All you want to do is see this…’ She spread her knees apart real quick so I could get a look.” Rathbun said he figured that was an invitation so he began kissing her thighs.

Copies of the photos of Linda wearing black stockings and holding open the sheer dresses as they were unbuttoned from the crotch down, were blown up and posted on a bulletin board set up near the witness.

Continuing his testimony, the defendant told the jury that while Linda changed outfits, she became less and less concerned about privacy. He said some fondling occurred, and he shot some photographs of her genitals while she touched herself.

Rathbun explained away the damage to the model’s rectum and anus, as being caused by his fingers before his clumsy forcefulness brought an end to any further sex. Rathbun said she complained it hurt, but she was “more indignant than anything else.”

Linda also reputedly became upset when she realized Rathbun had taken pictures of her genitals, and demanded the film. He said he agreed to give it to her, and finally, they got around to the job of shooting the photos with the Lexus. He climbed behind the wheel to demonstrate how to perform doughnuts, while she watched.

According to the photographer’s courtroom version of the accident, he never struck Linda with the car, but it came so close to her that she jumped back to get out of the way. That caused her to fall, and she injured one ear and a hand.

Rathbun said he helped her back inside the car, and began cleaning up the wounds, but she was furious. Linda was worried that the injury to her ear would interfere with her modeling, and called the photographer a “dumb ass.” She threatened to sue him.

“I took it for a while, but then she started to get personal, said she was going to take my house away from me, the one I just bought,” he related. “She said she was going to make trouble for me.” Peering soberly through his round-rimmed glasses at his attorney, Rathbun observed that he was having “a real bad day.”

They yelled at each other, and then Linda began kicking at the interior of the prototype luxury vehicle, he said. “I grabbed at her foot. It became a real struggle,” the broad-shouldered, six foot three, 210-pound witness said while explaining that he tried to quiet her down by sprawling on top of her.

“I was pinning her down to the seat,” he said of the struggle with the five foot four inch woman, who was almost exactly half his weight and lying facedown on the seat. “At one point she was struggling for about thirty seconds or so and then she got very calm. I kept holding her down, figuring she was playing possum.” Rathbun said that while he was waiting for her to “cry uncle” or to give up her struggle, he was staring at the door of the car, thinking of all the troubles he was having with the model, with Lexus, and with AutoWeek.

When he at last climbed off and spoke to her, she didn’t respond. He couldn’t tell if she was breathing, so he lifted her from the car and put her on the dry lake bed and tried to revive her, he continued. She didn’t respond, so he picked her up and tried to get her back into the car, but couldn’t get her inside. So he used an Ace bandage to tie her ankles together and sufficiently improved the balance to enable him to get the limp body of the woman back into the car.

The witness said he still believed she was alive, and decided to drive her to a hospital in Palmdale. “I thought I’d turn her over and make her someone else’s problem, because I didn’t know what to do.” Before driving away however, he checked her eyes and was unable to find any signs of life. “I saw an eye that was fixed and dilated,” he said.

“Had you ever seen a dead body before?,” his attorney asked.

“No,” Rathbun responded.

Instead of replying when Werksman asked what he did after observing the condition of her eyes, Rathbun broke down in tears. Judge Pitts ordered a brief recess to give the witness an opportunity to compose himself.

When testimony resumed five minutes later, Rathbun said he thought briefly about leaving the body in the desert, but didn’t. Instead he drove to a K-mart in the town of Lancaster where he bought a shovel and gloves. Then, while the dead model’s body was in the back seat of the Lexus underneath a car cover, he returned to his home in Hollywood. Finally, before dawn, he drove back to the Angeles National Forest and buried the dead girl. While the witness described Linda’s crude burial, Mrs. Sobek sobbed in the front row of the spectator’s section.

Rathbun described dumping Linda’s possessions in trash cans and driving aimlessly through the forest before burying her body. He didn’t notify police because he didn’t expect them to believe his story, he explained. The only person he called just after realizing the model was dead was the woman who was his girlfriend at the time, Glenda Elam, Rathbun added. Ms. Elam was in the courtroom and listened and watched along with members of his family, while the photographer recounted his version of the tragic events that led to the model’s death.

During cross-examination, Rathbun stubbornly stuck to his basic story that he and Linda had consensual sex, before she was accidently asphyxiated during the struggle inside the Lexus. At one point ADA Bowman asked if it was true that the model considered him to be repugnant.

“I don’t know,” Rathbun replied.

“She rejected you, didn’t she? And you couldn’t take that, could you? You had to show that little bitch who was boss, didn’t you?” the ADA fired back in a staccato burst.

Rathbun fidgeted in the witness chair, but his reply was negative to every question.

When the photographer’s lawyer brother was called to testify, he categorically denied altering the photographs that reputedly showed Linda’s lower torso.

“Would you manufacture or fabricate or alter evidence … in order to assist your brother in this case?” Werksman asked him at one point.

“No, I would not,” Robert Rathbun replied.

During cross-examination, Kay asked the lawyer why he didn’t take the film to a professional photo laboratory to be processed. Rathbun said he considered he could do as good a job as anyone.

Norman Perle, a forensics expert on recorded evidence and video imaging, was the final witness for the defense. He testified that after comparing the model’s autopsy photos with those of the nude female torso in the other photographs, he concluded they were “one and the same person.”

During cross-examination by prosecutor Bowman, the witness conceded that he had no expertise in medical anatomy and that one of the double-exposed photos he described as showing a woman’s front thigh actually showed her buttocks.

On Friday, November 1, the jury of nine men and three women deliberated less than two hours before returning twin verdicts of guilty in the murder of the model, and of anally raping her with a foreign object.

Rathbun watched, seemingly impassive while the verdict was reported. Members of Linda’s family burst into tears. “I hope Rathbun gets his due. I hope he suffers as much as my daughter suffered,” Bob Sobek told reporters while the convicted killer was led out of the courtroom by sheriff’s officers.

The onetime auto and cheesecake photographer was faced with a bleak future. He would never again journey into the pristine loveliness of the national forest, or head for Southern California’s sun-splashed beaches with a camera, a sleek new car, and a beautiful woman to spend the day snapping photographs. The sentence for the sexual assault and murder of the model was mandatory: life in prison without the possibility of parole.

UPDATE 2005

The gangly photographer’s moments of dark celebrity didn’t follow him to prison. Except for his closest family members and those who knew and loved his pretty victim, he is largely forgotten.

Ten years after his conviction and sentencing, he was locked safely behind bars and thick concrete walls topped with razor wire just outside the quiet central California valley town of Corcoran about midway between Fresno and Bakersfield.

Rathbun was one of approximately 1,050 inmates assigned to the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, according to California Department of Corrections authorities. The 280-acre state-of-the-art prison was opened in August 1997, less than a year after his conviction for the brutal sex-slaying of Linda Sobek.

The SATF is a companion institution to the 92-acre California State Prison–Corcoran, which was opened in 1988. At times the prison has held such notorious inmates as the diminutive hippie guru Charles Manson, who unleashed his bloodthirsty followers on a killing spree in 1969 that claimed the lives of pregnant Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, several of her houseguests, a wealthy executive with a Los Angeles supermarket chain, the businessman’s wife, and an unknown number of other victims.

Both prisons are well equipped to handle desperate, violent men under maximum security conditions, and Rathbun’s new life is nothing like the world he inhabited when he was photographing gorgeous models and sleek new cars. In 1997, about a year after he moved from the Los Angeles County Jail into the California State Prison system, the CSP was up to its ears in a scandal over allegations that guards were exploiting gang rivalries to stage and videotape vicious fights among inmates. The flap led to federal and state investigations. The bespectacled, nerdy-appearing sex-slayer wasn’t one of the gladiators, but the violence and fear that is a part and parcel of convict life were indicative of his new world.

Although, in some law enforcement circles, he was once suspected of being a possible serial killer, it appears highly doubtful today that Rathbun belongs to that dreadful fraternity. Evidence has never been developed to tie him to any of the violent deaths or mysterious disappearances of other beautiful young women which briefly drew the attention of homicide investigators in three states to his activities.

A former boyfriend of Rosie Marie Larner was tracked down in Mexico, and is serving a life sentence at the Saginaw Correctional Facility for her murder.

On February 18, 2002, almost exactly 12 years to the day after the savage rape-slaying of airline stewardess Nancy Ludwig, Jeffrey W. Gorton was arrested for the crime. The sinister ex-convict and landscaper was convicted of her murder and pleaded no contest to the earlier sex-slaying of music professor Margarette Eby in Flint, Mich. Gorton was given three life sentences for the stewardess’ slaying, and two more for the Eby murder. Michigan has no death penalty.

Early in 2004, more than a decade after the remains of model Kim Pandelios were discovered, an ex-convict and registered sex offender was charged with her murder. He pleaded not guilty. In Santa Barbara, early in the new millenium, the slaying of bad luck beauty Kym Morgan was still under investigation. In Ohio, the murder of OSU coed Stephanie Hummer also remained unsolved.

Even though Rathbun is no longer a suspect in any of those slayings or disappearances, he is expected to spend the rest of his life behind bars. In 1999, the California State Supreme Court refused to review his petition for the appeal of his conviction. A state appeals court ruled against him earlier. A civil suit he filed against his life insurance company, Lloyd’s of London, alleging the firm owed him a legal defense, was dismissed in 1998.

The former West Hollywood auto and cheesecake photographer is living out his days among his own kind; murderers, sex fiends, former drug dealers, stick-up artists, street gang members and other savagely brutal men. They are frightful neighbors!