In Santa Monica I exited on Fourth Street and then took Pico down to the beach. I pulled into the parking lot where Denise Babbit’s car had been abandoned by Alonzo Winslow. The lot was almost empty and I parked in the same row and maybe even the same space where she had been left.
The sun had not burned off the marine layer yet and the sky was overcast. The Ferris wheel on the pier was shrouded in the mist.
Now what? I thought to myself. I checked my phone again. No messages. I watched a group of surfers coming in from their morning sets. They went to their cars and trucks, stripped off their wet suits and showered with gallon jugs of water, then wrapped towels around their bodies, pulled off their board shorts and changed into dry clothes underneath. It was the time-honored way of the pre-work surfer. One of them had a bumper sticker on his Subaru that made me smile.
CAN’T WE ALL GET A LONGBOARD?
I opened my backpack and pulled out Rachel’s legal pad. I had filled in several pages with my own notes from the survey of the files. I flipped to the last page and studied what I had put down.
WHAT HE NEEDED TO KNOW
Denise Babbit
1. Details of prior arrest
2. Car-trunk space
3. Work location
4. Work schedule-abducted after work
5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs
Sharon Oglevy
1. Husband’s threat
2. Hiscar-trunkspace
3. Work location
4. Work schedule-abducted after work
5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs
6. Husband’s home location
The two lists were short and almost identical and I felt sure that they held the connection between the two women and their killer. From the killer’s angle, these were all things that he would seemingly need to know before he made his move.
I lowered the car’s windows to let the damp sea air in. I thought about the Unsub and how he had come to choose these two women from these two different places.
The simple answer was that he had seen them. They both displayed their bodies publicly. If he was looking for a specific set of physical attributes, he could have seen both Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy onstage.
Or on computer. The night before, while composing the lists, I had checked and found that both the Femmes Fatales exotic revue and Club Snake Pit had websites that featured photographs of their dancers. There were numerous photos of each dancer, including full-length shots that showed their legs and feet. On www.femmesfatalesatthecleo.com, there were chorus-line shots that showed the dancers high-kicking at the camera. If the Unsub’s paraphilia included leg braces and the need for a giraffe body type, as Rachel had suggested, then the website would have allowed him to research his prey.
Once a victim was chosen, the killer would need to go to work identifying the woman and filling in the other details on the lists. It could be done that way but I had a hunch that it wasn’t. I felt sure that there was something else in play here, that the victims were connected in some other way.
I zeroed in on the first item on both lists. It seemed clear to me that at some point the killer had acquainted himself with the details of each of his victims’ legal affairs.
With Denise Babbit, he had to have known of her arrest last year for buying drugs and that the arrest took place outside the Rodia Gardens housing project. This information inspired the idea of leaving her body in the trunk of her car nearby, knowing that the car might be stolen and moved but ultimately traced back to that location. The obvious explanation would be that she had gone there again to buy drugs. A smooth deflection away from the true facts.
With Sharon Oglevy, the killer had to have known the details of her divorce. In particular, he had to have known of her husband’s alleged threat to kill her and bury her out in the desert. From that knowledge would spring the idea of putting her body in the trunk of his car.
In both cases the legal details could have been obtained by the killer because they were contained in court documents that were open to the public. There was nothing in any of the records I had that indicated that the Oglevy divorce records had been sealed. And as far as Denise Babbit went, criminal prosecutions were part of the public record.
Then it hit me. The thing I had missed. Denise Babbit had been arrested a year before her death but at the time of her murder the prosecution was ongoing. She was on what defense lawyers called “pee and see” status. Her attorney had gotten her into a pretrial intervention program. As part of her outpatient drug-abuse treatment, her urine was tested once a month for indications of drug use and the courts were ostensibly waiting to see if she straightened out her life. If she did, the charges against her would go away. If her attorney was good, he’d even get the arrest expunged from her record.
All of that was just legal detail but now I saw something in it I had overlooked before. If her case was still active, it would not yet have been entered into the public record. And if it was not part of the public record, available to any citizen by computer or visit to the courthouse, then how did the Unsub get the details he needed to set up her murder?
I thought for a few moments about how I could answer that question and decided that the only way would be to get the information from Denise Babbit herself, or from someone else directly associated with her case-the prosecutor or the defense attorney. I leafed through the documents in the Babbit file until I found the name of her attorney and then I made the call.
“Daly and Mills, this is Newanna speaking. How can I help you?”
“May I speak to Tom Fox?”
“Mr. Fox is in court this morning. Can I take a message?”
“Will he be back at lunchtime?”
I checked my watch. It was almost eleven. Noting the time gave me another stab of anxiety over still not hearing anything from Rachel.
“He usually comes back at lunch but there is no guarantee of that.”
I gave her my name and number and told her I was a reporter with the Times and to tell Fox that the call was important.
After closing the phone I booted up my laptop and put the Internet slot card in place. I decided I would test my theory and see if I could access Denise Babbit’s court records online.
I spent twenty minutes on the project but could glean very little information about Babbit’s arrest and prosecution from the state’s publicly accessed legal data services or the private legal search engine the Times subscribed to. I did, however, pick up a reference to her attorney’s e-mail address and composed a quick message in hopes that he received e-mail on his cell phone and would return my request for a phone call sooner rather than later.
From: Jack McEvoy ‹ JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com›
Subject: Denise Babbit
Date: May 18, 2009 10:57 AM PDT
To: TFox@dalyandmills.com
Mr. Fox, I am a reporter with the Los Angeles Times working on the ongoing story about Denise Babbit’s murder. You may have already spoken to one of my colleagues about your representation of Denise, but I need to speak with you as soon as possible about a new angle of investigation I am following. Please call or e-mail as soon as possible. Thank you.
Jack McEvoy
I sent the message and knew that all I could do was wait. I checked the time on the corner of the computer screen and realized it was now after two P.M. in Washington, D.C. There seemed no way that Rachel’s hearing could have lasted this long.
My computer dinged and I looked down and saw I had already gotten a return e-mail from Fox.
From: Tom Fox ‹ TFox@dalyandmills.com›
Subject: RE: Denise Babbit
Date: May 18, 2009 11:01 AM PDT