Jury Gets Rathbun Case After Emotional Appeal by Prosecutor

In a wrenching end to weeks of often grisly testimony, a veteran Los Angeles County prosecutor choked with emotion Wednesday as he told a jury that Charles Rathbun savaged model Linda Sobek before strangling and burying her last November in the Angeles National Forest.

“He killed her,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Steve Kay told a Torrance jury that begins its deliberations today. And, Kay said, the 27-year-old Hermosa Beach model “didn’t deserve to die.

“She was a decent human being,” Kay said, as tears came to his eyes and the eyes of Sobek’s family and friends in the court. “She didn’t deserve to spend the last moments of her life on Earth being tortured at the hands of the human monster, Charles Rathbun.”

Portraying Rathbun, 39, as a brutal attacker who believed, wrongly, that he could have his way with Sobek, Kay argued that the photographer sodomized her during a photo shoot and then methodically lied about the crime while trying to destroy all evidence that the two had been together.

By calmly telling others that he last saw Sobek hours, even weeks, before her death, Kay said, Rathbun not only demonstrated no remorse over what he later called an accident, but also attempted to deceive everyone about what happened between the two.

And the truth, as Kay described it, was unspeakable.

Although claiming he took Sobek on a photo shoot for an auto magazine, Kay said, Rathbun brought the model to the forest with the intent of coaxing--or forcing--her into sex. “I think he took her out there to see what he could get,” Kay told the jury.

And while Rathbun has testified that he and Sobek drank tequila and had consensual sex during the photo shoot, Kay cited testimony by several prosecution witnesses, including a deputy coroner, to offer a wholly different--and sordid--version of Sobek’s last few hours.

After rejecting Rathbun’s advances, Kay said, the 5-foot-3 model was bound at the ankles by Rathbun and then sodomized, possibly with Rathbun’s .45-caliber handgun.

The assault was met with a struggle by Sobek that was so desperate that her ankles were rubbed almost raw, Kay said, displaying graphic photos from her autopsy.

“Can you imagine the fear she must have had? And the pain? And the helplessness?” Kay said, scoffing at the suggestion such injuries were evidence of consensual sex.

Likewise, Kay dismissed Rathbun’s claim that after the sexual encounter, he accidentally asphyxiated Sobek during a fight in the back seat of the vehicle he was assigned to photograph.

Describing Rathbun’s story as preposterous, Kay insisted that the photographer strangled Sobek to conceal the fact that he had assaulted her. “The motive for the killing was to avoid detection. After what he did to her, how could he possibly let her live?” Kay said.

And the gruesome nature of Sobek’s death, Kay charged, was matched in its evil by the cold-blooded way in which Rathbun attempted to conceal his crime.

From lying about his time with Sobek to later pricing shovels “like you would pick out a bottle of cabernet,” Rathbun was anything but a panicked player in a tragic accident, Kay said. “The key to this case . . . is that he buried her,” Kay said. “Panicked? This guy had ice water in his veins.”

Indeed, Kay said, Rathbun’s actions after Sobek’s death were as incriminating as the physical evidence linking him to it. And those actions, Kay said, included concocting a story that Sobek posed nude before her death. Photographs showing the nude torso of a woman were presented at trial but those photos, which Rathbun’s brother said he recovered in undeveloped film long after Sobek’s death, have prompted an investigation into the brother’s discovery of the film. Authorities believe the photos were manufactured to provide Rathbun with an alibi.

After his summation, Kay, whose prosecutions have included followers of Charles Manson, spoke for several tearful moments with Sobek’s family in the courtroom.

Praising the work of authorities, Sobek’s mother, Elaine, said she and others were confident that the man they believe killed Linda Sobek would be sent to prison for life.

“The only thing that can’t happen,” Elaine Sobek said, “[is] she can’t come back.”