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By Marc Peyser
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She was a sexy calendar model and a former L.A. Raiders cheerleader, but Linda Sobek was not the kind of woman to forget to call home. Before heading off to a modeling shoot for a car magazine on Nov. 16, Sobek told her mother, Elaine, that she would call that evening to make plans for a weekend barbecue. The call never came. What's more, Sobek, 27, didn't show for three other appointments that day, including a costume fitting for a bit role on "Married . . . With Children"--a part she hoped would be her big break into acting. Five days later, after frantic friends had appealed through local TV news for leads about her whereabouts, a road-crew worker in the Angeles National Forest 25 miles north of Los Angeles reported finding photos of Sobek in a trash can near the forest. He also found a page from her date book and a receipt for a car that had been loaned out for the photo shoot. Police say the name on the receipt was Charles Rathbun.
It may not have been the first time Rathbun visited that forest with a woman who never came out again. Rathbun, a 6-foot-3 freelance photographer, says he accidentally hit Sobek with a Lexus 450 sport-utility vehicle while teaching her to do "doughnuts"-high-speed, circular turns-as part of a photo shoot for AutoWeek magazine. As police continued to piece together clues about whether Sobek's death was an accident or a murder, investigators have begun to look into the 1992 death of another blond model who knew Rathbun and whose skeletal remains were found near the spot where he admits to burying Sobek. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles sheriff has been fielding thousands of calls from police around the country who wonder if Rathbun may be linked to unsolved murders in their areas. Last week, two Los Angeles deputies flew to Ohio, where Rathbun grew up and was once acquitted of rape, to investigate two still-open murder cases. "We're trying to work with everyone to see if Rathbun could have been involved in other incidents," says Deputy Shift Britta Tubbs. "The calls have been so numerous, we've had to put on extra people to keep up."
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But first they have to figure out exactly what happened to Sobek. Rathbun confessed to hitting her with the vehicle. Then, he says, he drove around in a panic with Sobek's body for several hours before arriving at the forest. He says he buried her in a rocky, shallow grave-he never got her arm fully covered by the ground--where he led officers eight days after her death. Yet police are suspicious. They say Sobek was asphyxiated and that a preliminary autopsy shows no broken bones or other internal injuries that would be expected ff someone had been nm over. And last week, AutoWeek publisher Leon Mandel said that his magazine never uses models in its photos. Says one source at the LAPD: "We never believed his story."
Connecting Rathbun to any other murders will be difficult. Police think the most promising is the case of Kimberly Pandelios, 20, who was last seen heading to a photo shoot and found-dead-in the Angeles forest. Investigators have determined that she had met Rathbun at least twice. Both Pandelios's mother and Sobek's family believe-- and hope-- that Rathbun will be implicated in both deaths, if not more. "Any connections to other murders makes [our] case stronger," says Sobek family attorney Wayne Willette. "And we want this guy to get what's coming to him."
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