The Scarecrow

One photo showed her face behind a clear plastic bag pulled over her head and tied tightly around her neck with what looked like common clothesline. Denise Babbit had died with her eyes open in a look of fear. I had seen a fair number of dead people in my time, both in person and in photographs like these. I never got used to the eyes. I had known a homicide detective-my brother, in fact-who told me not to spend too much time with the eyes because they stayed with you long after you turned yours away.

Denise had that kind of eyes. The kind that made you think about her last moments, about what she saw and thought and felt.

I went back to the investigative summary and read it through, highlighting the paragraphs with information I thought was important and useful and moving them onto a new document I had created. I called this file POLICESTORY.DOC and I took each paragraph I had moved from the official report and rewrote it. The language of the police report was stilted and overloaded with abbreviations and acronyms. I wanted to make the story my own.

When I was finished I reviewed my work, looking to make sure it was accurate but still had narrative momentum. I knew that when I finally wrote the story for publication, many of these paragraphs and nuggets of information would be included. If I made a mistake at this early stage it could very well be carried wrong into publication.

Denise Babbit was found in the trunk of her 1999 Mazda Millenia at 9:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 25, 2009, by SMPD patrol officers Richard Cleady and Roberto Jiminez. Detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady responded as lead investigators of the crime.

The patrol officers had been called by Santa Monica parking enforcement, who found the car in the public beach lot next to the Casa Del Mar hotel. While access to the lot is open overnight, it becomes a pay lot from 9 to 5 every day and any cars still remaining are ticketed if a parking pass is not purchased and displayed on the dashboard. When parking enforcement officer Willy Cortez approached the Mazda to check for a pass he found the car’s windows open and the key in the ignition. A woman’s purse was in plain view on the passenger seat and its contents were dumped beside it. Sensing that something wasn’t right, he called the SMPD and officers Cleady and Jiminez arrived. In the course of checking the license plate in order to determine ownership of the car they noticed that the trunk had been closed on what appeared to be part of a woman’s silk-patterned dress. They reached into the car and popped the trunk.

The body of a woman later identified as Denise Babbit, owner of the car, was in the trunk. She was naked and her clothing-undergarments, dress and shoes-were found on top of the body.

Denise Babbit was 23 years old. She worked as a dancer at a Hollywood strip bar called Club Snake Pit. She lived in an apartment on Orchid Street in Hollywood. She had an arrest record for possession of heroin dating back to a year before. The case was still pending, the conclusion delayed because of a pretrial intervention program that placed her in an outpatient drug treatment program. She had been arrested during an LAPD sting operation in Rodia Gardens in which suspects were observed by undercover police making drug buys and then stopped after leaving the drive-through drug market.

Hair and fiber evidence collected from inside the car included multiple exemplars of canine hair from an unknown but short-haired dog breed. Denise Babbit did not own a dog.

The victim had been asphyxiated with a length of commonly purchased clothesline used to tie the plastic bag around her neck. There were also ligature marks on her wrists and legs from when she had been bound during her abduction. Autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped with a foreign object. Minute splinters found in the vagina and anus indicated this object was possibly a wooden broom or tool handle. No semen or hair evidence was collected from the body. Time of death was set at 12 to 18 hours before the discovery of the body.

The victim had worked her normally scheduled night shift at the Snake Pit, leaving work at 2:15 a.m. on Friday, April 24. Her roommate, Lori Rodgers, 27, a fellow dancer at the Snake Pit, told police that Babbit did not come home after work and never returned to the Orchid Street apartment during the day on Friday. She did not show up for her shift at the Snake Pit that evening and her car and body were found the following morning.

It was estimated that during the previous evening the victim made in excess of $300 in tips while dancing at the Snake Pit. No cash was found in her purse, which had been dumped out in her car.