The Scarecrow

Crime scene investigators found that the person who abandoned the victim’s car with the body in the trunk had unsuccessfully attempted to remove evidence from the car by wiping down all surfaces that potentially held fingerprints. The door handles, steering wheel and shift lever were all wiped clean inside. On the outside, the trunk lid and outside door handles were also wiped clean. However, the investigators found a clear thumbprint on the interior rearview mirror, presumably left when someone driving the car adjusted it.

The thumbprint was matched by computer as well as physical comparison by a latent prints specialist to Alonzo Winslow, 16, who carried a juvenile arrest record for sale of narcotics in the same projects where Denise Babbit had bought heroin and been arrested the year before.

An investigative theory emerged: After leaving her job in the early morning hours of April 24 the victim drove to the Rodia Gardens projects in order to buy heroin or other drugs. Despite her being white and Rodia Gardens ’ being 98 percent black in population, Denise Babbit was familiar and comfortable going to the projects to make her purchase because she had purchased drugs there many times before. She may have even personally known dealers in Rodia Gardens, including Alonzo Winslow. She may have also had a past history of trading sex for drugs.

However, this time she was forcefully abducted by Alonzo Winslow and possibly other unknown individuals. She was held in an unknown location and sexually tortured for six to eighteen hours. Because of the high levels of petechial hemorrhaging around the eyes, she also appeared to have been repeatedly choked into unconsciousness and then revived before final asphyxiation occurred. Her body was then stuffed in the trunk of her car and driven almost twenty miles to Santa Monica, where the car was abandoned in the ocean-side parking lot.

With the fingerprint as a solid piece of evidence supporting the theory and linking Babbit to a known drug dealer in Rodia Gardens, detectives Walker and Grady obtained an arrest warrant for Alonzo Winslow. The detectives contacted the LAPD in order to elicit cooperation in locating and arresting the suspect. He was taken into custody without incident on Sunday morning, April 26, and after a lengthy interrogation confessed to the murder. The following morning police announced the arrest.

I closed out the summary file and thought about how quickly the investigation had led to Winslow, all because he had missed one finger-print. He had probably thought that the twenty miles between Watts and Santa Monica was a distance no murder charge could leap. Now he sat in a juvy cell up in Sylmar, wishing he had never turned that rear-view mirror to make sure he wasn’t being followed by the police.

My desk phone rang and I looked over to see Angela Cook’s name on the caller ID screen. I was tempted to let it go, to maintain focus on my story, but I knew it would ring through to the switchboard and whoever answered would tell Angela that I was at my desk but apparently too busy to take her call.

I didn’t want that, so I picked up.

“Angela, what’s happening?”

“I’m over here at Parker and I think something is going on but nobody’s telling me shit.”

“Why do you think something’s going on?”

“Because there’s all kinds of reporters and cameras coming in.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the lobby. I was leaving when I saw a bunch of these guys coming in.”

“And you checked with the press office?”

“Of course I did. But nobody’s answering.”

“Sorry, that was a stupid question. Um, I can make some calls. Stay there in case you need to go back up. I’ll call you right back. Were they only TV guys?”

“Looked like it.”

“You know what Patrick Denison looks like?”

Denison was the main cops and crime reporter for the Daily News, the only real print competition the Times faced on a local level. He was good and every now and then broke an exclusive I would have to chase. It was a reporter’s worst embarrassment to have to follow a competitor’s scoop. But I wasn’t worried about getting scooped here, not if the TV media was already in the building. When you saw TV reporters on a story, that usually meant that they were following yesterday’s news or were headed to a press conference. The TV news in this town hadn’t had a legitimate scoop since Channel 5 came up with the Rodney King beating tape back in 1991.

After hanging up with Angela I called a lieutenant in Major Crimes to see what was shaking. If he didn’t know, then I would try Robbery-Homicide Division and then Narcs. I was confident I would soon know why the media was storming Parker Center, and the L.A. Times was the last to know about it.