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Hey everyone and welcome back to another episode. Before we jump in today's case, if you are watching on YouTube, can you please give this video a thumbs up and also subscribe to the channel? It just helps the algorithm. And if you are listening on a podcast platform that you can leave a review on, can you please leave me a five star review? If it's anything under five stars, that's okay. You can skip it for today. Okay. Only five stars, only five stars. Okay. Let's get into the episode.
While some predators ambush their prey, others will use ruses to trick their victims into vulnerable positions. And for a lot of these sickos, that's part of the thrill: duping people. On today's episode, I'll be covering two cases where the predator used the same ruse. And it wasn't just the ruse that was the same, but nearly everything else about these two cases seemed to point to one perpetrator: a serial killer.
Kimberly Pandelios was just 18 years old when she tied the knot and she and her husband, Peter, wasted no time leaving Pennsylvania for the warmer weather of Boca Raton, Florida. Once there, they rented a house, they both found jobs in telemarketing, and by early 1991, their first child was born, a baby boy.
Both Kim and Peter were ambitious, and before long, Peter went into business for himself and started his own telemarketing company. But his heart just wasn't in cold calling. I mean, whose is, right? Who dreams of growing up to one day be a telemarketer? Instead, what Peter really wanted to do was he wanted to earn a living making music.
And Kim, his wife, wanted to be a model. And while Boca Raton may have been prime territory for telemarketing, it wasn't the best place to be a budding creative. But then one day, Peter made a lucky connection. He made friends with a band that was based out of Los Angeles. They told him he should come out to LA, he and his wife.
They love it out there, they said. Tons of cool people to meet, an exciting music scene with major record labels within a stone's throw. Plenty of gigs and also modeling opportunities for Kim. So in October of 1991, the pandeliosis made the big leap from the smooth southern shores of the Atlantic to the rocky Pacific coastline.
And when they got to LA, they settled in the city of Northridge in the San Fernando Valley. Kimberly had been nervous about the move. For a lifelong East Coaster, LA was an intimidating place. It was sprawling in a way South Florida just wasn't. In South Florida, the sprawl felt linear and contained. In LA, it just felt endless, spider webbing outward in all directions.
But what terrified Kim more than anything else were the earthquakes. She'd only ever seen earthquakes in movies and couldn't imagine what it would feel like to actually experience one. From the day she arrived, it was always sort of in the back of her mind.
And also from the day she arrived, Kim was looking for work, modeling work, which wasn't as easy to come by as she'd hoped, at least not for a newcomer and also work to pay the bills and to pay the babysitters because these young parents were also hustlers. And when they weren't taking care of their baby, they were out pounding the pavement and seeking out new opportunities so they could fulfill their shared dream of becoming a power couple.
In winter of 1992, Kim actually landed a job with a financial company. And one of her first modeling gigs also came about around the same time. It was early February when Kim responded to an ad she saw in the classified section of one of the free weekly newspapers. She called the number and got an answering machine. So she left her name and number and soon got a call back from a man who introduced himself as Paul.
He was a photographer, he said, and he was looking for a model to pose for a layout in an automotive magazine. He said he would pay her well and the shoot needed to be done as soon as possible. So on Thursday, February 27th, Kim had a busy day planned and her husband Peter also expected to be gone most of the day. So they decided to hire a babysitter to watch their son who was now 13 months old.
Kim woke up early and let Peter know she had a pre-employment training session that morning with the financial firm. She had a hair appointment and then she had her first meeting with Paul, the photographer. He was going to do the photo shoot with her that coming Saturday and she wanted to show him the swimsuit she planned to wear on the shoot.
She got dressed and chose an outfit that would be impressive both in training and in her meeting with the photographer. A white blouse with a sharp blue suit jacket and high heel shoes. Tell the babysitter I'll be back by five o'clock, the usual time, she told Peter. And then she headed through the door and drove off in her sporty Plymouth Lazer. After her training session, Kim stopped by her hair salon in Sherman Oaks for an appointment with Steve, her stylist.
As she was having her hair done, she told the stylist about her upcoming photo shoot, and she pulled out a photo of a woman modeling in a swimsuit standing next to a sports utility vehicle. "This is what I'm going to wear on the shoot," she said, indicating that the shoot would be similar to what was shown in the photo, which looked like the kind of ad you'd see in Car and Driver magazine.
by the time her hair was finished it was already one o'clock and her meeting with paul the photographer was at two but she still barely knew her way around la keep in mind this was in the days before ways before gps before smartphones when all you had were directions and maybe a road map la is one of the toughest cities to navigate so she knew she'd be running late she called the house and got the babysitter on the phone she had
She explained she had a two o'clock appointment with a photographer named Paul. And if he called the house asking for her to tell him she was running late, but would be there as soon as possible. The babysitter said she'd relay the message. And sure enough, just after two o'clock, the phone rang at the house, the babysitter answered. And on the other end was Paul, the photographer asking for Kim. The babysitter told him Kim wasn't at home. And then the photographer informed the babysitter that he had a new phone number.
which he then provided and asked her to pass it along to Kim if she called again. Where are you guys supposed to meet? The babysitter asked. Kim doesn't know her way around that well, and I'm afraid she might have gotten lost. Paul said they were meeting in the vicinity of Burbank and Glendale and that he'd given her pretty specific directions, so he was confident she'd find her way just fine. Flash forward three hours to five o'clock.
The babysitter was ready to go home, expecting her shift to end, expecting Kim to be back at any moment. But as 5 became 5.05, became 5.15, became 5.30, it was clear that Kim was running late. And by 8 p.m., it was clear that Kim was running very late.
And it was odd to the babysitter that she hadn't at least called check in because remember she had called earlier to relay a message to Paul, the photographer that she was behind schedule. So Kim was obviously conscientious in that way. But then a little after eight o'clock, the phone rang, the babysitter answered. And on the other end, it was Paul. The guy Kim had supposedly met with earlier that day. Hey, is Kim there? He asked. The babysitter told him that Kim still hadn't gotten back.
And he then requested that she asked Kim to call him when she did return home because she had left her appointment book behind after she left their appointment, which he added was around 4 p.m., four hours earlier.
After she got off the phone with Paul, the babysitter continued to wait, and eventually Peter, Kim's husband, returned home from work. Surprised that Kim still wasn't there. Did she call? Have you heard from her? Peter asked the babysitter. But Kim hadn't called the house since earlier in the afternoon to give the message to relay to Paul, the photographer.
So now it was clear that something was very wrong. Paul began to call friends and acquaintances of Kim's, asking if anyone had seen her since that afternoon. No one had. At around 9.40 that evening, L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy Candace Dean was cruising along Angeles Forest Highway when she saw a Plymouth laser parked on a dirt shoulder just north of the Monte Cristo campground.
Deputy Dean slowed down to check it out, thinking that maybe the car had broken down and there was a driver in need of assistance. The car appeared to be okay. Its front hood was down, its tires looked full, there was no sign of any issues, and there was also no one in sight.
So Deputy Dean drove away, not thinking much more of it. Four hours later at around 1:40 AM, another sheriff's deputy, Deputy Richard Ellis, was passing through the area when he too saw the same Plymouth laser. But this time the car was engulfed in flames.
and the fire appeared to be emanating from the front passenger side of the vehicle rather than the engine compartment, which was odd, and the sort of thing that told him that this fire probably wasn't accidental. Deputy Ellis called the fire department, and once the flames were extinguished, the car was impounded, and it was soon learned that it belonged to Kimberly Pandalios, whose husband by this time had reported his wife missing.
Four whole days then passed with no sign of Kimberly. Her family wondered if she might have run off with someone, but they dismissed this as being highly unlikely. She wouldn't have willingly disappeared and left her baby behind. And then a sheriff's deputy searching the area where the burning car was found located an empty charcoal lighter fluid container about 15 feet below the road.
And nearby, there was a plastic lighter, an even clearer indication that the fire had been intentionally set.
but by whom? A few days later, another investigator found something in the charred dirt that was even more chilling. It was a shiny handcuff key, which did not belong to any of the other deputies who'd been out to the scene. And it did not look like the standard handcuff keys that law enforcement personnel are usually issued. A month passed with still no clue as to Kim's whereabouts. And then another ominous discovery was made.
this time by hikers in the Angeles National Forest.
It was Kim Pandelios' appointment book, the one she carried with her every day. The one that the mysterious photographer named Paul, who never called the house again and who no one was able to identify, had claimed Kim forgot when she left their appointment supposedly at four o'clock that day. And now here it was lying next to a creek bed underneath a bridge along a remote hiking trail.
Around this time, Kim's husband, Peter, was going through stuff at the house when he found a slip of paper with a name and phone number on it. The name on the paper was Paul. Could it be the same mysterious Paul that Kim was last known to have met right before she went missing?
Peter turned the slip of paper over to investigators and when they ran a check on the number, they found that it had been disconnected and no one named Paul was associated with it. The number had been registered to a man named David Raidmaker and when police reached out to him, he told them he had no idea who Kim Pantaleos was and how his phone number had ended up in her possession. And then the trail grew cold.
Kim's appointment book would be the only piece of her that would be found until a full year after Kim's disappearance. By this time, Peter Pantaleos had given up on his pursuit of a career in the music industry and returned to his home state of Pennsylvania, where he began working construction jobs.
And then on March 3rd, 1993, a mining prospector in the Angeles National Forest ventured out into one of the more isolated, densely wooded parts of the forest. The kind of terrain that requires special gear to navigate. This was an area known as the cement slab because of the elevated stream bed that ran through it. And it also wasn't far relatively from the Monte Cristo campground near where Kim's burning car was found.
And while out in the area, the prospector made a grisly discovery when he stumbled upon a human skull and a pelvic bone. Sheriff deputies were called out to the scene to recover the bones, and when they searched the surrounding area, they found a bra and pantyhose, both of which they collected and bagged.
and when they were later examined it was found that the bra straps had been cut with a sharp object and the pantyhose had also been cut from the waistband to where the leg hose had been attached and the leg portion was cut away completely.
A special forensic recovery team was dispatched to the area two weeks later, and during their search they found a human mandible, human hair, pieces of fabric, women's jewelry, and a pair of handcuffs. And remember that handcuff key that police had found the year before in Kimberly's car? It was a perfect fit.
The skull and mandible were then examined by a dental expert and he confirmed that these were the remains of missing Kimberly Pandalios. So now, the question of what happened to Kimberly had been tragically answered. And the mystery that remained was, who was responsible? And who was the mysterious Paul, the so-called photographer who was the last known person to have seen Kim alive?
In 1995, one more piece of the puzzle would turn up, Kim's leg bone. And in 1995, a new puzzle took shape, the murder of another young model in the area, a woman named Linda Sobeck.
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Let's get back into the episode. Now, making it as an actress and a model is a hard road, and no one knew this better than 27-year-old Linda Sobeck. Linda was a former cheerleader for the LA Raiders, whose fledging model career was marked by appearances in magazines like California Grapevine, Swimsuit Layouts, and Nude Photoshoots.
Because she was 5'4", she was rejected for runway modeling and fashion layouts because she wasn't tall enough. But in the fall of 1995, her luck began to turn and it looked like her career was entering an upswing. In just a few short months, Linda went from appearing at GlamourCon 5, the international Betty Page festival, to landing a guest spot on the popular sitcom, Married With Children.
Around 8 a.m. on the morning of November 16th, Linda talked to her boyfriend and told him about her married with children costume fitting, which was scheduled for that evening. Shortly before 11 a.m., Linda's mother called to talk about a weekend barbecue they had planned, but Linda was in a hurry. She told her mom she was running late for a photo shoot and she'd call her back later that evening after the costume fitting.
After she got off the phone, Linda put a message on her answering machine saying she was on her way to a photo shoot where she wouldn't have access to a phone. Her boyfriend was surprised when he called and heard this message because she hadn't mentioned anything to him about a photo shoot. Her mother was the only person she had mentioned it to, in fact.
None of her friends or roommates were even aware of it. So it must have been like a last minute thing for Linda. But usually Linda was good about letting friends or family know where she was going or whom she was meeting up with. On this occasion, she uncharacteristically neglected to let anyone know, and that included her mother, where and with whom her afternoon photo shoot was.
And on this occasion, Linda would disappear, seemingly into thin air, never to be seen again. Sound familiar? She never showed up for her married with children costume fitting, which was a blazing red flag because it's something she wouldn't have missed for the world. It was her biggest break yet.
and she also missed the two auditions she had scheduled the next day. The last time anyone heard from or saw Linda was that Thursday morning, driving away from her apartment in Hermosa Beach, which is the South Bay area of Los Angeles County.
For the record, Hermosa Beach is about 34 miles south of Northbridge, where Kimberly Pandalios lived. But that's like over an hour's drive because it's LA. And Linda's 1992 Nissan 240SX sports car also remained missing and unaccounted for.
So Linda basically left for this photo shoot and was never seen again. Neither was her car. Linda was last known to have been meeting up with an unknown photographer for a photo shoot in an unknown location, just like Kim Pandalios. The only thing known about the location where Linda Sobeck was headed was that it was somewhere where she wouldn't have access to a phone.
Most of Linda's photo shoots were arranged through her modeling agency, but in this case, her agency knew nothing about the shoot, so it seemed to confirm that this was a last-minute freelance sort of thing. Investigators subpoenaed the phone company for Linda's phone records to get a sense of whom she was in communication with in the days and even weeks leading up to her disappearance.
Meanwhile, Sobeck's social circle and a band of raiderettes began their own efforts in trying to track down Linda, as well as the mysterious photographer she was going to meet on the day she disappeared.
It was baffling because, like I said, Linda was very careful and usually took every precaution, just like other models in the industry. It was just standard safety protocol. This led investigators and people close to Linda to suspect that whoever she met with was someone she knew and trusted. Her friends printed over 50,000 flyers with her face on them and offered a $20,000 reward for any information leading to her return.
They even discussed hiring a psychic because at this point, everyone who knew Linda had begun to fear foul play. There was nothing else that would logically explain her disappearance. She had no history of mental health issues. She was independent, physically fit and psychologically stable. And she was not known to have any enemies, owe money to shady people or to have jilted ex-boyfriends or even stalkers that anyone knew about.
And she talked to her mother by phone at least twice a day, so there's no way she would voluntarily cut contact with her mom. As media around the US ran the story, hundreds of tips poured into the Hermosa Beach Police Department. And then on November 21st, five days after Linda was last seen, a road crew worker contacted the Hermosa Beach Police after seeing a TV broadcast about Linda's disappearance.
He told detectives he had been working in the Angeles National Forest the previous Thursday, the day Linda disappeared, and found a page from Linda Sobeck's appointment book.
Is this sounding familiar yet? Angeles National Forest, appointment book. The similarities are eerie. So this road crew worker found a page from Linda's appointment book dated Thursday, November 16th, 1995. That would be the day she vanished, along with some modeling photos of her.
He found these items in a trash bin and he didn't think anything of them, but he did take them home with him, he said, because he thought the woman in the pictures was attractive and the photos were especially well done. It wasn't until he saw the TV broadcast that he realized who the woman in the photo was, as well as the potential significance of what he had found.
It turns out, the photos found in the trash can were the same photos that Linda carried with her on meetings with photographers and prospective employers. And the area where the photos were found was not far from where Kim Pantaleos' remains had been located.
Searchers returned to the area and found inside the same trash bin Linda's day planner, the one that the missing page had been torn from. They collected everything else that was in the same trash bin and a search crew of about 20 fanned out and combed the surrounding forest well into the evening, but nothing else of note turned up.
On Wednesday, searchers returned to the Angeles National Forest, but this time the search team was made up of friends of Linda's and Radarette's. And their search, unlike the previous day's effort, was fruitful. They discovered Linda's purse, her hair curlers, a receipt from a copy shop, and other belongings, which sadly made them even less optimistic that Linda would be found alive.
Because again, at this point, everyone remembered Kim Pantaleos. And this was all just an uncanny echo of what had happened in Kim's case. That same day, newspapers reported on the discovery of the photos and the page from Linda's appointment book. And not long after, detectives received another phone call, this time from a man named Charles Rathbun, who said he had some information that may be helpful to the investigation.
Rathbun was a 38-year-old freelance photographer who told police he saw Linda on the afternoon of her disappearance. Rathbun explained that he'd first met Linda a month earlier at an automotive show in Las Vegas where they exchanged information and he told Linda to keep him in mind for modeling jobs. And then on the afternoon she disappeared, he had met with her at a Denny's in the neighboring city of Torrance to give her tips on how to improve her modeling portfolio.
After their meeting, Rathbun said they both left and went their separate ways. But when investigators drove down to the Denny's, they found Linda's missing Nissan 240SX in the parking lot. Nothing in the vehicle suggested foul play or indicated any kind of struggle had taken place inside of it. But police wanted to know why, if she and Charles Rathbun had gone their separate ways, her car was still parked at the Denny's where they met.
Another thing that cast doubt on Rathbun's account of events was that among the items found inside the trash bin where Linda's photos and day planner were found was a car rental agreement for a Lexus SUV with Charles Rathbun's name on it. Later that afternoon, Rathbun contacted detectives by telephone and when he learned about the car rental agreement, he changed his story.
He now explained to detectives that he had been on assignment with AutoWeek magazine and had contacted Linda the morning of her disappearance to hire her for the shoot. They met at Denny's to discuss the shoot, and he explained that he wanted to shoot her both near the car and driving the car. He said he drove her up to El Mirage, a dry lake bed in the Mojave Desert, and that he wanted Linda to drive the car in tight circles or donuts for the shoot.
She wasn't clear on how to pull it off, according to what he was telling investigators. So he then got behind the wheel of the SUV to demonstrate. And while he was driving the SUV in donuts, he said he lost control of the vehicle and accidentally crashed into her and she died from her injuries. He then panicked, drove to the Angeles National Forest, buried her, and then got rid of her belongings because he was afraid of getting in trouble.
Rathbun told police he couldn't quite remember where he left her remains, and then the phone call ended. As police arrived at his home to arrest him, they learned he was inside with a gun and threatening to kill himself.
At one point, as police entered the home, Rathbun fired the gun, but the bullet missed and ricocheted off a wall, grazing the arm of a reserve deputy. He was then taken into custody without further incident. Investigators went down to the rental car company where Rathbun had rented the Lexus and tracked down the vehicle. On the exterior of the SUV, they saw no evidence of a crash or collision of any kind.
If the Lexus had hit Sobek hard enough to kill her, there no doubt would have been damage to the vehicle, but there was nothing. Nothing to corroborate Rathbun's story. But they did find a small amount of blood in the backseat of the car. And in the cargo area of the vehicle, they found a car cover which tested positive for blood and also saliva. So now, they strongly suspected Rathbun's story was a load of bullcrap.
In the interview room, they pressed him to disclose the location of Linda's body. But he kept changing the location, claiming his memory was fuzzy. Police felt an urgency to get this information out of him for two reasons. One, in the event Linda was still alive and confined somewhere, they wanted to get to her while there was still time to save her.
But in the more likely scenario that Linda was dead, the sooner they got to the body, the better preserved it would be. The longer they waited, the more she would decompose and the harder it would be to determine the actual cause of death and prove Rathbun's accident story was a lie. And they felt that Rathbun knew this and that's why he was stalling.
When they ran a background check on Rathbun, they discovered that he had once been put on trial for rape back in Columbus, Ohio, where he had previously lived. This was after a married coworker alleged that he had sexually assaulted her. It was back in 1979 when Rathbun was a student at Ohio State University. At the time, he had a job working at a Kroger supermarket.
according to the woman who accused him. It was late one night after work when he approached her in the parking lot and asked her for a ride home, explaining that his car had a flat tire. When they got to his apartment, he invited her inside to look at some pictures he had taken. When he was finished showing her the pictures, the woman turned to leave when, suddenly, Rathbun grabbed her from behind, undressed her, and threatened to kill her if she made any noise.
He then forced himself on her. Afterward, the woman demanded her car keys back, but he told her he was going to hold on to them because he was going to drive her somewhere. He wouldn't tell her where, she would later recount to police,
After she got dressed, they walked outside the apartment and as they were heading to her car, the woman, who surely feared he would take her somewhere and kill her, began screaming at the top of her lungs and dropped down to the ground. Rathbun climbed on top of her and forced his hand over her mouth and tried to convince her that what had taken place was not a rape.
In the end, she managed to get her car keys back and leave. And as soon as she could, she went to the Columbus police and made a complaint. When he was interviewed by police, Rathbun claimed, as so many rapists do, that the encounter was consensual. He was nevertheless arrested, the case went to trial, and he was acquitted. Los Angeles County investigators also learned that Rathbun had a reputation for displaying a volatile temper, one that had cost him clients and jobs.
And in talking to some models whom Rathbun had worked with, investigators discovered that he quite vocally hated Linda Sobeck and repeatedly vowed never to work with her again. Remember, they had worked together multiple times.
One model recalled driving to Malibu with Rathbun for a photo shoot, and when she suggested Sobek for a Sport Truck Magazine layout, Rathbun angrily clutched his steering wheel and said that Linda was a little B-word and deserved what she got coming to her. Inside Rathbun's home, police found some disturbing items. A collection of over 200 guns. 200 guns! And dozens of photos of women in poses meant to simulate death.
No blood or injuries appeared on any of the models, so they didn't appear to be actually dead, but investigators wanted to contact all of the models in the photos to make sure they were okay. Police believed at this point that Charles Rathbun might be a serial killer, although they couldn't tie him to Kimberly Pantaleos' murder or any other crimes.
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Visit cbdistillery.com and use code dark for 20% off you guys. If you wanted to give CBD a try, go to cbdistillery.com code dark cbdistillery.com use code dark. All right, let's get back to the episode. They continue to press him and finally he agreed to lead police to her body. Rathbun accompanied investigators in a police helicopter and led them on what at first first
felt like a wild goose chase as he repeatedly failed to locate the area he said he'd left her.
But eventually they found her, partially buried next to a tree. And considering the length of time she had been dead, nine days, her body was in remarkably good condition. Enough for the medical examiner to conclude that Linda had been anally raped and then asphyxiated. There were clear defensive wounds on Linda's body. She had evidently fought for her life, but in vain.
Because at six feet and three inches tall, Charles Rathbun was nearly a foot taller than Linda and he had a hulking frame. He would have easily overpowered her. Linda had also been washed and redressed before she was buried, as her makeup had been cleaned off and the collar on her blouse was awkwardly zipped all the way up to her neck. Also, her blood alcohol level was well above the legal limit.
Which was puzzling, because as her friends and loved ones would attest, Linda would have never gotten drunk on a day shoot, particularly when she had that costume fitting for married with children later in the evening. So it was assumed that Rathbun probably forced her to drink alcohol. And when he was confronted with the evidence that contradicted his account of things, he changed his story yet again.
He now claimed that Linda had been drinking and that after he accidentally struck her with the Lexus, she began kicking and screaming and while he was trying to restrain her, he accidentally suffocated her. He also claimed that he and Linda had consensual sex and that he had nude photographs of her to back up this claim. He told police to talk to his brother, Robert.
His brother could provide this evidence and it would clear his name. So investigators contacted Robert Rathbun and he then showed up at the sheriff's station with a stack of photographs and a story. The story was that Charles told him after the arrest that he had buried these rolls of film in the desert and they would exonerate him if the rolls of film could be found.
Robert claimed Charles drew him a map to the location where he buried the film, and he and his girlfriend then drove out to that location and located the film exactly where Charles indicated they'd find it. But the map, Robert claimed, he had thrown out. And instead of turning the actual rolls of film over to police, he developed them himself and handed them over to police.
The pictures in the first four rolls of film showed Linda Sobeck posing at El Mirage where Rathbun took her fully clothed. It was all just standard issued modeling stuff, non-sexual and non-explicit. But then pictures from the fifth roll of film were double exposed and water damaged and half of them showed the dashboard of a vehicle and the other half were pornographic close-ups of an unidentified woman.
Investigators studied the photos and noticed that the vehicle dashboard that was shown in the images was not the dashboard of a Lexus. It was instead an Oldsmobile that Rathbun had photographed on a previous unrelated shoot. And they suspected the woman whose privates were photographed was not Linda Sobeck. To prove this, they compared the photos to pictures of Linda's body taken by the medical examiner. And it became quite obvious that these were two different women.
So they believed now that Charles's brother had fabricated this evidence in an effort to aid his brother. Robert Rathbun was lucky that he never got charged with evidence tampering for doing this.
But eventually the state's case against Charles Rathbun went to trial in 1996. And in December of that year, he was found guilty of first degree murder and sodomy and sentenced to life in prison without parole. So it probably seems like Charles Rathbun is not only a likely suspect in the murder of Kim Pantaleos, but the perfect suspect. Both women were petite blonde models and perhaps coincidentally both drove sports cars.
In both cases, the women vanished after going to meet a mysterious photographer for a photo shoot. Both were doing photo shoots for automotive magazines. Both women's bodies were left in the Angeles National Forest in close proximity of each other. Both had their appointment books discarded in the Angeles National Forest and found before their bodies were recovered. I mean, in many ways, Sobeck's murder looked like a carbon copy of Kim Pantaleos' slaying.
And it was learned during the course of the investigation that Rathbun and Kim Pandelius were acquainted with each other. But despite all of this, investigators were never able to develop any evidence to make a case against Rathbun, who remained a suspect in Kim's death until 2004. More than a decade after Kim's murder, cold case investigators opened the old files and took another look with fresh eyes.
They began reviewing tips that the LA County Sheriff's Office had received during the original investigation. Tips that may have not been followed up on at the time. And one of those tips was an anonymous call suggesting that police check into a man named David Raidmaker, the woman who refused to identify herself. Said that Raidmaker mentioned he had been involved in setting a car on fire after murdering someone up in the mountains.
The details fit, but there was no indication in the file that this lead had ever been pursued. As there were so many other leads cops were running down at the time, leads they felt were more promising. But what investigators in 2004 noticed that apparently had been overlooked before was David Raidmaker was also the man behind the phone number that Kim had written down on that slip of paper bearing the name Paul. You might remember this from earlier.
And in a check into Raidmaker's background, it was learned that Raidmaker had since become a registered sex offender. He had served six years of a 12 year sentence for statutory rape. He had been dating a 15 year old girl whose parents later pursued charges against him, not just for statutory rape, but for supplying their daughter drugs. Police now instantly had a new prime suspect in Kim Pantaleos' murder more than a decade earlier.
Detectives tracked down Cynthia Haddon, one of Raidmaker's former girlfriends, who had also been 15 years old at the time they dated back in the early 1990s, around the time Kim went missing. The woman told investigators that she first met Raidmaker when he presented himself as a photographer with powerful Hollywood connections.
Of course, this turned out to be just a ruse, but she ended up dating Raidmaker for three years, during which time she moved in with him, did drugs with him, and became his partner in operating a phone sex hotline. He also, at the time, was running an escort service. Cynthia also told police she had been with Raidmaker in February 1992 when they drove into the mountains and Raidmaker set a car ablaze.
She claimed that she had watched as Raidmaker squirted charcoal lighter fluid into the passenger seat of the car and then lit it on fire. When shown pictures of Kim's Plymouth Laser, Cynthia told police that it looked like the same car. At this point, Cynthia agreed to allow investigators to tape record her conversations with Raidmaker. And it was during one of these taped conversations that Raidmaker acknowledged setting a car on fire in the mountains back in the day.
Investigators also tracked down the young woman whose statutory rape Raidmaker had been convicted of. And that young girl came forward and said that David had essentially confessed to killing Kim. So they both agreed to testify against David Raidmaker, who was then arrested and charged with the murder of Kim Pantaleos. He entered a plea of not guilty, but in February 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
So it's pretty amazing how closely these two cases resembled each other. Before David Rademaker was identified as Kim's killer, you'd have every reason to think Charles Rathbun had been responsible for her death. So I'm sure it came as a shock to many to learn that it was another suspect entirely.
And sadly, predators luring young models with the ruse of being photographers has happened before, and it's happened since. Next week we're going to explore this topic, the theme of killers with cameras. And I'm going to take a look at three different serial killers with a penchant for photographing their victims.
All three are now dead and they left behind a mountain of photographs of women, some of whom were murder victims, some of whom have been found and are all right, and many of whom remain unidentified. I'll see you then.