Free The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly Page B

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.
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