Slain Model Was Sexually Assaulted, Coroner Says : Crime: Linda Sobek died of asphyxiation, an autopsy finds. She had a blood-alcohol level of 0.13%.

Model Linda Sobek was sexually assaulted before she was killed by asphyxiation, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Monday.

A spokesman for the coroner also said the former Raider cheerleader was legally drunk--with a blood-alcohol level of 0.13%--when she died.

Scott Carrier declined to be specific about how Sobek was slain, other than to say that the asphyxiation was caused by “neck and body compression.” Carrier stressed that he was under orders from the Sheriff’s Department to provide no other details, but he did say that the asphyxiation could have been consistent with someone sitting on the victim’s chest, strangling her manually.

Asked to comment about earlier speculation that the victim had been been buried alive, Carrier said, “That does not appear to be the case.”

Sobek’s body was found last month after photographer Charles E. Rathbun, 38, led searchers to a shallow grave in a remote gully in the Angeles National Forest.

Rathbun, who has been charged with murder, told homicide investigators that the 27-year-old model was killed accidentally while he was trying to show her how to do spins in a luxury sports vehicle they were using on a photo shoot.

The investigators said from the outset that they doubted Rathbun’s story, and Carrier said two weeks ago that Sobek’s injuries were “not consistent with injuries caused by an automobile.”

Carrier said Monday that Sobek had suffered no broken bones or other injuries that would tend to support Rathbun’s story. Instead, he said, her death is consistent with some heavy person or object “sitting on somebody or laying on somebody. . . . There was a lack of oxygen to the lungs. . . .

“[Manual] strangulation could be part of that,” he said. “It’s just speculation right now.”

The coroner’s spokesman declined to provide details about the sexual assault, other than to say that it occurred before the victim’s death and to say that the sex appeared not to have been consensual. Asked whether the victim had been bound before her death or was found tied in her grave, he said he did not know.

Carrier stressed that he was not present during the autopsy and could only relay the information provided by forensic pathologists. He said the coroner’s office provides data, not analysis, and final interpretation of the data is up to the Sheriff’s Department.

The Sheriff’s Department declined to comment Monday on the information released by the coroner’s office.

Further blood and tissue tests are under way, according to law enforcement sources.

The sources said the coroner’s office, along with other local law enforcement agencies, decided against waiting for the final results out of concern that the slain model’s family and friends would learn of her asphyxiation and sexual assault in a news report based on leaks. A veteran Hermosa Beach detective was taken off the case for allegedly leaking early details of the case to a local newspaper. Law enforcement officials said the alcohol in Sobek’s body should not lead anyone to conclude that the slain model was negligent in a way that made her vulnerable to attack.

At the same time, authorities noted that the details of what occurred before her death remain unclear. “The only people who really know . . . one has an attorney representing him and the other is dead,” said one law enforcement official.

Sobek vanished Nov. 16 after leaving her Hermosa Beach home for a photo session. Her friends and family said she had left a message on her answering machine that she was on a modeling assignment, but gave no details.

Five days later, a road crew worker found photos of Sobek and her family in a trash can near the Clear Creek Ranger station in the national forest. Detectives say the the worker also found a receipt for the sports vehicle that Rathbun had rented for the photo shoot.

On Nov. 22, a few hours after Sobek’s car was found in the parking lot of a Torrance restaurant where she had met Rathbun for the photo assignment, sheriff’s deputies went to Rathbun’s home in Hollywood.

When they arrived, the officers said, they found Rathbun in the driveway with his lawyer and a woman friend, threatening to shoot himself. The officers said a struggle ensued, the gun went off and the bullet grazed the woman in the arm.

Detectives say Rathbun told them that he had taken Sobek to a dry lake bed in the Antelope Valley, where he had tried to teach her how to spin the vehicle in tight circles, or “doughnuts.”

He reportedly said that when she was unable to perform the stunt, he had her get out of the vehicle to watch him do it. While she was watching, he said, he lost control of the spinning vehicle and it struck her.

Rathbun said he panicked, and after driving aimlessly through the back-country for more than three hours, he buried Sobek’s body in a grave that he had dug with his bare hands, according to Lt. Mark Wright of the Hermosa Beach Police Department.

Sheriff’s deputies said Rathbun told them he was so stricken by Sobek’s death that he could not remember where he had stopped the sports vehicle to bury her. Later, he said that all the mountainous terrain looked alike to him.

Booked on suspicion of murder, Rathbun spent Thanksgiving night in the Hermosa Beach jail under a suicide watch. The next morning, Wright said, the suspect appeared to have recovered enough emotionally to be given a jail-issue razor with which to shave.

Moments later, Rathbun tried to slash his wrists, deputies said. Officers wrested away the blade, Rathbun was treated for superficial cuts, and deputies bundled him aboard a helicopter for an aerial search for the grave.

Officials said that shortly before sundown, Rathbun pointed to a gully beside a dirt road in rugged terrain about 15 miles south of Palmdale.

Ground crews rushed to the spot and spotted a hand sticking out from beneath a small pile of dirt and rocks.

“Bingo,” one of the deputies muttered grimly over the searchers’ radio frequency.

In the days that followed, evidence was developed that might link Rathbun to other slayings, and Sheriff Sherman Block called the suspect a “possible serial killer.”

While there was no word on detectives visiting states other than Ohio, where Rathbun grew up, the photographer officially remained a suspect in the slaying of model Kimberly Pandelios, whose skeletal remains were found in 1993 a few miles from where Sobek’s body was buried.

But it remained unclear whether investigators could tie Rathbun to Pandelios’ murder. Last week, authorities disclosed that detectives were having a difficult time corroborating statements of witnesses who claimed to have seen Rathbun and Pandelios together on at least two occasions.

“So far, nothing solid has panned out,” in the investigation of Pandelios’ murder, a law enforcement official said Monday. “[Rathbun] is a suspect. But it is still too soon to be positive.”

Times staff writer Greg Krikorian contributed to this story.