Sobek’s Death an Accident, Rathbun Testifies

In graphic testimony that was alternately cold and filled with anguish, photographer Charles Rathbun said Friday that he accidentally asphyxiated model Linda Sobek last November while trying to subdue her during an argument that followed drinking and consensual sex on a photo shoot.

Offering his first public account of what led to the death of the 27-year-old Hermosa Beach woman, Rathbun told a Torrance courtroom that he struggled with Sobek in the back seat of a new luxury sports utility vehicle he was photographing for a magazine. The argument, he testified, followed a driving stunt in the Angeles National Forest that went awry.

Rathbun’s story was not the same one he told investigators when he led them to Sobek’s shallow grave. At that time, he said he accidentally struck the model with the vehicle as she stood on a dry lake bed in the forest. On Friday, he testified, he did not run into her but came close enough for her to jump back and fall, cutting her head.

After she was injured, Rathbun said under questioning by his defense attorney, Mark Werksman, he helped Sobek back to the car. There, he said, she angrily threatened him because of the near-accident and began kicking at the interior of the prototype luxury vehicle.

“I grabbed at her foot,” Rathbun testified, describing how he struggled to prevent the former Raiders cheerleader from further damaging the car. “It became a real struggle,” he said, claiming that he positioned his 6-foot-3, 210-pound frame on the back of Sobek, who was a foot shorter and half his weight.

“I was pinning her down to the seat,” Rathbun said. “At one point, she was struggling for about 30 seconds or so and then she got very calm. I kept holding her down, figuring she was playing possum.”

Finally, Rathbun said, he got off Sobek and spoke to her. But when she did not respond, he said, he checked her and could not tell if she was breathing.

Lifting her from the car, Rathbun testified, he put her on the dry lake bed and tried to revive her. When she didn’t wake up, he said, he made a vain attempt to get her back into the car. And when that failed, he said, he tried to help balance her by tying her ankles together using an ace bandage.

Once he got her back in the car, Rathbun said, he still believed she was only unconscious and decided to drive her to a hospital in Palmdale so the whole incident could be “somebody else’s problem.”

But before driving off, he said, he decided to check Sobek’s eyes to see if there were signs of life. And when he did, Rathbun said, “I saw an eye that was fixed and dilated.”

“Had you ever seen a dead body before?” Werksman asked him.

“No,” Rathbun said.

“What did you do after you saw that her eyes were dilated and fixed?” Werksman asked.

At that moment, the defendant did not answer and broke down in tears, asking Superior Court Judge Donald F. Pitts for a recess.

When testimony resumed five minutes later, Rathbun said he briefly thought about leaving Sobek’s body in the desert out of sheer panic--the same panic, he said, that led him to drive aimlessly through the forest before burying Sobek’s body and discarding her belongings in trash cans.

And he never contacted police, Rathbun said, because he did not believe they would accept his story and figured it was “just a matter of time” before he would be arrested.

The only person he called right after realizing Sobek was dead, Rathbun said, was his then-girlfriend, Glenda Elam, who was in the courtroom with his family.

The day’s most graphic testimony came when Rathbun claimed he and Sobek had consensual sex, with him fondling her at one point, in the vehicle’s back seat. Their encounter, he said, occurred after Sobek drank most of a small bottle of tequila and allowed him to photograph her nude lower body and take other shots of her modeling sheer dresses with no underwear. Photos of Sobek in the dresses were entered into evidence, as were more difficult-to-read nude photos that were double-exposed.

Outside court, Rathbun’s attorney said the testimony showed Sobek’s death was a “tragic accident,” and not, as authorities contend, a sexual assault and murder.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Steven Kay called Rathbun’s story a fabrication. It was, Kay said, nothing more than an alibi by a “cold-blooded killer.”