Iraq Veteran Charged in 2000 Slaying

An Army National Guard sergeant who had just come back from active duty in Iraq was charged by Los Angeles County prosecutors Tuesday with murdering an Antelope Valley cheerleader five years ago.

Michelle O’Keefe, 18, had just returned from working as an extra in a music video in Los Angeles when she was shot repeatedly as she sat in her electricblue Mustang in a Palmdale park-and-ride lot.

The case gained notoriety in part because the victim’s parents bought billboards adorned with their daughter’s photo that read: “I wasn’t ready to die ... at 18. Can you help catch my killer?”

Detectives initially had 10 possible suspects in the case. But over time, they came to believe that the killer was Raymond Lee Jennings, a security guard who was working for a company that the city had hired to patrol the park-and-ride lot.

Jennings told investigators that he discovered O’Keefe’s body during routine patrol. Detectives said they were suspicious of his story, however, because Jennings told them that the teenager was still alive when he found her but that he did not perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation because he feared contaminating the crime scene.

Hoping to bolster the criminal case, O’Keefe’s family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Jennings and his employer. But the suit was put on hold, first when Jennings filed for personal bankruptcy and then when he joined the Army National Guard as a driver. His unit was sent out for training and later to Iraq in a deployment that began in 2003.

Authorities declined to provide details of the evidence against Jennings. But the charges came after the district attorney’s office had embarked on a reexamination of the case a few months ago at the urging of O’Keefe’s family.

“That was the turning point,” said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. “It changed the character of the case.”

O’Keefe’s parents expressed relief that an arrest finally had been made after five years of waiting.

“All I could think was, ‘Oh God, you’ve finally answered our prayers,’ ” said Patricia O’Keefe, Michelle’s mother. “We’ve been going to church a lot and having people pray for us.”

She said the family had spent tens of thousands of dollars since the killing on a private investigator and attorney -- expenses they now believe were well worth it.

“It was like I carried a 160-pound weight on my shoulders the last five years,” said Michael O’Keefe, Michelle’s father.

A law enforcement source close to the case said detectives had considered going to Iraq to arrest Jennings but decided to wait until he returned home. Authorities put him under surveillance and waited until he was outside his home Tuesday to make the arrest.

Jennings has no criminal record. No one at his home returned calls seeking comment, and an attorney could not be reached.

O’Keefe attended Antelope Valley College to prepare for a career in computers. During her off-hours, she landed bit parts in Hollywood productions.

On Feb. 22, 2000, she and a girlfriend spent the afternoon and evening working as extras in a music video for musician Kid Rock at the Shrine Auditorium near downtown Los Angeles.

Sometime after 9 p.m. they returned to the Palmdale park-and-ride lot in the 100 block of East Avenue South, where O’Keefe had left her car. The friend told investigators that she saw Michelle get in her car and turn on her high-beam lights. She assumed that Michelle was safe and drove away.

Jennings told investigators that he found O’Keefe, shot four times, slumped in the car’s front seat. Authorities later said she had not been robbed or sexually assaulted.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department conducted hundreds of interviews and chased scores of leads that included claims by 10 men that they had killed her. Ultimately, investigators had no physical evidence to tie the slaying to a specific killer.

Sgt. Rick Longshore said the case came together over several years after detectives kept reexamining the evidence, slowly eliminating possible scenarios and suspects.

“You threw away the impossible, you dust off the implausible, and what you’ve got left is what you’ve got,” Longshore said. “We looked at it and looked at it. There was no other explanation for what happened, while some of Jennings’ actions and statements were just not possible.”

Detectives said they were particularly interested in Jennings because, in various interviews with deputies and in depositions for the civil trial, he appeared to change his story about how he had found O’Keefe.

But Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said prosecutors would need to do more to win a conviction than show that Jennings had made inconsistent statements.

“The prosecution will try to introduce some motive, maybe some prior actions, but from what we know now, this is a challenge,” she said. “Maybe they had enough to bring the charges, but they will have their work cut out for them to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. I’d be very nervous going to trial with inconsistent statements and a lack of an alibi.”

With an arrest finally made, the O’Keefe family said they were proud of their role in the case.

Their attorney, R. Rex Parris, said his office helped prosecutors by presenting them with an hour of videotaped evidence -- edited down from 50 hours of footage -- that was originally presented a year ago to sheriff’s investigators.

Michael O’Keefe said he heard about Jennings’ arrest at work.

“I was walking down the hallway and a manager stopped me and said I looked like I had won the Lotto,” he said. “I said, ‘It feels much, much better than that.’ ”