I called this file POLICESTORY.DOC and I took each paragraph I had moved from the official report and rewrote it. The language of the police report was stilted and overloaded with abbreviations and acronyms. I wanted to make the story my own.

When I was finished I reviewed my work, looking to make sure it was accurate but still had narrative momentum. I knew that when I finally wrote the story for publication, many of these paragraphs and nuggets of information would be included. If I made a mistake at this early stage it could very well be carried wrong into publication.

Denise Babbit was found in the trunk of her 1999 Mazda Millenia at 9:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 25, 2009, by SMPD patrol officers Richard Cleady and Roberto Jiminez. Detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady responded as lead investigators of the crime.

The patrol officers had been called by Santa Monica parking enforcement, who found the car in the public beach lot next to the Casa Del Mar hotel. While access to the lot is open overnight, it becomes a pay lot from 9 to 5 every day and any cars still remaining are ticketed if a parking pass is not purchased and displayed on the dashboard. When parking enforcement officer Willy Cortez approached the Mazda to check for a pass he found the car’s windows open and the key in the 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.