Police spokesmen said identification of fingerprints collected from the victim’s car after her body was found in the trunk Saturday morning led detectives to the suspect. He was taken in for questioning Sunday from the Rodia Gardens housing project in Watts, where it was believed the abduction and murder took place.

The suspect faces charges of murder, abduction, rape and robbery. During a confession to investigators, the suspect said he moved the car with the body in the trunk to a beach parking lot in Santa Monica so as to throw off suspicions that Babbit had been killed in Watts.

The SMPD wishes to acknowledge the help of the Los Angeles Police Department in bringing the suspect into custody.

The press release was not inaccurate. But I now viewed it very cynically and thought it had been carefully crafted to convey something that was not accurate, that there had been a full confession to the murder when there had not been anything close to that. Winslow’s lawyer was right. The confession would not hold up, and there was a solid chance that his client was innocent.

In the field of investigative journalism, the Holy Grail might be the taking down of a president, but when it came to the lowly crime beat, proving a guilty man innocent was as good as it gets. It didn’t matter how Sonny Lester had tried to play it down the day we went to Rodia Gardens. Springing an innocent kid trumped all. Alonzo Winslow may not have been judged guilty of anything yet, but in the media he had been condemned.

I had been part of that lynching and I now saw that I might have a shot at changing all of that and doing the right thing. I might be able to rescue him.

I thought of something and looked around on my desk for the printouts Angela had produced from her research on trunk murders. I then remembered I had thrown them out. I got up and quickly left the newsroom, going down the stairs to the cafeteria. I went directly to the trash receptacle I had used after looking over the printouts Angela had pushed across the table to me as a peace offering. I had scanned and dismissed them, thinking at the time that there was no way stories about other trunk murders could have any bearing on a story about the collision between a sixteen-year-old admitted killer and his victim.

Now I wasn’t so sure. I remembered things about the stories from Las Vegas that no longer seemed distant in light of my conclusions from Alonzo’s so-called confession.

It was a large commercial trash can. I took the top off it and found that I was in luck. The printouts were on top of the day’s detritus and were no worse for wear.

It dawned on me that I could have simply gone on Google and conducted the same search as Angela instead of rooting through a trash can, but I was elbows deep now and this would be quicker. I took the printouts over to a table to reread them.

“Hey!”

I turned and saw a double-wide woman with her hair in a net staring at me with her fists balled tightly on her ample hips.

“You just going to leave that there?”

I looked behind me and saw I had left the top of the trash receptacle on the floor.

“Sorry.”

I went back and returned the top to its rightful place, then decided it would be best to review the printouts back in the newsroom. At least the editors weren’t wearing hairnets.

Back at my desk I looked through the stack. Angela had found several news stories about bodies being found in trunks. Most were quite old and seemed irrelevant. But a series of stories in the Las Vegas Review-Journal did not. There were five of them and they mostly repeated the same information. They were reports on the arrest and trial of a man charged with killing his ex-wife and stuffing her body into the trunk of his car.

Ironically, the stories had been written by a reporter I knew. Rick Heikes had worked for the Los Angeles Times until he took one of the early buyouts. He banked the check from the Times and promptly took the job with the Review-Journal and had been there ever since. He had made it over the wall and by all accounts was the better for it. The Times was the loser because it had let another fine reporter go to another newspaper.

I quickly scanned the stories until I found the one I remembered. It was a report on the trial testimony given by the Clark County coroner.

Coroner: Ex-Wife Held, Tortured for Hours

By Rick Heikes,

Review-Journal Staff Writer

Autopsy results showed that Sharon Oglevy was strangled more than 12 hours after her abduction, the Clark County coroner testified Wednesday in the murder trial of the victim’s ex-husband.

Gary Shaw testified for the prosecution and revealed new details of the abduction, rape and murder. He said the time of death was determined during autopsy to be approximately 12 to 18 hours after a witness saw Oglevy forced into a van in a parking garage behind the Cleopatra Casino and Resort, where she worked as a dancer in the exotic Femmes Fatales show.

“For at least twelve hours she was with her abductor and many horrible things were done to her before she was finally killed,” Shaw testified under questioning from the prosecutor.

A day later her body was found in the trunk of her ex-husband’s car by police officers who had gone to his home in Summerland to ask if he knew his ex-wife’s whereabouts. He allowed the police to search the premises and the body was found in the car parked in the home’s garage. The couple’s marriage had dissolved eight months earlier in an acrimonious divorce. Sharon Oglevy had sought a restraining order prohibiting her ex-husband, a blackjack dealer, from coming within 100 feet of her. In her petition she said her husband had threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert.

Brian Oglevy was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and rape with a foreign object. Investigators said they believed he had placed the victim’s body in the trunk of his car with the intention of burying it later in the desert. He has denied killing his ex-wife and said he was set up as a fall guy for her murder. He has been held without bail since his arrest.

Shaw provided jurors with several lurid and ghastly details of the murder. He said Sharon Oglevy was raped and sodomized repeatedly with an unknown foreign object that left significant internal injuries. He said histamine levels in the body were unusually high, indicating that the injuries that caused her body to manufacture the chemical had occurred well before her death by asphyxiation.

Shaw testified that Oglevy had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag that had been pulled over her head and tied closed around her neck. He said several cord markings or furrows on the victim’s neck and a high level of hemorrhaging around her eyes indicated she had been asphyxiated slowly and may have been allowed to lose and regain consciousness several times.

While Shaw’s testimony illuminated much of the prosecution’s theory of how the murder took place, there are still blanks to fill in. Las Vegas Metro Police have never been able to determine where Brian Oglevy allegedly held and then murdered his ex-wife. Crime scene technicians spent three days examining his home after his arrest and determined that it was unlikely that the murder occurred there. The defendant has also not been linked by evidence to a van, which witnesses said Sharon Oglevy was abducted in.

Brian Oglevy’s attorney, William Schifino, objected several times during the coroner’s testimony, asking the judge to stop Shaw from editorializing and putting his personal view of the details into his testimony. Schifino was successful at times, but for the most part the judge allowed Shaw to speak his mind.

The trial continues today. Schifino is expected to mount his defense sometime next week. Brian Oglevy has denied killing his wife since the crime occurred but has not publicly offered a theory on who killed her and set him up to take the fall.