Besides the rescues that the Montrose Search and Rescue team (MSAR) performs on a regular basis, they occasionally do some detective work as well. Such was the case for longtime MSAR team member Fred Koegler way back in the fall of 1995 in the case of the disappearance and murder of Linda Sobek. It was a famous case, big in the news at the time, and it was Koegler who located her body.
In November 1995, professional photographer Charles Rathbun was assigned to do some glamour shots of a new model Lexus for an auto magazine. He contacted 27-year-old model Linda Sobek to accompany him on the shoot and to pose in the photos. To make a long and gruesome story short, after sexually assaulting her, he strangled her to death and buried her body in a shallow grave on a lonely dirt road far back in the Angeles Forest.
Her disappearance was a mystery for a few days, since she hadn’t told anyone where she was going the day of her murder. The first break on the case came when a forest service worker emptying a trashcan on Angeles Crest Highway just above La Cañada found some professional photos of a beautiful girl. He took them home and then was horrified when he saw they matched the broadcast images of the missing model. He called the police, who now had a possible location.
The MSAR team was called out to begin searching the roads and back-roads of the Angeles Forest. They examined every turnout, and every place that a car could have gone over the side. In the meantime, the police had found more of Linda Sobek’s possessions in that same trashcan, along with some paperwork with Charles Rathbun’s name on it. Rathbun was located and brought by helicopter to the Mill Creek Ranger Station, which had been set up as a command center. Fred Koegler and Al McGee were patrolling the dirt roads near Pacifico Mountain. They just happened to check back in at the Ranger Station when Rathbun was flown in.
Rathbun was at that point a mess, feigning remorse, and telling the authorities he had accidently run over the model while demonstrating some driving maneuvers. Koegler approached the helicopter where he was able to overhear Rathbun describing to deputies in vague terms where he had buried Sobek. Koegler recognized the landmarks Rathbun described, so he and McGee drove to a lonely backroad turnout. There they saw the arm of the buried murder victim sticking out of her shallow grave. They taped off the scene and called in the authorities. Thanks to the work of Koegler and McGee, police now had a body, and Rathbun’s story began to unravel. After a sensational trial, Rathbun was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Since Fred Koegler had such a large part in solving of the case, he was called to testify in the trial. Rathbun’s defense attorney was particularly interested in the way that Koegler had found the body, probably with the intention of saying the body would not have been located were it not for his client’s cooperation. Koegler’s testimony countered that assertion. Before he had overheard Rathbun’s descriptions, he had already gotten tire prints from the murder vehicle, and was preparing to use them to track the vehicle on the dirt roads. He told the court he was 90% sure that he or another MSAR team member would have found the grave, based on the MSAR’s tracking abilities.
The MSAR team is well trained in back-country tracking. Team members received special training by the U.S. Border Patrol in tracking border-crossers across the desert. Just a couple of weeks ago they competed in a tracking competition with 22 other search and rescue teams from across Southern California. They successfully found their quarry, and finished first in the competition.
Fred Koegler received a commendation for his work on this case. Now in his 70s, he is still an active member of the Montrose Search and Rescue team.