As the guard got out of his car and approached the pale form stretched out on the asphalt next to a Chevrolet Citation, two students walking to their vehicles from the nearby fine-arts building joined him. They gasped in horror.
Lying in a crimson pool next to her car was someone they had seen minutes earlier at a party in the fine-arts building: 23-year-old communications major Robbin Brandley. She had just left the party, which followed a piano concert at which she had been a volunteer usher. Her long, flower-print dress was hiked up above her stomach, exposing bikini-style underwear and knee-high stockings. Her purse sat on the pavement a few feet away.
The blood stained the pavement on both sides of her torso. By the time Michael Stephany, a homicide investigator with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, arrived at the scene, automatic sprinklers in the parking lot had turned on and covered the body in an eerie mist. An autopsy would later reveal that Brandley had been stabbed 41 times. Most of the wounds were in her neck, chest and back, and there were several deep cuts—defensive marks, police figured—in her hands.
But besides the victim’s gruesome injuries, there was nothing for police to investigate: no fingerprints; no suspect’s blood, hair or DNA; no physical evidence of any kind. It was what prosecutors often call the “perfect crime.”
The grisly murder would remain unsolved for 11 years. Witnesses offered inconsistent accounts of events in the hours preceding the crime; Brandley’s parents became convinced that someone she knew was responsible for the killing. Then, in April 1997, a man confessed to the murder—and several others. The cop writing down his confession would note that the killer had simply wandered around Mission Viejo until he ended up at a dark parking lot, where he saw a woman walking to her car.
The victim, in the words of the confessed murderer, “could have been anybody.” She “was just a random female.”
ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, Jack and Genelle Reilley sit on either side of a table at the Weekly’s offices in downtown Santa Ana. They’re taking turns answering questions about the murder of Robbin Brandley, their daughter, 21 years ago. It’s a story they’ve told so often that it’s almost become routine for them, although there’s nothing routine about what they have to say—or about the pain of their loss, still visibly etched in the deep wrinkles on Jack’s tanned forehead and the strained, almost helpless smile on Genelle’s face. Only a few minutes into the interview, her eyes well up with tears.
Part of the routine is explaining why their daughter had a different surname at the time of her death. Robbin, they explain, was born in Long Beach—the town where Jack and Genelle grew up and became high-school sweethearts—on December 6, 1962, with the name Dana Reilley. She spent most of her youth in Huntington Beach and then St. Louis, where Jack had been transferred to work at the headquarters of Ralston Purina, the company that employed him until his retirement a few years ago.
It was in St. Louis, when Dana was 11 years old, that she changed her name to Robbin Brandley. Genelle, a New Age enthusiast who claims to have psychic visions, says the idea came from a numerological booklet that uses one’s birth date to come up with a new name. “It was my idea,” she adds.
Her daughter had been a hyperactive child and poor student in her younger years, but once she had a new name, Genelle insists, she blossomed into a focused, highly motivated child. “I believe in all that stuff,” Genelle says. “If what you’re doing isn’t working, delve into it. She grew up to be a really fabulous, sensational person. I guess everyone thinks that about their child, but she just loved to make people laugh. She was very funny and very bright.”
In 1983, the family returned to California, settling in Laguna Beach, where Brandley enrolled at Saddleback College to pursue a career in journalism.
She had lots of friends at Saddleback and dated a lot of young men, but, her parents say, she refused to get involved in any steady relationships because she wanted to focus on her career. Aside from her classes, she worked at KSBR, the campus radio station, and helped book performances at the college, including established musical acts such as the Thompson Twins. She loved to volunteer for campus events, like the piano concert that brought her to Saddleback College on the last day of her life.
In the hours leading up to her trip to the unlit student parking lot in Mission Viejo, Brandley spent several hours with her father at their home in Laguna Beach watching television. Jack Reilley was a big fan of Charles Dickens; he was delighted when she told him that the 1946 Hollywood adaptation of Great Expectations was on television. After watching the movie, they sat through several reruns of the popular 1960s black-and-white TV comedy The Munsters.
“It had been 15 years since we’d watched that show, and it was as funny as ever,” Jack recalls.
At around 2 the following morning, Jack awoke to loud knocking at the door: Detective Stephany and another officer were standing on his porch. “He had a big grocery bag,” he recalls. Stephany asked Jack if he could identify anything in the bag. Inside, Jack found Brandley’s purse, and inside that, her wallet and driver’s license. “The first thing that went through my mind was the drunks in [Laguna] Canyon, a car wreck or something like that,” he says. “And then he said she’d been murdered, and I just couldn’t believe it. It was like being hit with a hammer.”
Jack woke up Genelle and told her the news. Four hours later, at sunrise, he called their son Jayeson, and several other family members and friends. They received another visit from the sheriff’s department and answered interminable questions about their daughter. “They came down to figure out the sequence of events,” Jack said. “Who her friends were, what type of girl she was, any [love] triangles or anything else. They were curious because her last name is different than ours and thought maybe there was an ex-husband or something.”
LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, 300 mourners attended a memorial service for Brandley at a San Juan Capistrano church, an event covered by the Los Angeles Times. “She was a vibrant, energetic, caring person whose concern for and love of other students was the foundation of her existence,” Vern Hodge, then-dean of student development at Saddleback College, told the crowd. The article noted the sheriff’s department had “no significant leads” in solving the murder.
On March 7, Saddleback College hosted a series of bands, including Fishbone, the Rave-Ups and Secret Service, for a memorial concert in tribute to Brandley, an event prominent enough that Times music critic Randy Lewis covered the show. His story also noted that the sheriff’s department had no leads. “It’s very much an active case, but I’m not aware of any new information at this time,” a department spokesperson told Lewis.
By this time, the Reilleys were conducting their own, unofficial murder investigation, based on statements they say were made to them by police and friends of Brandley who called them to share their suspicions. Those suspicions centered on Valerie Prehm, a student at Saddleback College who worked with Brandley at KSBR and who also had volunteered as an usher at the piano concert on the night of the murder.
According to witnesses who spoke to the Reilleys, Prehm had left the party with Brandley, making her the last person to see her alive. More disturbingly—to the Reilleys, at least—was the fact that other witnesses told them Prehm and Brandley had gotten into an argument just a few weeks before the murder when campus administrators had rejected Prehm’s proposal to bring Manhattan Transfer to campus, saying they wanted Brandley to handle the project. Furthermore, the Reilleys say, Prehm disappeared for three days after the murder.
Yet police ruled out Prehm as a suspect, citing witnesses who saw Prehm leave the after-concert party alone. And Prehm hadn’t disappeared for three days, they said: She was at home in San Clemente all weekend, unaware that Brandley had been murdered until she returned to campus on Monday. Police hadn’t been able to interview her sooner because they didn’t know her telephone number.
But to the Reilleys, particularly Genelle, Prehm clearly had a motive to harm their daughter. She became convinced
Prehm had persuaded somebody to rob her daughter, to scare her into leaving campus in revenge for stealing her project. She even claims Brandley visited her in a psychic vision just three days after the murder. “She screamed. ‘Mom, Valerie did it! Valerie did it!’” Genelle says. “I was stunned.”
As the years passed with no progress in the case, the Reilleys say they grew increasingly frustrated with the sheriff’s department, especially Stephany, who has since retired and could not be located for an interview for this story. “He said ‘Don’t call; don’t bother me,’” Genelle claims. “He just couldn’t solve the case.”
The Reilleys filed a lawsuit against Saddleback College, arguing that the school was in part responsible for their daughter’s murder because of the lack of streetlights at the parking lot where she died, but they dropped the suit after their lawyer quit. They also lobbied for a bill to require that all California universities and colleges provide lights at student parking lots, but the legislation, signed into law in 1990 by California’s then-Governor George Deukmejian, only applied to future campus construction.
Meanwhile, they continued their private hunt for their daughter’s killer, inviting a series of psychics to visit the crime scene in the late ’80s and early ’90s. A few years later, they also consulted with a pair of psychics on an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. Genelle brought a ring that belonged to her daughter to the studio and handed it to one of the psychics, who then closed her eyes and narrated what she purported to be a description of the murderer, a supernatural echo of the killer that was emanating from the ring itself.
“She was holding this ring and looked like she was going to pass out,” Genelle recalls. “She said this person was in uniform, in camouflage, and Robbin knocked the knife over his left eyebrow. She said the man works as a security guard.” After the show, Genelle says the psychic’s husband approached her and said his wife would offer her services free of charge in the hope of solving the crime. “I was going to do that,” she says. “But then she died not long after the show. She was a big, heavy woman.”
By then, the couple had hired a private detective to track down Prehm and confront her about the crime. In 1992, Genelle drove to rural Washington, where Prehm was living with a boyfriend, and convinced her to take a polygraph test in exchange for $10,000.
Wanting to clear her name, Prehm took the test and passed. Genelle believes the test was improperly administered. She provided the Weekly with a videotape of Prehm answering questions about Brandley’s murder. In the tape, recorded on June 25, 1992, Prehm denied having any knowledge of the crime and stated that while she may have argued with Brandley a few weeks before her death, she certainly wasn’t angry enough to kill anyone. She also claimed that she last saw Brandley at the party and left by herself that night.
Asked if she had seen anyone suspicious that night, however, Prehm stated that while she was working as an usher, a man with curly hair and glasses wearing an olive-drab hunting jacket had approached her and asked if Robbin Brandley were in the building. He didn’t look dressed for the concert.
“I almost asked for his ticket, but I was too busy, and unfortunately, I just turned and pointed her out,” Prehm said on the videotape, adding that she told police about the mysterious stranger at the concert, but that they didn’t believe her because nobody else had seen anyone matching that description. It probably didn’t help her case, Prehm added, that she prefaced her statement to police by mentioning that the mother of one of her friends had also told her she’d seen a similar man in a dream.
“The police saw me twice, and they never wrote it down,” Prehm continued. “I don’t remember his nose, but I remember his hair and glasses, and he was wearing a dark-green jacket, kind of a backwoods jacket. It was an olive green with long sleeves, like an army jacket.”
THREE MONTHS LATER, on the evening of September 27, 1992, Jennifer Asbenson, a 19-year-old nursing assistant, had just bought a snack at Palm Canyon Liquor in Palm Springs. She was on her way to work at a home for handicapped children in Desert Hot Springs, several miles away. As she waited for her bus outside the liquor store, a young man in a blue car pulled up to the curb and asked her if she needed a ride.
“No, it’s okay,” Asbenson replied.
The man smiled. “Are you sure? I’m going to Desert Hot Springs.”
Because the driver seemed friendly and didn’t care if she accepted his invitation, but mostly because she did need a ride, Asbenson got in the car. For some reason, she took note of his license-plate number, and as they rode together, she kept repeating it to herself. But after several minutes, she figured she was being paranoid. “‘Why do I keep memorizing his license plate?’” she wondered. “‘This guy is totally nice.’…He was just a really friendly guy, and I thought I was lucky to get a ride with such a nice guy.”
As the man drove through the desert, he asked Asbenson what she did for a living. She told him she wanted to be an actress. “He asked me if I was interested in pornos,” Asbenson later testified. “I said, ‘No, that’s sick.’” She inquired as to what he did for a living and the man replied that he was a detective. She didn’t believe him. She thought it was a little odd that he kept staring out at the desert. Then, halfway through the trip, she got “creeped out” when she told him to make a left turn. He seemed to be ignoring her, but he finally pulled over at the last moment and made the turn.
When the man dropped her off at her job, he asked for her telephone number and invited her to breakfast the next morning. Asbenson, who had a boyfriend, gave him a phony number, hoping to let him down easy. But when she left the building the next morning at 6, she saw the blue car idling down the block. “He just pulled over and rolled the window down and said, ‘Good morning,’” she recalled. “And he was nice. I didn’t feel threatened at all.”
Asbenson accepted his offer for a ride back to Palm Springs. Almost immediately, the driver became angry about the phony telephone number, and Asbenson realized she was in trouble. “He was being persistent, but then all of a sudden, he just flipped out, and he had a knife, and he just held it up to my throat and started screaming at me, calling me a bitch and telling me to shut up.” The man pulled over on the side of the road, pushed Asbenson’s head into the dashboard and grabbed a ball of twine from under his seat.
“He pulled my hands behind my back and just started wrapping them,” she said. “And it just felt like I was doomed…. I couldn’t believe what was happening, and I couldn’t even think, and I just said, ‘This is a joke. Oh, my God, all this over the phone number. Oh, my God.’ And he just said, ‘Shut up.’”
Asbenson asked the man what he was doing, but he wouldn’t answer. When she told him he wouldn’t get away with anything, he placed a hat and sunglasses on her head, then locked her door and pushed her seat back so other motorists wouldn’t be able to see her.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon, and from her vantage point, Asbenson would later recall, she could see nothing but an endless parade of telephone poles in the early-morning sky. She asked if he planned to rape her. “He wouldn’t say anything,” she said. “He had a lot of rage. I kept looking at him. I provoked no emotion. No matter what I said, he couldn’t feel a thing for me. He was just really pissed off.”
As he drove through the desert, one hand on the wheel and the other gripping a knife to her neck, the man forced her to perform oral sex on him. The road became bumpy, and Asbenson, who grew up in Palm Springs, knew he was taking her to a remote area. After what seemed like nearly an hour, he pulled over, cut off all her clothes and stuffed her panties in her mouth, using her bra as a gag. As he raped her, he began viciously cursing Asbenson.
“And then he just told me to tell him that I loved him,” she said. He removed the gag, and Asbenson did her best to sound sincere. It didn’t work. The man punched her in the face. She tried again, imagining what it would be like to say those words and truly believe them. Her second effort didn’t fare much better. He called her a
“bitch,” and the next thing Asbenson knew, he was strangling her. The world turned white, and Asbenson passed out. When she awoke, the man was licking her neck, biting her. He pushed her out of the car and, holding a handgun to her head, forced her once again to perform oral sex. She thought about biting his penis, but she couldn’t muster the courage. Instead, she asked him to shoot her.
The man then forced her into the trunk and began driving down the road, deeper into the desert. Gathering all her energy, Asbenson managed to pop the twine off her wrists. Terrified that she would be cut to pieces by her captor, she tried to strangle herself with the twine. When that failed, she began feeling around the darkness until her fingers gripped a latch. As she did so, the trunk popped open. Asbenson lifted the trunk a few inches and stuck her hand out, hoping to attract the attention of passing motorists. But her abductor immediately noticed the trunk was open and pulled over to the side of the road. He got out and slammed the trunk shut again.
“Keep it shut, bitch,” he yelled. Then he ran back to the driver’s seat and revved the engine. But he hit the gas so hard, his wheels spun, stuck in a sandy rut. Asbenson opened the trunk and, naked except for her sweat shirt, ran down the road. In the distance, she could see an approaching truck. She turned around and saw the man running after her, waving a machete. She kept running, eyes closed. When she opened them, the truck had screeched to a halt.
“Catch him!” she screamed. “He kidnapped me! I just got out of his trunk!”
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 25