Sex offender convicted of killing model
(AP)
Updated: 2006-02-16 15:09

A registered sex offender was convicted Wednesday of kidnapping and killing a model whose skeletal remains were found in the Angeles National Forest a year after she disappeared.

David Rademaker, 42, was convicted of first-degree murder with a special circumstance that the crime was committed during a kidnapping. He could face the death penalty or life in prison.

Prosecutors said Rademaker lured 21-year-old Kimberly Pandelios to the forest in February 1992 for a photo shoot and drowned her in a creek when she resisted his sexual advances.

Pandelios, the mother of a year-old son, had told her husband she was meeting a photographer named Paul, authorities said. Her skull and other remains were found by hikers in March 1993 in the San Gabriel Mountains northeast of Los Angeles.

Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department unsolved homicides unit relied on interviews with witnesses and telephone records discovered in 1992 to arrest Rademaker.

An attorney for Rademaker said the case relied heavily on testimony from two of Rademaker's former girlfriends who claimed he made incriminating statements. The testimony should not have been allowed, Kim Pearman argued.

Rademaker served about half of a 12-year sentence after pleading no contest to charges of procuring a child to engage in a lewd act and furnishing controlled substances to a minor. He was paroled in 2004.