Death of Raven, a Hollywood Beauty

Joel never saw Raven again.

Around dawn on June 4, 2007, Julio Cesar Carbajal Cunca, leaving his job as a night-shift cleaner at El Cid restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, spotted what he assumed was a homeless person passed out in the alley. He was horrified to discover a dead woman instead, the upper half of her black-clothed body wrapped in a green comforter.

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More About

• Dyan Cannon
• Gilton Pitre
• Staten Island
• Silver Lake (Staten Island)
• Homelessness

It took tragically little time for police to identify Raven as a well-known runaway and failed ward of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Raven was wearing her trademark goth clothing: black T-shirt and jeans, yellow socks inside out, black shoes. Her fingernails were painted with metallic-black polish. Her arms were marked with multiple new and old self-mutilation scars.

And on her left arm, scrawled in reddish-orange felt marker, was her boyfriend Curly’s real full name, along with a curt message that put Northeast Division detectives on full alert: “Mathew Edward Kent Hates Me.”

Despite that glaring clue apparently pointing to Curly, detectives were worried that the case could be a toughie. Body dumps are typically the most difficult to unravel: The original scene of the killing is unknown to police, meaning that key evidence, including the weapon, hairs or fibers, is often never found, and witnesses are sometimes long gone.

At first, detectives thought that Cunca, the restaurant’s cleaning man, had grabbed the green comforter from inside El Cid and placed it over Raven’s body. But that didn’t sound right: Why would a restaurant have a comforter?

The cheesy green tapestry bed covering just “screamed motel,” one of the investigating detectives, Lou Rivera, told the Weekly. Rivera called Cunca and learned that the cleaning man had found Raven already shrouded in the blanket — crucial information that was enough to send no fewer than eight detectives bolting out of Northeast Division to scour the seedy motels in Silver Lake, Highland Park and Echo Park.

But there were no reports of a missing comforter — or of foul play. The detectives turned to the comforter itself for clues. Following the ID number and other information on the blanket’s manufacturer tag, they tracked down its Pacoima maker, and on June 5, 2007, asked one of the factory’s employees to determine whether the company had sold any of the bedspreads to hotels in the Echo Park, Silver Lake, Hollywood or Highland Park areas.

A few days later, company officials contacted the LAPD to tell them that they had indeed sold three green tapestry-patterned comforters to the Olive Motel on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake in December 2006.

It was great police work, and an unbelievable stroke of luck for cops who were determined to find the killer. The Olive Motel on Sunset is about a mile east of where Raven’s body was found. The detectives immediately contacted the motel’s owners and asked them to hang on to any security-video footage from the previous two days.

The footage was extremely difficult to download, and for three weeks, police waited for the owner to figure out how to review tape from the crucial days of June 3 and 4 last year.

Meanwhile, detectives homed in on Raven’s 25-year-old live-in boyfriend, Curly, whose real name she had scrawled on her arm in orange marker before her death. They learned that Raven had complained to friends about the couple’s volatile relationship, and had planned to leave him. In addition, Curly had recently been arrested — for having sex with Raven, who was a minor.

The owner of the Olive Motel handed over the surveillance footage on June 28. What the detectives discovered astonished them. On June 3, at approximately 11:22 p.m., one camera captured a short, stocky black guy walking through the motel parking lot with a woman “close in stature and dressed in clothes similar to those found on Gomez,” and carrying a gym bag. At 4:33 the following morning, another camera captured the same man leaving his room at the motel with a gym bag. Eight minutes later, he again left his room — carrying a large object wrapped in a comforter.

A third camera caught him standing behind a tan-colored Cadillac Seville SLS, opening the trunk lid, closing it, jumping into the car and driving off.

Armed with the eerie footage, the detectives collected every motel registration card from that night. They discovered that a registered sex offender named Gilton Pitre had checked into room 5 at 11:15 p.m., giving his full name and driver’s license number.

They also learned that the 220-pound Pitre, who went by the street name “Little Nut,” had done time in 1994 for burglary, and had been convicted in 1996 of raping his roommate, a crime for which he was sentenced to three years in state prison. Then, in 2005, Pitre was arrested and convicted for selling marijuana to an undercover officer in front of the McDonald’s next to the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

Pitre was released from state prison on May 31, 2007, just four days before Raven’s body was found dumped behind El Cid restaurant.