Bibi Lee, murder victim
sl...@ishipress.com
The Case of Bibi Lee has been a big item in the news in California since
the time of her murder in 1984. Bibi Lee was a student at the University
of California at Berkeley. On the morning of her murder, she had a fight
with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, because he had discovered that she had
gone out on a date with another guy. Later that day, they and another
girl went jogging in the Berkeley Hills. When the boyfriend and the
other girl reached the end of the jogging trail, Bibi Lee was nowhere to
be seen. The boyfriend went back to look for her but returned 15 minutes
later, unable to find her. He and the other girl then drive back to
campus, leaving Bibi Lee to her own devices.
The next day, after she had not returned home, her roommates notified
the police. The police questioned the boyfriend and then he along with
the police searched with bloodhounds and Explorer scouts the area where
he had last seen her. They were unable to find any trace.
The police continued to question the boyfriend from time to time and
gave him a polygraph test. Five weeks later, the police decided to play
a trick on him. They lied to him by saying that they had found her body
along with proof that he did it. He immediately confessed. He explained
that when he had gone back to look for her, he had found her sulking. He
had become angry and hit her, knocking her to the ground, leaving her
bleeding.
That night, he had come back and had had sexual intercourse with her
dead body. He had then buried her in a shallow grave "to give her a
decent burial". On at least one other occasion, he had returned to the
site, dug her up and had sexual intercourse with her dead body and then
had buried her again.
With this new information, the police were able to go to the spot where
Bradley Page had said that he had buried her and dig her up.
The case was tried in California Superior Court. Bradley Page was found
guilty and, due to the heinous nature of the crime, he was sentenced to
four years in prison for murder and additional years for rape.
On appeal, the California Court of Appeals reversed the rape conviction,
on the ground that sex with a dead body does constitute rape, because
the dead body lacks the capacity to consent. The murder conviction
stood.
This case because a cause celebre in California, because it was claimed
that the murder confession had been coerced by the police, when they had
tricked him by saying that they had found her dead body, when actually
they had not.
Hundreds of newspaper articles were written about this case. This case
was even featured on the Connie Chung show. Bradley Page did not have to
serve his sentence until 1992, because he was allowed to remain out on
bail pending appeal. When he did finally surrender himself, there were
pickets and signs protesting his incarceration. In addition to claiming
that his confession was coerced, the demonstrators complained that four
years in prison was too severe a sentence because (1) Bibi Lee was
Chinese and (2) she had been a Cal Berkeley student.
I found out about this case by accident. I was browsing through the law
library. Some discarded paper back supplements of the California
Reporter had been thrown in the trash can, so I pulled them out and took
them home. I found the lengthy opinion of the Bibi Lee case in these
books. Because of its gory details, I read the entire opinion. When I
later often saw this case mentioned in the news media, I found it
difficult to believe that anyone would claim that Bradley Page was
innocent.
However, never fear. Bradley Page got out of prison in 1994. He only had
to serve 2 1/2 years of his four year sentence.
Sam Sloan
Posted at http://www.samsloan.com/bibilee.htm
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Kim Bova
I never heard of this case before, but I can't believe Bradley didn't
serve a longer sentence. That is really screwed up. Kim
Animals are creatures of God, created by love and kindness, treat them
as you would like to be treated.
Patty
<sl...@ishipress.com> wrote:
: The Case of Bibi Lee has been a big item in the news in California since
: the time of her murder in 1984. Bibi Lee was a student at the University
: of California at Berkeley. On the morning of her murder, she had a fight
: with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, because he had discovered that she had
: gone out on a date with another guy. Later that day, they and another
: girl went jogging in the Berkeley Hills. When the boyfriend and the
: other girl reached the end of the jogging trail, Bibi Lee was nowhere to
: be seen. The boyfriend went back to look for her but returned 15 minutes
: later, unable to find her. He and the other girl then drive back to
: campus, leaving Bibi Lee to her own devices.
:
: The next day, after she had not returned home, her roommates notified
: the police. The police questioned the boyfriend and then he along with
: the police searched with bloodhounds and Explorer scouts the area where
: he had last seen her. They were unable to find any trace.
:
: The police continued to question the boyfriend from time to time and
: gave him a polygraph test. Five weeks later, the police decided to play
: a trick on him. They lied to him by saying that they had found her body
: along with proof that he did it. He immediately confessed. He explained
: that when he had gone back to look for her, he had found her sulking. He
: had become angry and hit her, knocking her to the ground, leaving her
: bleeding.
:
: That night, he had come back and had had sexual intercourse with her
: dead body. He had then buried her in a shallow grave "to give her a
: decent burial". On at least one other occasion, he had returned to the
: site, dug her up and had sexual intercourse with her dead body and then
:
: With this new information, the police were able to go to the spot where
: Bradley Page had said that he had buried her and dig her up.
:
: The case was tried in California Superior Court. Bradley Page was found
: guilty and, due to the heinous nature of the crime, he was sentenced to
: four years in prison for murder and additional years for rape.
:
: On appeal, the California Court of Appeals reversed the rape conviction,
: on the ground that sex with a dead body does constitute rape, because
: the dead body lacks the capacity to consent. The murder conviction
: stood.
:
: This case because a cause celebre in California, because it was claimed
: that the murder confession had been coerced by the police, when they had
: they had not.
:
: Hundreds of newspaper articles were written about this case. This case
: was even featured on the Connie Chung show. Bradley Page did not have to
: serve his sentence until 1992, because he was allowed to remain out on
: bail pending appeal. When he did finally surrender himself, there were
: pickets and signs protesting his incarceration. In addition to claiming
: that his confession was coerced, the demonstrators complained that four
: years in prison was too severe a sentence because (1) Bibi Lee was
: Chinese and (2) she had been a Cal Berkeley student.
:
: I found out about this case by accident. I was browsing through the law
: library. Some discarded paper back supplements of the California
: Reporter had been thrown in the trash can, so I pulled them out and took
: them home. I found the lengthy opinion of the Bibi Lee case in these
: books. Because of its gory details, I read the entire opinion. When I
: later often saw this case mentioned in the news media, I found it
: difficult to believe that anyone would claim that Bradley Page was
: innocent.
:
: However, never fear. Bradley Page got out of prison in 1994. He only had
: to serve 2 1/2 years of his four year sentence.
Thanks for all the information on this case. This was one case that had
always baffled me. I knew that Bradley Page's confession had been
coerced but I didn't know all the other details. I also read the book
"The Dead Girl," but it was badly written and IIRC wasn't so much
about the murder but about the friendship between Bibi Lee and
her childhood girlfriend, who wrote the book while attending an ivy
league college. Bibi Lee was from Mass where her father was a
professor at MIT. I always found it a fascinating case so I do plan
to read the articles at your site.
I was incensed at the time that he got such a short sentence-wasn't
he sentenced for manslaughter. By the time the trial was held,
he was married and with a child.
Again, thanks for the site.
Patty
Patty
> : The next day, after she had not returned home, her roommates
notified the police. The police questioned the boyfriend and then he
along with the police searched with bloodhounds and Explorer scouts the
area where he had last seen her. They were unable to find any trace.
> :
>The police continued to question the boyfriend from time to time and
>gave him a polygraph test. Five weeks later, the police decided to
>play a trick on him. They lied to him by saying that they had found
>her body along with proof that he did it. He immediately confessed. He
>explained that when he had gone back to look for her, he had found her
>sulking. He had become angry and hit her, knocking her to the ground,
>leaving her bleeding.
I was wondering about your stating that the body was found after he
confessed so I went back to the archives of the San Francisco Examiner
and found that the body was found first. This is why jurors were in
doubt about his guilt. If he had led the police to her body, there
would be no doubt about his involvement. He said that the police had
coerced him and that they put the ideas about having sex with her
corpse into his head. One never knew if he did it or not. Assuming
she was raped, today he would ask for a DNA test to prove his
innocence. Since the case is closed, I case that will never happen.
From the San Francisco Examiner 2/9/95:
"Bibi' Lee slaying riveted nation in '84
Bradley Page, the UC-Berkeley student who helped launch a nationwide
search for his missing girlfriend, Roberta "Bibi" Lee, but was later
convicted of killing her in the East Bay hills, is scheduled to be
paroled Friday after serving two years and eight months of a six-year
sentence.
Page, 34, will be released from the California Men's Colony in San Luis
Obispo to an undisclosed location in Northern California.
Parolees are generally returned to the county where the crime was
committed, unless a request to deny the release to the same area is
received from the victim, a prison spokeswoman said.
She said that under state law, prisoners earn a day of jail credit for
every day worked, as long as there is no disciplinary action against
them, which is why Page was eligible for parole after serving less than
half of his six-year sentence for manslaughter.
Page's father, Jack Page, a journalism professor at Merritt College in
Oakland, would neither comment on his son's plans nor say where he
would live.
"My son has been punished for 10 years for a crime he didn't commit and
I hope the media will let him assume a useful life," Jack Page said.
Kenneth Burr, senior deputy district attorney in Alameda County, who
tried the case, said, "I'm satisfied Mr. Page was held
accountable. . . . That's the best I can hope for. Obviously, Bibi Lee
will never be returned to her family and that's what everybody would
like. That can never be done."
In a case that stunned UC-Berkeley students and drew national
attention, 2,000 volunteers joined the search for Lee and 3 million
flyers were distributed across the West. Lee was reported missing on
Nov. 4, 1984, after she went jogging with Page and a female friend in
Oakland's Redwood Regional Park.
The 21-year-old Lee, a linguistics student who had been having troubles
with Page and was upset on that day, according to court testimony,
separated from Page and the friend, Robin Shaw. Page later went to find
his girlfriend, but returned 20 minutes later without her.
It was then, prosecutors contended, that the two fought and Page hit
her in the head with a rock. He then rejoined Shaw and said he had been
unable to find Lee.
Lee's body was found buried in a hollow five weeks later following
intensive searches, many of them led by Page himself. About 450 people
attended her funeral.
Shocking details confessed
Page was arrested the day after Lee's body was found, and an all-night
interrogation resulted in Page's confession. Page included shocking
details about returning that night to Lee's body and having sex with
her, then burying her, according to court records. He quickly recanted,
citing police intimidation.
He later testified that police wrongly told him they had his
fingerprints and an incriminating witness.
In an exclusive interview with The Examiner the day after Lee's body
was found, Page read a poem he had written to her:
"On a warm winter's day terror held in the soul as the appetite of the
mind's eye took a look but didn't see.
"Witnessed by one, viewed by millions, the rest fed on the 6 o'clock
news with coffee and dessert."
Lee's father, Francis Lee, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, always believed Page was guilty, but that the killing
was probably an accident.
At Page's sentencing in 1988, Lee asked the judge to sentence Page
to "intense suffering."
"We are relieved to see that a jury finally convicted him for the
hideous crime he committed. . . . For what he did and the additional
suffering he has caused us, I believe he should be punished by being
sent to state prison and his time should not be less than 3-1/4 years
of intense suffering which he inflicted on our family."
But Page and his family steadfastly maintained his innocence through
the years.
Manslaughter conviction
In 1986, Page was acquitted of murder but the jury deadlocked on a
voluntary manslaughter conviction. He was tried for manslaughter in
1988, convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. An appeals court
upheld the decision, and Page began serving his sentence in May 1992.
He had already earned about four months prison credit for time served
in Alameda County, officials said.
During the long ordeal, Page also got married and had a son, but has
since been divorced.
Page's mother, Betsy, became ill with cancer and died during court
proceedings.
Patty
book is being written on the case by Ann Williams.
Excerpts from the San Francisco Chronicle 1/10/99:There's nothing like
a seamy old murder story to put the chill in your bones -- and for any
crime buff with memories of the Bay Area stretching back to 1960, first-
time writer Ann Williams has dished up a doozy.
Her true-crime ``In the Cold Light of Day'' is a time trip to those pre-
Charlie Manson days when folks left their doors unlocked and it didn't
take much to vault a killing into national headlines. The grisly
garroting of society star Gene Tate in the little Mississippi college
town of Columbus was one such murder, and by the time the killer was
nabbed, the star witness blabbed and the jury ruled, the story had
resonated all the way to Berkeley and back to Mississippi.
Williams -- a lawyer whose main prior experience with print was being
written about as mayor of Pinole in the early 1990s -- laces together
the still-murky murder tale of Tate, killer Jon Mattox and the witness
who sunk him, fellow college student Sarah Grayson, into a surprisingly
polished yarn that cuts right to the fearsome facts and doesn't mess
around along the way.
snip
Williams moved to California but returned to Mississippi in 1994 to
write this book; she is now working on the true-crime story of the 1984
Bibi Lee killing in Berkeley. What you don't learn in ``Cold Light'' is
that Grayson, after earning a sociology degree at UC Berkeley, founded
the famous Petrouchka restaurant in Berkeley and devoted her life to
Zen. She was an integral figure at the San Francisco Zen Center in the
early 1980s and today is an ordained Zen priestess practicing with
Richard Baker-Roshi at an undisclosed location in the West -- but then,
that would have to be another story.
robertc
as Robert "Bibi" Lee (Linguistics). I didn't know her, but some
people in my dorm did, and years later, they claim to remember a
time when she was in the hallway and I walked past her and we
said hello to each other. For the life of me I can't remember
it.
I knew a kid who had grown up with her in Boston and said she
once chased him into the bathroom.
Melanie Thernstrom who wrote The Dead Girl also wrote a book
called Halfway Heaven which was about a murder/suicide in
Harvard. She also wrote a Vanity Fair article about Matthew
Shepard.
Lee apparently lived in Lothlarian Hall (named after something
in The Lord of the Rings).
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Patty
>
> I was wondering about your stating that Bibi Lee's body was found
after Brad Paige > confessed so I went back to the archives of the San
Francisco Examiner and found that the body was found first. This is
why jurors were in
> doubt about his guilt. If he had led the police to her body, there
> would be no doubt about his involvement. He said that the police had
> coerced him and that they put the ideas about having sex with her
> corpse into his head. One never knew if he did it or not. Assuming
> she was raped, today he would ask for a DNA test to prove his
> innocence. Since the case is closed, I case that will never happen.
>
I was just thinking that another case where I wish they could do the
DNA testing of a suspect is the 1977 Oklahoma Girl Scout murders.
Sperm was compared at the time of the murders to the suspect, (can't
recall his name - just that he was a Cherokee and found not guilty by a
non-Indian jury and then died a few years later of a heart attack), and
was found to be similar.
st...@mail4pages.com
Norbert K
> Bibi Lee, Murder Victim
> The Case of Bibi Lee has been a big item in the news in California since
> the time of her murder in 1984. Bibi Lee was a student at the University
> of California at Berkeley. On the morning of her murder, she had a fight
> with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, because he had discovered that she had
> gone out on a date with another guy. Later that day, they and another
> girl went jogging in the Berkeley Hills. When the boyfriend and the
> other girl reached the end of the jogging trail, Bibi Lee was nowhere to
> be seen. The boyfriend went back to look for her but returned 15 minutes
> later, unable to find her. He and the other girl then drive back to
> campus, leaving Bibi Lee to her own devices.
>
> the police. The police questioned the boyfriend and then he along with
> the police searched with bloodhounds and Explorer scouts the area where
> he had last seen her. They were unable to find any trace.
>
> The police continued to question the boyfriend from time to time and
> gave him a polygraph test. Five weeks later, the police decided to play
> a trick on him. They lied to him by saying that they had found her body
> along with proof that he did it. He immediately confessed. He explained
> that when he had gone back to look for her, he had found her sulking. He
> had become angry and hit her, knocking her to the ground, leaving her
> bleeding.
>
It's extremely obvious that Brad Page killed Roberta Lee. He and Roberta (who was being difficult) went jogging with Robin Shaw. Roberta went off on her own. Bradley and Robin returned to their vehicle. They agreed that Robin would wait where they had parked, while Brad would make a search for Roberta.
Fifteen to twenty minutes later, Brad returned to Robin. He was acting weird: confused & frightened. He insisted that they should leave.
Why would he leave a petite Asian girl in a park in Oakland when she lived in Berkeley and had no transportation? Because, obviously, he knew she was not going to return to their car; he had killed her.
Police were aggressive in inducing Bradley to confess -- but the confession itself nmatches the facts of where Robin was left and the state she had been left in. That is, she was left in a wooded area, and her skull had been subjected to blunt force trauma -- consistent with Bradley's confession.
The confession may have been coerced; it was also TRUE.
To imagine, as Bradley & his apologists attempt to get people to do, that Roberta was abducted by a "man in a van" makes no sense whatsoever. If Roberta had been abducted & driven away, why was her body found among the trails -- precisely where Bradley admitted to having left her?
Norbert K
I studied at Berkeley in the 90s. I picked up a copy of Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl at one of the many great used book stores in the city. I got curious about the case, and started digging up old articles about it using the microfilm machines in the Moffitt Library.
True story: While doing research in this library, I noticed the inscription "Brad Page was here" on a vertical beam in the building. Someone else wrote beneath that "Necrophile."