Fans of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” know that the dabo girls at Quark’s bar are much more than just window dressing. But Cathy DeBuono, the stunning actor who portrayed dabo girl M’Pella and was a body double for Terry Farrell, proved she was made of beauty, brains, and bravery when she helped catch a real-life serial killer. In a story featured on a 2024 “Dateline” episode ,”The Girl With the Hibiscus Tattoo,” DeBuono recounted her brush with a Hollywood Hills predator who lured in his prey by posing as a casting agent.

As recounted in the Keith Morrison-narrated “Dateline” episode, DeBuono was among several Los Angeles women to be approached over the course of several years by a man claiming to be a Hollywood casting agent. According to their various accounts, the man would target his victims in public spaces like Westfield Century City Mall and invite them to an audition to be the next Bond girl. The women were given a very specific, Shania Twain-esque dress code for the audition: a men’s white dress shirt, super-short black mini skirt, sheer pantyhose, tightly slicked-back hair in a ponytail, and black “sky-high stiletto heels.” The casting agent, they were told, would provide a black tie at the audition.

DeBuono had been shopping at the mall in late-1998 or early-1999 when the then 28-year-old actor, a regular on “Deep Space Nine” at the time, fell for his trap. According to DeBuono, when the well-dressed man approached her to ask if she was a model or actress and told her she would be perfect for something he was casting, no red flags went up — at first. “At this point in the conversation, his creep level didn’t exist,” DeBuono told Dateline.

According to DeBuono, the strange request for a photo shoot did put her on alert, though it didn’t seem dangerous at first. Typically, DeBuono said, audition requests would go through her agent. But although alarm bells went off and the red flags finally appeared, DeBuono said her own curiosity got the better of her. “He seemed really good at what he was doing, so I stayed and continued to talk to him,” she told Morrison.

It was then that the man suggested she leave the mall right away and ride with him to a Hollywood Hills location for a photo shoot. Aware now that something was shady but too curious to let it go, DeBuono drove to the second location on her own, bringing along “Deep Space Nine” stuntman Chester E. Tripp III. But when they arrived, the man never came out to meet her. “He saw Chester and aborted his mission,” DeBuono surmised. “I would just have to move on and hope that no one fell for his ruse.”

But other women did fall for his ruse, women like aspiring actor Alice Walker. She was working as a Century City restaurant server in 2003 when she met the man, who introduced himself as Victor before inviting her to a photo shoot with the film’s director in a dodgy-looking West Hollywood location. Although she arrived in the prescribed attire only to find the director wasn’t there, Victor still managed to convince her to return for a second time and, ultimately, a third. It was around that time that both DeBuono and Walker saw a sketch of a man who looked like Victor in a local news story. He was wanted in connection to the disappearance of actor Kristi Johnson, who went missing while on her way to a Bond girl audition with him.

Finding the predator, whose real name was Victor Paleologus, would turn out to be the easy part. Fresh out on parole after doing a stint as a sex offender, criminal mastermind Paleologus had almost immediately turned around and gotten himself locked back up trying to abscond with a test drive car. But even after Johnson’s body turned up in a ravine and several witnesses connected Paleologus to the crime, getting Paleologus to admit to murder on top of his grand theft auto charges proved challenging.

Although several women would soon step up with horror stories about him dating back to 1989, encounters that included tales of assaults and knockout drug-laced drinks, Paleologus, who could have faced the death penalty at the time, refused to come clean. To compound the issue, shortly after cutting a plea deal mid-trial, Paleologus tried to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming that he had been coerced into it. The judge, however, denied his attempt, and Paleologus was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

The daughter of a New York detective and a woman whose own instinct had always known Victor was up to something, Cathy DeBuono couldn’t let it go. To DeBuono, who had gone on to study psychology with an emphasis on criminal psychopathy, Victor had seemed so smooth at his game that she worried that if he hadn’t already committed other murders, he certainly would if released. In 2016, she began working on a true crime documentary on Paleologus, bringing together his surviving victims to bond over their shared longing for justice in the process. When her research into Paleologus led DeBuono to a Jane Doe case near Philadelphia, DeBuono went to visit her “pen pal” in prison, intent on surreptitiously getting a DNA sample to help with the case. Not only did she get one (though the DNA ultimately didn’t match the Jane Doe case’s evidence), but DeBuono says she also managed to coax a murder confession out of him while there. Years later, Paleologus opted to delay his own parole hearing; it’s currently scheduled for November 2025.