Woman’s Slaying Last Year May Have Been by Mistake

A Fountain Valley flight attendant was slain by mistake last year when a contract killer from Los Angeles went looking for another woman, possibly the wife of a private investigator who owed as much as $400,000 to a Huntington Beach finance company, authorities said Tuesday.

The investigator and his wife lived in the same community as Jane Carver, 46, who was inexplicably shot in the face in June while returning home from a routine morning jog at Mile Square Regional Park.

“This appears to have been a murder for hire with a mistaken victim,” Fountain Valley Police Chief Elvin G. Miali said, accompanied by Carver’s husband at a news conference packed with residents, city officials and police officers from neighboring agencies. “He made a mistake and shot the wrong person.”

Prosecutors filed a murder charge Tuesday against the suspected hit man, Los Angeles electrician Leonard Owen Mundy, who police said had business ties with the finance company. Mundy was arrested Saturday after an Orange County sheriff’s detective recognized similarities between Carver’s killing and the attempted murder of James Wengert, the owner of a private investigation firm, in the parking garage of his San Clemente office last month.

Wengert and Carver were both shot point blank in the face. But Wengert survived and authorities charged Paul Alleyne, 32, of Los Angeles with attempted murder and armed robbery.

Police say Alleyne also is associated with Premium Commercial Services Corp., the Huntington Beach finance company that loaned money to Wengert. Fountain Valley detectives spent hours interviewing employees at the company April 30 and turned up Mundy’s name.

Authorities would not confirm the identity of Mundy’s intended victim but said it was a woman who frequented the park in Carver’s neighborhood. A source close to the case said Margaret Wengert, James Wengert’s wife, appeared to be the target.

Three residents in the area said Tuesday that Jane Carver, who was blond, did not resemble Margaret Wengert, who is 49 and has brown hair. Carver was an avid jogger. Neighbors said the other woman did not jog but walked her dog every morning in the neighborhood.

Carver was slain June 10, three days after Margaret Wengert filed a lawsuit against Premium Commercial Services accusing company officials of strong-arming her to sign over the couple’s Fountain Valley home, court records show.

Los Angeles and Fountain Valley SWAT teams searched Mundy’s Los Angeles home Saturday and took him into custody, first shuttling his wife and two small children to a neighbor’s house. The murder weapon has not been recovered.

Witnesses identified Mundy as the man in a sports coat who calmly shot Carver just a block from her home and walked away as her body crumpled into a flower bed.

At Mundy’s arraignment in a Westminster courthouse, the judge took the unusual step of barring photographers from taking his picture, citing concern that publicity might jeopardize his right to a fair trial later.

Mundy pleaded not guilty, and Municipal Judge Caryl A. Lee set bail at $500,000.

The slaying rocked the tightknit community near Mile Square Regional Park and galvanized an unparalleled response among neighbors and friends of the Carver family, who distributed 250,000 fliers around the country offering a reward for the killer’s capture.

“This is a happy day and a happy moment for the family,” Carver’s husband, Al Carver, said Tuesday, his voice cracking as he thanked his friends for supporting him and his two sons, ages 16 and 21, over the past year. “Hopefully this will allow us to reach closure on this horrible thing that happened to my wife.”

But Mundy’s arrest leaves many questions unanswered. Chief Miali said his detectives still are investigating who might have arranged the hit that claimed Carver’s life. The investigation has also shined a spotlight into the money-lending practices of Premium Commercial Services.

“We’ve got weeks and weeks of work ahead of us,” Miali said. “We’re looking at this organization to see if there is a front there for organized crime. We’re looking at the company as a whole to see who does what.”

The allegations are not the first against company officials. Premium Commercial’s former president, Coleman Allen, pleaded no contest last year to beating another borrower with a pipe wrench during a business meeting in Signal Hill, Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. James Koller said. Allen has since died of a heart attack.

The doors to the 13-year-old company’s storefront office on Springdale Street in Huntington Beach were locked Tuesday and employees declined to answer questions about the company’s role in the search for Carver’s killer.

Police said Alleyne and Mundy are acquaintances who were both associated with the Huntington Beach financial business. Both have their own businesses in South-Central Los Angeles, Mundy as a self-employed electrician and Alleyne as owner of Paul’s Auto Parts & Accessories in the Crenshaw district.

“The common link was some dealing with Premium Commercial,” said sheriff’s homicide investigator Christine Murray. “What became evident right away was that Mrs. Carver had no connection to any of this. She was merely the tragic victim.”

Murray, who was investigating the recent shooting of James Wengert, said it became apparent that there were “similarities between the cases that we couldn’t rationalize away.”

James Wengert, who owns Financial Search, a private investigation firm, owed more than $400,000 to Premium in May 1994, the company alleged in court records.

Margaret Wengert said in her lawsuit that her signature was on papers putting the couple’s Sioux River Circle home up as collateral, but that she never signed them. Wengert alleged in the lawsuit that she agreed to encumber the house, but only for up to $100,000 of the debt.

She said she agreed to sign over the interest in the house after being threatened by company officials who would “make sure her husband and quite possibly herself would be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for some alleged irregularities involving the dealings between the parties,” according to the lawsuit.

Court records indicate that the company foreclosed on the house. The couple then moved to San Clemente, where James Wengert was shot April 10. A settlement conference on the Wengerts’ lawsuit is scheduled for July 19, court records show.

The arrest of Alleyne led detectives to Premium Commercial and Mundy.

The break in the Carver case came after 11 months of investigating and more than 1,000 tips from the public, said Fountain Valley Det. Kim Brown.

“There were so many scenarios in the beginning about why this happened to Jane Carver,” said Brown, who drew on the network of friends and neighbors to help distribute fliers and mailings to law enforcement agencies all over the state. “We could never understand why Janie might be chosen. She was simply out for a jog. She was a loving mother. It was a senseless killing.”

It was the community’s response to the murder that ultimately paid off. According to Miali, James Wengert saw a flier on Carver’s assailant and noted the similarities between the cases and began discussing them with investigator Murray, who alerted Fountain Valley officers.

“This case has been intense,” Brown said. “You never stop working on a case, but after a few weeks the public expects something to happen. I never gave up. . . . I’ve always felt that this case was solvable.”

Police are still offering a $50,000 reward for anyone who comes forward with information linking Mundy to the killing, Fountain Valley Lt. Bob Mosley said.

It was Mosley who notified Carver’s husband in a tearful meeting that a suspect had been arrested. Saturday afternoon, still dressed in SWAT gear, Mosley drove to Al Carver’s home and found him in the front yard, planting flowers.

“We have developed a very close friendship over the months,” Mosley said. “It was very, very emotional. There’s an absolute exhilaration when you finally arrest someone you’ve looked for for so long and had almost zero chance of capturing.

“There’s a certain amount of relief but there’s also a tremendous amount of sadness when you realize that someone as wonderful as Jane Carver was murdered by mistake over something like money. How can you be happy to tell a man that you’ve arrested his wife’s killer?”

Times staff writers Geoff Boucher, Renee Tawa, Lorenza Munoz, Rene Lynch, James Granelli, Thao Hua and Michael Granberry, correspondent Michael Krikorian and researcher Sheila A. Kern contributed to this report.