Money at root of O.C. double killing?

Kevin and Joni Park’s erratic behavior in the hours before their deaths at a posh Laguna Beach resort may have been driven by the wife’s zeal to obtain the couple’s share of a family inheritance and the fear that someone would kill them to take it away, two officials told The Times on Tuesday.

Joni Park summoned sheriff’s deputies to the couple’s Mission Viejo home Friday to tell them the couple was set to inherit $1 million, according to an investigator who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak about the investigation.

The money was apparently to come from the estate of Kevin Park’s father, Oliver Park, who died March 29 at age 82.

Joni Park, 48, gave deputies the name of someone she said was trying to swindle the money from them and might even kill the couple over it, the investigator said.

“She believed that their life was in danger and that if anything happened, they wanted to name the suspect,” he said.

Relatives said the couple behaved oddly for years, and one said he found it strangely poetic that after bragging about their inheritance for so long, it was their undoing.

While authorities say they did not see evidence to substantiate Joni Park’s fears, her “paranoia” appeared to have driven her to call a family meeting in a $2,200-a-night bungalow Saturday night at the idyllic Montage Resort & Spa, perched above the sea in south Laguna Beach.

By Sunday morning, she was in such turmoil over the inheritance that she threw a gun-wielding fit inside the bungalow, the investigator said. Two police officers arrived on the terrace outside her open sliding glass door and found her pointing the gun repeatedly at them, Laguna Beach Police Sgt. Jason Kravetz said.

Police ordered her to drop the weapon and shot her when she refused, Kravetz said. Kevin Park, 49, picked up the gun and was fatally shot when he aimed it at officers, the investigator said. The wounded wife grabbed the gun again and raised it at police, who shot her dead in a second volley. Police officials would not say how many bullets were fired by the two officers.

The encounter between police and the Parks was recorded on audio devices attached to the officers’ gun belts. That evidence has been given to the Orange County district attorney’s office, which is investigating the shooting. Also under review were the contents of a home computer of the Parks’ and boxes of documents found in the bungalow.

“They were just people that got pushed a little too far with things they couldn’t clear up legally and financially,” said the couple’s 23-year-old daughter, Christie Park, the day after the shooting. “My mom was at her wit’s end.... She was so frustrated that it just caused this madness.”

According to relatives, Oliver Park’s will named Kevin Park and his older brother, Patrick, as the executors of the estate. It instructed them to divide large chunks of his holdings equally. The will, said the relatives, split their father’s numerous properties in California and Hawaii between the brothers, who had yet to have the holdings appraised.

“We knew exactly what we were getting,” said Patrick Park, a retired grocery store manager who lives in Placentia. “There’s no million dollars.... There’s no cash.” Their father “was property-rich.”

Relatives said that a much smaller amount of cash was to go to the son and two daughters of a third brother, Michael D. Park, who died in 2001.

Michael D. Park’s son, Michael K. Park, a 37-year-old Corona firefighter, complained bitterly in an interview that he and his siblings were left with “a few thousand dollars each” and that his mother had been cut out entirely.

Kevin and Joni Park, the 37-year-old Corona firefighter said, were “gold-digging, superficial, money-grubbing people.... For [Kevin Park’s] whole life, he talked about wanting my grandfather’s money.”

The couple’s deaths so soon after Oliver Park’s death, Michael K. Park said, amounted to “poetic justice.”

Michael K. Park scoffed at the notion that someone had threatened his aunt and uncle, with whom he had barely spoken in the last decade, save stilted greetings at his grandfather’s funeral.

Michael K. Park’s mother, 60-year-old Caroline Park of Whittier, said of Joni Park, “There’s not one tear shed for her. Not in this home. I know that sounds crass and very cold. But you reap what you sow -- and she has. Amen for that.”

Kevin and Joni Parks, married since 1983 and the parents of three children, lived in a modest, red-roofed house in Mission Viejo, where neighbors described the wife as a volatile woman who was preoccupied with class status.

The couple owned a small real estate investment firm. Oliver Park, the family patriarch, owned properties that included a Balboa Island home and businesses with extensive real estate holdings.

Patrick Park said he last talked to his brother Thursday morning when the pair spent two hours at a Bank of America branch doing paperwork related to their father’s estate.

He said his brother appeared calm, and they agreed to talk early this week.

But Joni Park, he said, was a “very controlling” woman who might have convinced his brother that someone was out to do them harm.

“She has accused everyone she knows of everything,” he said. “She was very paranoid -- everyone was after everything.”

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garrett.therolf@latimes.com

ashley.powers@latimes.com

christine.hanley@latimes.com

Researchers John Jackson and Robin Mayper contributed to this report.