Arizona Meeting With Alleged Murder Victim Told by Trial Witness

A 23-year-old Arizona woman testified Wednesday that she is “99% sure” she saw the man Billionaire Boys Club leader Joe Hunt is accused of murdering--alive and flirting with her boyfriend at a Tucson gas station last September.

Carmen Canchola, a college student at the time, said she had stared at the “regal and meticulous” silver-haired man driving a classic car and accompanied by an “effeminate” young man, only to find that he was eyeing her boyfriend.

Two months later, she said, she read a magazine article about the Billionaire Boys Club murders that included a sketch of alleged victim Ron Levin, a Beverly Hills businessman and admitted con man who disappeared June 6, 1984. His body has not been found.

Question of a Beard

The face looked “familiar,” she said, and when she read the description of Levin that accompanied it, “all of a sudden I went back to the picture, (thinking) ‘God, that’s the guy we saw.’ But the article said he had a beard and the guy we saw did not.”

Canchola, a soft-spoken and articulate young woman, said “it bothered me so much that night I couldn’t sleep.” After class the next morning she drove to the police station. “I thought this person might be alive and there were people being tried for a murder they didn’t commit,” she explained.

She picked Levin’s photograph out of a 12-picture police lineup, and after being shown a photograph of a beardless Levin, said she is “99% sure that it was the man we had seen.”

Canchola is the third defense witness to take the stand at Hunt’s trial, which began Feb. 2 in Santa Monica Superior Court and is expected to last several weeks more.

The prosecution contends that Hunt, 27, and an associate shot Levin for revenge and profit, then bragged about it afterward to friends. The defense maintains that Levin skipped town to avoid being prosecuted for grand theft and fraud, and that at the time of the alleged murder Hunt was actually at home brushing his teeth and talking on the telephone with his girlfriend’s mother.

Description of Man

In her testimony Wednesday, Canchola said she and her boyfriend, Chino Lopez, who is expected to testify today, had stopped for gas at a self-service station last fall when she noticed “a real attractive older gentleman,” whom she described as being about 6 feet, 1 inch, slender and impeccably dressed in expensive clothes with not a silver hair out of place and with a “scar or deep wrinkle” beside one eye.

“There was something different about him,” she said, and he looked especially out of place at a gas station frequented by students from the nearby University of Arizona campus. “I remember saying something to Chino about his eyes, that they were haunting, hypnotic.” She recalled thinking that “He’s very attractive for a man his age (early 40s). Too bad he’s gay.”

Canchola said the man’s younger companion appeared annoyed with him for staring at Lopez, and they drove off in an early fifties “silver-pinkish-beige” coupe, only to circle the station and come back for another lingering look, in which the two men “locked gaze,” she said.

“Chino said, ‘Why was that guy looking at us? Were you flirting with him?’ . . . I said, ‘he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at you. ‘ “

Canchola was subpoenaed by the defense to testify--against her wishes, she said, breaking into tears. She explained that Beverly Hills police detectives and prosecutor Fred Wapner flew to Tucson and questioned her and her boyfriend for 10 hours one Saturday last fall, that a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney later accused her of “messing up all the investigative work that had been done” and that she had been harassed by anonymous telephone calls and a break-in at her home.

Wapner, who began his cross-examination of Canchola late Wednesday, began by questioning her in detail about the incident “to test her recollection.” He asked her where the gas tanks of the cars were, whether the windows were rolled up or down and whether she could say “how many seconds, minutes or hours you looked at him.”

She frequently answered, “I don’t know.”