Man Halts Drive Through Utah to Confess San Pedro Homicide

When Los Angeles police were called to a San Pedro neighborhood Saturday night by residents who reported hearing arguing and gunshots, they could not find the source of the trouble.

Nineteen hours later and 630 miles away in a small Utah town, a 23-year-old man pulled off the highway, sought out police and turned himself in for a shooting in the Los Angeles port community. Police then returned to San Pedro and found the man’s former landlady, dead of two gunshots, in the bedroom of her home.

Police in Payson, Utah, said Kevin Manley confessed to them that he shot and killed Marilyn Mallory, a 45-year-old real estate agent.

Manley is being held in Provo, 20 miles north of Payson, pending extradition to California.

Los Angeles Police Detective Larry Kallestad said authorities knew nothing of the killing until 6 p.m. Sunday, when Manley pulled off Interstate 15, intending to tell local police that he had killed Mallory and then fled in her four-door Pontiac.

Manley found the doors of the police department in the community of 10,000 locked for the night, however, so he knocked on the door of the house across the street and asked a man living there to call the authorities, according to Payson Police Officer Tom Runyan.

Runyan said he walked across the street to talk with Manley. “He handed me a knife before he said anything,” Runyan said. “He said he killed someone in San Pedro last night and I said, ‘With the knife?’ and he said, ‘No, with a gun.’ ”

The dead woman, who had offices in Wilmington, had rented an apartment to her daughter, Manley and two others, Kallestad said. Manley recently lost his job and his three roommates forced him to move out of the apartment when he could not pay his share of the rent, he said.