Suspect Arrested in Catalina Killing

A 41-year-old Avalon man has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a 34-year-old woman friend in what authorities said was the first homicide on Santa Catalina Island in decades.

Bruce Edward Kingman was flown Thursday afternoon to Long Beach and then driven to the Lakewood Sheriff’s Station, where he was being held without bail in the death of the woman, whose name was not released pending notification of relatives.

Sheriff’s deputies said that Kingman telephoned at about 4 a.m. Thursday for paramedics, who found the woman’s body outside a trailer on Pebbly Beach Road.

Kingman said that he and the woman had argued, and that she was injured when she slipped and fell on a wooden patio, deputies said. Authorities declined to provide further details.

A former constable on the island and a sheriff’s deputy on Catalina said there has not been a murder case on the resort island since the 1940s. A woman who shot and killed an intruder in the early 1960s was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, said Fern Whelan, clerk of the Santa Catalina Justice Court.