Slaying Stuns Retirement Community

Residents of the Prescott Country Club--a sprawling, sun-drenched retirement community--say the last serious crime around here involved pranksters toppling porta-potties at home construction sites.

This has become a mecca for Southern Californians who are up in age and eager to leave the crime, smog and congestion far behind them.

Last year, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department investigated only six murders, and the county’s biggest city, Prescott--population 100,000 and rapidly growing--was declared the nation’s No. 1 retirement spot by Money magazine.

But residents of the country club in a suburb of Prescott were stunned Sunday by the grisly discovery of a young Newport Beach woman’s body in a freezer humming away inside a truck parked at a neighbor’s home.

It has made them realize their orderly retirement community is not immune to crime--even murder--after all.

“It’s really shocking, because that kind of thing just doesn’t happen here,” said Richard Joseph, a transplant from Thousand Oaks. “That’s why we came here, to get away from all of that.”

“I guess you have to expect this in a growing community,” said Mardelle Kean, who lives across the street from John Joseph Famalaro, charged in the death of Denise A. Huber, who was 23 when she disappeared in 1991. “But it’s just amazing that this young woman has been missing for three years and turns up right here.”

Residents wonder whether they will ever feel as secure as they did before, knowing that behind a neat home landscaped desert-style with gravel, boulders and native vegetation--a neat home that matches all the others in the retirement community--lay a nude, frozen corpse wrapped in garbage bags.

Shaken neighbors peered from behind curtains and blinds Sunday as investigators and volunteers swarmed Famalaro’s home during the search for possible additional bodies. Some yelled at reporters while others eagerly agreed to be interviewed. Some residents ventured out beside television camera crews, taking their own pictures.