Police Seeking Clues, Motive in Slaying of Female Jogger : Investigation: They believe the killer was a stranger to the victim and her family. There is no indication of attempted robbery or abduction.

Police continued to search Sunday for clues in the bold and apparently random slaying of a 46-year-old jogger near her home.

Jane A. Carver was shot to death Saturday morning by a gunman dressed in a tweed sport coat and dark slacks. Witnesses in the parking lot of a medical building on Warner Avenue a couple of hundred feet away heard Carver scream about 8 a.m., and then heard a loud report of what police believe may have been a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun.

They saw Carver slump into a flower bed.

“A witness heard the scream and then the gunshot,” said Lt. Bob Mosley. “Then they saw our victim go down and the suspect bend over her and then walk nonchalantly back 20 to 30 feet to his car.”

The close-range shot hit Carver beneath the left eye. She was taken to nearby Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center and pronounced dead.

Mosley said witnesses watched the assailant get into his car, make a U-turn and drive back through the neighborhood to Euclid Street.

“He was not in any particular hurry,” Mosley said.

Carver, a United Airlines flight attendant for 26 years, did not appear to be the victim of a robbery. Contrary to earlier reports, police said they have no indication that the gunman attempted to abduct her.

“So far we have not been able to establish the motive; we just don’t know,” said Mosley. “We feel that she did not know her attacker at all.”

Mosley said police believe the family had no knowledge of or association with the gunman.

“Nobody in the family recognized the composite. This is a very loving, very close family,” Mosley said. “They’re just at an absolute loss as to why this occurred.”

Carver’s husband, Albert Carver, who often jogged with his wife, was home at the time of the shooting with the couple’s 14-year-old son, who was still asleep. An older son, Cliff Carver, 20, was at college.

Cliff Carver said Sunday that his father did not want to be interviewed.

Before the shooting, police had received no reports of suspicious cars in the peaceful neighborhood of large two-story houses near Mile Square Regional Park.

“This is very strange,” Mosley said of the shooting. “We’re hoping that somebody will be able to come up with some kind of a lead, or saw something yesterday and from that we’ll be able to piece something together.”

The gunman is described as a black man, 30 to 40 years old, 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8 and weighing 145 to 150 pounds. He drove off in a white two-door hatchback car, possibly an early 1980s Ford Fiesta, Ford Tempo or Pontiac.

Anyone with information is asked to call Detective Kim Brown at (714) 965-4466.