Friends Recall Independent Nature of Woman Slain in Carjacking Try

A card attached to the small bunch of flowers left at the door of a tidy white mobile home in south Oxnard read simply, “God speed, Mildred.”

Mildred Charlotte Wilson, 65, was gunned down Saturday afternoon in the parking lot of Ventura’s Poinsettia Shopping Center during an apparent carjacking. The daylight shooting of an older woman in one of the area’s most popular shopping areas has left Wilson’s neighbors in the Oxnard Pacific Mobile Home Park fearful for their own safety.

Police on Sunday were still looking for the group of youths who allegedly accosted Wilson in the parking lot and killed her with a bullet to the chest. Investigators said the gunman was a young Latino, between the ages of 18 and 24, with a very short haircut. He was wearing a white T-shirt at the time of the shooting.

The assailants took Wilson’s car, a 1986 Ford Crown Victoria, but abandoned it on Telegraph Road outside one of the entrances to the parking lot where she was killed.

Wilson had no family in Ventura County, but neighbors said she had many friends. They painted a picture of a woman whose approach to life was far from the violence that claimed her.

“It’s a damn shame,” said neighbor Henry McCarthy, 81, who lived two doors down from Wilson for seven years. “Everybody here knows everybody.”

“She was very independent, strong,” said McCarthy’s wife, Doris, 82. She said Wilson had retired as a surgical nurse. “Anyone in nursing for 24 years had to be strong.”

Doris McCarthy said she often looked after Wilson’s home when the widow traveled abroad, which was one of her favorite pastimes.

“She was happy traveling,” Doris McCarthy said. “She toured all these different countries--and she gets killed in Ventura.”

Neighbors said Wilson was a reserved, neat, well-educated woman who enjoyed walks, chatting with friends and dancing at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Ventura. She was the widow of a Navy lieutenant commander who died in 1990.

Wilson had also survived a recent battle with breast cancer, Doris McCarthy said.

She added that the suddenness and the apparent randomness of the attack on an otherwise calm July afternoon had left her stunned. About the time of the shooting, she said, she had called Wilson’s home after a walk outside to tell her that her television set was still on.

“It was the last time I heard her voice, on the answering machine,” Doris McCarthy said.

The coroner’s truck and homicide investigators from the Ventura Police Department arrived a short time later.

Ventura Police Sgt. Gary McGaskill said several people witnessed the 2:25 p.m. shooting near the Ross discount clothing store, at 4687 Telephone Road, and asked that they come forward.

“They know who did it and how many,” McGaskill said. “That’s what makes it critical for us to get [the witnesses] identified.”

Doris McCarthy said she thinks she knows why witnesses have been slow to talk with investigators.

“People are scared to death to be witnesses, and I understand that,” she said.

McGaskill could not recall any similar crimes in Ventura.

“A carjacking in general is a highly unusual crime in our city,” he said.

McGaskill added that, aside from proximity, Wilson’s shooting is unrelated to the May 6 slaying of Sharri Dally, who was abducted from the parking lot of a Target department store one block from the scene of Saturday’s attack. Dally’s decomposed body was found three weeks following her disappearance, north of Ventura.

“I don’t think there’s any connection at all between the two incidents,” McGaskill said.

The lack of any connection between the two killings is far from reassuring for Wilson’s neighbors, who said they would never go back to the Poinsettia Shopping Center after Saturday’s deadly incident.

With violence apparently on the rise in Ventura County, Wilson’s neighbors also wondered aloud whether they would continue living in the area.

“She minded her own business, and gets shot,” said neighbor Nancy Bernier, 53. “Why? For a lousy purse?”

“No, I’d sooner live out in the desert,” she said.

Times correspondent Scott Steepleton contributed to this report.