Convicted Thief Held in Fatal Carjacking

A 29-year-old convicted car thief was arrested early Thursday in Orange County on suspicion of killing Mildred Charlotte Wilson, the 65-year-old retired nurse shot to death during a Ventura carjacking nearly two weeks ago.

Tracking a purchase made on Wilson’s stolen credit card, detectives from the Ventura Police Department said they identified Alan Brett Holland of Hollywood as a suspect about a week ago.

On July 26, Holland was picked up in Newport Beach after he sped away during a routine traffic stop. Officers also found a concealed .25-caliber handgun on him. Tests later determined that the weapon was the same one used to kill Wilson, police said.

Early Thursday, Holland was served with an arrest warrant at the Orange County Jail in Wilson’s slaying. The warrant also includes counts of carjacking and robbery. He is the only suspect in the case, Ventura police said.

“This is a really important arrest,” said Sgt. Gary McCaskill, who worked on the case with about eight other detectives from the Ventura Police Department. “These kind of cases really frighten the public--even more than something like the [Sherri] Dally murder. . . . Millie could have been any one of our wives or mothers.”

The arrest came the same morning that Ventura detectives picked up a suspect in the abduction and slaying of Dally, a Ventura mother who disappeared in May from a Target store parking lot.

Wilson, of Oxnard, was shot to death during an afternoon shopping excursion July 20, when a man demanded the keys to her 1986 Crown Victoria car in the parking lot of the Poinsettia Shopping Center.

The man then took the car and sped off. Her car was later found blocking the road not too far from the shopping center on Telephone Road just south of Main Street.

Holland apparently made a purchase at an auto parts store with Wilson’s credit card, McCaskill said. Detectives went to the store and interviewed clerks and were eventually able to identify Holland, he said.

Detectives have also found some undisclosed evidence that shows that Holland was in Wilson’s car on the day of the incident.

“We still don’t really know why he felt compelled to kill Millie,” McCaskill said. “What kind of threat could this 65-year-old woman have ever presented to this man.”

Wilson’s brother, G. Ian Ferguson of Newfoundland, Canada, did not want to comment on the arrest, but friends of Wilson said they were relieved by the arrest.

Paul Hermanson, the owner of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, where Wilson danced for the last two years, said he was happy to see that a suspect has been arrested.

“Without a doubt I am,” Hermanson said. “This was very scary to have happen here. I know we live in a violent society . . . but gosh you think that the chances of something like that happening here are pretty slim. It was a real shock.”

The “outrageousness of the crime,” he said, had prompted some of Wilson’s friends to set up a fund to help pay for the capture of her killer.

Wilson’s family were thankful for what her friends were doing, but did not want it to go too far, said Hermanson.

“They’re not vengeful people,” he said. “They wanted the person responsible captured, but did not want to urge anyone to get revenge or anything. They didn’t want it to go beyond normal channels.”

In the short time since her death, friends have raised about $2,500, and are still trying to determine what they will do with the money, said a friend, Janice Moon.

“The point of raising the money was not to be vindictive but to get this person off the streets,” said Moon, who often went shopping with Wilson at the mall where she was killed. “The point was always to keep him from hurting other innocent people . . . and stop this kind of senseless violence.”

Holland has been arrested and convicted of stealing cars in Los Angeles County as well as a 1988 arrest for car theft in Ventura, McCaskill said. As of Thursday, he remained in the Orange County Jail pending a transfer to the jail here where he will await arraignment next week, McCaskill said.

“I can’t tell you how pleased we are knowing that he will not be able to do something like this again,” McCaskill said.