No Death Penalty in Murder-for-Hire Scheme

In an unusual move, prosecutors said Monday they have decided not to seek the death penalty against Leonard Owen Mundy, the Los Angeles electrician accused of gunning down a Fountain Valley woman in a murder-for-hire plot gone awry.

Citing unspecified “new facts” brought forward by defense attorneys, Asst. Dist. Atty. John Conley said his office has taken the rare step of reversing its plan to ask for capital punishment when the high-profile murder trial begins next month.

“I can’t think of another time when we’ve seen this happen,” said Conley, who, since 1985, has been a member of the prosecutor panel in Orange County that weighs murder cases for death penalty potential.

Conley and Mundy’s attorney would not comment further on the nature of the new information. No new indictments are expected in the case, the prosecutor said.

Though Mundy, 43, remains charged with first-degree murder with special circumstances in the shooting death of 46-year-old flight attendant Jane Carver, the prosecution will seek life in prison without possibility of parole for Mundy, Conley said.

Investigators say Mundy was involved in a complicated plot with a Huntington Beach finance company at its center. Mundy owed thousands of dollars to Premium Commercial Services Corp. and was allegedly drafted by the company as a hit man with orders to kill another debtor, but he shot the wrong woman on June 10, 1995, prosecutors say.

The shooting death of Carver shocked and mystified Fountain Valley residents, who rallied to support her grieving family and publicize the search for clues. The case took a bizarre turn when investigators tracked the case to Premium and theorized that Carver was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Carver family could not be reached Monday for comment, but Conley said “the family is OK” with the decision not to propose the death penalty as a jury option.

It was one year ago this month that prosecutors announced they would seek lethal injection for Mundy if he were convicted. The first-degree murder charge qualified for death penalty special circumstances because Mundy was allegedly lying in wait for his victim and killed for financial gain, prosecutors said.

Mundy’s attorney, Marlin G. Stapleton Jr., would not discuss the prosecution’s reversal or any other facets of the case.

“This is a big case. The trial is set to start two weeks from today,” he said. “We’re so close I’m not going to comment.”

Stapleton did say, however, that he would stand by his statements made last year when he said the death penalty was “not appropriate in this case because there is significant doubt regarding the identification of my client.”

Detectives testified in a three-day preliminary hearing in 1996 that Mundy was the man identified by witnesses as the shooter. Stapleton has said in previous interviews that those witnesses were too far away from the incident to provide an accurate identification.

The case is intertwined with the trial of Paul Gordon Alleyne, a small-business owner from Los Angeles who also owed money to Premium. Alleyne was convicted last year of attempted murder for shooting James Wengert--a San Clemente man also deeply in debt to the financial company--in April 1996.

In a preliminary hearing for the Mundy trial, Stapleton hinted that Carver’s killer may have been Alleyne. Likewise, Alleyne’s attorney told jurors that Wengert was likely shot by Mundy. In both cases, prosecutors have said that the shootings were orchestrated by Coleman Allen, co-founder of Premium, who died of natural causes in 1996.

“It’s really a very complex case,” Conley said Monday.