Victim’s Husband Recounts Tragedy as Murder-for-Hire Trial Begins

When he heard the noises shortly before 8 a.m., Al Carver was sitting at a desk in a spare bedroom of his home, paying bills. His wife, Jane, was out on her usual morning run.

He stepped outside his Fountain Valley home to meet some neighbors who also heard the frightening sounds: a scream, a gunshot, police sirens, screeching tires. Someone said they thought a jogger had been shot.

That’s when Carver knew.

“I walked around the corner to get a closer look, and then I was 4, 5, 6 feet away and immediately recognized that it was Jane,” he said Wednesday while choking back tears.

He was the first witness to testify in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana during the murder trial of Leonard Owen Mundy, a Los Angeles electrician. Mundy is charged with killing Jane Carver on June 10, 1995, in a botched murder-for-hire plot.

Carver, a 46-year-old flight attendant, wasn’t the intended target. Prosecutors said Mundy, 44, was carrying out a contract killing for Premium Commercial, a Huntington Beach loan company to which he owed money. He was supposed to kill another debtor, but he shot the wrong woman, prosecutors said.

“This case is about greed,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jim Tanizaki said. “People whose thirst for hunger and money took precedence over human life.”

Premium Commercial gave short-term loans to small businesses at high interest rates. Its principal owner, Coleman Allen, who prosecutors say ordered that slaying and others, died of natural causes in 1996.

Two months after Carver was killed, prosecutors say, Mundy received a $40,000 loan from Premium Commercial. He was arrested nine months later, in May 1996.

But in another twist in the case, prosecutors announced last month that they will no longer seek the death penalty against Mundy because of unspecified “new facts” that no one has revealed. Al Carver and Marlin G. Stapleton Jr., Mundy’s lawyer, also declined to comment Wednesday on the reasons for that decision.

Mundy now faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if the jury convicts him of first-degree murder with special circumstances.

Prosecutors began calling witnesses who identified Mundy at the scene, but in opening statements, Stapleton said Mundy was far from Fountain Valley when Carver was shot.

“Mr. Mundy was at home,” Stapleton said. “He wasn’t anywhere near Orange County, especially at 6 to 7 a.m.”

Stapleton also has hinted that Carver’s killer could be someone else who also owed money to Premium Commercial.

Authorities have said that Mundy probably was hired to shoot Margaret Wengert after she filed a lawsuit against Premium Commercial because of the company’s strong-arm tactics to induce her family to repay their loan.

The Wengerts also live off Warner Avenue in Fountain Valley, not far from the Carver home.

“It’s so incredible it sounds like a book,” Stapleton said. “The trouble is, it’s true.”