2 Charged in Slayings of Doctors on Remote Section of Highway

More than a year after two Huntington Beach doctors, husband and wife, were found slain execution-style along a remote stretch of Ortega Highway, prosecutors Monday charged two Anaheim residents in connection with the deaths, which they said might have been murder for hire.

Homicide detectives said the suspects--a 30-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman--helped plan the November 1999 killing of Kenneth C. Stahl, 57, and Carolyn Oppy-Stahl, who were found shot to death in their car, Orange County sheriff’s officials said.

The suspects, whom officials did not identify Monday, were allegedly paid a substantial sum for the professional hit on the two doctors, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said. It is unclear who fired the fatal shots, Amormino said, adding that investigators were working through the night to unravel the mystery. He said more arrests are possible in the next few days.

Both suspects, Amormino said, have been in custody for weeks in connection with unrelated crimes. The woman is being held in Southern California and the man in another state, he said.

Sheriff’s officials said they will detail today who they think paid the two defendants to carry out the attack and how investigators cracked a case so lacking in physical evidence that it at one stage looked unsolvable.

“It was definitely a murder for hire,” Amormino said. “It took a lot of old-fashioned detective work.” The case took some bizarre twists as investigators unraveled what few clues were left at the scene, Amormino said, and there were, indeed, few. Detectives found no witnesses, no sign of struggle, not even any shell casings, only a shattered driver’s side window.

The couple were discovered by a security guard who saw Oppy-Stahl’s Dodge Stratus with its headlights on idling on California 74 two miles east of Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park. Nearby stood a call box, but phone records show the couple had not used it.

Where the couple had gone that night is also a mystery. Family members had thought the couple were heading to a restaurant to celebrate Oppy-Stahl’s 44th birthday. Detectives confirmed that the couple had eaten at a South County restaurant.

The two were well-liked, acquaintances said, and had been married for 14 years. He was an anesthesiologist who was on call that night through a Huntington Beach hospital. She was an optometrist.