Body, Head Found in Home

The decapitated body of a 36-year-old woman was found early Monday in her northeast Pasadena home, and police said she may have been slain by a man who committed suicide later by stepping in front of a big rig on Interstate 15 in the Cajon Pass.

Officers said the deaths apparently stemmed from a domestic dispute, but detectives provided no further details about possible motives. Officials did not release the identity of either the man or the woman.

However, neighbors said the woman was an associate professor of psychology at Cal State Los Angeles, where she specialized in the study of children with developmental disabilities.

The neighbors said the woman lived alone in the spacious, single-story house in the area known as Upper Hastings Ranch.

Lt. Lisa Perrine of the Pasadena Police Department said dispatchers received a call about 4 a.m. from someone worried about the woman’s welfare. Officers were sent to the woman’s home in the tree-shaded, 1100 block of Medford Road.

Finding the house locked, the officers forced their way in and found the woman’s headless body, sprawled on the floor.

She had been stabbed several times in the torso, officers said. Her head was found in another room.

Officers said she apparently had been dead for several hours before her body was found.

Police said that shortly after the body was found, a woman in West Covina received a telephone call from the California Highway Patrol, telling her that her brother had been killed in a traffic accident on I-15, just south of Cajon Summit in the mountains of western San Bernardino County. CHP investigators said it appeared that the man, who was in his 30s, had deliberately stepped in front of a fast-moving truck.

The place where the man died is about an hour’s drive from the house where the decapitated woman was found.

It was not immediately known whether it was the West Covina woman who first raised concerns about the welfare of the woman in Pasadena, but police said conversations with the West Covina woman and other evidence led detectives to suspect that the man had slain the Pasadena woman in a domestic dispute.

Yvonne Pizzo, who lives across the street from the slain woman, described her as a “very beautiful woman.”

“This shouldn’t have happened to her,” Pizzo said.

Another neighbor, Julie Kelinsky, said the woman who died was outgoing and friendly, well-known to many in the neighborhood, where she walked her large, amiable yellow dog every day.

“She made the world a better place,” Kelinsky said. “She had the kind of spirit we need in the world.”