Who is Jane Carver? California jogger was shot execution-style after loan shark's hitman got the wrong woman
ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA: The posh neighborhood of Fountain Valley in Orange County was shocked to the core when a female airline worker was senselessly killed one morning in 1995 when she was out jogging. Turns out, she was simply a victim of mistaken identity.
The bizarre killing of Jane Carver, 46, a flight attendant who died on June 10, 1995, while jogging yards away from her home, formed the subject of the premiere episode of Oxygen's docuseries 'The Real Murders of Orange County' that begins airing on Sunday, November 8. Nothing explained why Carver was shot execution-style — one shot to the face. There wasn’t much to go on and investigators had to rely on witness statements — six witnesses at the scene — who described the suspect as between 30 and 40, with a receding hairline, wearing a brown or tweed sports coat, high neck shirt, and dark pants. They found one bullet casing at the scene and very little evidence. Neither the suspect nor the car that the suspect was driving was ever found.
The case went unsolved for a year and was about to go cold when another shooting took place in San Clemente, similar to that of Carver. James Wengert, a businessman, was shot in the face in a parking garage on April 10, 1996. Fortunately, he survived and was able to identify Paul Gordon Alleyne, a small-business owner in Los Angeles, as the man who shot him. After investigators dug into the background of Alleyne, they found that he was hired by Coleman Allen, the co-founder of Premium Commercial Services Corp., a Huntington Beach finance company, which had loaned both Alleyne and Wengert money. The shooter was supposed to carry out the murder-for-hire plot as one way of repaying his debt. Allen had died of a heart attack a few days before Wengert was shot.
As it turned out, Allen was running an elaborate loan-shark scheme that enabled him to make large sums of money even after the borrower died. Allen required Wengert to take out a very large life insurance policy that listed Allen as the beneficiary — the amount of the insurance policy was almost three times the amount owed. He used the repayment of loans as a means to blackmail the people. “He would take out insurance policies on the people that owed him money and make himself and his company the beneficiaries. So now you have a situation where someone is gonna spend the rest of their life paying this money and when they are done paying them, then they are gonna die, and then they are gonna pay him some more," Geoff Boucher, a former reporter at Los Angeles Times said in the documentary.
However, after investigators at San Clemente reached out to the police department of Fountain Valley, it was determined that Alleyne was not the one who had shot Carver. But after analyzing his interrogation transcript, one of the investigators came across the name of 43-year-old Leonard Owen Mundy. As it turned out, Allen's company wanted him to satisfy his $80,000 debt by murdering another delinquent borrower, who as it turns out, was Wengert’s wife Margaret “Peggy” Wengert, who had filed a lawsuit against Premium and at the time, lived in Fountain Valley. Since the directions to both the women's houses could easily be confused, the gunman mistakenly thought Peggy was Carver.
During his interrogation, Mundy called Allen "the Godfather." While Alleyne was sentenced to 29 years to life in prison for botched killing, Mundy received life in prison without parole.