The road was too dark, the traffic too light, and they were going in the wrong direction. Ken Stahl had promised his wife Carolyn Oppy "a big surprise" for her birthday, but when he pulled over on a deserted turnout 30 miles from their home in Huntington Beach, Calif., she must have been worried. No streetlights, no houses in sight, no reason to be there at all. The engine was still running when the killer approached, a gun in his hand. It was all according to plan: $30,000 up front, paid by the husband for a hit on his wife.
But the killer didn't stick to the plan. When the shooting was over, both Stahl and Oppy were dead. Then the killer left--no witnesses, no clues, not even an empty shell casing on the ground. Just a middle-aged doctor and his optometrist wife lying in their car for more than an hour before a local security guard found them in their big sleep.
The double cross has a certain logic in its treachery--bad turns on bad; injustice eats its own offspring; nobody gets off free. But it was to be almost a year before detectives from the sheriff's department worked out what happened that Saturday night, Nov. 20, 1999, on Ortega Highway in Orange County. Along the way a lot was discovered about Ken Stahl's secretive life, Carolyn's Good Samaritan reputation with her patients and the long criminal history of a man called "the Weasel."
Initially, the case seemed unsolvable. Nobody saw the killer; nobody heard any shots; there were no leads and no obvious motives. The Orange County police closed the road from Saturday night until Sunday afternoon for a search of the area but found little to go on. Was it a random killing? That would be almost impossible to solve. A contract hit? Neither of the victims had any known enemies. A robbery attempt? Nothing was missing from the car.
After going unsolved for 10 months, the case was handed over to a new team: Detectives Brian Meaney and Felipe Villalobos. Meaney had been on the force for 23 years, seven of those in narcotics. He has the tough, dour demeanor of someone who knows how bad it can get out there. Villalobos, 14 years with the police, worked gangs and sex crimes before coming to homicide but has a more empathetic, sunnier approach to life. "Brian is very intense, I do the softer approach. We feed off each other real well," says Villalobos.
The partners read over the old files, talked to more people, discussed theories--and then made a breakthrough. In a routine check of Ken Stahl's cell-phone log, the two found a large number of calls to Adriana Vasco, a receptionist at a hospital where Stahl worked. The detectives went to talk to her, and suddenly the lights went on. It turned out Vasco had been having a relationship with Stahl for a number of years, and the doctor had been supporting her with regular money payments. His 14-year marriage to Carolyn Oppy had gone stale. Sometime early in 1999, Stahl allegedly asked Vasco to find someone to kill his wife.