Mystery Amplifies Grief at Service for Huntington Couple

By BONNIE HARRIS

Dec. 5, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Hundreds of friends and relatives of a murdered Huntington Beach couple met Saturday to share their memories and their grief--pain that is magnified, they said, by the mystery surrounding the two-week-old killings.

“It’s hard enough just being here in the first place,” said Denise Lowery, a former neighbor of Kenneth Stahl and his wife, Carolyn Oppy-Stahl. “But then you add the uncertainty, the not knowing who is responsible for this, and it becomes unbearable.”

The memorial service at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church was marked by tearful eulogies from the couple’s friends and co-workers, who described Kenneth Stahl as a dedicated physician with a passion for the outdoors and Carolyn Oppy-Stahl as “an angel who walked among us in human form.”

Stahl, 57, an anesthesiologist, and Oppy-Stahl, 44, an optometrist, were found dead Nov. 20, inside their 1996 Dodge Stratus.

The car was discovered, engine running, along a remote stretch of Ortega Highway east of San Juan Capistrano. The couple had been shot numerous times.

Orange County sheriff’s investigators have made no arrests. They are exploring theories that the couple were victims of a carjacking, road rage or a random shooting.

No shell casings were found at the scene, suggesting that a revolver was used, or that the killer took the time to collect evidence of the crime.

At a graveside service for Stahl last week, detectives gathered signatures from guests.

Police sometimes collect handwriting samples to compare them with notes or other writings that may be linked to a crime, although the victim’s mother, Bobbi Stahl-Polley, said she couldn’t imagine whom police might be targeting within the couple’s inner circle.

“We can’t think about that right now,” she said last week. “It’s unthinkable.”

At the memorial service on Saturday, the Rev. Edward B. Cole urged guests to stay focused on the couple’s new life together, rather than dwell on the details of the tragedy. But he acknowledged that doing so would be difficult.

“Our Kenneth and our Carolyn were cruelly wronged,” Cole said. “It happened because of a very evil world.” Good people, he added, are not supposed to die the way they did, “by a pistol, on the side of the road, with the motor running and the headlights on.”

“Life is not a pretty thing,” he said. “There’s a lot of suffering in it.”

Dr. Ronald Hartman, who worked with Oppy-Stahl at an eye clinic in Lakewood, said she could work miracles with her famous smile.

“I can recall some really obnoxious patients,” he said, drawing a chuckle from the congregation.

“But Carolyn, in her magic, magic way, would turn those patients around, and, believe it or not, they became nice. . . . She was a real-life Pollyanna.”

Between the two of them, Stahl and Oppy-Stahl helped countless people over the years, a gift that friends said the couple were proud of and cherished.

“Things like this, they don’t make sense,” said Keith Korstjens, a longtime friend of the Stahl family.

“The destruction of two lives . . . that were devoted only to helping people, it just seems so senseless.”