Murder For Hire

A man alleged to be a founding member of Mexico's feared Zetas, assassins linked to the Gulf drug cartel, will stand trial on organized crime, drug and weapons charges, prosecutors said Friday. Jaime Gonzalez Duran, known as "The Hummer," will also face charges of transactions with illicit funds. Gonzalez Duran is an army deserter who was arrested in November in the northern city of Reynosa.

A man was arrested for trying to hire someone to behead New York's police commissioner in revenge for the police shooting that left a young groom dead on his wedding day, authorities said. David Brown, 47, a felon, was charged with criminal solicitation after he offered an undercover officer $65,000 to kill Commissioner Raymond Kelly and blow up police headquarters in Manhattan, police spokesman Paul J. Browne said.

A hit man has been convicted of stabbing a woman to death in her Long Beach home as police waited outside, hoping to catch the intruder who they mistakenly believed was a burglar. A Long Beach Superior Court jury deliberated just 30 minutes Tuesday before convicting Nicholas Harvey of first-degree murder for financial gain in the slaying of Lynn Schockner, 50. Harvey faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. He will appeal the verdict, said his attorney, Anthony Patalano.

A 20-year-old Seabee told authorities that he shot and killed a Camarillo man after he was recruited for the crime and supplied with the gun by a female sailor, who is also implicated in the slaying along with the victim's ex-wife, according to court documents. Matthew Gerald Toerner said he shot John Marmo Jr., 27, outside Marmo's condominium as he walked to his car, according to the declaration for Toerner's arrest warrant filed with the court.

The editor of a weekly newspaper in Oakland was gunned down as he walked to work Thursday morning in what police called a contract killing. Chauncey Bailey, 57, recently promoted to editor of the Oakland Post, was shot at 7:30 a.m. not far from his office. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Witnesses told police that a gunman in dark clothing approached Bailey and shot him multiple times before fleeing. He was shot in the back and in the head.

After less than two hours of deliberation, a Long Beach jury Friday convicted a retired millionaire businessman of first-degree murder for paying $50,000 to have his estranged wife killed. Manfred Schockner, 66, was the third person found guilty in the November 2004 stabbing death of Lynn Schockner during what authorities first believed was a botched burglary at her home in the affluent Bixby Knolls neighborhood.

The mystery began in July 2006 when a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon was gunned down on his rugged 200-acre Lancaster ranch, where he grew olives, pistachios and other produce from his native Iran. For months, detectives were stumped, saying they could not figure out who would want to kill Dr. Esfandiar "Steve" Kadivar. Then last spring, the man who had leased the property from Kadivar's family, Efrain Martines, was found shot to death a few miles away in the bed of his pickup truck.

SACRAMENTO -- More than a quarter-century after he was sentenced to death, a man convicted of carrying out the contract killings of three people in a Fresno grocery store has died of natural causes at a hospital in Bakersfield. Billy Ray Hamilton, 58, used a shotgun in the Sept. 4, 1980, murders of Douglas Scott White, Bryon William Schletewitz and Josephine Linda Rocha at Fran's Market. Hamilton died Monday after a long battle with cancer.

Francisco Lopez had been stabbed seven times, severely beaten and strangled before he was tossed down a remote mountainside. It took him two days to crawl back up, where he was discovered by hikers and rushed to a Santa Barbara hospital. But, in a startling reversal sketched out Friday by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department, Lopez, 23, has been arrested on suspicion of masterminding an alleged murder-for-hire plot that ended up nearly killing him.

A 20-year-old soldier was sentenced Monday to five years and eight months in federal prison for trying to hire a hit man to kill a romantic rival. Thomas Ryan Knight, who is being discharged from the Army, pleaded guilty in federal court to seeking to hire a man for $2,000 to kill the boyfriend of a woman he had met on the Internet. Knight did not know that the hit man he tried to hire was an undercover San Diego police officer, officials said.