A Huntington Beach man was convicted Wednesday of killing his wife in Torrance 30 years ago before changing his last name and moving to start a new life in Orange County.
After deliberating less than a day, the Los Angeles County Superior Court jury found 59-year-old Michael Clark–formerly Lubahn–guilty of second-degree murder in the slaying of Carol Jeanne Lubahn, who was 28 when she was last seen alive on March 31, 1981.
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High school sweethearts at their alma mater, North High School in Torrance, the couple went on to have two children. They'd been married for 10 years when Mrs. Lubahn called her mother on March 30, 1981, to say she was upset over the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.
Clark claimed Lubahn left in the middle of the next night, after the two argued about selling their Torrance home. Her body has never been found.
Torrance Police arrested Clark in April for the cold-case murder, in part because his story about what happened that night has changed over the past 30 years. Police, prosecutors and now the jury believe Clark killed her because she had an affair.
Perhaps before his scheduled Dec. 12 sentencing, Clark can get in good with the judge by telling him where Carol Lubahn is.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.