Man, Woman Found Dead in Newport Home : Unidentified Bodies Are Discovered After Neighbor Notes Broken Window

A man, a woman and a small dog were found dead Sunday in a town house in a placid Newport Beach neighborhood, authorities said.

The unidentified bodies were discovered Sunday morning by a neighbor who peered in after noticing that a window near the front door was broken, Newport Beach police said. The woman, whom police declined to identify, told authorities she saw the woman’s body on the floor, then rushed to call police.

Officer Kent Stoddard said the dead man appeared to be about 35 years old and the dead woman about 65. Investigators had not yet positively identified the bodies, but neighbors said Sunday that John G. McMullin, a man they described as a “loner,” and his mother, Harriet McMullin, lived in the town house in the 2000 block of Barranca and were about those same ages.

“They may, in fact, be the victims,” Stoddard said of the woman and her son as he stood outside the home on a quiet residential street of town houses between Upper Newport Bay and Corona del Mar High School. “We just don’t know yet.”

Investigators would not say how the victims may have died, if weapons were found in the house or whether there were apparent signs of robbery. Stoddard did say that the door to the house was locked, even though the window next to it had been broken.

Neighbors, however, said they had overheard police say that both the man and woman had been shot, and one said he heard what may have been gunshots early Sunday morning. Authorities still were trying to obtain a search warrant to go back into the house Sunday evening, police said.

Officers who responded to the unidentified neighbor’s call at about 11 a.m. stayed long enough only to determine that the man and woman were dead and that no suspects were inside the home, Stoddard said. Re-entering the house to investigate the crime scene required a search warrant, which was difficult to obtain on a Sunday, he said.

‘A Real Loner’

Neighbors interviewed Sunday described the younger McMullin as a loner who had recently lost his job and who used to pass the time by walking up and down the street with his year-old dog, a Shih Tzu named Amen.

“He was a weird guy, a real loner,” said Bill Greene, who lives across the street from the McMullins’ house.

Greene said Sunday afternoon that McMullin had lost his job at General Telephone in Long Beach “within the last few months.”

He described Harriet McMullin as “a very lovely woman; she wouldn’t speak poorly to anyone.” It was her idea, Greene said, to get the dog about a year ago “for company.”

Greene said Harriet McMullin had gone to lunch with his wife the previous week and appeared to have been in good health.

Another neighbor, Jack Morris, said he had spoken with McMullin several times in the past few weeks during McMullin’s walks. “I’d been feeling kind of guilty--he loaned me a couple of books to read and I hadn’t gotten around to looking at them yet,” Morris said, holding the borrowed volumes about home-built aircraft, which appeared to be new. Morris, a former World War II pilot, said McMullin liked to talk about flying, but he did not know whether McMullin was a pilot.

Member of Rifle Assn.

Greene said the younger man had told him that he was a member of the National Rifle Assn. and that on occasion he had seen McMullin “washing ammunition.”

Morris said McMullin’s father, also named John McMullin, lived in the house with his wife and son until he died about a year ago. The family moved to the neighborhood about eight years ago, he said.

None of the neighbors interviewed Sunday remembered ever seeing friends at the house.

Art Whiting, who lives five doors down from the McMullins, said he thought he heard “what may have been gunshots” Sunday between 2 and 3 a.m. “I heard something and it woke me up. . . . I heard it twice, like someone closed a car door real heavy or something,” said Whiting. He went to the window and looked out but, seeing no one, went back to bed, he said.