Neighborhood on Edge in Wake of Slayings of Mother, Daughter : Crime: Police approach the investigation assuming that the killings are related to three others nearby.

Residents of University City worried Friday that a serial killer might be on the loose in their quiet, well-groomed community as San Diego police confirmed that they are assuming that Thursday afternoon’s stabbing deaths of a mother and daughter are related to a series of three earlier slayings in nearby Clairemont.

“You struggle for so long, and you think you’ve got paradise, then this happens,” said Zofia Ozarowski, a Chicagoan who spends about four months every year in the neighborhood with her daughter’s family.

“Where can you go?” she said, “I’m so scared I can’t sleep. God, it’s frightening.”

Pamela Clark, 42, and her daughter Amber, 18, were found stabbed to death in their house at 5890 Honors Drive about 12:30 p.m. Thursday. The bodies were found by a family friend who was asked to check on them after Pamela Clark’s husband, acupuncturist Joseph Lazzaro, told the friend his wife had missed an 11 a.m. appointment.

Talk around the area was subdued, merchants and neighbors said, but the subject was on everyone’s mind.

“If there’s a brush fire up the way, everyone comes in and talks about it, but it’s not that type of atmosphere now,” said pharmacist Perry Bell, whose store is in a shopping center about a quarter of a mile away from the crime scene.

Another merchant there, who lives a few houses down from the murder site and asked not to be identified, fears the deaths are linked to the Clairemont cases.

“I was hoping it was something different,” she said. Neighborhood customers she talked to Friday “just want to know what’s going on,” she said. “Just to know (the killer) is roaming the streets is bad enough.”

Although there is no certain physical evidence that links Thursday’s stabbings to the slayings of three young, attractive Clairemont women, Lt. Gary Learn said, investigators are “looking at the totality of all the circumstances and evidence (and are) operating on the presumption that this most recent case and the other three cases are probably related.”

However, he declined to say what had led police to this assumption.

Police said a knife, believed to be the murder weapon, was found near one of the victims.

Pamela Clark left the house before 8 a.m. Thursday to go to a gym, which she did most mornings, said Vito Lazzaro, her father-in-law. She worked as a body masseuse and had a patient scheduled for a massage at 11 a.m., he said.

Joseph Lazzaro left the house soon after, he said, locking the front door, leaving Amber alone at the residence.

“When (Pamela) didn’t show up at the clinic, she had a patient there, so they called home and no one answered,” he said.

Vito Lazzaro speculates that the killer entered the house while Amber was alone and killed her first.

“I don’t know how (the murderer) got into the house when Amber was all alone. I think she was fighting him off,” he said. “He probably had already killed Amber when Pam came home and surprised him. That’s why she’s in the entry hall.”

“I think, between the two of them, something should have happened. One of them would have run out,” he said. “I think he killed them separately.”

Joseph Lazzaro is staying with colleagues, he said.

“It’s strange, they are trying to connect it to the serial killer in Clairemont,” he said. “Why they picked my son’s house, how they’d know there would be two women in there, I don’t know.”

Lazzaro and Clark had been married about three years and have no children together, but Lazzaro has a a 21-year-old son from a previous marriage.

Pamela Clark was only a year away from earning a master’s degree in counseling psychology, which she had been working on for two years, said Steven Lorei, a dean at the University of Humanistic Studies in Del Mar.

“She was a very delightful, likable student,” Lorei said. “Excellent and very serious, with just impeccable integrity to work and studies.”

She worked alongside her husband as a body masseuse at the Pacific Center of Health & Medicine & Acupuncture in Mission Hills for four years, said Dr. Richard Gold, one of the men who co-owns the center with Lazzaro.

Pamela “was well-loved by everyone who knew her, a very caring, generous, loving woman who had created a really wonderful relationship with her daughter,” family friend Carola Eastwood said.

“She worked really hard to be a good mother and to create that strong bond.”

Amber Clark had just started her first year at Mesa College. “She was going to become a counselor like her mother,” Vito Lazzaro said.

A neighbor and schoolmate at University City High School, where Amber went before she transferred in her senior year, Alex Klyusner, 18, said she was a nice girl, if a little shy.

She was “back in the crowd. No one at the school really knew her that well,” he said.

Learn said police are using the composite picture developed after the Clairemont deaths for this case. That description is a of young black man about 5-foot-8 and 150 pounds.

Learn says one simple precaution might have saved all five women. “The entry (in all four cases) has probably been through an unlocked door,” he said.

Police ask that anyone with information concerning any of these cases call the Homicide section at 531-2293.