A Look Back:

A Newport Beach drug smuggler fatally shot his girlfriend in the head at his upscale West Coast Highway apartment during a lover’s quarrel in September 1972.

Diane Singleton was a 21-year-old actress and UCLA student living in West Los Angeles at the time of the shooting.

Her boyfriend, 33-year-old Newport Harbor High School and Orange Coast College graduate Corliss Ankeny, had recently bought her a 1972 Mercedes-Benz sedan bearing the personalized license plate “BIZZAR.”

Law enforcement officials would later wonder how Ankeny could afford to pay $12,000 cash for his girlfriend’s flashy car. He was a divorced, unemployed student teacher at the time.

Just after midnight the night of the shooting, a witness who lived next to Ankeny at the Tower Apartments, 3121 W. Coast Hwy., “heard a loud thump” from his unit, she told the Los Angeles Times in an article dated Sept. 20, 1972.

The woman’s husband later heard what he thought was “someone banging on the elevator,” she told the Times.

Police detectives would later piece together that Ankeny shot Singleton in the head in his apartment as the two quarreled.

He then drove Singleton to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in his dark blue 1972 Corvette. Ankeny didn’t identify himself to hospital staff, claimed the shooting was an accident and then fled.

Singleton never regained consciousness and died about 10 hours later. Ankeny later surrendered to police in San Anselmo.

Police found $35,000 in cash hidden in Ankeny’s apartment. Law enforcement officials at the time contended Ankeny was involved in smuggling large quantities of marijuana into the United States from Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Ankeny was charged with murder, but the charges were reduced to voluntary manslaughter when he changed his plea to guilty just as the jury was preparing to hear its first witness in his trial.

Ankeny’s attorney, Moses Berman, would claim at a sentencing hearing that his client smuggled drugs so he could shower Singleton with nice cars and other gifts.

“He loved her deeply,” Berman said. “And if I would put him on the stand today he would still say he loved her.”

On May 4, 1973, an Orange County Superior Court judge sentenced Ankeny to serve 1 to 15 years in state prison for Singleton’s death.