Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : AT THE SCENE : Common-Law Wife Charged in 2-Year-Old Death of Accountant

It has been two years since Mel Dulay Dyson, a 30-year-old accountant, was stabbed to death in his Huntington Harbour home.

On that November night in 1984, Dyson’s common-law wife, Dixie, told police that she had been raped by a masked man who later forced her to drive him to an intersection, where he jumped out and fled. When she returned home, she said, she found her husband’s body and called police.

Investigators have been tailing Dixie Dyson ever since, said her attorney, Michael Schuur. Tuesday night, Huntington Beach police arrested Dyson at her home in Carson and charged her with murder.

The arrest came on the eve of a trial in which Dyson and the slain man’s mother, Delores, were to appear in court in their battle over who would be administrator of $135,000 in life insurance. The two women, along with Dixie Dyson’s children, have shared the Carson home since the murder. Delores, according to court papers, contested her daughter-in-law’s claim to the money because she “has come under suspicion of having been culpably involved in bringing about the death of the insured.”