Couple Found Stabbed to Death in Apartment

The bodies of a husband and wife who had been dead for several days, apparently from a murder-suicide, were found by police in their one-bedroom Anaheim apartment, police said Saturday.

The door to the apartment was blocked from the inside by furniture when police arrived about 10 p.m. Friday, a witness said. The couple, described by the apartment manager as in their late 20s, were found in the bathroom, both stabbed to death.

Police said it appears the husband killed his wife, then stabbed himself. The police withheld their names until relatives could be notified.

The couple had not been seen or heard from since Tuesday evening, when neighbors heard arguing inside their pool-front apartment. One next-door neighbor said Saurday that she heard the argument Tuesday but heard no sounds of a struggle.

“They were perfect tenants and seemed to be the perfect couple,” said Cindy Trantham, manager of the 91-unit complex in the 1900 block of Greenleaf Avenue.

The couple lived alone in the apartment. But information they provided when they moved in indicated that at least one of them has two children who live with a grandmother, Trantham said.

The husband was a newspaper deliveryman for the Orange County Register, she said. The wife worked for a check-cashing firm but helped her husband on his newspaper rounds at night. They had lived at the complex only about a month.

“They had new furniture, new cars, good credit. They seemed happy,” Trantham said.

The wife’s supervisor at her firm began to worry when she did not show up for work Tuesday morning, police said. He later told them she never missed a day of work and was always punctual.

Trantham said that Tuesday afternoon, the husband came into her office to thank her and her partner for the good job they were doing running the complex.

“He seemed very nervous, his hands seemed clammy, and he told me that he and his wife had been having some problems but it looked like they were going to work them out,” Trantham said.

She said that she told him all young couples go through such spells and that he seemed assured that everything would be OK. He was also upset, she said, that his new truck had been hit recently.

Although no one heard what the couple’s argument was about Tuesday night, one neighbor said she heard them arguing over money problems the Saturday night before.

One neighbor told police she thought she saw a man going in and out of the apartment as late as Thursday, fueling rumors in the complex that the husband had remained in the apartment with his wife’s body for two days. But police said it appeared that both died the same night.