Slaying Shatters Family . . . and Illusions : Crime: When a man is accused of killing his wife after a disagreement, the quiet, middle-class couple is found to be anything but conventional.

David and Grace Lang had a horse called Sweet Pea, four Shetland sheep dogs, three children and a rose garden that was the envy of Colina Drive in Topanga Canyon.

But what happened on the night of June 4, police reports said, belied those trappings of upper middle-class comfort and the image of the hard-working father who helped pay for them. Securities broker Lang emptied six shots into Grace’s body, then reloaded, and fired two more shots into her head at point-blank range.

What touched off the slaying was deceptively mundane--where to place a gate outside the family’s ranch-style house. But the violent act has since led to revelations demonstrating that little about the couple’s 27-year relationship was as conventional as it seemed, including Lang’s disclosure in court records that he and Grace were never legally married.

“The whole relationship was a bizarre one,” said attorney Albert Garber, now defending Lang against a charge of first-degree murder.

Further complicating the situation is a civil suit the children filed against their father after their mother’s death. The Superior Court case seeks to prevent David Lang from depleting the family’s assets for his criminal defense and to ensure the children--ages 22, 19, and 16--will have money for their daily needs and education.

Garber said the civil case is in the process of being settled, and that his client has no intention of leaving his children without money. The children are living with relatives and have had no contact with their father since their mother was killed, Garber said, although Lang, who is being held in Los Angeles County Jail, “would love” to see them.

Why someone of Lang’s success and lack of a criminal record would resort to such violence is a question many who knew the couple are asking, and one expected to be the focus of a preliminary hearing Aug. 24 in Malibu Municipal Court. Lang, 47, has pleaded not guilty.

“He is in the process of being examined by a psychiatrist to answer the question of why a man of such intelligence and no element of violence would shoot the woman he loved,” Garber said. He said the former broker for Dean Witter Reynolds Inc., who earned at least $100,000 a year, killed in self-defense after years of abuse from a woman who drank and threatened him with knives.

But police reports and friends of Grace Lang portray David as the troubled spouse, describing him as a driven, controlling man whose final act of rage against his 46-year-old common-law wife was set off when she moved a gate without his permission.

Court records indicate the couple had been bickering over the gate most of the weekend of June 2 and 3, and continued the argument Monday night, June 4.

“When the suspect saw what had been done on Saturday morning with the gate, he became enraged because it was done without his permission,” said a report by Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators.

“The victim accused him of being a ‘dictator’ in his own house,” the report continues, citing Lang’s own description of the argument after his arrest. He also told investigators he had been “deeply in love” with Grace since 1963, their reports said.

But the couple “had not gotten along for several years,” their 16-year-old daughter told investigators, adding that “her father is very abusive both physically and mentally toward her mother.”

The daughter was awakened by the 11:30 p.m. shooting and her mother’s cries for help, police reports said. She ran to neighbors who phoned for emergency help.

Neighbors on Colina Drive--where residents greet each other on horseback and along the trails of Topanga State Park--declined to discuss the Langs as a couple. But they described Grace as a gentle, friendly woman who hiked daily and took pride in her garden.

“She was a hiker, a mother and a happy person,” said close friend Esperanza Riskin. “She had a beautiful garden filled with roses, lots of roses. She had the prettiest garden in the neighborhood.”

Riskin said Grace Lang had a college degree in anthropology but never used it. Most recently, she had worked as a secretary in a Woodland Hills pharmaceutical company.

“She was a very generous, warm, good person, and I think this was a horrible, horrible act,” Riskin said. Of Lang’s allegations that it was Grace who was abusive--drinking and wielding knives--Riskin vehemently denied the characterization, saying, “That’s not her.”

John Walsh, Grace’s employer at the Boots Company Inc., remembered her as a warm, efficient woman and said he found Lang’s allegations that she was a knife-wielding threat hard to believe.

Grace was clearly devoted to her children, Walsh recalled. The boys checked in by phone regularly, and Grace would pick up her daughter from high school each afternoon and bring her back to the office until it was time to go home, Walsh said. “You could see they had a strong bond,” Walsh said, adding, “I just saw her as really the one who was holding the family together.”

Adrian Lang, 19, said in an interview that his mother was “really close to all three of us even though each us of were different.” Of his father, Adrian said: “He wasn’t even a father when he was here. He was just like the businessman who came home and barked at everybody.”

Lang was a father under pressure to pay for his children’s schooling, cars and trips to Europe, his attorney said. Lang has been fired from Dean Witter since his arrest, a company spokesman said.

Lang also supported a fourth child from a previous marriage, Garber said. The son, now 22, was born within a month of when Grace gave birth to the couple’s oldest son.

Lang disclosed in court records that after his sons were born in the spring of 1968, while he was still legally married but involved with Grace, “it became impossible me to maintain two separate residences, one with my legal wife . . . and the other with Grace.”

So Grace and the baby moved in with Lang, his wife and the other baby, “and we all lived together for a period of time,” his statement said.

David and Grace, whose last name was actually Lujan, never married because “we mutually had the same opinion that no marriage was necessary,” Lang said in his court statement.

A former biology teacher, Lang changed careers to support his family, his attorney said. He loved to read and the den where Lang kept his handgun also contained 10,000 books, Garber said.

Lang appeared to be under constant pressure to succeed in business, according to colleagues and clients--several of whom wrote letters to Municipal Judge Lawrence J. Mira on Lang’s behalf.

“Something horrible had to have happened to him for him to have resorted to such a thing,” Lynn James, a client of Lang’s for eight years, said in an interview. “It was just the biggest shock in my life when I heard the news.”

James praised Lang’s sound investment advice, availability and patience.

“Any time I had a question, no matter how stupid it was, he’d take the time to answer it and explain it,” she said.

Robert Levy, who worked with Lang for several years at a now-defunct bond brokerage, similarly described Lang as a diligent municipal bonds broker who worked 12-hour days, often skipping lunch.

Sometimes the men worked together at night, Levy said, and Lang had confided that his marriage was strained over how to discipline the teen-agers. Lang favored a stricter approach while Grace was more liberal, Levy and Garber said. “I feel as though David is innocent in this situation and it’s only because I feel there was a lot of pressure brought on him through whatever was going on,” Levy said.

“You’re going to find a situation not all black on one side and not all white on the other,” Garber said. “It’s a tragedy. There’s no justification for it, but there may be an explanation of how it could reach that level.”