Neighbors Tell of Accused Killer’s Weird Beliefs : Armageddon: Hansel talked of killing, survival and a biblical link to a coming nuclear holocaust.

About two weeks ago, Larry T. Hansel showed his next-door neighbor the latest in a series of interpretations he had done of biblical scriptures. In this one, according to the neighbor, Hansel said it was his understanding that the book of Ezekiel “stood for E-Z kill.”

Neighbor Bruce Mills, 29, an engineer, said he didn’t know what that meant. “We didn’t discuss it at that point in time,” Mills said. “I never knew.”

Hansel, 41, who turned himself in to police in Palm Desert on Tuesday after the shooting deaths of two Elgar Corp. executives, had his own, individual “hard to follow” religious beliefs that involved notions of nuclear holocaust, Armageddon and a “new world order,” according to neighbors and Elgar officials.

Those beliefs earned him a formal warning at work. “He was quite religious and was caught preaching the Gospel on the floor,” said Drummond Murdoch, chairman of Elgar. “He was warned several times about this.”

Before he was laid off in March from Elgar, Hansel also had talked at work about John Merlin Taylor, the disgruntled postal worker who in late 1989 shot and killed his wife, then drove to the Orange Glen postal substation and killed two co-workers before finally killing himself.

In addition, Chris Kelford, Elgar’s chief financial officer, said Hansel “made other unsettling statements before he was laid off.”

Elgar employee Don Deuel said, “He had talked about kind of like, when the big one comes, he had his weapons and he was going to go out somewhere and get ‘them’ before ‘they’ got him, that sort of attitude.”

But, along the quiet street of single-story homes in the San Diego neighborhood just south of Lemon Grove where Hansel lived with his wife, Maria, and their two children, several neighbors said that Hansel did not appear to espouse survivalist beliefs.

“I knew he talked about guns and going to the desert,” said Hansel’s other next-door neighbor, the Rev. Bill Burties, a Baptist minister. “But I didn’t think he was in the survivalist camp. He liked the outdoors, though. And he liked to talk about weapons.” Burties said he had never seen Hansel handle a weapon.

As neighborhood children played in the sidewalk in front of the Hansel house and a pickup basketball game gathered steam down the street, several neighbors talked about Hansel’s unusual beliefs.

“He was real nice but kind of strange,” said Erin Edwards, 20, who lives across the street. “Everybody used to say that he was talking to Martians every night in the back yard. That’s what he would tell them.”

Two doors away from the Hansel house, Bessie Griffin, 49, said Hansel “had his own way of thinking, his own way of thinking about the Bible. He was nice--but weird. He talked weird. He was in a little world of his own.”

That world, said Burties, often was peppered with references to nuclear annihilation and mass destruction. Hansel thought “the Scriptures pointed toward nuclear war,” Burties said.

Burties said Hansel “thought things were out of order. That things were happening in the world that were too fast-paced. He mentioned (the prophet) Ezekiel, but I could tell his comments weren’t accurate because I study the Bible.”

“We talked about the government, and he said a new world order was about to take place,” Burties said. “He talked about how some people could be in charge of the world and how there would be a trilateral world order. I didn’t always follow what he was saying.”

Juan Mejia, 48, brother of Hansel’s wife, Maria, said the family had been “many times in crisis.” He did not provide details.

But, he said, referring to his sister and her husband, “A long time ago, she say to him, ‘Go for psychiatry.’ But he don’t like it.”

“Many times,” Mejia said, Hansel “talked of the Bible. I don’t understand.”

Mejia arrived early Wednesday evening at the Hansel house to comfort his sister. San Diego police officers who talked to her said she learned of the shootings--and of her husband’s alleged involvement--by watching television news through the afternoon.

Maria Hansel declined to answer the door when a reporter knocked. From behind closed doors, she said, “I do not want to talk to you. I have nothing to say.”

Times staff writers Mark Platte, Nora Zamichow and H.G. Reza contributed to this story.