Accused Killer Haunted by Disturbing Visions : Crime: Robert Earl Mack, charged in Convair shootings, says he had intended to kill himself.

In his mind’s eye, there it was, the letter notifying Robert Earl Mack he would be fired from the job he had held his entire adult life. And the paper was on fire.

That image tormented him. It taunted him, haunted him, left him unable to sleep, denied him peace. In fear, he drew back as the paper roared across his field of vision. There were times he felt the heat from the flames as the letter rushed toward his eyes.

He decided he could take it no longer. He would kill himself. He would go to General Dynamics Convair Division plant near Lindbergh Field, after working for the company 25 years, and blow his brains out in front of company and union officials. Then there would be an investigation--and the world would see how he had been abused.

Except, as Mack said in an interview last week from jail, “something went wrong.”

Instead of killing himself, Mack chased and killed labor negotiator Michael Konz, 25, with a shot to the head, prosecutors allege. Mack also allegedly shot James T. English, 52, with a bullet to the head. But English, Mack’s former supervisor, survived. On Wednesday, Mack, 43, goes on trial in San Diego Superior Court, charged with murder and attempted murder.

If convicted, Mack could draw from 34 years to life in custody. Prosecutors opted not to seek the death penalty, and last month a judge said the shootings did not meet the legal standard that justifies the possibility of life without parole.

Prosecutors on the case could not be reached last week for comment. But defense lawyer J. Michael Roake said the trial is as likely to be about corporate America as it is about Mack’s mental state--how he and the company hassled over his attendance records before it suspended him, then fired him. Feeling betrayed, Mack cracked.

Last month, Mack entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. But Roake said last week that, for strategy reasons, the plea might revert by the start of the trial to a simple not guilty.

Occasionally during the 70-minute interview, Mack referred to himself as “we.” He said, “It’s just, that’s the way I’ve been talking. I don’t understand it myself. But I don’t know. A lot of people ask me that. Just a way of speaking. We. Me and me.”

Mack remembers nothing about the shootings last Jan. 24. He blacked out and recalls only strange and bizarre visions of riding a big black cat. He came to, he said, with a .38-caliber revolver pointed at his head and an insistent desire to call his mother, to tell her to play two songs from the 1970s musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” at his funeral.

Mostly, Mack said, what he recalls about that day is that he had to get away from the burning letter. The hallucination had appeared again, horrifying him, the instant before he blacked out.

The vision had begun troubling Mack the week before, on Jan. 18, when he received an actual letter that said the company intended to fire him.

For Mack, that prospect was inconceivable. He had been working at Convair since 1968, when he was 17. To lose his all-consuming job would be catastrophic.

“I enjoyed my job,” he said. “I loved my job. That’s all I lived for, was to go to work and come home.”

Every day in recent years, no matter the weather, Mack wore a blue jacket to work that advertised the Tomahawk cruise missile, manufactured at the Lindbergh Field Convair plant. The company is best known as a defense contractor that builds aircraft frames and missiles.

Mack took intense pride in his “top-secret” clearance. For fear of compromising it, he declined to get involved with neighborhood or civic activities.

“I had a top-secret clearance (that) wouldn’t let me go out and mix and mingle with the outside public world,” he said. “Everything I did was secret, secret, secret.”

Work consumed him. He stockpiled books at home, such as instruction manuals for the panels of a DC-10 airplane. “I got books at home right now from 1968, 1970, ‘71, ‘72--I have books at home (that) tell you how to build the whole thing,” he said.

Home is the same Southeast San Diego house he had lived in since 1969. Mack was divorced in 1977 and has three grown children.

Over time, Mack switched from airplane frames to missiles. For the past several years, he said, he had been assigned to an unusual job that reflected his experience and seniority--he was a “production distribution analyst” who tracked lost documents on the cruise missile line, ensuring both the security of the project and cost control.

Though he loved his job, Mack consistently had trouble making it to work on time. He had regular problems with what he called his “raggedy” car, a silver 1977 Cadillac. When he took the bus, a red light or two could make him late for the start of his shift, at 5:30 a.m.

Mack’s frequent late check-ins earned him punishments ranging from warnings to a one-day suspension, which he served last Dec. 12. After that, any new late check-ins were to be counted toward termination.

Last Dec. 13, Mack checked in at 5:31 a.m. English, his immediate supervisor and a by-the-books Navy electronics veteran, docked him for a full hour of pay, killing the overtime pay Mack said he needed for his Christmas bonus.

The next day, Saturday, Dec. 14, Mack was 84 minutes late, he said. He was late again the next working day, Monday the 16th, and late again on the 17th.

Without much of a bonus, Christmas was miserable, Mack said. He and his live-in girlfriend had no tree, no presents. “I’m ready for some Christmas spirit and Christmas light,” he said. “I didn’t get it.”

On Jan. 3, Mack was told he was being suspended for three days.

The three days came and went. But Mack could not go back to work because company officials were holding his employee identification badge.

He spent the next few weeks fibbing to his girlfriend about why he wasn’t going to work--a headache, a bad hip. Then he stopped talking. Meanwhile, he was running out of money.

“It was lousy,” Mack said. “Everything I touched broke. The heater broke. The washing machine broke. The toilet thing broke.”

On Jan. 18, expecting notification from Convair that he could pick up his badge and return to work, he got the letter notifying him he was being fired.

Under company rules, each late check-in counted as a half-point demerit. Being two hours late counted for a full point. When the demerits totaled 2 1/2 points, that was enough for termination.

For reasons that remain unclear, the 84-minute late check-in on Dec. 14, which should have counted as a half-point, was counted as a full point. The company calculated that Mack had 2 1/2 points, defense lawyer Roake said, though the correct count was only 2.

Mack said none of this registered. All he knew was that the burning letter began to haunt him, day and night.

“I did not know how to handle this,” Mack said. “This was a form of what you might say is a nightmare, something like that. OK. But this was also the form of a daytime-mare, because it comes at night and it comes in the daytime.

“It, like, makes me want to run, but where do I run to? I can’t run outside my house. I have to run sometime inside my house. Plus, this starts a lot of tears. This is not the way I live. This is not the way I want to be.”

Escaping the letter became his priority. “What it might say to me, I don’t know,” Mack said. “What it might say to me might also end up destroying me.”

Mack’s union set up a grievance hearing for Friday, Jan. 24. On Thursday, the day before, desperate for cash, Mack called the company to see if he could have $7,000 of earnings he believed was invested in a stock plan.

The company said he could have access to only half of that, and he would have to wait for the money until mid-March, Mack said. He decided to commit suicide.

“For me to have to go through all this miserable business at night and day, and not sleeping and worrying about some letter coming up behind me or coming in front of me, running me down or something like that, you know, it was time for me to go,” he said.

That night, the burning letter dogged him.

“I lay down, 10 to 15 minutes, boom, here comes one,” Mack said. “I got to get up. I cannot be caught sleeping. Sometimes I get caught sleeping--in my sleep, there the letter is. In my pillow. My pillow is literally busting in flames.”

On the morning of the 24th, Mack bought the .38-caliber revolver from a friend for $40. His plan was to kill himself at the hearing.

“If I would have terminated myself at home, then Convair would have called it a domestic dispute,” he said. “The city, the nation, all my people, all my friends would have said it was a domestic dispute. Something at home went wrong, leaving Convair off the hook.”

The suicide, he said, would draw attention to the way Convair was forcing him out. He envisioned investigations by the Department of Defense, General Dynamics, the San Diego County Grand Jury and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Mack arrived 40 minutes late for the 1 p.m. meeting. Three union representatives were waiting with Konz and English. After management detailed the grounds for firing, the union challenged the calculation of the points.

Testimony at the preliminary hearing revealed that the union representatives were pleased with the session, believing the company did not have good cause to fire Mack.

But Mack was not pleased. He never got to talk. “Every time I speak up, they shut me down: ‘Mack, be quiet. We’ll tell your story later.’ Union and company, too. They wanted to do all the talking.”

The meeting broke up at 2:30 p.m. The company and the union agreed to meet again in a week. Konz and English left the room, which was “hot and stuffy,” Mack said.

“I was sitting in there, my mouth getting all dry, my head kind of felt light,” he said. “I had tingling all in my fingers and stuff. I knew. See, the only thing that kept us cooled down after we got the burning letter was cold water.”

Mack tried to walk from his seat to the water fountain. A co-worker who had known Mack for 23 years testified at the preliminary hearing that Mack’s eyes were as big as golf balls.

“I did not make it to the water fountain. Or, if I did make it, I didn’t get enough water,” Mack said. “I felt this big old surge and this big whoosh, like a big blast, big old flash, come boom, just like that.

“From that point on, I don’t remember anything, OK? I hope you understand that, because I don’t remember what transpired. I do kind of seem to remember riding on a black cat, OK.

“Like a big cat. Not a house cat, but like a big, you know, fast-moving cat. This is a big cat. I can ride on him. Like the cat kind of came and swooped me away, you know.”

When he came to, Mack said, he had the gun pointed at his head. He became distracted by the commotion and saw the back of English’s foot and the back of Konz’s foot. Both were sprawled on the ground in the courtyard just outside the hearing room.

According to court documents, Mack shot English first, then chased and shot Konz.

In moments, Mack heard helicopters and sirens. “I don’t know what happened, but I know they’re going to kill me,” he recalled. “I know the people are going to come and kill me.”

Mack called his mother. At his funeral, he instructed her, play certain songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Those songs, he said, “pretty much describe the way how I felt.” Among the tunes: “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

“During the investigations, they would look those songs up and find out if there was anything in those songs there, like they normally do (on) Sherlock Holmes, they do on TV,” Mack said.

At 2:55 p.m., Mack surrendered. Only later, in custody, did Mack learn he had shot the two men, he said.

“I keep reading over and over and over in the papers, I keep hearing people saying more and more and more, and it just don’t fit,” Mack said. “You know, it ain’t me. Ain’t no way in the world I can think of shooting two people.

“I went there to terminate myself, you know,” he said. “That’s what I was supposed to do. That’s what I was tired of. Hurting people couldn’t make things go easier or better for me. In fact, they only make things worse for me. “

Denied bail in jail, he said, there’s really no place to run. But the burning letter terrorizes him still.

“Still today, I don’t sleep at night,” he said. “I try to get a little old catnap in--with my legs moving, with my arms moving. I lay on the side of the bed, let my arm dangle.

“That way, and then, we’ll be able to at least have a jump when it comes, with that something that can wake us up, something that can kick, kick up against something, so the tires are already set for our escape route.”