ANAHEIM : Plea of Not Guilty in Double Slaying

An unemployed construction worker from Compton, wanted by police for more than two years, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court to charges that he murdered an Anaheim couple in an apparent dispute over drug dealing.

Police allege that Rudolph Benjamin, 29, along with a second suspect who is still at large, shot to death Diane Swarbrick, 23, and Louis Arturo Herrera, 24, in Swarbrick’s Anaheim apartment on May 30, 1989.

Benjamin and Herrera were overheard arguing at a local nightclub a few hours before the shootings, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Molko. “Apparently the defendant was trying to cut in on the drug business of (Herrera). . . . He wanted to get a cut,” the prosecutor said.

Herrera was shot three times in the head, while Swarbrick, found in a closet, was shot twice in the chest.

Two children--the couple’s 20-month-old daughter and Herrera’s 18-month-old son--were alone in the apartment, unharmed, for about eight hours after the attack. The bodies were discovered only after the older child made her way next door and told neighbors, “Mommy has a boo-boo, and I can’t wake her up,” according to a police account.

Within days of the slayings, police identified Benjamin as a suspect after a witness said he was one of two men who had left the apartment on the night of shootings. But he was not apprehended until August, more than two years later, after an anonymous caller told police he was in a Los Angeles hospital under a different name.