Suspect Had Given Hints of Violence

Until Thursday, Douglas Frederick Stanley, a onetime ranch hand from Wyoming, was known for his swagger.

He talked tough and bragged like a “know-it-all,” the kind of man one did not want to make angry, co-workers and neighbors said. Police described him as a “survivalist type.”

Pointing one day to a newspaper article about a shooting, the 57-year-old Stanley told co-worker Scott Pham: “When I do it, I’ll do the job right.”

Tragically, police said, Stanley’s words turned into action Thursday when he walked into his sister-in-law’s small embroidery business, Design-It, in Fountain Valley, allegedly pulled the trigger of a handgun and shot to death the sister-in-law and an employee.

Witnesses said Stanley then calmly walked away and escaped.

As police searched for the suspect and a motive for the shootings, they offered hints that he had a troubled relationship with his family. During the past year, Stanley lived with his brother, Charles, his sister-in-law, Joyce, a niece, Sharon, and the brothers’ mother in a five-bedroom house in Westminster.

Police said Douglas Stanley had threatened his relatives with bodily harm.

The suspect does not appear to have a criminal history, except for an arrest warrant for unpaid traffic tickets issued in early 1988, police said. His California driver’s license expired in 1987. Although there is no record that he renewed the license, the DMV suspended it a year later when he failed to appear in court on the traffic tickets, according to records. He later surrendered the license to Wyoming authorities.

It was during that time that Stanley, unmarried, lived the life of a ranch hand in Wyoming, according to a neighbor who later befriended him.

Employees at Design-It said Stanley underwent heart bypass surgery about a year ago, around the time he moved in with his family in Westminster. He worked at Design-It in a seemingly unofficial basis.

John Piech, 69, a neighbor of the Stanleys and a friend of the suspect, said Stanley seemed “smart” with computers.

But Donna Ashley, the owner of a business next to Design-It, said Joyce Stanley had confided that her brother-in-law “could never do anything right. . . . Joyce told me they should let him go, but he’d have nowhere else to go.”

Recently, as Joyce and Charles Stanley planned to move Design-It out of state, Piech said Douglas Stanley whimsically talked of starting his own business.

Whether at work or in the neighborhood, Douglas Stanley earned a reputation as a hostile, argumentative man who claimed to know more than anyone else on any given topic.

“He liked to argue,” neighbor Barbara Provence, 30, recalled. “He used to say, ‘No, you’re not doing it the correct way,’ when I would talk about horses. I used to tell him, ‘I work with horses five days a week.’ He didn’t care, he would still say, ‘I know more than you.’ ”

Piech said he spent a lot of time with Stanley and described him as a “don’t-tread-on-me” type of guy.

“When we were painting a house together, I was telling him how to paint it, and he told me that he knows more than I do and he was going to paint it his way,” Piech said. “All he did was end up putting a white spot on his roof. He would rather be wrong and do it his way than listen to another person.”

Still, Piech and Stanley spent hours relaxing together--during a drive to northern Mexico, or even just to Newport Beach during the Christmas holidays. “He’s single, he likes to go and look around and camp,” Piech said.

Though Stanley spoke of being a hunter, Piech said he never saw him with guns. And he said he never heard any arguments from the Stanley household across the street.

But at work, co-worker Pham said, the two Stanley brothers argued frequently. Nevertheless, Douglas Stanley seemed to get along with the other employees.

“He was pretty nice to me. He talked to me all the time,” Pham, 26, of Tustin said.

On the other hand, Stanley seemed obsessed with weapons and talked about shooting people, Pham said.

Just last week, he said, Stanley spoke of getting a license and obtaining “lots of guns.”

In one unforgettable episode several months ago, Pham said, Stanley jokingly pressed the muzzle of a revolver against his ribs.

“He said if he wanted to shoot somebody, he could and nobody would catch him,” Pham said.