Dreams of a New Life End in Gunfire : Victims: The women were planning to move to Arkansas where a rural lifestyle awaited them. One had already sold her home and was packed to leave.

The two women gunned down Thursday at a Fountain Valley embroidery shop were friends who had worked together for years, lived about a mile apart and planned to move soon, with their husbands and the business, to Arkansas.

They had worked together at Design-It, a small firm that embroidered insignias on Boy Scout and Girl Scout uniforms, for about a decade.

“They were hard workers, very friendly, good business persons,” said Tuan Pham, who worked in the back of the small shop.

“They were both real nice people, just real good people,” added Carl McDonell, a real estate broker who was selling both women’s houses. “They were both real down-to-earth, real friendly people who loved outdoors. That’s why they were moving out there, ironically enough. To get away from the rat race.”

Terry Vasquez, 41, was born in Indiana and had lived in a gray-and-blue ranch house in a quiet neighborhood in the northwest corner of Santa Ana since 1983. She had no children of her own, but was close to the children--and many grandchildren--of her husband, Eddie, from a previous marriage.

“She’s a very friendly, very intelligent lady, very nice, she’s a very creative lady,” said Vasquez’s neighbor and friend, Maggie Mecil.

“She’s a very good neighbor,” Mecil repeated again and again, barely catching her breath between sobs. “What is this world becoming, anyway?”

Vasquez, an avid gardener with beautiful flower beds and two dogs, for many years was a Girl Scout leader for her step-granddaughters’ troops, Mecil said. She loved to read fiction and paint pictures to adorn the walls of her home, and frequently went fishing and camping.

“She was a wonderful person; we were very close,” said Sally Perez, 41, Vasquez’s next-door neighbor.

“I still can’t believe it,” Perez said. “I saw it on the news, and I said, ‘May they rest in peace, whoever it is, I hope it’s no one I know. . . . She was a great person. She was a really outgoing person.”

The Vasquez home had already been sold. In fact, Mecil said, the couple had packed their things.

Both the Vasquezes and Joyce and Charles Stanley, who own Design-It, had already bought homes--each with several acres of land--outside Little Rock, Ark., McDonell said.

Joyce Stanley, 52, was listed as the official owner of Design-It, and a friend said she was “the brains behind the company.”

“They eat, sleep and work again,” Helen Piech said of the Stanleys, who lived across the street from her in a well-groomed Westminster neighborhood. “They are very business-minded.”

Joyce Stanley was “very friendly and worked in her garden,” Piech said. “She was very intelligent.”

The Stanleys have two daughters, Pamela, 31, an accountant who lives in Lake Forest, and Sharon, 28, who lives in the two-story Westminster house with her parents, her uncle, her paternal grandmother and Douglas Stanley, the suspect in the shootings.