Ominous Signs Preceded Violent Spree : Crime: Friends of former postal worker say his quiet demeanor gave way to bizarre behavior in the years before he allegedly went on a fatal rampage across Orange County.

To some, Mark Hilbun’s most notorious hours--the ones he allegedly spent knifing and shooting his way across Orange County--marked the final, intense culmination of trouble that was many years in the making.

Others saw the tragic events as a contradiction to a mostly ordinary life.

This was a man who once was so unobtrusive, so nonthreatening, that few noticed or remembered him. But when he became withdrawn and ill at ease around others--and later occasionally acted bizarre--acquaintances began seeing him as deeply disturbed.

A mailman whose obsession with a female co-worker had cost him the job he loved, Hilbun is accused of stabbing his 63-year-old mother to death as she slept on the morning of May 6. Then, slipping through the back door of the Dana Point U.S. Postal Service office, he allegedly shot dead his best friend and wounded a former co-worker.

By the time he was caught 40 hours later, police say, he had wounded four others.

Now, as the 39-year-old Hilbun sits in the Orange County Jail, accused of crimes that could send him to the gas chamber, psychiatrists are trying to determine whether he is mentally competent to assist in his own defense. That issue was the focus of a court hearing last week. On Friday, evidence emerged that Hilbun is trying to starve himself and has lost 40 pounds in jail, and a judge disclosed that two court-appointed doctors have disagreed on the accused murderer’s mental competency to stand trial.

A year or more before the shootings, Hilbun’s friends had sensed ominous changes in his behavior.

Mary Jane Galletly, whose longtime boyfriend, Charles Barbagallo, was Hilbun’s closest friend when he was shot and killed in the post office, remembers receiving calls at home from an edgy, frightened Hilbun.

“He would say he had been listening to music and he heard voices coming out of the speakers, over the music,” recalled Galletly, “and he would think the world was coming to an end.”

Hilbun has told at least one person that when he stabbed his mother, slit the throat of her beloved cocker spaniel, Golden, and shot his best friend, he was convinced he was sparing them the horrors of an impending holocaust.

Part of his plan, Hilbun claimed, was to escape into the wild with Kim Springer, a mail carrier whom he had pursued for months, and start the human race over, like Adam and Eve. One of the charges Hilbun faces is the attempted kidnaping of Springer.

With a graying beard and a figure thinned from sometimes refusing jail food, Hilbun has also said that he sometimes believes himself to be Christ, and that when he hurled himself from a second-story jail walkway in June, fracturing his spine, he was trying to sacrifice himself for mankind.

Even if Hilbun is deemed competent to stand trial, his attorneys have hinted they may mount an insanity defense.

But some who are familiar with the case scoff at the notion that Hilbun had lost his senses when he cut a 30-mile swath of terror across Orange County.

They point to the time and thought he invested in loading his pickup with survival gear, and the way he disguised himself and his truck to evade capture: shaving his mustache and cutting his hair, and affixing an Idaho license plate and magnetic door signs from a local business on his vehicle.

People who have met Mark Richard Hilbun in the past almost always use the same word to describe him: quiet.

His youth appears to have been comfortably middle-class. The only son of a paper products salesman and a homemaker, he attended elementary school in La Mirada, junior high in Sacramento and high school in a prosperous section of Fullerton.

In contrast to his sister, a bubbly cheerleader, Hilbun was reserved, a member of the high school “parking lot crew” that preferred cigarette breaks to class. Most former classmates remember Hilbun as an average student who blended easily into the crowd.

Even years later, postal colleagues described Hilbun as “mild,” and “hard to get to know,” and his landlord noted that his rent was paid on time and his apartment was always immaculate.

“He was almost too quiet,” said Bob Gandara, 40, a fellow mail carrier.

A close friend who spent a lot of time with Hilbun in the last two years describes him as “totally introverted.” His job, his books and his music were the only things that meant anything to him, and he seemed so uninterested in women as to be “almost asexual.”

Hilbun first showed signs of mental instability in March, 1980, when, as a member of the security police squadron at Edwards Air Force Base, he was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation. Military records reflect the diagnosis was a schizoid personality with depressive features.

Just what triggered the exam is unclear. But years later he would tell a friend, letter carrier Denise Arroyo-Oldridge, that he had turned in his gun because he feared he might commit suicide.

Military records say his weapon was taken away and his security clearance revoked. But upon completion of his four-year enlistment in December 1980, he apparently received an honorable discharge.

A civilian again, Hilbun studied electronics at Orange Coast College and received an associate of arts degree in 1983, later taking a job at the post office.

Hilbun’s kayaking instructor, Ed Gillet, said Hilbun was “never really outgoing, not the most socially adjusted.” But around the spring of 1992, he seemed especially tense and oversensitive. One morning, on a kayaking trip, Hilbun was convinced the others were “trying to get rid of him” because they pushed off into the water before he was ready, Gillet said.

Friends began noticing a shift in Hilbun’s behavior.

“All of a sudden,” said Arroyo-Oldridge, he “wanted to get together with people, barbecue at the beach, things like that. He got real profane, using the F-word all over the place. Everyone noticed the change. A lot of us thought, ‘Something’s going on.’ ”

In September, Kim Springer filed a complaint with police that Hilbun was pestering her, a complaint she withdrew five months later because Hilbun had agreed to stay away from her and was receiving psychiatric treatment.

He also lost his job in September. At work on Sept. 17, Hilbun had music blaring from a portable tape player as he sorted the mail. He sang and danced. And he wore a pair of green men’s underwear over his mailman’s uniform.

After being summoned into a supervisor’s office, he emerged and put the underwear on his head. He was escorted off the premises.

Postal employees say that within a day or two, Hilbun returned to drop off his keys. Inexplicably, he released a white balloon at the post office and left behind a baby pacifier for Springer. He also dropped off his two pet rabbits, and when a colleague asked what should be done with them, Hilbun reportedly said they could be skinned and eaten.

Worried that Hilbun would commit suicide, carrier Arroyo-Oldridge called Hilbun’s mother, asking if she was aware of the way her son was behaving. “She said, ‘I’ve tried to help him and I can’t help him anymore,’ ” Arroyo-Oldridge recalled.

She also called postmaster Don Lowe, who she said alerted law enforcement. Sheriff’s deputies visited Hilbun at home and took him to a psychiatric hospital. An involuntary, 72-hour commitment was extended to two weeks. He was diagnosed as a manic-depressive and put on lithium, a mood-stabilizer.

For periods after he started taking lithium, Hilbun left Springer alone. But a week before the shootings he told at least two friends he had stopped taking the drug.

On May 6, Hilbun seemed “calm and methodical” as he walked into the post office with a gun, said letter carrier Robert Hagstrom.

When he fled the post office after the shootings, he had a kayak atop his truck. When investigators eventually searched the truck, they found the makings of an extended outdoor trip, including food, fishing and boating gear, a compass, toilet paper, camp stove, deck of cards, books and a tape player. A few items suggested that he expected company: a game of backgammon, a pair of women’s shorts and two women’s swimsuits.