The Oxnard Rampage : Winterbourne ‘Just Seemed Eccentric’ : Background: Potential employers say the job seeker’s looks, manner put them off, but that he gave no hints of violence.

Personnel directors who interviewed Alan Winterbourne described him Friday as a persistent but polite man whose unkempt appearance and off-kilter personality prevented him from getting a job.

“His personal demeanor did not give you a warm and fuzzy feeling,” said Harvey Pena, director of human resources for Engineering Management Concepts in Camarillo. “He did not fit the format of people we hire.”

Winterbourne, who had long hair and a scraggly beard, had been unemployed for nearly eight years. He resigned his position as a systems engineer for Northrop Corp. in Newbury Park on Feb. 14, 1986.

According to documents Winterbourne left at the Ventura County Star-Free Press minutes before Thursday’s shootings, his search for a job included writing letters to 288 companies in the area.

Winterbourne followed up his letters with frequent visits. Deborah Garcia, human resources manager at Metters Industries Inc. in Camarillo, remembers him showing up in her office three or four times over the last few years, even though she did not encourage him.

“Last September, I had to talk to him simply,” Garcia said. “I told him, ‘Believe me, I spend more time with you than with other applicants, but there are no openings.’ His reaction was, ‘Oh,’ which I thought was very childlike. But he seemed thankful and appreciative.”

Winterbourne’s appearance often turned off prospective employers.

“He showed up with shoulder-length hair and looked very incongruous,” said Philip Brandes, who interviewed Winterbourne in 1989 at Comptek Research in Goleta. “We basically concluded he was a space case.”

After years of frustration in the job market, Winterbourne apparently got the message that his looks might be holding him back.

In March, he visited an employment agency in response to an advertisement about a job in brokerage, said Jenifer Peterson, account executive at Techstaff West Inc., Oxnard. Winterbourne “asked me if I thought he should shave off his beard and mustache--if (not doing) that would work against him in a job interview.

“I told him he needed to look as neat as possible.”

Even with door after door slammed in his face, Winterbourne wasn’t pushy or obnoxious, nor did he lose his temper, personnel managers said.

“He was never unpleasant in any way,” Brandes said. “He just seemed eccentric.”

Richard Kraft, manager of the Merrill Lynch brokerage’s Oxnard office, called Winterbourne “well-spoken, articulate and polite.”

Although Peterson said Winterbourne “wasn’t rude or mean, there was something about him that wasn’t quite right. He struck me as being a bit strange, but I couldn’t pinpoint quite what it was.”

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Winterbourne, who earned a bachelor of science degree from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, mostly applied to engineering firms. At some point, however, he decided to try other fields. He even took a general skills exam at Merrill Lynch.

“He did reasonably well,” Kraft said, “particularly in the math portions, but we just didn’t have any positions.”

Winterbourne’s tenacity impressed people. He had stopped in at Merrill Lynch every week for the past two months, Kraft said.

“We have people come in, but none that I can think of who came in as often as he did,” Kraft said.

None of the personnel people would have predicted Winterbourne’s rampage.

“I was surprised that he was violent,” Pena said. “He was always gentle and polite . . . solemn and quiet.”

Brandes said Winterbourne “didn’t strike any of us as a dangerous person.”

Winterbourne apparently resigned from Northrop because he couldn’t adapt to a new assignment. His long-term unemployment worked against him in job interviews, personnel officials said.

“He couldn’t explain why he was unemployed so long,” Pena said.

Brandes agreed: “What was striking was the large gap in his employment history. That’s the thing that struck us all.”

Winterbourne’s persistence and appearance made people remember him. When Ellen Butler at SRS Technologies saw his photo on television Thursday night, she recognized him as the man who brought application after application to her Camarillo office.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s him!’ ” she said. “The whole thing gave me the willies. I got my job at the Oxnard unemployment office,” where Winterbourne shot three people to death.

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Some managers struggled to understand the cause of Winterbourne’s rage.

“I think the guy was so frustrated with trying to find a job that he just went off the deep end,” said Larry Fryman, manager of the Oxnard office of Tracor Applied Science Inc.

Winterbourne applied at Tracor about three years ago, following up with phone calls.

“I didn’t want to risk hiring someone like he appeared to be,” Fryman said. “Maybe it’s good it turned out the way that it did. We had to do some layoffs recently, and if we had to lay him off, who knows how he would have reacted?”

Winterbourne’s anger at the system is a sign of the times, Garcia said.

“People are so desperate looking for jobs,” she said. “I get calls from people crying on the phone.”