Senseless Violence Leaves Its Deadly Mark on O.C. : Incidents: Family disputes and random attacks are among episodes that bring the homicide rate to a startling 212.

At times in 1993, Orange County’s local headlines read like the roster for a true-crime television docudrama. A month could not pass, it seemed, without a bizarre, big-city crime story shaking up the suburbs.

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Co-workers killed one another. Family disputes turned deadly. And perhaps most frightening were the seemingly random attacks: A 2-year-old Santa Ana boy was slain by a gang member’s bullet as his father carried him home from a haircut. A Mission Viejo couple was killed by a suspected drunk driver as they returned from their daughter’s softball tournament. A 64-year-old grandmother was gunned down in front of her home during a daytime drive-by shooting.

The tragedy reached from the Dana Point post office--the flash point of a murderous rampage in which a former letter carrier is accused of killing two people and injuring five more--to a La Habra parking lot where a traffic dispute turned into a savage beating that left a mother of four dead on the sidewalk.

It was a record-breaking year of bad news in Orange County. Homicides blasted past last year’s record-breaking total of 186 by Nov. 20, and had reached 212 as of Monday. Even an armed, uniformed police officer wearing a bulletproof vest was among the victims.

The only thing more saddening than the numbers are the stories behind the crimes.

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Barely a month into the new year, a janitor with a criminal record and rocky personal life was charged with dousing a bookkeeper with gasoline, setting her afire with a cigarette lighter, then calmly walking away as the woman was engulfed in flames that fatally burned her.

Authorities said Jonathan Daniel D’Arcy, 31, of La Habra, apparently was desperate for $150 he was owed by the Quintessence of Building Maintenance Co. when he attacked Karen LaBorde, 42. LaBorde, a mother of two who lived in Orange, was known for saying, “Better a hug than a handshake.” Officials said D’Arcy’s $150 check was probably in LaBorde’s office and was destroyed in the fire that killed her Feb. 2.

D’Arcy had a long history of lawbreaking. As a teen-ager, he committed several burglaries, including stealing stereo equipment from a church. He was placed in classes for the “emotionally handicapped,” and a juvenile court psychologist found that he showed “a deviation in social development.”

As an adult, D’Arcy was jailed for breaking into a neighbor’s home and stealing household items in 1981 and for assaulting two men with a baseball bat a decade later. The woman he lived with had sought several restraining orders against him, alleging that D’Arcy abused her children. The woman’s 17-year-old son described D’Arcy as “a nice guy” whose rages sometimes turned him into “the meanest person in the world.”

D’Arcy could face the death penalty if convicted of murder and torture. He is currently being evaluated at a psychiatric hospital to determine if he is mentally fit to stand trial.

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For 14 years, Garden Grove Police Officer Howard E. Dallies had been chasing criminals. In March, one caught him.

It was about 2:45 a.m. when shooting erupted on Aldgate Avenue, a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes in the city that Dallies, 36, had patrolled since 1984. Awakened by gunshots, residents rushed into the street in their pajamas in time to hear the screech of a motorcycle speeding away. They found Dallies, a father of two young boys, in the street bleeding from a stomach wound just below his bulletproof vest.

In line to become a sergeant, Dallies already had done stints as a vice and narcotics investigator and a training officer. He had received 26 citizen commendations and had been named a master officer, serving as a mentor for rookies and earning a reputation as a “cop’s cop.”

He was the 31st Orange County officer, and the fifth from Garden Grove, to be slain on duty. Orange County Sheriff’s Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins, 30, was killed Christmas Day in an accidental shooting while on duty.

“He knew you put the badge on, you put the gun on--it’s a risk, you take that risk,” Dallies’ widow, Mary, an Irvine police dispatcher, said a few days after he died. “He knew that was what he was doing. It’s a scary job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

About 4,000 people attended the officer’s funeral at the Crystal Cathedral, including Gov. Pete Wilson, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams and a cadre of local, state and federal officers who arrived in a checkerboard of black-and-white patrol cars that stretched for seven miles.

“Howard Dallies typified our department’s motto as he lived his life with courage, courtesy and commitment,” Garden Grove Police Sgt. George Jaramillo said in the eulogy.

Police recovered what they believe is the gunman’s motorcycle and publicized a composite photo of the gunman on the “America’s Most Wanted” TV show, but no arrests have been made in the case.

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Perhaps the year’s most terrifying incident came in May, when a fired letter carrier with a history of mental problems allegedly stabbed his mother and her dog, then burst into the Dana Point post office and killed one of his best friends. Five others were shot and wounded before Mark Richard Hilbun was arrested 36 hours later at a Huntington Beach sports bar.

Witnesses said Hilbun, 39, was wearing a “Psycho” T-shirt when he stormed into the post office in search of Kim Springer, a fellow letter carrier whom he had followed at work, sent love letters to and stalked with obscene messages on her answering machine. Authorities said Springer hid in a back office as Hilbun opened fire, killing Charles T. Barbagallo of San Clemente and injuring another postal worker.

Hilbun fled the post office, a kayak strapped on his pickup truck, and allegedly shot John Kersey in a Dana Point garage. Later that afternoon, police said, Hilbun shot Patricia Salot of Costa Mesa--who had chased his car in Newport Beach--several times in the face. Two nights later, he shot at a couple during a holdup at an automated teller machine, but no one was injured in that incident, police said.

Investigators looking for clues about Hilbun at his mother’s Corona del Mar home found Frances Hilbun, 63, stabbed to death in her bedroom. The family’s dog, Golden, met the same end in the kitchen.

Two days later, after a countywide manhunt that turned up few clues, regulars at the Centerfield Sports Bar & Grill spotted Hilbun--his hair cut and dyed, face shaven--sipping Stolichnaya and 7 Up on a bar stool. They called police. “It’s almost like he wanted to be caught,” one police officer mused at the time.

A diagnosed manic-depressive, Hilbun previously was arrested for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer. In 1992 he spent two weeks in a mental hospital and was charged with making harassing phone calls to Springer; he was suspended and eventually fired from the post office for bizarre behavior, such as coming to work with his underwear outside his pants, then sticking it on his head.

“A lot of people thought it was a prank and didn’t take it seriously,” letter carrier Robert Gandara remembered. “I though Mark needed some help.”

Hilbun has been ruled mentally competent to stand trial and faces a preliminary hearing Jan. 22.

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Another man went berserk, allegedly killing loved ones at the workplace, two months after Hilbun’s arrest.

Douglas Frederick Stanley, 57, apparently was depressed that his brother and sister-in-law planned to move to Arkansas without him. Police said he opened fire at a Fountain Valley embroidery shop in July, leaving his sister-in-law and a co-worker dead behind the counter.

A onetime ranch hand from Wyoming known for his swagger, Stanley had a history of threatening relatives before he allegedly gunned down the shop owner, Joyce Stanley, 52, and Terry Vasquez, 41, one of her employees. Acquaintances said he was a “survivalist type” who fancied guns, and a detective testified that just before the killings, Stanley told a friend in Wyoming that he would “take out” his brother, sister-in-law and a third person.

Joyce Stanley, her husband, Charles, and Vasquez had planned to close the shop, Design It, within a month to move to Arkansas; they had already bought land there. Douglas Stanley did various chores at the embroidery shop but was not included in the plan to move.

Stanley fled after the slayings, but was eventually arrested in Colorado when a gun slipped from his pants as he talked with a police officer, authorities said. He is charged with murder, along with special circumstance allegations that make him eligible for a death sentence. No trial date has been set.

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Tragedy struck south Orange County again in July when a Mission Viejo couple was killed in a car accident as they drove home from their daughter’s softball tournament. A Laguna Beach doctor who had worked with AIDS patients was charged with drunk driving and murder.

Mark and Noreen Minzey, their 11-year-old daughter, Karie, and two friends were driving along Santiago Canyon Road when internist Ronald Joseph Allen, 31, who had allegedly been swerving erratically in and out of lanes, hit them head-on. Allen, who had a history of drug-related arrests, said later he was distraught because his father had died in Chicago earlier that day.

Karie, who suffered severe head injuries in the crash, spent six weeks in a hospital and then moved with her older sister to Georgia to live with her aunt and uncle. Allen faces charges of second-degree murder at his trial, scheduled for May.

The two young girls have also filed a civil suit against Allen and the company that rented him the car he was driving during the accident.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I do wonder how I’m going to be able to live with myself. I’m despairing,” Allen said in a jail interview. “If I were that family, I would be so angry at me. What I did was so totally inexcusable.”

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As shoppers and one of her daughters watched, a mother of four was savagely beaten and then died of a heart attack in a crowded La Habra parking lot in September. Nobody intervened to stop the beating, which apparently stemmed from an argument over a traffic dispute.

Rebecca Luker, 22, of Whittier and Sara Ward, 17, of La Habra are accused of attacking Tina Roxanne Rodriguez, 26, in front of a hair salon in a strip mall. Luker, Ward and El Monte resident John Richard Collins, 25--who allegedly cheered during the beating--are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

Investigators believe Luker and Ward hit Rodriguez, who suffered from Grave’s disease, about 35 times. After Rodriguez fell and hit her head on the pavement, police said, the women continued to kick her and one of them banged her head against the curb.

The women allegedly taunted Rodriguez, who was black, with racial slurs during the fight, but police later decided against classifying the killing as a hate crime.

Rodriguez, an unemployed fast-food worker, had four children ages 3 to 11. Just before her death, she was considering moving back to her native Kentucky, friends said.

“It’s hard to imagine that in such a busy shopping center someone didn’t get involved,” La Habra Sgt. Robert Wyse said at the time. “Usually there’s a good Samaritan in every crowd. I guess that wasn’t the case this time.”

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Several high-profile Orange County cases from previous years were resolved or reopened during 1993:

* Stephen Wagner, the top financial officer of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District who pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $4 million in public funds in the state’s largest-ever school district embezzlement, was sentenced to six years in state prison in June. He has also pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in exchange for the promise of a sentence of no more than 10 years in federal prison. That sentencing is set for March.

* Steven Wymer, the Newport Beach investment adviser who defrauded small cities and government agencies--mostly in Iowa, California and Colorado--of about $92 million, began serving a 14 1/2-year federal prison sentence in September.

* Richard K. Overton, who is accused of the 1988 killing of his wife, a popular Capistrano Unified School District member, was granted a new trial by an appellate court panel. Because of the severe depression of Overton’s attorney, his trial had an unprecedented yearlong recess and the justices ruled that the attitudes of the jurors may have become set during the delay. A new trial has not yet been scheduled.

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Times staff writer Rene Lynch contributed to this article.