A Lifetime Sentence : Post Office Rampage Survivor Fears She’ll Never Be Free of Anguish

For more than a year, Mark Richard Hilbun has remained behind bars, but for Kimberly Renee Springer, he is never far away, nor is the memory of May 6, 1993. It was on that day that Springer’s world, as she knew it, came crashing to an end.

“The whole thing just took me and knocked me right off the face of the earth,” Springer said Tuesday in her first extensive interview since Hilbun’s 38-hour rampage in which his own attorney admits he killed his mother and his best friend and tried in vain to kidnap Springer.

He had stalked her for more than a year and showed up at the Dana Point post office where both of them worked fully intending to take her away. Foiled in his attempt that Thursday morning, he continued his robbery and shooting spree before being arrested the following Saturday.

Hilbun, 40, faces two counts of murder, seven counts of attempted murder and one count of attempted kidnaping, and has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

Springer, 30, faces what she sees as a lifetime of restoration and recovery, waking up from the nightmare that has given her what she and her therapist call an existence on permanent hold.

“My anxiety level is still way out there,” she said, crying often, pacing and twisting her long fingers together as she spoke.

She feels anger, not only for Hilbun--whose name she won’t say, referring to him only as “that person”--but also for her employer of five years, the U.S. Postal Service, and her union, the National Assn. of Letter Carriers. Springer recently filed a lawsuit against the union seeking $10 million in damages.

She also feels a deep-rooted survivor’s guilt, she said, for the people who died or who suffered injury, such as Patricia Salot of Newport Beach, who took six shots, all because of a twisted passion felt for Springer.

Prosecutors have asked her not to talk to other survivors, such as Salot, for fear of tainting potential testimony. But Springer said that only makes it harder.

“It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I can say, ‘You’re not really to blame.’ The lives affected, the co-workers, even his close friends, his family, all the other people whose lives are affected . . . I can’t stop thinking about it.

“I’m getting along better than I was, but . . . “

Her voice trailed off, as it often does, but it’s better than it was, she said, noting that she could barely speak and then only mutter “Martian talk” in the hours and days after the shootings.

“Even now, I can’t do more than one thing at a time. I can’t concentrate. And I’m always looking over my shoulder,” she said.

Men with “salty, gray” hair, in particular--the same color as Hilbun’s--send her into spasms of paranoia.

“I used to be outgoing, never fearful of things,” she said. “I was easy about being alone, but now, I’ll never live by myself. Never again. I can’t be on my own. I just can’t.”

She lives with her grandparents, moving from Laguna Beach to their home in the country, and spends most of her time with a tight circle of friends, as well as her two sisters, a nephew and her parents, who still live in her hometown of Garden Grove.

Dating--even trusting men as friends--is a thing of the past, she said, as are dreams of marriage and children.

“I just don’t trust them,” she said of men. “I don’t trust anybody really. It’s hard. I’m just not ready for any of that.”

With men, she said, there’s always suspicion, the inescapable sense that “they want something more. I don’t even think about that any more. It’s no longer one of my interests.”

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Around the time of the shootings, Springer had been dating a man, with whom she lived for a while and who, to no avail, she said, confronted Hilbun over the stalking. She and the man parted ways, and no one has replaced him.

Frances Mead-Messinger, her therapist, whom Springer recently began seeing twice a week instead of five, said her client has moved “from a stage of shock to one of denial. She’s only now beginning to accept what actually happened in Dana Point. So when you try to project her into the future . . . she just isn’t there yet.”

Both Mead-Messinger and Jack M. Earley, Springer’s attorney, sat with her during Tuesday’s interview at Earley’s office in Irvine.

Springer said the hardest times have been notable anniversaries--such as Thanksgiving, 1993, because Hilbun was released from a mental hospital one year before, after being fired from the post office and then arrested for the first time for having violated a restraining order.

But the hardest was May 6, 1994. She found herself thinking continuously of Charles T. Barbagallo, 42, Hilbun’s best friend and one of her favorite co-workers, who died in the post office from a single shot between the eyes from a .22-caliber revolver.

In tearful desperation, she found herself calling radio station KLOS to request a song. She asked them to play John Lennon’s “Imagine,” which had been Barbagallo’s favorite.

“They asked me what my name was,” she said. “I told them, ‘Renee,’ and left it at that.”

Small and thin with straw-blond hair and deep-set blue eyes, Springer said she has lost so much weight that she’s down to a Size 4. Stress has complicated almost every facet of her life, she said, from the movie scenes she finds herself freaking out over to the fact that she can’t fall asleep until 4 in the morning.

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She tried working during January and February, even delivering letters on a route but got so sick to her stomach that she had to go home. She’s at her grandparents’ place now, collecting workers’ compensation and hoping the civil and criminal courts give her a measure of satisfaction.

She can’t believe Hilbun won’t be tried until early 1995 and complains that she and all of his other victims will have to delay peace of mind through one more grueling year.

She said her greatest fear is “him getting out . . . being sent to a mental hospital where he might escape.”

She said she feels for women who have been stalked, who live “with this incredible feeling that someone out there is thinking about you constantly, and you’re the reason they’re doing everything they do. It just makes you crazy.”

Springer hopes her lawsuit results in “changes, rather than Band-Aids.” She blames the Postal Service but particularly her union for “not protecting me when they promised they would.” She also blames them for tending to blame her--in Earley’s words, for wanting to know what she did “to egg the guy on.”

Both Postal Service officials and union representatives declined to discuss Springer’s charges.

But regardless of how the suit or Hilbun’s trial turns out, Springer will never again be the person she was before. She might be a better person, her therapist says, but never the same. She dreams of leaving her native Orange County and moving far away.

“I want to go to a low-key place where I’m not such a wreck any more. I’m hyper anyway, but this really kind of did it for me,” she said, and for the first time all day, she managed a small laugh.