Waiting for Justice to Take Its Course : Kin of Women Slain in Shop Deal With Fear, Pain

For Pamela Harrington, the nightmare of her mother’s murder continues to haunt her every day.

“Sometimes, the nights just don’t end,” said the 32-year-old daughter of Joyce Stanley, who was shot to death a year ago today inside her Fountain Valley embroidery shop along with co-worker and close friend Terry Vasquez.

Accused of killing the two women is Stanley’s 58-year-old brother-in-law, Douglas Frederick Stanley, who fled Orange County immediately after the shootings and became the subject of a nationwide manhunt before he was arrested four days later in a small town in Colorado.

Douglas Stanley, who was extradited to California two months after the killings, is scheduled to go to trial later this summer. Family members said Thursday that only when he is “locked up for life” will they be able to get on with their lives.

“I just fall apart sometimes,” said Vasquez’s mother, Nannette Adelsperger, 66, of Temecula. “Any situation can just trigger my emotions and I won’t see it coming. We won’t be able to have any closure to this until we go to court.”

Harrington said she has lived “day-to-day, hour-to-hour” since her 52-year-old mother was shot on a Thursday afternoon last summer. She said she has had trouble concentrating on even the simplest of tasks because the memories of that tragic day continue to haunt her.

“I remember my dad calling me and saying, ‘Doug’s gone berserk and mom and Terry have been shot. You’ve got to get here right away,’ ” the daughter recalled.

Court records depict Douglas Stanley as a desperate and despairing man who lived at the home of his brother’s family, along with his mother. He was often upset and apologetic over his failure to do a better job of running his life, according to court documents.

Neighbors and acquaintances described the defendant as a “survivalist type” who fancied guns and frequently went about making threats against people. The day before the slayings, Stanley called a friend in Wyoming and vowed to “take out” his brother, sister-in-law and an unidentified third person, police testified at a preliminary hearing last November.

Harrington recalled that on the day of the shootings, she drove in a daze from the accounting business she and her husband run in Irvine to Design-It, the embroidery business owned by her mother and father, Charles Stanley. She said she arrived to the sight of numerous police cars and spotted her grief-stricken father pacing back and forth in the parking lot.

Harrington said it was hours before police confirmed that her mother was dead.

Adelsperger and her husband, Richard, said they learned of the shootings from a television report and had their worst fears confirmed when a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy arrived at their house to tell them that their only daughter was dead.

But the news of the deaths was only the beginning of a four-day nightmare for the families, who lived in a state of fear during the time that Douglas Stanley remained at large.

“There was terror,” said Harrington’s 55-year-old husband, Robert. “It was a total relief when he was caught.”

Since family members didn’t know of a motive for the attacks, they said they feared that Douglas Stanley might come looking for them. The Adelspergers stayed in a motel for a few days, then moved to the home of a friend.

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The Harringtons also stayed at a motel, while other family members remained under guard at the Westminster home of Charles and Joyce Stanley--the home they had opened up to Charles’ troubled older brother a few years before and where he lived free of charge.

“He was well taken care of by my parents,” Pamela Harrington said of her uncle. “They were very supportive of him, providing him with a place to live and with a paycheck.”

The daughter declined to discuss her uncle in any detail, saying she did not want to say anything to jeopardize his trial, which has been scheduled for Aug. 29 in Orange County Superior Court.

Douglas Stanley has pleaded not guilty to two charges of murder. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty in the case, which rankles family members. They said they are now hoping for a life sentence.

“This is going to be with us for the rest of our lives,” Robert Harrington said. “There are many more victims in this than the two who were taken away.”

The family members said they are at loss to explain why the slayings happened.

Court documents unsealed last fall include police interviews with Design-It employees who told investigators that Joyce Stanley considered her brother-in-law, who worked as a maintenance man at the embroidery shop, to be a troublemaker and that she had imminent plans to relocate the business to Springdale, Ark., to get rid of him.

But family members have steadfastly denied this. In a previous interview, Charles Stanley said, “We would never have abandoned him, ever. That’s just misinformation.”

A warm letter written by Joyce Stanley to her brother-in-law and found among his possessions after his arrest shows how she felt about him. In it she wrote, “I hope I was able to get through to you that I am available to listen if you want to talk with someone and that I do care.”

It was Charles and Joyce Stanley who took custody of Douglas’ daughter, Lisa, when she was 8 years old and raised her as one of their own children, Pamela Harrington said.

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The couple, who had been married for 33 years, had already sold their Westminster home and were planning to leave on July 11--two days after the shooting--for Arkansas, where they were to oversee construction of a new embroidery plant.

Terry Vasquez and her husband, Eddie, had already purchased a home in Springdale and were in the process of moving from their Santa Ana home when the shootings occurred.

“The day it happened, I remember Eddie and my father sitting on the front steps of the police station and they decided that they were going to follow through with my mother and Terry’s dream,” Harrington said. “My dad said, ‘We’ve got to continue on.’ ”

And they have.

The embroidery business that Joyce Stanley began in the garage of her home 13 years ago continues to thrive in Springdale and is being run by Charles Stanley, his 29-year-old daughter, Sharon, and Eddie Vasquez.

Pamela Harrington said she has not spoken to her uncle since the shootings and has borne the burden of the case since the rest of her family moved from Orange County, leaving the painful memories behind.

“My family is all gone, so I’ve been doubly abandoned,” she said. “I’m kind of here holding the bag, but I plan to attend every day of the trial--every second. I know it might be hard for me and may hurt, but my mom would have been there if it had been me.”