Jury Hears Victim’s Dying Declaration

Her face and most of her body horribly burned, Karen Marie LaBorde knew she was near death. But even as she moaned in agony in the hospital, the 42-year-old bookkeeper identified Jonathan D’Arcy as the man who doused her with gasoline and set her on fire.

“He threw this cup of . . . I guess it was gas. . . . He threw it all over me and then he lit me,” she said in a faint voice.

“And how did he light [it]?” Tustin Det. Douglas Finney asked.

“Cigarette lighter,” she replied.

Although jurors heard some of LaBorde’s last words Monday in a rare tape-recording of a dying declaration, they saw only a color photograph of the former janitor charged with her slaying on Feb. 2, 1993, in a Tustin business office.

D’Arcy took the unusual move Monday of refusing his right to be present for the start of his murder trial. Meanwhile, another Orange County Superior Court judge ordered the 34-year-old D’Arcy to end a 12-day hunger strike in apparent protest of the way his case has been handled.

Defense attorney George A. Peters contends his client has a long history of mental problems and never intended to torture or severely maim LaBorde, circumstances that make him eligible for the death penalty if convicted.

In D’Arcy’s mounting depression over money problems, the bookkeeper came to symbolize all his frustrations in life, Peters told the jury of 11 men and one woman.

“He was about to do something only a madman would do,” Peters said.

D’Arcy has blamed a space heater for igniting the fire and has vehemently protested use of his alleged paranoid-type mental problems in the defense case.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko said D’Arcy knew exactly what he was doing, and set LaBorde on fire with his cigarette lighter out of revenge over a paycheck he believed he was owed.

As flames engulfed the woman, Molko said D’Arcy watched without helping. D’Arcy eventually walked out of the office, asked a passerby for a light, and sat smoking until police, summoned by an employee inside the building, arrived, Molko said.

Earlier that morning, Molko said D’Arcy stopped at a service station, filled a squeeze bottle with $1 worth of gas, and told his girlfriend’s teenage son: “No one screws with me. I want to burn [the bookkeeper]. I want to go light her on fire.”

The paycheck, as it turned out, was D’Arcy’s for the asking, LaBorde said in her dying declaration.

“He made a mistake,” she said. “I didn’t hold his money.”