Hilbun’s Life a Study in Contradictions : Profile: Man charged in deadly O.C. rampage seemed ordinary to some, deeply disturbed to others.

Mark Hilbun’s most extraordinary hours--the ones he allegedly spent knifing and shooting his way across Orange County--can be seen as a contradiction to his mostly ordinary life, or as the final, intense culmination of trouble that was many years in the making.

This was a man who was so unobtrusive, so apparently normal, that few noticed or remembered him. But he was also a man so withdrawn and ill at ease around others, and occasionally so bizarre, that some saw him as deeply disturbed.

A mailman whose obsession with a female co-worker had cost him the job he loved, Hilbun has been accused of stabbing his 63-year-old mother to death as she slept in a pink nightgown on that sunny May 6 morning. Then, slipping in through the back door of the Dana Point post office, he shot dead his best friend and wounded a former co-worker.

By the time he was caught 40 hours later, sipping vodka-and-7-Up cocktails in a bar on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach, police say he had wounded four others.

Now, as Hilbun, 39, sits in jail, psychiatrists are evaluating him to determine if he is mentally competent to assist in his own defense, an issue that will be the focus of a court hearing this week.

A year or more before the shootings, Hilbun’s friends had begun to feel deeply uneasy, sensing ominous changes in his behavior.

Mary Jane Galletly--whose longtime boyfriend, Charles Barbagallo, was Hilbun’s closest friend until he took a bullet between the eyes that day in the post office--remembers receiving calls at home from an edgy, frightened Hilbun.

“He would say he had been listening to music and he heard voices coming out of the speakers, over the music,” recalled Galletly, “and he would think the world was coming to an end,” a thought Hilbun would echo later in discussing his rampage.

Hilbun has told at least one person that when he stabbed his mother, slit the throat of her beloved cocker spaniel, Golden, and shot his best friend, he was convinced that the world was about to end, and wanted to spare them the impending holocaust.

Part of his plan, Hilbun claimed, was to escape into the wild with Kim Springer, a mail carrier whom he had pursued for months, and start the human race over, like Adam and Eve. One of the charges against Hilbun is the attempted kidnaping of Springer.

Hilbun, sporting a graying beard, his figure thin from occasionally refusing jail food, has also said that he sometimes believes himself to be Jesus Christ. When he hurled himself from the second floor of the jail in June, fracturing his spine, he was trying to sacrifice himself for mankind, Hilbun said.

If Hilbun--accused of crimes that could usher him into the gas chamber--is deemed competent to stand trial, his attorneys have hinted they may mount an insanity defense, a tactic that is rarely employed and rarely successful.

But some who know details of the Hilbun case scoff at the notion that Hilbun had lost his senses when he cut a 30-mile swath of terror across Orange County.

They point to the time and thought he invested in loading his pickup with survival gear, and the way he disguised himself and his truck to evade capture: shaving his mustache and cutting his hair, and affixing an Idaho license plate and magnetic door signs from a local business to his vehicle. Would a crazed man have acted that way?

People who have met Mark Richard Hilbun almost always use the same word to describe him: Quiet. Of all the people whose lives touched his, relatively few seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary about the brown-eyed six-footer.

Hilbun’s youth appears to have been comfortably middle-class. The only son of a paper products salesman and a homemaker, he attended elementary school in suburban La Mirada, junior high in Sacramento and then Sunny Hills High School, in a prosperous section of Fullerton.

In contrast to his sister, a bubbly cheerleader, Hilbun was reserved, a member of the high school “parking lot crew” that preferred cigarette breaks to class. Although one classmate recalls as odd his habit of sitting in his open garage, watching goings-on in the street for hours, others remember Hilbun as an average student who blended silently into the crowd.

“He didn’t seem weird. He was just a loner,” classmate Peter Kruip said. “But he seemed like a normal person. He wore (Levi’s) 501s and a white T-shirt like everyone else.”

Even years later, postal colleagues in Dana Point described Hilbun as “mild,” and “hard to get to know,” and his landlord noted that his rent was paid on time and his apartment was always immaculate. But a few, like fellow letter carrier Bob Gandara, said they felt that something a little ominous lurked beneath Hilbun’s quiet manner.

“He was almost too quiet,” said Gandara, 40.

A close friend who spent a lot of time with Hilbun in the last two years describes him as “totally introverted.” His job, his books and his music were the only things that meant anything to him and he seemed so uninterested in women as to be “almost asexual.”

He favored Rolling Stone magazine and the novels of John Steinbeck and Stephen King. But he was especially fixed on the surreal horror tales of turn-of-the-century American writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose work, one critic said, was characterized by “the horror of unknowable forces or beings which sweep men aside as indifferently as men do ants.”

Hilbun first showed signs of mental problems in March, 1980, when, as a member of the security police squadron at Edwards Air Force Base, he was hospitalized for a psychiatric evaluation. Military records show that the diagnosis was a schizoid personality with depressive features.

Just what triggered the psychiatric examination is unclear. But years later he would tell a friend, letter carrier Denise Arroyo-Oldridge, that he had turned in his gun because he feared he might commit suicide.

Military records say his weapon was taken away and his security clearance revoked. His psychiatric problem apparently was not serious enough, however, to mar his military record. After he completed the usual, four-year enlistment in December, 1980, he apparently received an honorable discharge.

A civilian again, Hilbun studied electronics at Orange Coast College and received an associate of arts degree in 1983, later taking a job at the post office. For quite a while, his life appeared to proceed without incident: He delivered the mail, took kayaking lessons and built a formidable compact-disc collection, his favorites being the laid-back Grateful Dead and hard-rockers Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. Most mornings upon waking, he watched MTV.

Arroyo-Oldridge, who kayaked with Hilbun, said she viewed him as quiet and thoughtful. She said he confessed to being lonely and wanting to get married and have children. When she spoke to him, he would avert his eyes, turn “beet red” and jerk his head to the side a little.

Galletly says that from the time she met Hilbun, about two years ago, he gave her an “eerie” feeling. Last fall, she said, he dropped by the San Clemente home she shared with Barbagallo, sweaty after a bike ride. He wanted the addresses of two of Springer’s friends, but she did not have them.

“We had this swiveling lounge chair and he just swiveled back and forth for about 45 minutes,” Galletly said. “He wouldn’t leave and he wouldn’t talk to me except for one-word answers. He just sat swiveling in that chair that whole time with his eyes darting. It made me very nervous.”

Hilbun’s kayaking instructor, Ed Gillet, said Hilbun was “never really outgoing, not the most socially adjusted.” But around the spring of 1992, he seemed especially tense and oversensitive, Gillet said. One morning, on a kayaking trip, Hilbun was convinced that the others were “trying to get rid of him” because they pushed off into the water before he was ready, Gillet said.

It was around that time Hilbun’s troubles with the law began. On his way to a concert in June, 1992, Hilbun was stopped on the San Diego Freeway in Lakewood by a California Highway Patrol officer. Court records show that when the officer tried to arrest him for drunk driving, he sped off, knocking her down. He pleaded guilty to drunk driving and resisting arrest and was put on probation.

The following month, he was headed for trouble again, this time for an obsession that helped cost him his job and his freedom.

He had his eye on Springer. A group of postal workers had planned a July trip to the Orange County Fair, but the others dropped out, leaving only Springer and Hilbun, friends said. After that day at the fair, Hilbun began leaving notes for her at work and at home and hanging around her apartment. Galletly remembers Hilbun telling Barbagallo that he imagined himself and Springer running off together, “like a prince and princess.”

Springer, however, had a boyfriend; she was not interested in Hilbun. But he persisted with a flurry of rambling love messages on her answering machine. Police reports say that in one he threatened to kill himself if she refused to talk to him. In another, he said, “Kim, I really want to see you in your bathing suit,” and made noises as if, the report said, he were “kissing, holding or having sex with” her.

In September, Springer filed a complaint with police, which she withdrew five months later because Hilbun had agreed to stay away from her and was receiving psychiatric treatment.

As early as the spring of 1992, friends had detected a change in his behavior.

“All of a sudden,” said Arroyo-Oldridge, the previously withdrawn Hilbun “wanted to get together with people, barbecue at the beach, things like that. He got real profane, using the F -word all over the place. Everyone noticed the change. A lot of us thought, ‘Something’s going on.’ ”

But it was a September incident that put him out of a job. At work on Sept. 17, Hilbun had music blaring from a portable tape player as he sorted the mail. He sang and danced. And he wore a pair of green men’s underwear over his mailman’s uniform.

Summoned into a supervisor’s office, he emerged only to put the underwear on his head, and continued singing and dancing. He was escorted off the premises.

Postal employees say that within a day or two, Hilbun returned to drop off the keys to his mail truck. Inexplicably, he released a white balloon at the post office and left behind a baby pacifier for Springer. He also dropped off his two pet rabbits, and when a colleague asked what should be done with them, Hilbun reportedly said they could be skinned and eaten.

Worried that he would commit suicide, Arroyo-Oldridge called Hilbun’s mother, asking if she was aware of the way her son was behaving. “She said, ‘I’ve tried to help him and I can’t help him anymore,’ ” Arroyo-Oldridge recalled.

Arroyo-Oldridge also called Postmaster Don Lowe, who she said alerted law enforcement. Sheriff’s deputies visited Hilbun at home and took him to a psychiatric hospital. An involuntary, 72-hour commitment was extended to two weeks. His illness was diagnosed as manic depression and he was put on lithium, a mood stabilizer.

Postal Inspection Service spokeswoman Pamela Prince said Hilbun, who had been put on paid leave since the day of the underwear incident, was fired Dec. 8.

One Dana Point neighbor recalls that Hilbun was acting strangely the day that deputies picked him up. Todd Granquist, 25, a machinist, says Hilbun hurled a glass terrarium onto the street, shattering it less than 20 feet from where schoolchildren were getting off a bus.

“All the kids scattered, yelling,” Granquist said.

A few hours later, Hilbun chatted with Granquist, petting and talking to Granquist’s two dogs, then went home. As Hilbun was walking away, however, he spun around and shouted from across the street. “If you don’t keep those f------ dogs in your yard, I’m going to kill ‘em and skin ‘em!” Granquist recalled Hilbun shouting. “It was like he had a double personality.”

For periods after he started taking lithium, Hilbun left Springer alone. But a week before the May 6 shootings he told at least two friends that he had stopped taking the drug.

He had begun talking about Springer again, and had sent her a love letter saying he was going to “kill us both and take us both to hell.” He had been hanging around her apartment.

The Sunday before the shootings, Hilbun called Barbagallo, talking of the frustration of trying to get his job back. A message Hilbun left on Barbagallo’s answering machine prompted him to tell Galletly that Hilbun was “really off the deep end, that he’s lost touch with reality.”

In a call later that day, Hilbun told Galletly to ignore his previous calls. Something about that call bothered her even more than the others. “This time he sounded completely normal, which scared me to death,” she said.

In a call that same day to Arroyo-Oldridge, he pleaded with her to arrange a meeting with Springer, sobbing that if he could not offer his love to Springer, he would kill himself.

Later, he called Arroyo-Oldridge to say he was feeling better, and would see his doctor the next day. She was anything but reassured.

Four days after that, Hilbun seemed “calm and methodical” as he walked into the post office with a gun, letter carrier Robert Hagstrom said.

“He looked like he had worked out a plan,” Hagstrom said.

Wearing a green T-shirt with the word “psycho” emblazoned across the chest, he entered through a back door, wrapped both hands around his .22 magnum revolver, and fired a fatal bullet between Barbagallo’s eyes. Witnesses say he shouted, “Kim! Kim!” Springer hid unharmed under a desk in her boss’ office.

Police and sheriff’s deputies say Hilbun fired at--but missed--his former supervisor, and wounded a co-worker with a blast of tiny pellets from bullets called “snake rounds.” He also allegedly beat, shot and tried to rob an elderly man in his garage, shot a woman who was following him in Newport Beach and accosted three people at automated tellers.

When he fled the post office, he had a kayak atop his truck, but ditched it soon afterward. When investigators eventually searched the truck, they found the makings of an extended outdoor trip, including food, fishing and boating gear, a compass, toilet paper, a camp stove, a deck of cards, books, a tape player. A few items suggested that he expected company: a game of backgammon, a pair of women’s shorts and two women’s swimsuits.

Letter carrier Hagstrom, for one, says he believes Hilbun had it all worked out.

“I think he’s laughing at everyone right now because he figured out a way to get away with murder by pretending to be crazy,” he said.