Who Killed Arlene Hoffman? : People: The just-hired secretary to Orange County Supervisor Jim Silva was slain by an arrow at her home. Friends say she was strong but gentle and full of compassion, and wonder why anyone would want her dead.

By NANCY WRIDE

Jan. 27, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

There is no way to do justice to the memory of Arlene Hoffman, her childhood friends say, no way to express the loss of such a gentle, strong woman.

At 57, she was valiantly trying to get on with life after burying her husband of 40 years. She was a shark at Scrabble and helped her friend throw an 80th birthday party for his neighbor because “hey,” she said, “I’ll be the youngest woman there!”

Although she was the just-hired personal secretary to newly elected Orange County Supervisor Jim Silva, she swiftly endeared herself to fellow smokers while puffing her Virginia Slims outside the Hall of Administration.

Dry-humored, she loved teasing her male friends about their romantic antics: to one of them she noted that she was the only woman he--a survivor of five marriages and an active love life--never dated.

Who, her friend asked, could capture the horror of learning that her killer fired a razor-sharp hunting arrow into her chest, leaving her to bleed to death in her foyer, the barkless poodle she adopted unable to alert help because previous owners muted the dog’s voice box?

“You couldn’t portray Arlene in words. It would take Mark Twain--nothing personal,” said Alan King, a friend since their youthful days in New Jersey and an employer during the Hoffmans’ bankruptcy last year. “She was a 100% person. Just irreplaceable.”

Now four weeks later, King says, closing his eyes at the thought, her killer still roams free.

“Just a little bit of all of us died when she died,” said Edward Abraham, an orthopedic surgeon who grew up with the Hoffmans and who is part of the “Bayonne West” clan of friends that relocated here from New Jersey. “It slices a little piece of your heart.”

She was a wife so protective of her proud dying husband that she kept him from knowing they were losing everything to bankruptcy--everything, that is, except a $500,000 life insurance policy she would claim just months before her murder.

She was a mother after adopting, in her mid-40s, a teen-age son from what one friend called a “rough” background.

She was a friend so compassionate in her own time of despair that she rallied consolation for her brother-in-law when his beloved dog, Murphy, died. She was an employee who went the distance for her bosses, which explains why she worked for so many powerful men.

And what may have been a lethal virtue, King says, was that Arlene Hoffman was a keeper of secrets.

“It hadda be something she knew,” he says. “I trusted her with the combination to my safe. . . . She was the kind of person you could trust with anything, and I hope that’s not what happened.”

It is hard to know why anyone would want Arlene Hoffman dead.

But a glimpse into her life, her associations, her political brushes, the money she lost as her husband died and the job she found just before her own death, reveals the possibilities detectives are considering as they investigate her slaying.

“It’s a huge puzzle,” said Lt. Dan Martini of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, “and you just have to put all the pieces together.”

Woven together, the stories of police, neighbors and friends offer a view into those last few hours of Arlene Hoffman’s life.

It was a colorful and full life that ended four weeks ago today in the entrance of her Laguna Niguel townhome. Investigators say the last-known person who spoke with her--besides possibly the killer--was her sister, who talked to her by phone about 7 p.m. Dec. 29 as she returned from clothes shopping for her job with Silva.

She’d been looking forward to his first staff meeting the following morning, and had offered to bring in doughnuts.

When she did not arrive at the staff meeting on Dec. 30, Silva grew concerned. “She had been so excited about it,” he recalled, and she “had a car phone to alert anyone if she’d been in a car accident,” or of any other delays. It was just so unlike her, Silva said, to just not show up.

By close of business that Friday, he called the Sheriff’s Department and asked that deputies check on Hoffman at her home. After deputies arrived at the peaceful townhome community and saw her body through a window, Sheriff Brad Gates himself called Silva with the terrible news.

The front door was unlocked and nothing appeared to have been taken from her three-bedroom home; it showed no signs of a forced entry nor was it in disarray. There were no signs of sexual assault, investigators said. Deputies found Cherie, the poodle Hoffman adopted from the pound, with the leash on, skittishly tapping around the flooring, perhaps for hours after the killer slipped out.

Because the arrow entered Hoffman at a downward angle, investigators believe she may have been ambushed by someone hiding above her on her stairway.

Several friends and relatives were fingerprinted by authorities, a common elimination practice that allows detectives to set aside the fingerprints of “people who would have reason to be there,” and “focus on those that don’t belong there,” says homicide Lt. Tom Garner.

One person who was fingerprinted at detectives’ request said the technician told him a partial fingerprint had been found on the stairway railing--from which detectives believe the killer fired the arrow down at Hoffman--and another on the kitchen counter.

Hoffman was killed with a hunting arrow, but investigators are not sure whether it was fired from a standard bow, a spear gun or a crossbow--a medieval-looking weapon with great firing power.

The arrow, which was removed from the murder scene, has not been found. Garner said detectives bearing a warrant searched Hoffman’s home and car, but the results of that search were kept by court order from public view. The Sheriff’s Department persuaded a judge to seal the normally public records, arguing that disclosure might hamper their investigation.

Hoffman bled to death from her aorta and other wounds, some of them exit wounds of the arrow.

The Sheriff’s Department says an autopsy places her death sometime during a 12-hour period between 7:30 p.m. Dec. 29 and 7:30 the following morning, not long before she was expected at her new job with Silva.

Somewhat adrift after her husband died, Arlene Hoffman volunteered for Silva’s campaign for supervisor, he said recently. She worked for free until he was elected in November, and was hired as his personal secretary. The former schoolteacher and Huntington Beach city councilman liked her immediately, as did his wife.

“She was almost perfect, really,” said Connie Silva, who helped her husband interview job candidates. “She was so impressive, so professional.”

Added Silva: “My entire family thought so much of her.”

Arlene Schwartz was the oldest daughter of a truck driver in Jersey City. Her own mother died when she was about 14 years old, and her father died by the time she was about 22, her friends said. She was mother, father and big sister after that, King said, adding, “She was one person you could count on 1,000%.”

She and younger sister Joanne--just two years apart--visited at the home of a quadriplegic friend where neighborhood friends played cards and watched the “Phil Silvers Show” and other TV programs together. It is here that Arlene met Joel, two years her senior, and where Joanne met her future husband, John. Among this tight-knit group, they were known as “the Schwartz girls.” The sisters were from Jersey City, the others--all boys who had grown up together on the same street--were from nearby Bayonne.

Their deep friendships over the next 40-plus years seem straight out of a 1940s Bing Crosby movie. King and Abraham are from that circle.

Arlene was a real lady, her husband a gentleman, King said, and together “they were in their own romantic world.”

Married sometime after high school, they soon moved from New Jersey to California. But by the time Arlene Hoffman was 26, she and her husband had filed the first of their two bankruptcy cases in Orange County, seeking protection from debtors.

Court records were not available on that case, but friends said Joel Hoffman’s butcher shop suffered financial setbacks.

Ironically, Arlene Hoffman was working at the time of that first bankruptcy for one of the richest men in America. From 1962 to 1970, she was employed by Norton Simon Inc. She started as a secretary and became executive secretary to then-President David Mahoney.

After she declined his offer to move with the company to New York, Arlene Hoffman became the personal secretary of Simon himself. She also did special projects for Simon, including work on his failed Senate bid.

It was the first of several brushes with politics, and friend King said she was intrigued by the authority it usually vested those in it.

“Arlene was attracted to power,” King said. “It was like moth to a light. Maybe it came from losing her parents. . . . She fit right in because she was a closemouthed person.”

From 1970 to 1972, Arlene Hoffman--a registered Democrat--was personal secretary and office manager to attorney Conrad Tuohey, and worked with him in his unsuccessful bid for the 37th Congressional District seat. From 1972 to 1974, she worked as a secretary for a political consulting firm called Fred Harber and Associates.

Between the years her husband served as a California probate referee--from 1975 to 1987--Arlene managed his business office. During that time and through 1991, she also oversaw his affairs and acted as a systems consultant to clients of his other endeavors.

None of their friends could remember who Joel Hoffman had been appointed probate referee by, although they felt sure it was a political appointment. And King added: “It would have been a politician Arlene knew.”

As they worked together at a Fullerton office, the couple kept more to themselves the past few years, friends said, and spent a lot of time enjoying their $600,000 hillside home in an Anaheim Hills neighborhood laced with horse trails and fences.

Records show they made about $10,000 in upgrades to their home, including a marble fireplace and entry. Their back yard offered a view of city lights below.

According to their own statements in their October, 1993, bankruptcy filing, Joel Hoffman had been grossing $15,000 monthly from Carrier Consultants Inc., the business through which he did accounting and tax preparation, mostly for small independent truckers. And Arlene said she was earning $3,700 a month.

But friends say everything changed after Joel was found to be suffering not one but two life-threatening ailments.

He couldn’t work, and she could not make their mortgage on her income, so friends like Abraham helped her out. Joel Hoffman never knew. In fact, he never knew his wife had filed for bankruptcy at all.

They eventually had to give up everything, from their home to their leased Mercedes. He was collecting $1,000 a month in social security payments, she $1,000 a month working for King as office manager of his car brokerage. They were, in Arlene’s estimation to the court, $782,566 in debt. Most of it was in the house, but they also owed $49,500 in credit card bills and $115,747 in an unpaid loan and credit line.

“I’ll give you a little idea of Arlene’s compassion,” King said. “Two years before his death, Joel was going to work. He had shivers, didn’t know how to handle it. Arlene immediately took him to the doctor, and the doctor said, ‘When did he have his last heart attack?’ He didn’t know he’d had a first one! They were discussing a bypass, and with further discovery (the doctor) found out he had cancer too. Arlene didn’t share this with him; she didn’t want to overwhelm him. She just wanted him to think he could lick it.

“She also didn’t want to move his surroundings. He had a year of private nursing. I’ve never seen a woman dedicate herself to someone like this.”

When Joel finally died March 7, 1994, due to complications from his two diseases, the couple had lost their house to a bank sale and were stripped of all but their modest personal possessions.

“She spent everything they had trying to prolong his life,” said Lyle Overby, a political consultant and friend of 20 years whose admiration for Arlene Hoffman led him to recommend her to Silva.

Two weeks before Joel Hoffman’s death, the bankruptcy case was closed, meaning the couple were released from their debts. What was spared from the hands of creditors were two term life insurance policies, one for $500,000, the other for $10,000. By law, such policies are exempt from liquidation by the court.

The $500,000 was paid to Arlene Hoffman after her husband’s death, family members told detectives. “The information (investigators) have in regards to the estate,” Martini added, “they don’t want to release.”

The airy Laguna Niguel townhome where Arlene Hoffman lived and died was owned by her sister and brother-in-law, property records show, and friends said she made the payments to them. Brother-in-law John Dougherty is a retired executive with Hunt Foods who has just passed the California bar; his wife, Joanne, is a schoolteacher. One of their two sons now has his aunt’s poodle.

Charles Anthony Hoffman, 25, of Yorba Linda is a former Marine Corps infantryman who served four years and was discharged in 1992. He is currently enrolled as a student at Fullerton College.

His parents adopted him when he was between 13 and 16, family friends said.

“They gave him something he never had--a good home,” said one friend who asked not to be identified.

“I remember when he went into the Marines,” King said, “She wrote him every day. . . . After Joel passed away everything was Charlie, Charlie. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for him.”

Charles and the Doughertys did not return phone calls and, through friends, the Doughertys expressed their wish not to discuss the case.

Friends say they and the family have scoured over every job she had, every encounter they knew of, and still they can’t fathom why someone would want to kill her.

Her new job for a high-profile politician in a newly bankrupt county government “would bring her into contact with a variety of people, but I have no idea (who among them) might have wanted her killed,” said Abraham, who last saw Arlene Hoffman at a “Bayonne West” lunch she threw at her townhome a few weeks before her murder. “We all feel it was so professionally done. Such a tragedy.

“In her own little or big way, she was going to make a difference. She was one of those people with a zest for life, and she was going to carry on. In that, she was a symbol and we all looked at her . . . as kind of a spirit,” he said.

“Joe and Arlene are in heaven. No doubt about it. When we’re younger we go to birthday parties, then we go to weddings, then births. Now all of a sudden, it’s funerals,” King said. “We used to play cards all the time. Poker. And when one of our group dies, we say, they’ve joined that card table in the sky. I like to think that’s where Arlene is now. That makes me feel better to think that.”

On a Sunday morning this month, Arlene Hoffman’s loved ones gathered for a chapel service at the same Newport Beach cemetery where her husband was buried after his March 7 death. She had been planning the unveiling of her husband’s grave marker, a Jewish custom performed on the first anniversary of a death, with the same mortuary that would handle her services.

In the chapel, she was memorialized by friends and family from around the country, including the mother of Morty, the quadriplegic childhood friend, who rented the Hoffmans an attic apartment when they were newlyweds four decades ago.

It was there that Charlie Hoffman was faced with his second parent’s eulogy in nine months, family friends noted. “I’m sure it must be terrible for him,” Abraham said.

“After her service,” King said, “a giant cloudburst hit, and the gal I was with said, ‘Look, it’s tears for Arlene, tears from heaven.’ She was just the kind of person you say things like that about.”