Families Had No Warning of Slaying Rampage

David Willsey never saw it coming.

The son of Richard W. Willsey said Wednesday he had no answers for La Habra homicide detectives who want to know what provoked his father to gun down his estranged wife, Nancy, and her boyfriend early Monday morning, then shoot himself.

“We’re trying to make sense of it all. We’re asking ourselves, ‘Why didn’t he talk to anybody? Why didn’t we see any signs?’ There was nothing,” said Willsey, 32, who teaches drama at a church in Orange.

Erin Hoefs of Valencia also was searching for answers two days after Willsey opened fire on her father, Dennis Hoefs.

The 17-year-old was watching TV news while dressing for school when she saw the La Habra house her father shared with Nancy Willsey.

Erin woke up her 23-year-old sister, with whom she has lived since their mother died nine months ago, and the sisters made the two-hour drive to La Habra, where police confirmed what they feared: Their father was dead.

David Willsey and Erin Hoefs, who had never met, now find their lives intertwined as they struggle to cope with the tragedy.

“As bad as it is for my family, I feel more for the families of the others,” Willsey said. “I have no idea what they’re going through.”

He said his grief and that of his two brothers had been compounded by news reports portraying their father as a hard-drinking trucker who turned bitter when his wife left him in 1996 and had a cache of weapons at his home.

He remembered his 60-year-old father as a loving and caring human being who had helped support Nancy Willsey’s daughter and elderly father, fixing up the house to make them more comfortable when they moved in. He recalled Thanksgiving a few years ago, when Richard Willsey cooked two turkeys for homeless people living under a freeway overpass near his Whittier home.

“The man who has done this tragic stuff--that’s not my father, that’s not my dad,” David Willsey said.

As for Dennis Hoefs’ four children, they never knew until Monday that their father and his girlfriend had been targets of stalking by Richard Willsey, who was convicted in 1997 of making threats against them and was on probation.

“My father didn’t want us to worry. He only said, ‘I have a girlfriend; I’d really like you to meet her,’ ” Erin Hoefs said Wednesday. “My mom and dad had just broken up, and he said [Nancy Willsey] was with a man who was a drinker who beat her up, and she left him.”

Hoefs’ six children and nine grandchildren from his two marriages were planning a birthday party for him on Feb. 13, when he would have turned 60.

“If this man had been behind bars,” Erin Hoefs said of Richard Willsey, “this would have been prevented. Nobody I talk to can believe it when they find out that someone convicted of stalking, who was found to have an arsenal, can get these weapons.

“There was no justice. I’m really disappointed in the system. This shouldn’t have happened.”

David Willsey said no one in his family thought his father’s threats were serious. “His bark has always been worse than his bite,” he said, adding that his father had no history of violence.

And, despite his felony conviction, Richard Willsey was hired last year by a subsidiary of TRISM Inc., a Georgia transport and trucking firm, to haul munitions for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Richard Willsey told his family that he had FBI clearance for the job, his son said Wednesday.

“The government trusted him. I figure if they’re going to let someone like that work for them it can’t be too serious,” David Willsey said.

TRISM spokeswoman Suzanne Perry said Richard Willsey did not have and did not need government clearance to transport the munitions.

“Although he had the previous conviction, he met all the government guidelines to haul all the freight that he hauled,” Perry said. “What he was hauling did not require clearance.”

Perry said she did not know specifically what munitions Willsey transported, only that they were “not sensitive.”

The ongoing police investigation into the shootings continues to focus on how and where Richard Willsey acquired his deadly arsenal.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that federal gun registration records showed Willsey purchased one of the firearms, a Bulgarian assault rifle, on Aug. 31, 1996, in California, La Habra police Capt. Terry Rammell said. That would have been before Willsey’s 1997 felony conviction and before passage of new federal restrictions on assault weapons.

Still, one of the conditions of Willsey’s probation was that he not possess, own or use any type of weapon, Rammell said.