Murders Orange County

SEPT. 12, 1986, SHORTLY AFTER 4 P.M. Two seventh-graders, Richard Bourassa and Jeffrey Bush, are playing after school. They are alone in the den of Richard's Anaheim Hills home, a pair of 13-year-olds training loaded guns on each other. The barrels touch. Suddenly, Richard later tells police, the 12-gauge shotgun in his arms goes off, spraying the room with buckshot. One pellet pierces the door. Another shatters the window. And several riddle Jeffrey's body and head.

The mother of a 23-year-old convicted of conspiring to murder her twin sister has broken her long silence with a letter to the judge begging for leniency. In the letter sent to Superior Court Judge Eileen C. Moore this week, Boo I. Kim said she bears responsibility for her daughter's actions because she abandoned the sisters at a young age, leaving them to grow up with relatives.

It was the height of Newport Beach's yachting season, the last day of a long Fourth of July weekend, and eight passengers on the Greene Machine were pursuing a school of playful dolphins off the Orange County coast. Then they heard the screams. "My wife! My wife! My wife!" They spotted a shirtless man floating on a body board behind an empty power boat spinning circles in the surf. Quickly, they tossed him a life jacket and summoned the Coast Guard via radio.

Robert Chan was one of the brightest students to ever walk the halls at Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton but he was also typical teen: He agonized over acne and clothes and had to work up the nerve to ask out a pretty cheerleader. "I don't date, you know, I don't know any girls," Chan told a Superior Court jury, shrugging shyly and looking boyish in a pale yellow sweater with a white collar peeking over the top.

The first to fall was Abel Castillo Chavira. The new year was a mere 37 hours old when Chavira crumpled to the sidewalk near the railroad tracks along Minnie Street, a hail of gunshots ending his life at age 21. Gustavo Ramirez became No. 2 a few days later when, police say, he stumbled into cross-fire between gangs clashing on McFadden Avenue. By January's end, the number of gang-related murders in the city had already hit nine.

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 former Marine staff sergeant was convicted Tuesday of fatally bludgeoning five Orange County women and killing the fetus of a sixth victim, whose husband served more than 16 years in prison for the attack. A jury took just over two hours to find Gerald Parker guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, including the death of the fetus. Parker, 43, could face the death penalty when sentenced Nov. 2.

As a former gang member, Ralph Rodriguez knew all about the code of silence. He understood the pay-back. He knew what could happen to rats who cooperate with police. He knew that when it comes to wars of the barrio, pity the fool who treads where he doesn't belong. Burdened with all that knowledge, Rodriguez had some serious thinking to do the night of Sept. 16 as he paced the corridors at AMI Medical Center of Garden Grove. Two hours earlier, around 7:40 p.m.

An Orange man was held Friday in connection with the fatal stabbing of a 23-year-old woman who was found lying on a street in Stanton, the Sheriff's Department said. Robert William Fordham, 28, was arrested in Garden Grove late Thursday night, shortly after the victim, Kimberly Michele Mims, was discovered. She had been stabbed at least twice in the upper torso, said Lt. Dan Martini.

Dianna D'Aiello is on the phone. She sounds exhausted. She's been up since 6 o'clock Thursday morning. "I tossed and turned all night," she says. That was before she, her mother and an aunt drove together to the Orange County Superior Court building in Santa Ana, where D'Aiello took a seat in Department 40 and spoke of the man who raped her, beat her into a coma and killed her unborn daughter. Or of the men who did. "Why do you think Kevin wasn't there today?"