Couple Believed to Be Victims of Murder-Suicide

An Irvine couple, whose long marriage was described as “blissful,” were found shot to death Thursday in a bedroom of their home on Claremont Street, the apparent victims of a murder-suicide, police said.

Irvine Police Lt. Michael White identified the victims as Larry D. Hubbell, 47, a Newport Beach lawyer, and his wife, Donna, 42, a legal secretary. They had no children.

“We are investigating the possibility of murder-suicide,” White said. “There is no evidence that a third party was involved.”

He said Donna Hubbell appeared to have been shot first and her husband immediately afterward. No note was found at the scene.

“We are still investigating for a motive,” White said.

The bodies were found by Irvine police about 11:30 a.m. Thursday after a neighbor called police to say that she had not seen the Hubbells for 2 days and was worried about them.

The couple had just returned from a cruise in the Bahamas, according to Donna Hubbell’s father, Donald Whitfield, who was reached in Huntington Beach at the home of his son, Brian.

Police found the bodies, clothed in pajamas, on a bed in the couple’s brown-and-beige, one-story home in the 3600 block of Claremont Street, White said. Both were dead from head wounds from a .357 magnum revolver.

“We are estimating that they had been dead for 1 1/2 to 2 days,” White said. “They were last seen alive at 8 p.m. on April 4, and we believe they died that same night.”

Whitfield said his daughter and her husband were married “18 very happy years, and they never had an argument--they were the most blissful couple you ever saw in all your life.”

He said while he did not know what could have happened, he believed that “Larry didn’t do anything to Donna they weren’t both willing to do.”

“I’m so bereft I don’t know what the hell to think,” Whitfield added. “I’m just as confused as anyone else is.”

A longtime neighbor, Rose Ward, said the Hubbells were “both very, very, very lovely, loving people. He just adored her.” The couple had lived on Claremont Street for more than 10 years.

“That would be the last two people that I would ever think that something like this would happen (to),” Ward said. “If they went out to dinner, they always went together. Their kitchen faces my house, and I never heard a loud conversation. Nothing. Nothing.”

She said Larry Hubbell “spoke quite a bit about being brought up in a good Christian home.”

Another neighbor, Mary Lou Truher, said the Hubbells were “very quiet” people who kept pretty much to themselves.

“They kept their house beautiful,” said Truher, adding that she was “really shocked” by their violent deaths.

Jeffrey M. Verdon, a lawyer who works in the same building that houses Hubbell’s office at 1600 Dove St. in Newport Beach, described him “as passive as they come.”

“He was very generous. He offered us the use of his library anytime we wanted,” Verdon said.

“He kind of reminded me of Pat Boone in a way. He was very articulate and clean cut. I always figured him for a guy with a happy home with a wife and three kids.”

Hubbell was a native of Ardmore, Okla., and attended undergraduate school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, according to the California State Bar. He studied law at UCLA. Times staff writer Michael Cicchese contributed to this story.