So this is what had become of C. Wayne Cox.

Dick Levy, a well-known philanthropist and Silicon Valley board chairman, stared at the newspaper mug shot in disbelief.

This guy had it all – once.

Cox was an elite engineer at Varian, a medical technology company that Levy helped run. The intelligent man with a slight Southern twang was living in a Saratoga ranch home with his wife of 27 years and two children. He adorned his wife with strands of pearls, expensive watches and once, for Christmas, a gold cat pin with twinkling emerald eyes.

That was back in the ’80s and ’90s.

And, now, here Cox was again – the 66-year-old man charged with fatally plowing his 1994 Infiniti into a pair of elderly church friends out for a stroll. One witness said he reached out the window to push one of the dying victims off his hood, then drove away. Police say Cox was a transient living out of his car.

Personal struggles

“God, he must have gone through hell in his personal life to have dropped such a long way,” said Levy, 70, a board chairman at Varian Medical Systems in Palo Alto and co-chairman of several foundations and non-profits.

Sometime during the last decade, Cox’s life fell apart. Civil court records reviewed by the Mercury News detail a layoff from Varian in 1996, a messy divorce two years later, financial struggles, and bouts of depression.

On Monday, Cox was arrested after a Santa Clara librarian tipped off police after discovering him at the library. She was reading about the collision on the Mercury News Web site and recognized Cox’s name from a police-involved “incident” at the library the week before. Officers arrived minutes later to find the white-haired man sitting at a library table, surfing the Web.

Cox now sits in a jail cell in San Jose, where he has declined two interview requests. He’s charged with the hit-and-run deaths of Oralia Puga Ramirez, 75, and Enedina Oliva, 70 – who had befriended each other at a Santa Clara church.

Police are waiting for a toxicology report but don’t believe that Cox was under the influence of alcohol or drugs when the women were struck in a crosswalk at Stevens Creek Boulevard and Cypress Avenue about 8:20 p.m. Aug. 9. If convicted, Cox faces at least 13 years in prison.

Those who knew Cox at the peak of his career can’t believe what’s now surfacing about a man they remember as a bright, successful executive, a man with no sign of a criminal record.

‘Southern gentleman’

“He was a Southern gentleman,” said Nancy Miller, 61, of Morgan Hill. “He was quiet, soft-spoken and well-respected. He was not a bum.”

Miller knows. In 1983, she was Varian’s human resources director who hired the Georgia native with a résumé that included past jobs at IBM in Kentucky and Mead in Ohio. Records show Cox earned $150,000 a year during the mid-1990s to head up Varian’s engineering department.

Like most at Varian, Levy had lost track of Cox after the company was reorganized in 1996, when Cox was let go.

“He was very smart, technically,” Levy said last week. “He was just a normal guy running a department.”

Ron Moeller, 67, of Fremont said Cox hired him in 1992. At the time, Cox was leading a prestigious engineering team at the company, which Moeller said developed a profitable “high-energy X-ray machine” that eradicated cancer tumors, called the Multileaf Collimator.

“They were selling like hotcakes,” Moeller told the Mercury News. “It was one of Varian’s great successes. Wayne was a great mentor, very helpful to me. And he was doing really great stuff.”

Most had no idea that Cox was having financial and possibly psychological trouble.

Tim Harper, a San Jose vocational consultant hired to document Cox’s employment status during his divorce, wrote in his court report that Cox said he was being treated for, and still suffering from, depression.

Harper also suggested that while Cox was a “cordial, pleasant” man who seemed embarrassed that he had been out of a job for two years, he also didn’t seem to be looking too hard for new work.

The documents also show Cox was in a contentious fight with his ex-wife for their cream-colored, Oakhaven Drive ranch home in Saratoga with the three-car garage, valued then at $700,000. Cox’s ex-wife, who lives out of state, could not be reached for comment on two occasions last week. The Mercury News is not identifying her.

It’s unclear what Cox did between his divorce and now. Police didn’t reveal many details about Cox, simply calling him a transient who may have been living out of his car. Public records show Cox’s last listed address was along Saratoga Avenue near Kiely Boulevard in San Jose. But a check at that address shows it is a Mail Station, tucked in a bustling strip mall.

Now, he is being held without bail and ordered to appear in court Monday.

“It seemed like he got hit, and never recovered,” Harper said in an interview. “What kind of choices did he make to go from the penthouse to the outhouse?”

Contact Lisa Fernandez at lfernandez@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5002.