Suspect in Slaying of Girl Was in Court Day Before Capture

The man in custody in last week’s kidnaping and shooting of two Chatsworth girls, one of whom was killed, was in court on an unrelated charge and released on $1,500 bail Monday, a day before he was shot by police, authorities said Wednesday.

Roland Norman Comtois, an often-arrested ex-convict with a history of drug abuse, appeared Monday in Van Nuys Superior Court for a hearing on a March, 1987, grand theft charge involving a $75,000 check-forging scam, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bradford Stone said.

But at the time, Comtois had not been identified as a suspect in the Friday night abduction and shooting that left one girl dead and the other wounded. After his trial in the grand theft case was scheduled for Nov. 9, Comtois was released on the bail originally set in March, Stone said.

“It’s bizarre,” Stone said. “In light of what has happened, it’s embarrassing. But the reality is we obviously didn’t know. According to what we knew, the guy had nothing in his background that allowed us to deviate from the standard bail.”

Comtois, 57, remained in critical condition at County-USC Medical Center.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles police focused their efforts on finding a woman accomplice in the case.

Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said investigators believe they know the name the woman. However, Gates would not release her identity.

“We feel we will pick her up soon,” he said.

Comtois was shot Tuesday after he fled from two officers who were in Elysian Valley, a community near Dodger Stadium, checking out a tip on the kidnaping of Wendy Masuhara, 14, and a 13-year-old companion. Wendy was killed, but her companion survived and provided detectives with the description that led to Comtois’ capture.

Hunting Woman

“We have no motive. We have not done much in the way of learning Comtois’ background,” Lt. John Zorn, lead investigator in the case, said Wednesday. “All our energy has been put into identifying and finding the woman.”

Los Angeles County Superior Court records revealed that Comtois has an extensive criminal record dating back to a Massachusetts rape conviction in 1952.

In addition to the grand theft charge filed against him in Los Angeles in March, court records show that this year he was arrested here twice in June on burglary charges and again in July on suspicion of auto theft. The auto theft charge was later dropped.

Court records show that Comtois was previously sentenced to five to 15 years in a California state prison after he pleaded guilty in 1974 to selling heroin and being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. How much of the term he served was not immediately known.

According to the records, Comtois also served prison terms for the 1952 rape conviction in Bristol County, Mass., a 1960 attempted armed bank robbery conviction and a 1962 robbery conviction, both in California.

Wrote Letter

In the 1974 drug case, Comtois hand-wrote a three-page letter to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Harry Peetris in Van Nuys asking that he be considered for entry in a drug-rehabilitation program rather than be sent to prison.

The letter, dated June 18, 1974, reads in part: “I have spent over half of my life in orphanages, foster homes of every kind, reform schools and prisons. After serving seven years in the California Dept. of Correction, I had promised myself never to enter another institution again.

“After leaving prison I worked day and night trying to get ahead. I bought my family a home and started a business. But due to the involvement and pressures of the business, I lost my family through divorce. . . .”

Comtois was convicted of the drug charge and sent to prison.

The family he wrote of--a son, 29, a daughter, 23, and his former wife--lives in Van Nuys. The son, Raymond Phillip Comtois, said his father also has a 3-year-old son, Joshua, by another woman. The child, Raymond said, has been in his and Comtois’ former wife’s care for about a year.

‘Lot of Problems’

“My father had a lot of problems, and so he brought the baby here,” Raymond said. “He was responsible for him though. Once in a while he would pop in and leave money for the baby.”

Raymond Comtois said that in recent months, his father had lived a nomadic life in a motor home, which he moved from place to place in the Valley.

“He’d come by all the time, but I don’t know where from,” he said.

The younger Comtois said he last saw his father Tuesday morning when he came by to borrow his pickup truck.

A few hours after that, police, acting on an anonymous tip, saw Comtois moving personal items from the motor home into the pickup truck in the 3800 block of Newell Street, near the Los Angeles River.

Police said that when Comtois saw the officers, he ran down the street, scaled a wall and was shot in the back and arm before he could get away.

Times staff writer Jane Hulse also contributed to this story.