Police Link to Missing Woman Is Investigated : Crime: Homicide task force has searched the property of a sergeant, seeking clues to the disappearance of a prostitute and friend of Donna Gentile.

The Metropolitan Homicide Task Force is investigating the relationship between San Diego police officers and a prostitute who disappeared four years ago, The Times has learned.

Gary Schons, a deputy state attorney general and task force member, confirmed Monday that the disappearance of Cynthia Maine has been included as part of a broad investigation of the murders of 43 women, mostly prostitutes, over a five-year period.

Last week, task force investigators searched the home, desk, car and locker of a San Diego police sergeant, looking for photographs tying Maine to several police officers and to slain prostitute Donna Gentile, according to a source familiar with the investigation.

The source told The Times that Maine, the daughter of former San Diego Police Officer Kenneth Maine, was a close friend of Gentile, whose death in 1985 was the first prostitute murder in the series.

The homicide task force, composed of investigators from the San Diego County district attorney’s office, the San Diego Police Department, the county Sheriff’s Department and the state attorney general’s office, has been investigating whether San Diego police officers killed Gentile.

At a press conference early this month, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis, the task force spokeswoman, said the attorney general’s office would be looking at police misconduct based on information that “more than one officer was involved with Donna Gentile.”

Just before she was killed, Gentile testified against two officers, one of whom was fired and the other demoted. Four months before her death, she predicted in a tape-recorded conversation that she might be harmed by “someone in uniform with a badge.”

Schons and other task force officials refused to comment on any details of the investigation of Maine’s disappearance.

Maine was the daughter of Kenneth Maine, who served on the force from 1967 to 1973. Kenneth Maine, who has since died, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and fined $5,000 in 1979 for his role in the scandal of a financial company operated by San Diego financier Joseph Bello.

Maine was indicted on 35 counts that charged he and Bello with bilking 1,200 investors out of about $20 million through MB Financial, an allegedly phony insurance investment scheme. Bello was sentenced to seven years in federal prison, but served only about 40 months before he was released.

The homicide task force is split into three areas: One branch is focusing solely on Gentile; another is investigating the other 42 murders; the third is looking at possible police misconduct.

Gentile’s death long has bothered top police officials, particularly Chief Bob Burgreen, who detached Norm Stamper, his second in command, to personally supervise the investigation.

“There is no slaying in this city that has bothered me more than the murder of Donna Gentile,” Burgreen said in a June interview with The Times. “And, if indeed a police officer was involved in murder, I want him arrested and I want him put behind bars.”

Gentile’s nude and battered body was discovered east of Sunrise Highway in East County, her mouth stuffed with gravel, which some investigators interpreted to mean she had been killed in retaliation for her testimony at a police civil service hearing.

Cynthia Maine disappeared in 1986. A source said the task force has been investigating her disappearance “for about a year.”

But the source said investigators just last week searched a police sergeant’s home for evidence linking Maine to several officers.

Four months before Gentile’s death, Gentile tape-recorded a message while sitting in the Las Colinas women’s jail, where she was taken after being convicted of soliciting for prostitution. When her body was found and identified, her attorney released the tape to the media.

“In case I disappear, I want my lawyer to give this to the press,” she said on the tape. “I have no intention of disappearing or going out of town without letting my lawyer know first. Because of the publicity that I have given a police scandal, this is the reason why I’m making this. . . .

“I feel someone in a uniform with a badge can still be a serious criminal.”

The Times reported in June that police officers were expecting criminal prosecutions against the department. One source said he was told to expect “some indictments soon against some rather high-ranking San Diego police officials.”

Times staff writer Richard A. Serrano contributed to this report.