Murder Suspect Leaves Suicide Letter : Crime: He allegedly confesses to the contract murder of a woman, but police find no sign of his body at the site where he said he was going to kill himself.

Authorities searched a remote desert hut here Wednesday but found no sign of Neill F. Matzen, who police believe wrote a suicide letter confessing to the Nov. 24 bludgeoning murder of a Buena Park nurse for a promised $15,000 payment from the woman’s husband.

Matzen, a 36-year-old tow truck driver from Santa Ana, told his wife, Cynthia R. Matzen, in one of the letters that he would kill himself at a rock hut about four miles south of Interstate 10 where the couple spent last New Year’s Eve, authorities said.

A search team made up of two Buena Park investigators, two Bureau of Land Management rangers and a Riverside County sheriff’s investigator located the primitive hut but found no traces of Matzen or any other recent visitors.

“Now he could be anywhere,” said Riverside County Sheriff’s Investigator John B. Jameson. “This is a truck stop. He looks like a trucker . . . and he could have caught a ride to Texas or Oklahoma.”

Nine days after Donna J. Connaty was murdered with a metal pipe, Matzen killed her husband and his friend, alleged co-conspirator Richard P. Connaty, in a shoot-out at a Santa Ana trailer park that began when Connaty yelled at Matzen, “You killed my wife!” and opened fire, according to police.

Investigators declined to file charges against Matzen in that killing, saying that Matzen shot Connaty in self-defense. But they arrested him later that day on suspicion of murdering Donna Connaty, only to free him two days later because of insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Two days after leaving the jail ward at Western Medical Center in Anaheim, where he was recovering from a wound in his left arm suffered in the gunfight with Connaty, Matzen wrote letters to police and his wife saying he would soon be dead, and a five-page letter to the Orange County Register detailing the violent events of the previous two weeks.

“These are facts known only to me and a dead man, and by the time you get this letter I will also be dead, out in Chiriaco Summit, 30 miles east of Indio,” began the letter, which was received by the newspaper Tuesday and turned over to Buena Park police.

The letter tells of an affair between Richard Connaty--who was in the midst of divorce proceedings with his wife--and Cynthia Matzen, and of Connaty’s wish to have his wife killed.

“He told me that he was going to refinance his house to do remodeling and, if his problem was solved before December, he would pay me $15,000,” Matzen wrote in the letter. He went on to explain how Connaty told him when his wife would be alone in the house and left a metal pipe and a change of clothes for him.

Matzen said that on Dec. 2, about two weeks after the murder, he told Connaty that he would not permit him to continue the affair with his wife, which led to the gunfight the next day.

“I told him that he wasn’t gonna have my wife either and that is why he tried to kill me,” Matzen wrote.

Matzen’s car was found Tuesday in the parking lot of the Gen. Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, where residents reported seeing him over the weekend in a coffee shop.

“He was not suicidal, believe me,” said Kay Allen, a waitress at the Chiriaco Summit Coffee Shop. Allen said Matzen told her that he had killed his best friend in a gunfight in Phoenix, and had no money because police kept his money as evidence. The curator of the museum down the road paid for his meals, Allen said.

Another waitress, Michelle Staci, said she first saw Matzen eating breakfast Monday about 6 a.m. He returned about noon to buy sodas, she said, and that was the last she saw of him.

While investigators Wednesday found no recent trace of Matzen, they did find a note in a visitors log in the rock hut left by Neill and Cynthia Matzen last Dec. 31: “We are here to say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new.”

Times correspondent Ted Johnson contributed to this report