Police Track an Elusive Quarry : Crime: Suspect in three killings is a private investigator highly trained in weapons use. He has boasted ‘that if he wanted to disappear, he could.’

The suspect, Robert Michael Suggs, is a master marksman, qualified to use weapons ranging from a semiautomatic pistol to a grenade launcher. He had studied anti-terrorist techniques at Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy’s Academy of Corporate Security and Private Investigation in Miami.

He has disappeared.

One victim, Roland Jon Emr, billed himself as a legitimate Hollywood deal-maker who had access to financiers with large sums of cash who could turn ideas and scripts into box office smashes. But he had so many enemies that he was heavily armed, had bodyguards and lived in fear of his life.

Police suspect that Emr made a promise of Hollywood glory once too often, triggering a rampage that has left him and two in his family dead, said Culver City Police Detective Hank Davies.

Instead of filing a deal-gone-sour lawsuit against Emr, as others had, police believe Suggs decided to settle with his former employer on a Culver City street, shooting him and his son dead through the window of their car July 11. One day before, police allege, Suggs killed Emr’s father in Paradise Valley, Ariz. The same gun was used in both shootings.

“I believe Suggs is responsible for all three murders,” Davies said.

Now police face the task of finding the savvy, well-armed private investigator, a 31-year-old native of Lynwood. Authorities hope to take him alive. But they concede it will be difficult and time-consuming.

“He bragged that if he wanted to disappear, he could,” said one police source.

How did these two men cross paths?

It started with Emr’s obsession with being protected.

Suggs had majored in criminal justice at a U.S. Air Force school in Washington state and attended the service’s security police school in Texas. After his discharge, he was a reserve officer in the Spokane, Wash., Police Department.

By 1988, he was ready to make his mark and hung out a shingle in Tacoma, Wash.--”Suggs Investigations.” It wasn’t long before he had eight private investigators working on cases for him.

“He was a happy guy,” said one of Suggs’ investigators, who requested anonymity. “He wasn’t homicidal.”

In 1989, Suggs moved to Scottsdale, Ariz., with his girlfriend, Susan Lynn Calkins, 28, a former Playa del Rey waitress he was training in his business. Police now are concerned about her--the couple reportedly had been feuding and she hasn’t been seen in more than two weeks.

Suggs called his relocated firm “Investigative Group International,” and it was officially licensed by the Arizona Department of Public Safety in November, 1989. About that time, he legally changed his name to Robert Michael Allen, Maricopa County court records show. “People made fun” of the name Suggs, he once complained to an associate.

The public safety agency eventually found out that Suggs’ Scottsdale address was nothing but a mail drop, a violation of state law, according to Lt. Mike Zell, who heads the department’s licensing division.

Meanwhile, Emr was living in Torrance, maintaining that he was a Hollywood deal-maker. Some of his film projects brought Emr into contact with the murky world of those who claim to know mercenaries and gunrunners and who could find a trail to Americans still held captive in Southeast Asia.

But several investors who had put substantial funds into his film ventures in recent years had sued him, alleging that he had put together fraudulent movie deals.

Feuds stemming from these kinds of fallings-out may have caused Emr to fear for his safety. He was heavily armed and had bodyguards.

Last December, Alan Hauge, a film writer, recalled visiting Emr at a cabin at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains. “He had loaded guns around the house,” he said. “A loaded 12-gauge shotgun was leaning against the kitchen door. He had a .38-caliber stainless steel pistol he carried in a leather butt bag.”

In April, 1990, Emr and Suggs met.

It was at a $250-dollar-a-plate charity fund-raiser sponsored by entertainer Glen Campbell in Scottsdale, Hauge said. A few months later, Emr hired Suggs as a bodyguard, according to Brian Barnes, who said he had been doing security work for Emr since 1987.

Shortly afterward, Suggs moved to Los Angeles, renting a Hermosa Beach house for $1,800 a month. Stashed in the house were the tools of his trade: sophisticated microphones used for covert surveillance; several 9-millimeter semiautomatic handguns; telephone-tapping equipment, and a German shepherd dog trained to attack on command in German.

According to associates, Suggs--or Allen as he called himself by then--enjoyed the good life of Los Angeles and dreamed of making a financial killing here.

“Rob would do anything for money,” said an acquaintance. “He lived high and he loved it.”

Timothy P. Coogan, a Tacoma lawyer who had represented Suggs in a divorce, said he had dinner with Suggs in Los Angeles about three months ago. Coogan said Suggs was anticipating the completion of a lucrative film-financing deal that Emr was putting together for writer Hauge, who had completed a film script on the life of the late actor James Dean.

Emr told Hauge that he had lined up about $30 million in investment cash for the film project and that Suggs would be chief of security for the project, according to Hauge.

“Suggs said he was excited about getting into the film industry,” Coogan said.

But shortly afterward, the two men had a falling out. The deal collapsed. And Suggs was suddenly down on his luck and had no one to turn to.

It was then, police believe, that he took out his revenge on people he blamed for his plight.

Police say the killer of the Emrs first shot Arthur Charles Emr Sr., 71, in the back of the head as he sat in his study. About five rounds were pumped into his head at close range from a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Then, police say, the killer drove or flew to Los Angeles and sought out the younger Emr.

Shortly after 4 p.m. on July 11, Emr; his son, Roger Jon Emr, 20; his mother, Renee, 70, of Paradise Valley, and Roland Emr’s friend, Sue Fellows, left GMT Studios in Culver City, where Emr rented space.

Roger Emr, the driver, stopped the rented 1990 white Lincoln Town Car for a red light at Sepulveda Boulevard and Slauson Avenue when, investigators said, the killer’s car pulled parallel to the passenger side of the auto in which Roland Emr was seated.

A burst of about 10 bullets, again from a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol, exploded through the car’s open passenger window, killing Roland Emr and his son.

Renee Emr and Fellows, who was grazed by one of the bullets, survived the attack. Before they ducked the fusillade, it is believed that one of them saw enough of the killer to identify Suggs, according to a law enforcement source.

Preliminary ballistics tests conducted by the Los Angeles County sheriff’s crime lab concluded that the same weapon was used in both the California and the Arizona slayings, a law enforcement source said.

According to Massad Ayoob, who runs the Lethal Force Institute in Concord, N.H., where Suggs once was enrolled in weapons courses, he was a highly qualified shooter and showed no dangerous aberrations. “If he had shown negative personality traits, we would have removed him,” Ayoob said. “We do not cater to the strange-ranger market.” Other acquaintences echo the disbelief that Suggs could have been the perpetrator of such a rampage.

But Detective Davies believes that Suggs is the killer and that the manhunt will be successful.

One of the places police are currently focusing upon is Las Vegas, where Suggs would often go to when in need of money.

“They say when he has trouble moneywise, he tends to matriculate to Las Vegas,” said Las Vegas Police Sgt. Bill Keeton.

Both police and acquaintances of the couple fear for the life of Calkins, a Manhattan Beach resident who has been missing since July 3.

Culver City police say that a car matching the color and shape of one driven by Calkins was used in the Culver City shootings. They do not believe she is an accomplice.