Cultural Barriers Slowed Inquiry Into Slaying : Crime: Investigators say they missed nuances early in their work on the killing of an Armenian businessman. But a breakthrough led them to the man now accused: his brother-in-law.

Harutian Truzian thought he had it made in 1990 when his sister and brother-in-law invited him to follow them to America and work in the fledgling family business, a tiny candy factory in Van Nuys called Chocolate Delight.

Coming from Yerevan, the Armenian capital where an average family lives on $50 a year, and where Coca-Cola and gasoline are symbols of vast wealth, Truzian believed his California relatives were millionaires, police and prosecutors say. He thought he’d be made a partner in the business, which manufactures a delicate, chocolate-covered marshmallow candy known to Soviet Armenians as ptichye moloka , or bird’s milk.

But his U. S. relatives, Manoush and Zaven Baregamian--who had only arrived in Los Angeles a year earlier--were far from wealthy and the business, Chocolate Delight, was struggling, according to court records.

There was a family falling out--Truzian thought his relatives were stingy and they thought he was lazy--and on Feb. 16, 1992, brother-in-law Zaven Baregamian, 42, was found lying in a pool of blood on the floor of the factory, where he’d gone to prepare his taxes. He’d been shot five times with a .25-caliber pistol and his pockets had been turned inside out.

At first it looked like a robbery. Later, it appeared someone had taken pains to make Baregamian’s slaying resemble an underworld shakedown.

In the end, police said it was a family affair, and Truzian was in jail on suspicion of murdering his brother-in-law.

After a 19-month investigation hampered by language and cultural barriers, police arrested Truzian last month and charged him with murdering Baregamian, extorting $18,000 from his sister and burglarizing the candy factory to set up his own candy-making business in Oakland. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Van Nuys Municipal Court today.

“This is basically the story of one man’s greed,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter S. Berman said.

Detective Phil Morritt, a homicide investigator at the Los Angeles Police Department’s Van Nuys station, said cultural and language differences slowed investigators in breaking what is largely a case of circumstantial evidence. Even though a translator was used to speak to family members and friends, initially nuances were lost.

“When you talk to people, not just in interrogation but just talking to people, you sort of get a feeling for the person you’re talking to,” Morritt said. But, he said, in this case cultural differences and mistrust of police limited the homicide investigator’s usual ability to rely on gut instinct.

“It’s very hard to do that through a third person,” Morritt said.

In investigating the case, police found themselves faced with difficulties familiar to others who deal regularly with the Armenian-American community: It is a closed and self-sufficient group, and the newly arrived immigrants are accustomed to handling problems among themselves. Furthermore, there is widespread distrust of the police, rooted in history and experiences with Stalinist repression and fear of the KGB, experts familiar with the culture say.

“If a killing happens to an Armenian family, the family won’t cooperate with the police,” said Levon Jernazian, a clinical psychologist who works with the community for the Armenian Relief Society in Glendale. “They would take care of it themselves. They’d prefer not to let other people interfere.”

“Police are perceived as evil,” Jernazian explained. “That is in the historical memory of the nation. . . . Police are cast as the dark and evil KGB. The police represent a hostile force. They are not to be trusted. There are still Stalinist memories and the first generation of immigrants will not be able to get over that stereotype.”

After the slaying, police were puzzled by Manoush Baregamian’s reaction after her husband didn’t come home the night of Feb. 16. She could not be reached for comment this week, but after the slaying she told police that she had driven by Chocolate Delight several times that day. Even after her husband missed an appointment, friends telephoned looking for him and it came time to go to a family birthday party, she didn’t go inside looking for him, police recounted. She became angry instead of concerned.

Why? To investigators, it just didn’t seem logical.

The answer lies in an Old World patriarchal family structure and the wife’s submissive role, Jernazian said.

That cultural lesson, learned during the investigation, eventually helped Morritt break open his murder case.

“If you go into their background, and we checked into that, the male was very dominant,” he said. “His whole life was consumed with making his business better. It was not unusual to spend hours at the office. He was all-consumed with his business. . . . Every time she went by there she assumed he was still there, talking to some Armenian friends.”

Morritt and his partner, Detective Angel Lopez, slowly worked on gaining Manoush Baregamian’s trust. They returned to interview her several times. But the breakthrough did not come until more than a year after her husband’s death, when the factory was burglarized and police were again interviewing Manoush Baregamian.

“I was getting up to leave and I looked at her,” Morritt recalled. “I got this feeling she was holding back something.” When the detective asked if there was anything else she wanted to say, Manoush Baregamian broke into tears.

“Well, there’s the letter,” Morritt recalled her saying, as she fetched it from the bedroom. She told the detectives that someone had extorted $18,000 from her and she handed them an envelope containing what she said was a threatening note written in the Soviet Armenian dialect.

Out dropped a .25-caliber bullet--with the same unusual aluminum casing as the bullets used to kill her husband. One prosecutor called the bullet the killer’s “signature.”

“She was crying and her two daughters were there. Their mouths popped open,” Morritt said. “She was scared to death.” But, he added, she apparently hadn’t mentioned the threat to her two teen-age daughters.

When translated later by an interpreter, the letter demanded money and threatened Manoush Baregamian that if she didn’t pay, she would die the same way her husband had died.

She told police the letter had arrived in October, shortly after she had had a fight with her brother, who vowed during one argument, “Someday you and your daughters will have to come to me because you will have nothing,” according to court records.

She had paid the $18,000 in November, she said. Her brother had disappeared for good in January, she said.

Three months after Manoush Baregamian last saw her brother, the chocolate factory she was then running with her daughters was burglarized. The candy machines were taken, along with some office equipment from the 500-square-foot storefront on Saticoy Street near Coldwater Canyon Boulevard.

That burglary investigation eventually led police to Truzian.

Police learned that Truzian had set up his own candy business in Oakland, S & H Chocolate Company. And they learned that his new business was licensed March 1--the day before the burglary at Chocolate Delight.

A search of Truzian’s offices last month confirmed investigators’ suspicions: The serial numbers on his candy machines matched those of the machines taken during the Chocolate Delight break-in.

“It you lay this thing out and put down what happened and the time sequence, everything points back to the brother-in-law,” Morritt said. “He just led the trail back to himself.”

As Truzian heads to court, police are conducting ballistic and other tests of physical evidence to bolster their case.

Jernazian, the psychologist, says that if Truzian is convicted, the case will add an ironic footnote to his research on the Armenian immigrant community, where inter-familial killings are rare.

“Because of the history, because of the genocide, because of all the centuries of persecution, these people have developed the instinct for self-preservation.”

No matter how Truzian fares in the American criminal justice system, he “will be stigmatized in his own culture,” Jernazian said.