Remains Linked to Missing Suspect : Crime: Police work to identify a body found in the wreckage of a truck that belonged to a man wanted in a 1993 slaying.

The wreckage of a pickup truck and possibly the human remains inside--both found in a deep ravine near Castaic this weekend--belonged to the suspect in a 1993 San Fernando Valley murder, authorities said Monday.

About 18 months ago, a 27-year-old man named Christ James Wetzel was fatally shot in the garage of a Northridge house, allegedly by his friend Mark Douglas Snyder, according to police.

Witnesses said that after the shooting Snyder drove off in a green pickup truck. He was never seen again.

On Monday, detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Devonshire Division confirmed that the truck spotted by forest rangers off the Templin Highway--Iowa license plates, white camper shell and all--was the one in which Snyder fled.

Still unconfirmed are whether the skeletal remains in and around the truck are Snyder’s as well and, if so, how he died. Police said they were working with Snyder’s sister to obtain dental records, and a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office said an anthropologist will examine the bones within the next week in an effort to positively identify them and determine the cause of death.

If the remains are those of Snyder, who lived in Winnetka, they would mark the tragic end of the life of a 29-year-old man tortured by the death of his father, Gary Snyder, a Van Nuys resident who barricaded himself and then died in 1989 as police stormed his house with a battering ram, detectives and friends said Monday.

“He’s been pretty distraught ever since,” said one friend, who watched as officers worked to retrieve the pickup truck wreckage Monday and asked not to be named.

He and another friend of Snyder’s, Shawn Stone, said they always believed the younger Snyder had killed himself after Wetzel’s murder. They even suggested to authorities at the time of the murder investigation that if Snyder committed suicide he might have done it in the Castaic area, where he often hiked and camped.

“He loved this area,” said Stone, who said he witnessed the shooting of Wetzel and called the police. “We told the detectives they’d find him up here dead. We thought it would be with a bullet in the head.”

Los Angeles Police Detective Tom Broad, the Devonshire Division’s chief homicide investigator, said police contacted local campgrounds after the slaying to see if the pickup truck was registered there and checked again several times over the last year and a half. They did not physically search the area because it is too vast, Broad said.

The truck wreckage was spotted Saturday in the 400-foot-deep ravine, about three miles from the Templin Highway exit off the Golden State Freeway, by U.S. Forest Service firefighters.

Broad and a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, Officer Hector Marquez, said investigators who were called in to check the wreckage found a .357-caliber handgun believed to have been used in the death of Wetzel, as well as a shotgun.

Broad also said police wanted to make sure that the remains were not those of an innocent victim, killed and placed inside the truck, to aid Snyder in an escape. Police had obtained a felony warrant for his arrest after the shooting of Wetzel, Broad said, and feared he might flee to the Seattle area.

But Snyder’s sister, Shawn, said Monday she believed the remains were her brother’s and that he probably drove himself over the side of the road out of remorse over the deaths of Wetzel--who was her boyfriend--and their father.

“I’m sure it’s him,” Shawn Snyder said, adding that no one had seen or heard from Snyder since Wetzel’s death. She also said a friend who watched TV news reports of the truck’s discovery told her a recovered jacket matched one worn by her brother.

The fatal shooting on Jan. 14, 1993, occurred in the garage of Stone’s house as the three young men were repairing a car, Shawn Snyder said. Stone told her Wetzel and her brother had been arguing over her, but he wasn’t sure why.

They had never argued before, she said Monday.

“Suicide makes sense, but why he killed Chris doesn’t make sense,” Shawn Snyder said Monday. “Maybe after he did that, in his mind, it was the only thing he could do.”

Shawn Snyder also maintained that the June 1, 1989, death of her father resulted from a SWAT team’s use of a battering ram and not from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as police reported at the time. She said the family hired its own forensic expert to review autopsy records and that she believes her 51-year-old father died when a 300-pound statue was knocked over by the battering ram, which destroyed his house.

Although all four brothers and sisters in the family were upset by the incident, Mark Snyder had been especially close to his father and “has been emotionally screwed up since that,” Shawn Snyder said.

“This is all the result of somebody who supposedly killed themselves,” she said.

An LAPD spokesman, Officer Rigo Romero, said he could not comment on the cause of Gary Snyder’s death because the case records were in archives and not available on short notice.