Car Dealer Linked to Suspect, Victim : Connection: While living in O.C., he and friends searched for the missing Huber. After moving to Arizona this year, he tried to repossess a truck from Famalaro.

The instant Lee Sattley, an auto sales manager, heard that John J. Famalaro had been arrested and that police had found a frozen body inside a stolen truck at his home, Sattley knew he had a story to tell the police.

In recent months, Sattley had had numerous run-ins with Famalaro and Famalaro’s mother, Anne, and he believed the truck with the body in it was the brand new vehicle Famalaro had “borrowed” from his auto dealership in January and refused to return.

Not until the body was identified as that of Denise Huber of Newport Beach, did Sattley, who had moved to Arizona from Huntington Beach, realize that he also had a connection to the victim.

As it turned out, the truck containing the body was reported stolen from a Ryder Truck franchise in San Clemente. The white Chevrolet truck owned by the Phoenix dealership where Sattley is a manager was impounded by Yavapai County authorities.

A sheriff’s department spokeswoman said the truck is being dusted for fingerprints. It has a bullet hole in its shell and a partial fingerprint “in what is possibly blood,” according to a court record filed Wednesday.

During a lengthy court hearing Wednesday, the prosecution offered the white truck as evidence that Famalaro is too dangerous to be released from jail on bond.

Sattley said in an interview Wednesday that when he came to work at the Phoenix auto dealership in April, he set out to find Famalaro after learning that he had a truck belonging to the dealership.

Famalaro was loaned the truck one Saturday in late January when he went to the dealership and complained that the truck he bought there was giving him trouble. Famalaro said he had taken his disabled vehicle to a Prescott Chevrolet dealership and had been given poor service, Sattley said. “He persuaded (an employee) to loan another truck to him until his could be fixed,” Sattley said.

Sometime in February, Sattley said, the truck purchased for Famalaro by his parents was repossessed.

The paperwork detailing the terms of the loan to Famalaro was lost, however, and when Famalaro did not return the truck, Phoenix police refused to take the case, Sattley said.

The dealership hired a private investigator to try to recover the Chevrolet truck, and Sattley even went to Famalaro’s parents’ home on Mothers’ Day.

Anne Famalaro, Sattley remembered vividly, insisted he leave and stop harassing them.

During a telephone call to the house, she also vigorously defended her son, attacked Sattley for calling and insisted her son had a perfect right to the truck.

When Sattley did make telephone contact with Famalaro, he also responded angrily, claiming that an attorney had advised him he was entitled to the vehicle.

The Famalaro family has refused to be interviewed since John Famalaro’s arrest last week.

When Famalaro was arrested last week, police found a key to the truck in his possession. Investigators later found the truck parked in a Prescott grocery store parking lot, without license plates and with the vehicle identification number covered by a newspaper.

The truck had never been licensed with the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division because it was brand new. The truck did not have a bullet hole when Famalaro drove it off the lot, Sattley added.

The day after Famalaro was arrested, Sattley said, the Phoenix police filed a theft complaint for the Chevrolet against the murder suspect.

Sattley’s run-in with Famalaro began as a dispute over a truck, “and now, six months later, we have a sensational murder,” he said.

“The ironic thing about all this is that I was from Huntington Beach and when this happened to (Huber), I went looking for this girl,” Sattley said.

He explained that he and some friends from a Newport Beach gym, who knew Huber, rode their bicycles along the Santa Ana River channel in search of her. He also had seen the billboards, banners and flyers about her disappearance.

“When they announced that they had identified the body and it was this Denise Huber missing from California, my heart just sank,” Sattley said.