Huber Case Going to Orange County : Courts: DNA test results to date indicate the former Northridge woman was murdered in Laguna Hills. She disappeared in 1991.

Long-awaited blood tests confirmed that a former Northridge woman whose battered body was found in a freezer here was apparently bludgeoned to death three years ago in Laguna Hills, leading Arizona authorities on Thursday to send the murder case to Orange County for prosecution.

Orange County prosecutors quickly filed capital murder charges against John J. Famalaro, a 37-year-old house painter who lived most of his life in Orange County before moving in 1992 to Arizona where he was arrested earlier this month on murder charges.

The victim, Denise Huber, 23, disappeared June 3, 1991 after her automobile had a tire blowout on the Corona del Mar Freeway.

Her whereabouts had been a complete mystery until Arizona detectives, thinking they were about to uncover a cache of illicit drugs, found her body in the freezer, which Famalaro brought here from California and kept supplied with power in a Ryder rental truck parked in his driveway.

Although criminal defense attorneys both here and in California have said that prosecutors would have a tougher time securing a death sentence if the murder case was sent to Orange County, they also said that Arizona would have little choice but to surrender jurisdiction if evidence surfaced that death had occurred in California.

That evidence was uncovered by police detectives from Costa Mesa, and confirmed by crime lab technicians of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The joint statement issued Thursday said that the decision to send the murder prosecution to Orange County was “based on the DNA analysis of blood stains collected at the warehouse (Famalaro occupied) at 23192 Verdugo” in Lake Forest. Two types of DNA testing were being done, the statement said, and “results to date show that the blood found at the warehouse matches that of Denise Huber.”

The complaint charging Famalaro with murder included the “special circumstance” of kidnaping. “Due to the special circumstance allegation, Famalaro is eligible for the death penalty,” the statement said.

The Huber family, prominent in Presbyterian church circles in the San Fernando Valley since 1973, moved to Newport Beach in 1987. Denise Huber attended Valley Presbyterian School and Los Angeles Baptist High School in North Hills.

The dead woman’s father, Dennis Huber, said from the family home in Newport Beach that he and his wife were greatly relieved that the jurisdictional issue had finally been resolved, and that his daughter’s body would be released in time for a twice-postponed funeral now scheduled for Tuesday in South Dakota.

“It closes the chapter, but not the book,” Dennis Huber said. He added that he had “mixed feelings” about the case being transferred to Orange County.

“We felt it might have been an easier prosecution over there,” he said. “I think it will be a fair trial and justice will be served. It just might be tougher.”

Famalaro’s defense attorney, Thomas K. Kelly, agreed with that assessment. “From Day One, I believed it to be in my client’s best interest to have the case tried in California,” he said, because it is easier to carry out a death sentence in Arizona.

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Only two of California’s more than 300 death row inmates have been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1977.

Famalaro will continue to be held without bail in Arizona’s Yavapai County Jail pending extradition to Orange County, said Yavapai County Sheriff Buck Buchanan.

“If he waives extradition, he’ll go quick (to Orange County). If he doesn’t, he goes slow. But, he goes.”

In addition, the Yavapai County attorney’s office has filed papers requesting that all evidence seized in three searches of Famalaro’s home here be turned over to Orange County authorities.

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Staff writers Greg Hernandez, Matt Lait and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.