Family and Friends Bury Denise Huber in South Dakota : Crime: Police unload suspect’s belongings and try to determine if he had met the former Northridge resident before the killing.

As Denise Huber was buried in South Dakota on Tuesday, police unloaded a truck packed with accused killer John J. Famalaro’s belongings, seized from Famalaro’s Arizona home, where Huber’s body was found in a freezer.

The discovery of the body ended a three-year mystery that began when Huber, who grew up in Northridge, was reported missing on June 3, 1991, after her car was found abandoned with a flat tire on the Corona del Mar Freeway.

Among other things, investigators hope to determine whether Famalaro, a 37-year-old house painter, had ever met Huber, a 23-year-old waitress who vanished while returning home to Newport Beach after a concert.

Authorities also are seeking evidence that would confirm that Famalaro, a former Orange County resident, was in the area at the time Huber disappeared.

“We’re pretty confident that he was in the Orange County area during the second and third of June, which is when she disappeared,” said Costa Mesa Police Lt. Ron Smith.

“But we’re looking for any kind of receipt, phone bill, letter, canceled check, anything that would give us a time and a date and a location, and anything that would somehow connect him with Denise before the disappearance that would explain their encounter,” Smith said.

“Is it just chance that her tire goes flat and he happens to be driving by? Or had he been following her?”

Famalaro is being held without bail in the Yavapai County, Ariz., jail pending his extradition to Orange County. Arrested July 13 after Huber’s body was discovered in a freezer inside a stolen rental truck at his Arizona house, Famalaro faces first-degree murder charges. He could be sentenced to death if convicted.

Orange County prosecutors filed murder charges against Famalaro last week after preliminary DNA testing indicated stains at a Laguna Hills warehouse facility rented by Famalaro matched Huber’s blood, indicating she may have been killed in California before her body was taken to Arizona.

Famalaro has not yet entered a plea to those charges, but he has pleaded not guilty to the Arizona charges.

Among other items, the 17-foot truck was filled with hundreds of boxes of documents, papers and personal effects. Police also unloaded the suspected murder weapon--a nail puller that was previously described as a crowbar--the freezer in which Huber’s body was found, Huber’s clothes and other belongings, a computer, typewriter, as well as a refrigerator found inside Famalaro’s house.

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Authorities predicted it would take weeks to pore through the cache.

“We’re looking through every shred of paper to see if there’s any significance to it at all,” Smith said.

Huber, meanwhile, was buried in Herreid, S.D., a farming community of 485 residents where her family, who were active in San Fernando Valley Protestant church circles for many years, has deep roots.

Denise “always enjoyed” visiting Herreid, said her father, Dennis Huber. “We really feel like we’re home and among friends and family, and that is very, very important to me,” he said.

More than 225 friends and relatives crowded into the tiny First Reformed Church to take part in a 90-minute service. Some mourners had to sit in the church basement, watching the service on a video monitor. Others gathered outside under cloudy skies around another monitor set up near a large cottonwood tree.

Dennis Huber and his wife, Ione, are moving later this month from Newport Beach to Bismarck, N.D., about 100 miles north of Herreid, a move they had planned before their daughter’s body was found three weeks ago.

“I look at it as a new start, and hopefully we can get away from some of the bad memories,” Dennis Huber said of the move out of Orange County.

The Hubers said they plan to attend Famalaro’s trial in Orange County, however, hoping that he will be sentenced to death.

“I don’t think I could ever begin to figure out why (she was killed),” Dennis Huber said. “She was a beautiful, wonderful person . . .”

Times staff writer Rene Lynch contributed to this story.