Suspect’s Gun Linked to Slaying of Officer : Crime: Man accused in Oregon killing was questioned earlier about slaying of Manhattan Beach policeman.

A man now suspected of killing Manhattan Beach Police Officer Martin Ganz in December was questioned by detectives just a few weeks after the crime, but there wasn’t enough evidence to connect him to the slaying, police said Friday.

But authorities say the .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol taken from Roger Hoan Brady, 28, after a robbery and homicide near Portland, Ore., is the gun used to kill Ganz.

“The bullet that killed Officer Ganz was fired from the gun in Mr. Brady’s possession,” William A. Baker, chief of detectives of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said at a news conference at the Martin Ganz Memorial, a commemorative pedestal at Live Oak Park in Manhattan Beach.

Baker said a 60-detective task force received an anonymous phone tip in January naming Brady as a suspect.

Detectives interviewed Brady shortly afterward at his home in Topanga Canyon, but “there was nothing tangible we could sink our teeth into,” Baker said. However, he added, Brady “was not dismissed as a suspect. . . . He was just one of more than 2,000 clues we were following.”

A gray, 1988 Daihatsu used in the Oregon robbery matches the car believed to have been used by Ganz’s killer. Since the officer’s slaying, detectives have checked out leads on 2,700 vehicles and examined 600 firearms.

Ganz, 29, who joined the Manhattan Beach Police Department in 1989, was shot in the head by a motorist he pulled over during a routine traffic stop near the Manhattan Village shopping mall the night of Dec. 27. The murder was witnessed by Ganz’s 13-year-old nephew, who was on a “ride-along” with his uncle, and by another witness.

Brady has been charged in Oregon with killing a 55-year-old registered nurse who was shot Aug. 3 as she stood outside a suburban supermarket that had just been robbed. A witness got the license number of the getaway car--the gray Daihatsu--and police traced it to an apartment in Vancouver, Wash., where Brady lived with his parents.

Brady eventually surrendered and is being held without bail in Oregon. The .380-caliber pistol was found in the apartment.

Federal court and prison records show that Brady was arrested in October, 1989, for the robbery of Home Federal Savings & Loan in Agoura Hills, in which he pointed a pellet gun at a teller and got $2,053.

He later was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison, with five years probation to follow. He was released from the prison at Lompoc in October, 1992.