Body of Missing Woman Identified : Investigation: The remains of Kyu-Hee Park Fernandez, who disappeared in August, were found by hikers near Riverside. Police are seeking her husband.

The body of a Garden Grove woman missing since August has been found in Riverside County, and authorities on Monday were hunting as far as Europe for her husband and the couple’s two children.

The decomposing body of Kyu-Hee Park Fernandez, 30, was identified by sheriff’s investigators on Thursday after being discovered by hikers a week earlier at the base of a mountain east of the city of Riverside, said Riverside County Sheriff’s Sgt. John Horton.

The husband, Manuel Fernandez, 27, holds a French passport and his family owns property in France and Spain, Horton said. While Horton said police want to question more people locally, they also have enlisted the help of federal and international authorities to find Fernandez and the children, Christopher, 6, and Sharon, 2.

“He’s probably outside the country,” Horton said. “We do want to contact him.”

Relatives reported all four members of the family missing from their Garden Grove apartment on Aug. 24.

A week or two earlier, Manuel Fernandez had moved back in with his wife and children after she dropped plans to divorce him, although he had beaten her during much of their six-year marriage, she charged in documents seeking a divorce and a restraining order against him.

“We got up in the morning and they were just gone,” neighbor Ana Acevez said. “The children’s bikes were out and the shoes were out and their mail started piling up. They were just gone.”

One of the couple’s two cars was found parked at Los Angeles International Airport, Garden Grove Capt. Dave Abrecht said.

Acevez said she befriended Kyu-Hee Fernandez and her children after they moved into the next-door apartment last spring, finding her new neighbor pretty and outgoing. Relatives said she was increasingly active in a local congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But friends and relatives said she also was troubled by her deteriorating marriage--a union beset by charges of recurrent abuse and fears that her husband would leave the country with the children, according to court records.

The couple wed as students in Paris in 1988. Both spoke several languages and traveled all over the world, from the South Pacific to South America, according to their attorneys and police.

But Manuel Fernandez, who was working as a convenience-store clerk at the time he disappeared, acknowledged in court papers this year that the marriage was unstable, saying he attended counseling for six months after “we had a problem with physical abuse.”

Fernandez said his wife had left three times in six years and said he feared that she would be the one to leave the country with the children, according to court documents.

In June, Kyu-Hee Fernandez obtained a court order to keep her husband away, saying she once had to flee to a battered-women’s shelter with the children. She charged in court papers that one beating while she was pregnant in 1992 left her unable to eat or get out of bed for two weeks.

Kyu-Hee Fernandez began divorce proceedings in July but changed her mind days later and asked her lawyer to get the restraining order and divorce suit dropped, said her attorney, Tonya Prescott. A judge ordered Kyu-Hee Fernandez’s lawyer to hold the family passports, but the order was never put into place before the couple reconciled, Prescott said.

Prescott said she advised against the reconciliation.

“I was reluctant to do it,” Prescott said. “When she came and said everything’s peachy keen, yeah, I was concerned.”

An autopsy failed to determine the cause of death, police said, and the results of toxicology tests are pending.

Times Staff Writer Mark I. Pinsky contributed to this report.