Police Suggest Motive in Slaying : Crime: Suspect held in Indonesia was questioned after man’s disappearance, but police said there was no evidence to charge him.

Soon after Suresh Mirchandani disappeared in August of 1991, sheriff’s detectives began investigating an associate who had sold him a Woodland Hills dry cleaning business.

It was more than just the fact that the associate, Harnoko Dewantono, was one of the last people to see Mirchandani the day he disappeared, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Jacque Franco, who investigated the case.

The dry cleaning business Mirchandani had agreed to purchase from Dewantono for $100,000 had not been a lucrative investment, Franco said, and Mirchandani owed Dewantono thousands of dollars. And, Los Angeles police would later learn, Mirchandani wanted to back out of the deal.

Then there was the $3,000 check, drawn on Mirchandani’s bank account and made out to Dewantono, that was cashed shortly after Mirchandani disappeared and was later determined to have been forged, Franco said.

“We felt that (Dewantono) was involved, but we just never had enough information to proceed with it,” said Franco, who interviewed Dewantono at least four times. “The main thing was we never came up with a body.”

But last month, three years after Franco launched the case, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed three murder counts against Dewantono in the death of Mirchandani and two other victims.

The key piece of evidence, the Los Angeles Police Department now says, turned up just five months ago--although police didn’t know it at the time. Authorities now say that Mirchandani’s corpse was one of three decomposed bodies found in a Northridge storage facility last August.

If the body had not been discovered, authorities say, the case would still be languishing.

“When we got further into the investigation, we thought (Dewantono) obviously had a motive because (Mirchandani) owed him money for the dry cleaning business, but at the same time we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him,” Franco said.

Dewantono, who is now 30, was arrested Jan. 7 by Indonesian authorities in Jakarta, the country’s capital, for possible passport violations, authorities said. Los Angeles police are working to have Dewantono extradited to the United States to face the triple murder charges.

LAPD Detective Ed Ramirez, who is investigating the case, said his department has not identified the business deal as a motive for the slaying, but confirmed he is aware that Mirchandani wanted to get out of the deal so that he could pursue a job offer in his native Kuwait.

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It remains unclear what was behind the slaying of two other people whose bodies were found in the same storage locker where Mirchandani’s was discovered. The victims have been identified as Eri Tri Harto Darmawan, 26, and Gina Sutan Aswar, 30. LAPD Detective Ted Ball, who is heading the murder investigation, said Wednesday that family members have confirmed that Dewantono and Darmawan were brothers.

Also unclear is whether Jakarta authorities will hand over Dewantono, since no extradition treaty exists between the United States and Indonesia, police say.

Sunten Manurung, a spokesman for the Indonesian consulate in Los Angeles, declined to speculate on the case, but he said it is possible Dewantono could stand trial on the murder charges in Indonesia.

“By law, I think it’s quite difficult for us to extradite our citizens to the United States,” Manurung said.

Barbara J. Moore, who heads the extradition services section of the district attorney’s office, said she is optimistic that an agreement will be reached.

“We will do whatever the government of Indonesia asks us to do because we would like to see him back here,” Moore said.

Pushpa Advani, Mirchandani’s sister, said in an interview this week that she and her family want to see Dewantono prosecuted and that whether the trial is held in Los Angeles or Jakarta is a moot point.

“We don’t want him to get away,” Advani said.

Advani said her brother, who would have turned 40 this month, had fled Kuwait in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion with his family so that his daughter could be treated for leukemia at a Los Angeles area hospital.

In his search for work, Mirchandani met Dewantono, who offered to sell him a dry cleaning business on Ventura Boulevard for $100,000, and the deal went through in January, 1991, Franco and Advani said.

“I was dead against him buying it because the business climate wasn’t great and it looked like Kuwait was on its way back,” Advani said. “But he said, ‘No, I want to do something’ and just went ahead and did it.”

After the business went bad, Advani said, her brother had expressed fears to her over having told Dewantono of his plans to return to Kuwait to accept a job with an airline.

The night before he disappeared, Mirchandani dined at Advani’s home at a Canyon Country condominium complex where each owned a unit. However, the next night Mirchandani failed to appear for a birthday dinner for their younger brother, Advani said.

The following day, an employee at the dry cleaning business reported that Mirchandani had not shown up for work or called.

“We suspected right then and there that something was wrong,” Advani said.

Police found Mirchandani’s Honda Accord in East Los Angeles a few days later, and the check made out to Dewantono was cashed soon after, authorities said.

Dewantono, who at the time was living at a house in North Hills, told detectives that Mirchandani had given him the check the day he disappeared, Franco said. A handwriting expert evaluated the check and determined that Mirchandani’s signature had been forged.

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Advani complained that detectives should have paid closer attention to the $3,000 check that surfaced after her brother disappeared.

But Franco said that when Dewantono’s writing was checked against the forged signature, it did not match. Although Dewantono was interviewed four times, investigators found no new leads into Mirchandani’s disappearance.

As for Mirchandani’s family, Advani said, his wife returned to Kuwait with the couple’s son and daughter in 1992 and was informed this week by family members that police have officially identified Mirchandani as one of the storage locker victims.

“She was just devastated,” Advani said.