Police Identify Suspect in Slayings of 3 Relatives : Crime: A former bodyguard for one of the victims is being sought. Authorities also seek to question his girlfriend as a witness.

A former bodyguard was being sought in the slayings in California and Arizona of a film producer, his son and his father.

Culver City Police Chief Ted Cooke identified the suspect as Robert Michael Suggs, also known as Robert Michael Allen, 31, of Scottsdale, Ariz.

Suggs’ girlfriend, Susan Lynn Calkins, 28, also of Scottsdale, was also being sought as a material witness. Cooke said Calkins apparently was trying to break off her relationship with the suspect. A missing person’s report was filed on her behalf in Manhattan Beach, where she was last seen.

“I would like to see her alive,” Cooke said. “I have serious concerns for her safety.”

Roland Jon Emr, 45, and his son, Roger, 20, both of Torrance, died in a hail of gunfire on a busy Culver City street Thursday afternoon. The killer pulled his car alongside their late-model Lincoln Continental and fired several rounds from a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol, police said.

The following day, the body of Arthur Charles Emr Sr., 71, the father of Roland Emr, was found in the study of his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz. He had been shot in the back of the head at close range with a similar weapon.

Suggs, owner of a Scottsdale-based firm called Investigators Group International, had been hired by Roland Emr as a bodyguard last October, a source said.

Police said there were at least two motives for the slayings. First, Suggs may have acted in retaliation for receiving only $10,000 of an expected $30,000 fee from Emr for his bodyguard services.

Police were also checking a report that Emr had offered Suggs the title of associate producer in a film on the life of the late actor James Dean, Culver City Detective Hank Davies said. Police theorize that Emr may have had a “falling out” with Suggs over his financial participation in the project.

Emr was working with veteran film writer-producer Alan Hauge, president of GMT Studios, where Emr rented stage and office space, although he was not connected to the studio’s management.

According to Mark Roesler, an attorney for the family of James Dean, who was killed in an auto crash in September, 1955, Hauge had obtained exclusive rights to the late actor’s life story.

Although the Dean family had been approached by many studios, Hauge was given the green light in 1988 to begin writing the story because the family felt comfortable with him, Roesler said.

Hauge, 48, said in a telephone interview Monday that he linked up with Emr last November because “we had to come up with about $30 million” to produce the feature. He said he first met with Emr in a Westside restaurant and that Emr said he could find the cash. “I’ve got some connections,” Hauge recalled Emr as saying.

In January, Hauge said, Emr claimed he had begun putting together a deal with three investors from Japan, Switzerland and California. Last week, he said, Emr told him the three investors were “like horses running to the gate,” and that the $30-million deal was ready to start closing.

Seed money, in the amount of $1.5 million, was supposed to be in the bank Thursday morning, Hauge said. Then Emr told Hauge that a legal technicality would delay the closing until the next day, Friday. Hauge said he learned about the murders Thursday afternoon while playing racquetball.

“I still can’t believe it happened,” he said.

Does Hauge believe that Emr would have come up with $30 million?

“In this business everybody says they have the money,” Hauge said. “But until they come up with the checks, you don’t know.”