In 1990, Suresh Gobid Mirchandani, an Indian national who had long resided in Kuwait, sought refuge in the United States for his family. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had upended their lives, and he brought his wife and two children to Los Angeles, hoping for a safe haven. Beyond safety, he was driven by a father's love, seeking advanced medical treatment for his young daughter who was battling leukemia.
A 40-year-old man starting over, Suresh was determined to provide for his family and build a new life for them in California.
To secure their future, Suresh entered into a business arrangement in January 1991, purchasing a dry-cleaning business in Woodland Hills for $100,000. The seller was a man named Harnoko Dewantoro, an Indonesian national known as "Oki." The business, however, was not the promising venture Suresh had hoped for. By August, the investment had soured, and Suresh wanted to back out of the deal, still owing Dewantoro thousands of dollars. On August 1, 1991, Suresh Gobid Mirchandani disappeared. His family knew something was terribly wrong when he failed to show up for work.
Detectives with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department immediately suspected foul play and quickly focused on Dewantoro, who was one of the last people known to have seen Suresh alive. The suspicion deepened when a $3,000 check from Suresh's account, made out to Dewantoro, was cashed shortly after his disappearance. A handwriting expert later determined the signature was forged. Despite interviewing Dewantoro multiple times, investigators hit a wall. They had a strong motive and a likely suspect, but without Suresh's body, they lacked the evidence to make an arrest. Suresh's car, a Honda Accord, was found abandoned in East Los Angeles a few days after he went missing, but the case went cold, leaving his family in an agonizing state of uncertainty.
For three years, there were no answers. Then, in August 1994, a gruesome discovery broke the case wide open. The contents of an abandoned U-Haul storage locker in Northridge were being auctioned off. Inside, authorities found the decomposing bodies of three people. It would take months for official identification, but one of the victims was Suresh Mirchandani. The other two were Gina Sutan Aswar, 30, and Ery Tri Harto Dharmawan, 26, Dewantoro's own younger brother. Investigators learned that Dewantoro had killed them all in separate incidents, storing their bodies and moving them between different locations before finally leaving them in the Northridge locker.
By the time the bodies were found, Harnoko Dewantoro had fled the United States and returned to his native Indonesia. He was arrested in Jakarta in January 1995 for passport forgery. Los Angeles police traveled to Jakarta and were present when Indonesian authorities interrogated him. Dewantoro confessed to bludgeoning Aswar to death over a failed business deal and killing his brother during an argument. He claimed his brother was the one who shot Suresh Mirchandani, an account detectives did not believe. He admitted to burying Suresh's body in the yard of a house he rented before later digging it up to hide with the others.
Due to the crimes being committed on U.S. soil by an Indonesian citizen, a complex legal situation unfolded. Indonesia declined to extradite Dewantoro. Instead, he was tried in a Jakarta court for the three Los Angeles murders. In 1997, after a trial where prosecutors from Jakarta had traveled to Los Angeles to gather evidence, including police photos of the victims' bodies, Dewantoro was found guilty on three counts of murder and sentenced to death.
The sentence, however, was not the final chapter. In 2003, Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri commuted Dewantoro's death sentence to life imprisonment. Years later, after being described as a well-behaved prisoner who taught English to other inmates, he was granted clemency by President Joko Widodo. In November 2019, Harnoko Dewantoro was released from prison on conditional parole. For the family of Suresh Mirchandani, who came to America seeking only safety and a chance for his daughter to live, the journey for justice took a turn they could never have imagined. His wife and children had returned to Kuwait in 1992, and were devastated to finally learn of his fate years after he vanished.
