MURDER SUSPECT ARRESTED 1984 RANCH KILLINGS UNFOLD.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

LANCASTER - Seventeen years after a retired Lockheed test pilot and his girlfriend were shot to death on his Valyermo fruit ranch, a former ranch employee was caught in Mexico and returned to Lancaster to face trial on murder charges.

A Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide investigator tracked Josif Jurcoane down in Mexico and arranged for him to be picked up by Mexican authorities and turned over to U.S. officials, authorities said Monday.

``I was prepared for both eventualities: that he would never be caught and that he would be. I was going to face whatever I had to face when I had to face it,'' said Nancy Roebuck, victim Lloyd Bryden's daughter.

Jurcoane, now 51, had been on the run since Bryden, 68, and Alice McCrannel, 39, were found shot to death the evening of July 4, 1984, on Bryden's ranch.

Jurcoane had once worked at the ranch, and his wife was still working there when the couple was killed.

``There was an employee-employer relationship that had gone sour,'' said Deputy District Attorney Rouman Ebrahim.

Bryden had been a test pilot for Lockheed in the 1950s at Burbank and Palmdale, said his daughter, who now with her husband owns a business that sells metal fabricating machinery.

Bryden bought the ranch, which grew cherries and other fruit, in 1964, Roebuck said, and later moved there.

Jurcoane disappeared after the shooting, and authorities believed he fled to Mexico, although he was a Romanian immigrant, not a Mexican.

Jurcoane was taken into custody Thursday by Mexican authorities and turned over at the border to U.S. officials. He is being held in Los Angeles in the Men's Central Jail without bail.

Because of the Mexican policy not to extradite people to face a possible death sentence in the United States, District Attorney Steve Cooley promised that the death penalty would not be sought against Jurcoane, Ebrahim said.

Investigators would not talk about how Jurcoane was located, saying it could compromise their sources of information.

Homicide Sgt. Alfredo Castro, who works in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's foreign prosecution unit, developed information on Jurcoane's whereabouts and - with the assistance of Mexican authorities in the United States and in Mexico - was able to arrange for him to be picked up, said sheriff's Sgt. Paul Mundry.