The person they found, whoever he or she was, had the misfortune to be the apparent victim of a murder. The murderer, whoever he or she was, had the poor taste to bury the dismembered body in a back yard in the exclusive city of San Marino.

Police were not saying much Friday, other than to confirm that the trisected skeletal remains had been unearthed during a swimming pool excavation behind a spacious home on Lorain Road.

On the other hand, the neighbors were talking a lot--about the young man and woman who had been living there and disappeared nine years ago, about a mysterious tenant, about the young man's mother, who died in poverty a few years later, and about how crimes such as this are not supposed to occur in places such as San Marino.

"But I live on the north side of Huntington (Drive)," a trim woman in a spiffy tennis outfit told reporters gathered in front of the two-story house on Lorain Road. "This is on the south side. Some people call this 'Sub Marino.' "

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department confirmed Friday that the remains found Thursday afternoon--buried about four feet deep in three plastic bags--apparently belonged to one person. Detectives said that person "may have been a previous resident missing since 1985."

San Marino police said there were two residents of the Lorain Road home on whom missing persons reports were filed in 1985--Jonathan Sohus and his wife, Linda Sohus, in their late 20s.

The coroner's office said it had not been determined whether the victim was a man or a woman.

Homicide investigators had little to add, except to say that the current residents of the house--Ray Parada and his wife--are not suspects in the case. The Paradas moved in a few months after the Sohus couple disappeared, and rebuilt the house, virtually from the ground up.

It was the neighbors, some of whom have lived on the quiet, tree-lined street for decades, who were able to provide a history of the place that stretches back more than 65 years.

The late Ruth (DiDi) Deidrick moved there at about age 12 in 1928, when her parents built a modest, Spanish-style house, one of the first homes in the newly subdivided neighborhood, according to Mary Ann Kent, who lives down the block. After Ruth's father and mother died, she continued to live in the house.

"Ruth was such a free spirit . . . very artsy," Kent said. "She was married several times . . . there were four, maybe five husbands, I don't remember."