Amazing appeared bizarre about the emails Christopher Ryan Smith was sending while on holidays in Africa pervious year. The 32-year-old traveler's talkative tone was subdued and replies were unexpectedly abrupt.
"The emails were small and cute," said Jim Amormino, an Orange County Sheriff's Department spokesman. "They were only too generic."
The cause Smith didn't look like he is because it wasn't him. Officials say Smith not at all went to Africa, but had been killed in his Southern California office by his business colleague Edward Younghoon Shin, who seized Smith's email account and imitated he'd gone overseas.
Shin's allegation has been postponed awaiting Oct. 21 at the request of the defense.
Messages began arriving soon after Smith was last seen in June 2010. In one, he was sand embarking on South African dunes. In another, he was paragliding closed to Johannesburg.
Officials say Shin, 33, kept up the dishonesty pending the last message arrived in December.
"The last one said he was going to the Congo," Amormino said. "I suppose (Shin's) consideration procedure was the Congo was hazardous and something must have taken place to him there."
Smith and Shin had gone into business several year ago, establishing a firm namely The 800Xchange, an "advertising agency that intentions on superior-quality radio campaigns," according to Shin's now-defunct Twitter account.
Shin had a shady business earlier and had been criminal of fraud and ordered to pay $700,000 in compensation, officials said. When Smith revealed about this and a numerous of complaints his colleague was facing, he wanted out.
The two men discussed a takeover where Shin would give Smith about $1 million for his attention in the company.
But "on contrary paying Mr. Smith $1 million, he killed him in his company’s office," Amormino said.
Shin's attorney, Al Stokke, denied to remark. A number listed for Shin's wife showed to have been disengaged.
At last, Smith's family grew doubts and appointed a personal investigator, who evaluated with U.S. embassies in many African countries quoted in the emails and battered the worldwide press for signs of the missing American.
In April, domestic police took a lost person's report and the sheriff's department took over an inquiry on Aug. 17.
Prosecutors went to a business park in San Juan Capistrano, a picturesque community in Orange County where Shin and Smith had located their business. Although their previous office had been efficiently cleaned and renovated, detectives found traces of blood in the carpet. They utilized DNA testing to verify it was Smith's.
After placing Shin under inspection for many days, prosecutors detained him Aug. 28 at Los Angeles International Airport as he was about to leave on a flight to Canada. Prosecutors did not say if it was on a one-way or round-trip ticket.
Following a six-hour interview, Shin owned up to the murdering, though he did not say what he had made with Smith's body, authorities said.
On Aug. 29, homicide prosecutors captured another man, Kenny Roy Kraft, 34, on doubts of being an accessory after the reality and helping dispose of Smith's belongings. The victim's Range Rover was finally found in San Jose.
