The first I heard that Gavin could be missing was on a Wednesday.
His wife, Lisa, had called me
and asked if I had heard from my brother Gavin,
and I said, "No."
And I said, "Why?"
And she explained that he didn't pick up one of the boys from school.
Smith is well known around the Calabasas community,
big on golf and the beach, his persona bigger than life.
He was last seen Tuesday night leaving a friend's
in the Oak Park neighborhood near Agoura Hills.
Gavin Smith was a Fox executive, and he was larger than life.
What we need to do is figure out, "Is there reason why this person is gone?"
I mean, it's a mystery.
I was trying to reach out to him.
I would leave messages just asking him
to please call, text, say everything's okay.
The 20th Century Fox executive disappeared
after driving off in his black Mercedes.
Nobody had heard from him.
No phone calls, no texts, nothing.
This is a suspicious circumstances missing adult.
You have to look at all the possibilities.
Never ever would I have ever been able to dream
that something like this could ever happen.
The LA County Sheriff's Department
is the best of the best.
Some of the highest-profile cases are tried in Los Angeles.
You have to be dedicated 110%.
This is murder. There's no more serious crime.
It boils down to a passion and a sense of duty.
Justice comes from finding the truth.
In May of 2012, I had just left a special assignment
from a task force that I was on,
and I was reassigned back to the floor.
In this particular case of Gavin Smith,
he had been missing for about a week,
and it had started out with the Missing Persons Unit.
When it was looked at a little bit closer,
the investigators brought it to our supervisor's attention.
And that's when I got the call
to look at it as a "suspicious circumstances" missing person case.
All missing person cases come through the Missing Persons unit.
When you have a case like that,
you're always hoping that you find the person alive.
You're an adult, you can go anywhere you want to go,
and you're not really required to report in to anyone
unless you're on parole or probation, right?
If you're missing, the big question is, "Why? Why is this person missing?"
And what pushes one over to a homicide team
is the suspicion of foul play.
We truly need assistance from the public
in verifiable information leading to the whereabouts
of their father, my husband, Gavin Smith.
My partner John O'Brien and I, we got the case.
We brief with the missing persons detective on the case,
and then we drove out and met Gavin Smith's wife.
We met her in a private gated community of San Fernando Valley.
The San Fernando Valley is at least 200 square miles,
which is a northern part of the city of Los Angeles.
The west San Fernando Valley is primarily residential,
upper-middle-class, bedroom communities that America's familiar with
only because the goddamn Kardashians live in Calabasas.
When we talked to Lisa that first time, she was obviously upset,
as anyone would be.
We tried to set her at ease,
let her know that we're there to help her and to find her husband.
They were a family in crisis. Her son was there.
Gavin's sister, Tara, was there.
But all extremely helpful, gave us oodles of information.
We learned that he was a phenomenal athlete.
Basketball became his life.
He was an All-American and he played for UCLA.
He was pretty much larger than life,
but it wasn't just his height.
He was an incredibly handsome man.
He had a smile that just went on for days.
We were living in San Pedro.
We lived about five, ten minutes from Ports O' Call restaurant.
That's where Gavin was working at the time, and Lisa came on in.
She saddled up to the bar.
Gavin was the bartender.
And they hit it off,
and, uh, it was wonderful.
They had their first son within the first couple years.
They were very much in love.
He was in a couple movies.
He was in the movie Glitz.
Give me a reason!
He was also doing some stunt work and he broke his back.
Um, really quite devastating.
But that was a real turning point for him,
because he was laid up for a long time.
I think that he realized, well, it just wasn't gonna be for him.
And so he ended up getting a job at 20th Century Fox.
He was in charge of film distribution for the west coast.
He just loved being in the movie industry.
Lisa had told us that Gavin didn't show up for work
and didn't talk to anybody.
So it was just very unusual.
And then also he had not picked up his son from school,
and that was a big red flag,
because in all her years of knowing him, he's never disappeared.
It was highly irregular
that somebody like him would just not show up for work,
or not show up to get their child, or just vanish into thin air.
Lisa told us of an extramarital affair that was occurring,
and he was estranged
and living outside of the house at the moment.
He's cheated on her before. She caught him.
A promise was made that that would stop.
Lisa caught him again cheating now, a year later, with a woman named Melanie.
And when she found out about that, she kicked him out.
And then he leaned on a coworker, and he was staying in her spare bedroom,
and she said that she saw him alive
at about 10:00 p.m. on May 1st.
He was drying some laundry and he...
he... he left.
The night before Gavin went missing, I spoke with him.
And I could just sense that he was very distraught at the time,
and he was in turmoil about the decisions that he had made.
He had talked to me about his relationship with Melanie.
From what I understood, he had broke that off earlier,
and he just knew that he had to somehow get back to the family,
and go back into the relationship,
and be the father.
That's all he really wanted to do.
Sorry.
I just remember him...
just loving his boys so much.
And loving our daughters so much,
like they were his own.
It's one of the things that I know.
As a father, he could not have done better.
There's some weird stuff here.
Did he run off with one of these women or someone?
Did he just go to cool his jets?
Uh, did he commit suicide?
Lisa's pissed off. You know, she's cheated on twice.
Did she set it up?
"Screw this bastard. I'm gonna hire someone to abduct him."
Or, you know, "I poisoned him."
It could be anything.
There was just a lot of follow-up we needed to flesh out
to rule anyone out at that time.
We're following up on leads
and all the information that we've gathered
about people he's come in contact with and that he's known in the past.
When we talked to Lisa that first time, she told us,
"My husband's having an affair with this Melanie gal,
and, you know, you might want to talk to her."
So we did.
She comes down wearing this white, sequined pajama outfit
that's almost 100% see-through,
and we're sitting across from this woman that is very sexy and seductive, in a way.
And you're trying to be a professional and ask all these questions,
and you're like, "This is just another moment in the life of a cop."
You look at your partner and go, "Fuck, man. Don't touch me right now."
"I need to get home and see my wife. This is... This is fucking crazy."
Melanie was very forthcoming with them.
She indicated, "Yes, we had been having an affair."
That Gavin was kind of in an emotional state,
uh, but that she didn't want to further cause problems in his marriage.
She'd told him, "I'm done. I don't want to deal with this drama."
After talking to Melanie the first time, I didn't feel she was hiding anything,
but we couldn't rule her out as being involved.
There was too many other things that needed to be done.
They plastered Gavin Smith's picture and car.
Wife Lisa and son Austin leading volunteers,
combing this area of Sylmar.
He's got a family waiting for him,
and that we love him with all our heart.
It's difficult, but...
I just like to think about all the good times we had,
and if we find him, many more that I might have.
Lisa was, you know, trying the best she could
to gather information.
I knew that they could use support,
and I would go down there and continued to go down there
to do searches or talk to people.
I did everything possible to try and find out where he was.
He disappeared.
He didn't actually have the longboard.
Lisa Smith is certain someone knows something.
Gavin Smith's phone was a big piece of the puzzle,
because now you can start painting a picture.
When did his phone go off-grid
and what were the hours when he was last seen
leading up to him being missing?
Some of the phone stuff had been already done by Missing Persons.
We just went back and did a more comprehensive search warrant on that.
We looked at Gavin Smith's phone data and identified,
"Okay, well, on the night that his phone went off-grid,
he called Lisa, the three boys, Tara,
and a woman named Chandrika Creech."
We knew she was the last person to talk to him based on phone records.
What we needed to now find out was, "All right, who is this chick?"
Lisa Smith had told us that Gavin, uh, met Chandrika
at a substance abuse facility called the Matrix.
With all the excruciating pain that Gavin was in from breaking his back,
sadly, the only thing that gave him comfort at that point was opiates.
And that's where he ended up succumbing to an addiction,
until he started telling me that he was in, um, you know, rehab.
When he was there,
Chandrika walked in there to try to sort out her life and her addictions.
Initially, Chandrika was somebody who was part of Gavin's counseling group,
but their relationship turned into something more,
and Gavin had a pretty torrid affair with Chandrika.
Lisa confronted Gavin about it, and he confessed.
The relationship with Chandrika lasted for about a year,
and her husband, John Creech, knew about it.
And then, as a result of Lisa's involvement,
Lisa felt that that relationship had ended.
Got a missing person, and he had an affair with Chandrika.
That right there throws her on the radar.
So we went to interview her, and we caught her at her house.
When we interviewed Chandrika,
she was an emotional wreck.
She was scared, apprehensive, evasive.
She was all over the map.
She said she talked to him.
She didn't know where he went,
but you could tell that she cared about Gavin.
She's adamant she doesn't know what happened to Gavin Smith
after their contact on May 1st, 2012.
While we were interviewing her, a black sports car pulled into the cul-de-sac,
and paused briefly, backed up, and then left.
And talking to Chandrika in that conversation,
she admitted that that was her husband, John.
Obviously, he's somebody that the detectives want to talk to,
but they can't because he took off, and they're immediately suspicious.
Later, we found out he's an ex-con.
You know, he's out right now on a release system with Glendale PD.
He was involved in some narcotics transactions and stuff.
So, yeah, immediately we know we want to find out where he's at.
You know, as a cop, I look at an ex-con,
I look at a guy who has narcotics background...
You know, he's pissed that his wife had an affair with this guy.
Say what you will, you know. A duck's a duck.
I see a duck, looks like a duck, walks, talks like a duck,
you know, it might be a fucking duck.
We looked at him pretty hard right away.
We were looking at John Creech's call detail record.
What we needed to now find out was
how did John Creech's phone overlay into Gavin Smith's movement and call frequency
on the night that he went missing?
I had a very strong background in, uh, phone analytics and mapping,
and we were seeing bizarre patterns.
The police were able to determine that the night of May 1st, 2012,
Gavin and Chandrika were in physical contact with one another.
And in fact Gavin Smith and Chandrika's phones start to ping
in an area of the Hidden Hills not far from the Creech residence
in an area that's viewed as kind of a "lover's lane."
Where did John Creech's phone travel to? Well, it traveled to...
Holy shit! It's pinging to the area where Chandrika was.
And in mapping the cell towers, we put all three phones right there.
At that time, we pretty much knew that something bad had happened.
Even though this case started out as a missing persons case,
we knew what we had at that point.
This is a murder.
We had no idea where John Creech was at the time,
but my partner and I had enough evidence at that time
to support getting a search warrant to search John and Chandrika's home.
Chandrika was home. Her elderly grandmother was there.
The caretaker to Chandy's grandmother was there, Reina Lim.
Neighbors say a nice family lives inside,
but they also say the high shrubs and multiple surveillance cameras
and warning signs to stay off property
are among the many signs that have raised suspicion.
"Abnormal behavior"?
Like, there's certain cars that come and they stay parked outside for a while.
We didn't find a lot of physical evidence to maybe help us in the case,
but we were able to document a lot of things
which to an investigator's mindset are meaningful.
For instance, it's a cul-de-sac. There's five homes on the block.
And for all intents and purposes, this house is the Bellagio.
It's got an elaborate camera system.
It's got $8,000 bronze statues of Buddha in the koi pond in the front yard.
He's got a moat.
A custom, probably at the time about $200,000 pool.
The other houses?
Yeah, it's West Hills. It's a nice area, but not that nice.
We learn Chandrika didn't know how her husband paid for any of it,
and she can't answer what he does for a living,
how he makes his income, if he paid taxes...
I mean, come on, are we stupid? Are we felony fucking stupid?
She's not telling the truth, right?
During the search warrant, she was petrified.
She just didn't know what to do.
I didn't know if she was involved.
I knew she knew, and she wasn't giving it up.
Also, she told us John was in Chicago.
She had no explanation as to why he just uprooted and went to Chicago.
You know? What's up with that?
So, we didn't get the smoking gun,
we didn't get his hands with cuts and bruises on 'em,
but we got a lot of intel.
We knew we were on the right path.
We are still seeking the public's assistance.
Uh, any information that we can glean from the public, we welcome.
We got a tip that Gavin Smith was seen
at a bistro or coffeehouse in Morro Bay.
Somebody had seen him in Morro Bay.
He had gone to school to UCLA and he knew Gavin.
And then the waitress verified that that was Gavin.
And I'm... "Oh, my God. Yes. Okay. He just went off the grid."
And then I drove there.
You know, I think you just click into gear,
and I was just in overdrive.
We have to be in command and control of our investigation,
at the same time, knowing it can spin out of fucking control at any minute.
And it might be little, it might be big, but it's gonna spin out of control,
and it's how you contain that.
Now, you're the lead detective.
You've got Tara and... and whoever, Code Three out there,
going up to Morro Bay to knock on doors and do their thing.
We had 60 to 100 sightings that came in,
and we knew that this was a homicide,
but I can't prove it.
So I gotta follow up on it.
So what do I have to do?
I have to send two detectives to Morro Bay
to follow up on this lead
that he's up there at a hotel having, I don't know, French onion soup.
As harsh as Ty can be, and very blunt,
and to some people maybe even abrasive,
he's able to... to show that,
"Hey, I might be talking this way, but I am here, and I care."
I call him the Ragin' Cajun, 'cause he has that personality.
He's very loud, very boisterous.
But as far as a detective, I know he had that passion,
and he had that care about his cases, and he cared about all of us too.
I was raised... "If you don't like something, say it,"
and I didn't care who I offended.
The lead from Morro Bay, it seemed so credible.
The waitress came out, and she said,
"Well, maybe it wasn't him."
"The newsperson made it seem like it was more him than what it was."
I don't even know how that all happened.
But that was, uh... that was really disappointing.
She... She believed that something very bad happened to Gavin,
but you don't have definitive proof yet, so you're hoping they're alive,
but you know the worst is probably gonna be your answer sooner or later.
Detectives, they had been monitoring John Creech's movement
and determined that John Creech had a history with law enforcement.
In fact, he had been charged with the transportation of illicit drugs.
He once pled guilty to distribution of narcotics,
and in lieu of going to jail, he agreed to become an informant
and work, uh, with Glendale PD.
But he was absolutely useless,
'cause he didn't give 'em anything. He just strung 'em along.
John Creech was still in that Chicago area,
and we needed to bring him in to do an interview.
So we contacted the Glendale detective, Dave Kellogg,
and he agreed to help any way he could.
Dave called him in, and one thing we had Dave do
was go sit down in a room.
We had it wired for sound and audio.
Then we came in.
We introduced ourselves.
We asked questions about Gavin Smith.
John Creech was cool and tried to be charming,
tried to be quick-witted.
Classic con man.
"Yeah. I know that guy." "Did you threaten him in any way?"
"No, never!"
He just downplayed everything, and I decided to try a different angle.
I tried to make Gavin look like a bad person.
I said, you know... I go,
"Gavin, this guy was a... this guy was a stalker."
"He would cultivate women."
I did everything I could just to get him fired up.
I go, "I don't blame you if you did something to him."
"Cut to the chase. Let's end this madness."
But he wouldn't break.
We explain to the judge Creech's suspected involvement
in the Gavin Smith disappearance
and his lack of fulfilling his commitment to provide information to law enforcement.
So the judge remanded Mr. Creech into custody on his narcotics case.
Anytime you can get someone you believe killed someone off the street,
that's a good thing.
That gave us time to flesh it out and investigate.
So we were looking at John Creech's phone data,
who he's calling, who's calling him.
And we notice that after Gavin Smith had talked to Chandrika
on the night Gavin went missing,
there was a series of phone calls
that John Creech called back-to-back-to-back-to-back,
and he's calling the same number,
and that number was Jorge Valles.
As we looked into him,
we realized that he was an associate to Creech.
Mr. Valles had done a lot of contracting work at the Creech home,
and as a result, Jorge Valles and John Creech developed a friendship.
On the night Gavin went missing,
the victim's phone, John Creech's phone, and Jorge Valles' phone
were registering on a cell tower right in Jorge's backyard.
So, we made contact with Jorge Valles.
The first time we talked to Jorge Valles, you could just tell he...
Completely fish out of water.
Valles tells them that John Creech had called him excitedly
during the early morning hours of May 2nd, 2012,
telling him that he needs help and that he's coming to his residence.
Um, Valles is kind of taken aback by that,
but Creech comes over,
says he needs help moving this car,
and it's a Mercedes-Benz.
Jorge Valles saw what looked like a mummified body
wrapped up in bedsheets in the passenger seat,
and John Creech told Jorge Valles that, "I killed him."
"I need you to hide him."
Jorge's like, "You're out of your mind. You ain't hiding him here."
Jorge Valles was very reluctant
to tell the detectives what had happened next,
but he follows John Creech in the black Mercedes
to this home in the Porter Ranch area, a gated community.
And they drive up to one of the homes.
When Creech gets to the residence,
he drives the black Mercedes into the garage,
leaving the black Mercedes there,
and then they leave the location.
Then John Creech told him, "I want you to get rid of this phone."
And poor Jorge was stupid enough to take the phone.
According to Jorge,
he said, the next day, he threw it in a trash can behind a McDonald's.
Jorge saw injuries on Creech's hands.
He saw what he thought was the body,
but he couldn't identify the license plate.
He couldn't identify the body.
So we still didn't have enough to take to a DA.
The detectives are able to determine
that the home that John Creech and Mr. Valles had gone to
was the residence of an individual named Stan McQuay.
Stan McQuay is a workout buddy of John's.
Mr. Health and Fitness Guru to the stars.
Stan McQuay was brought to Lost Hills sheriff station.
We went to talk to him, but he wanted his attorney.
So this high-profile attorney representing Stan McQuay showed up.
He was very candid with me. He said, "Ty, he's not gonna talk to you."
"I'm gonna advise him not to." I go, "Go talk to him."
And he did.
So five minutes passed up, 20 minutes, 40, 50...
I looked at John and go, "This is very good for us."
"The longer he's in there, the better,
'cause the longer he's in there, they're talking freely."
And that attorney's jaw's probably like, "Oh, fuck! Ugh!"
"What did you do now?"
So he comes out, and I loved it, 'cause he looked like a whipped dog.
Anytime you see a private defense attorney that looks like a whipped dog...
a beautiful thing.
It's just like, "Fuck, yeah. Now we're kicking some ass."
These are the little things that get us detectives excited!
"We got the upper hand."
Sure as shit, he says, "Hey, man." He wants to talk to us.
"Can we do it tomorrow at your office?"
"Absolutely, man! No problem."
And he says, "Hey, detectives, can you guys give him a ride home?"
And I said, "Yeah, no problem, sir. We got that handled for you."
This is why, as a homicide guy,
you've gotta be able to navigate without using the freeway.
So we took side streets,
and I stopped at every fucking red light for a long time.
We had a great conversation.
Stan McQuay told us that John showed up,
begged him to park the car in the garage.
He swears he didn't know the body was in there until it started stinking.
Nothing can stop the smell of a decomposing body.
And so he said that he was leaning on Creech
to get up there and get the body out.
He said that John Creech showed up with a U-Haul van,
he pulled the body out of the car, and loaded it up in the van himself.
And, eventually, John Creech picked up Gavin Smith's Mercedes-Benz
and moved it out of his garage.
We had written a search warrant to U-Haul Corporation
of all the known people so far in the case,
and none of our known target subjects
had rented any equipment in our time frame.
It made it frustrating.
Gavin was missing, presumed dead.
And we still didn't have a body.
We didn't have the car.
We didn't know if there was a weapon involved.
There was a lull to where it was getting pretty ugly
that we know, "What are we gonna be able to do next?"
And my partner John and I understand
that it's not checkers, it's chess.
And in this game of chess that we play as homicide detectives with our bad guys,
there is no two-minute clock on.
It's your move.
Both the detectives, Labbe and O'Brien, were extremely helpful.
It wasn't, like, the first 48 hours, it's... it's solved.
It wasn't.
But they had a lot of vested interest in this,
and they were gonna see it through.
In early February 2013,
one of the detectives at Homicide Bureau,
a retired guy,
he plays tennis with a group of men,
and one of those men
is Chandrika's father.
While they're playing tennis, Chandy's dad wasn't acting right.
He said his daughter moved back into their house,
and she was talking about how her husband killed somebody,
and her dad was so shook up about it that he felt compelled to tell a friend.
And so this particular detective knows me,
and he gave me the information right away.
I introduced myself to Chandy's dad,
and he says, "I'll tell you everything I know."
He told us, "I think the car is still around."
"It might be cut up."
"It may have been body-shopped out, but there's still some of it around."
And he said,
"You need to look at Reina Lim, the caretaker to Chandy's grandmother."
It was quite surprising to both of us.
It was like, "Nah, no way."
She's just the little 70-year-old,
non-suspecting, Christian, Filipino caretaker
of a dying old woman related to Chandrika.
And that... The bell just went on at that point, you know?
"Holy fuck. She's been there the whole time."
This is an example of "better off lucky than good,"
because it is a matter of timing.
Man, all of a sudden, you get that break, and it's just...
it's just by chance.
But you have it, you gotta run with it.
I said, "Let's find her."
So we started command and... uh, the surveillance on Reina.
And eventually, she came out of work,
and we made contact with her in the parking lot.
You could tell she was a little startled.
But she knew who we were. She knew what we were investigating.
We just talked to her and explained to her what was going on,
how her name came up in the matter, and she wanted to be completely helpful.
I felt she was being truthful.
She showed us documentation
that proved that she was paying the bill to a storage facility for John Creech.
And probably, whether she knew it or not, was paying the bill
for the storage facility where evidence in a murder was at.
I don't know about you, but I see a commonality.
"Jorge, can you hide this phone?"
"Stan, can I put this guy's car and dead body
in your house for five days?"
"Reina, could she just pay the bill?"
Do you see a pattern here?
This is a classic con man.
He used anybody he could to make himself less culpable, you know?
We get out there and write our search warrant.
And of course when we pop the lock, we find Gavin Smith's car inside.
It was pretty exciting, 'cause now we had our victim's vehicle
confirmed, intact, not cut up.
It's just lucky, you know.
The investigative gods shined down upon us that day.
After the car was found,
then they became determined that this was gonna be a full-on investigation
that would probably lead to a filing,
and I was officially working with Ty.
I knew that Bobby had a very strong reputation
amongst investigators in my unit that I respected.
He's coming out of Major Trials Division,
which is a pretty tough pedigree to get anyway in the DA's office.
I mean, he's a big shot.
The key piece of evidence that they want to determine
is whether the car was where Gavin Smith met his demise.
There is a lot of critical work
that forensic analysts would have to do with the car.
So they want to look for blood evidence.
They want to look for serology evidence, DNA, saliva, hair,
anything that would connect Gavin Smith to being in the vehicle.
We saw that the license plates were removed.
The VIN was intact.
That was not removed.
That's how we identified it. It was our crime scene.
You could see blood,
a lot of blood dried on the passenger side,
floorboard, dash, roof, back seat.
There was blood spatter,
meaning repeated punches and blows,
uh, casting of the blood on the ceiling.
We could see dried blood inside the doorjamb
where the door closes.
I'm not convinced, to this day,
that Gavin's head wasn't put in between that doorjamb
and repeatedly slammed.
He brutally beat the shit out of this guy, you know?
Make no mistake about it. This is an evil man.
The 57-year-old Smith disappeared May 1st 2012.
A year later, his Mercedes was found at this Simi Valley storage facility.
We needed to connect John Creech to Gavin Smith's car.
So you want to fingerprint the car,
but you now have a real focus of where to direct forensic people to look.
There was evidence in the car that indicated he was killed in the car.
Mr. Creech is still a person of interest.
The DNA samples come back, the blood evidence.
The blood evidence came back to Gavin Smith.
You know, I remember one of the things I saw.
The license plate was gone,
but the license plate screw on the left side was screwed back in.
Well, I told the crime lab I wanted that tested for DNA,
and it ended up being a match to John Creech.
It was bittersweet.
Because I knew that...
you know, that was...
The way that they were describing it,
I knew that there was a lot of biological and DNA in the car.
So I pretty much knew then.
It was kind of at that moment...
Well, you know, now there's no going back.
And then you just ask yourself,
"How did it happen? His last moments?"
It's tough.
It's hard.
In terms of a prosecutor's view of the evidence at that point,
now you can prove legally that we had strong circumstantial evidence
that John Creech was the reason why he was dead.
Obviously, there were still, you know,
major pieces to the story that we didn't know yet.
At that time in the case, we had two cooperating witnesses.
We had Jorge Valles, Stan McQuay.
The only thing we really didn't have was, uh, the victim's body,
and we still didn't have an eyewitness to anyone actually seeing how it happened.
There was way too many unknowns than there were knowns.
"No body" cases are some of the most difficult cases to prove.
All we had was the blood evidence inside the car,
but you still don't know how the person died,
and the coroner would not be able to tell you definitively
that the person was actually dead.
The investigation's ongoing.
At this point, we are not charging anybody with anything.
The sad part about it is the not knowing for so long, you know?
It was heartbreaking.
Rightfully so, Lisa was extremely upset,
going every day and not knowing what happened.
Even though more than two years had gone by,
we weren't gonna present a case to the DA
until we had done everything that we felt we could.
In October 2014,
in the mountain rolling hills area of Palmdale, California,
a husband and wife were walking their dog.
Their dog was off-leash, and it... it returned to them,
and it was carrying what appeared to be a human bone in his mouth.
If he smells something he likes, he takes off.
Buddy the brown Lab found something he liked
while hiking the mountains of Palmdale with his owner.
And they called the police to come investigate.
So deputies responded and called it into Homicide Bureau,
that they had a shallow grave with found human remains.
When the detectives go to the crime scene,
they have no idea who that person is.
Sometimes identifications are made by teeth.
Sometimes if the remains are fresh enough, you can do fingerprinting,
and in this particular case, uh, the human remains did show
a number of surgeries Gavin had had over the years,
so they were able to pinpoint that was, in fact, Gavin's remains.
We sent the evidence at the scene down to the coroner's office.
So the coroner begins their exam,
looking at X-rays, making opinions, and determinations on what they saw,
which was a defensive-type wound to his arm and fracture,
like he is blocking a blow, which is consistent with what we knew.
He was attacked in the car.
It was evident and opined that he had a fracture to the skull,
which was caused by blunt force trauma to the head.
We saw complete orbital fractures of...
Pretty much obliteration to his cheekbones.
Finding Gavin Smith, investigative-wise, it's huge. It's pivotal.
But, uh, my concern is the family.
I want to be there for them.
It should be my partner and I talking to Mrs. Smith and the boys about this.
I remember Lisa had called me
and said that he has been found.
You know, I feel like that...
was a closure moment, because...
Sorry.
You know how bad it was.
But then you know it's over.
Because it's true.
You know, families do need closure.
And bodies give closure.
It's not what we wanted, but...
we know he's not coming back.
Even with the discovery of Gavin's body,
there's still information that we did not know.
Namely, we didn't know how Creech actually killed Gavin Smith.
We knew that the only person who possessed that information
was Chandrika Creech.
What we didn't know at that time
was the extent of her involvement in Gavin's death.
As a result, we made the decision to tell her
that we would consider giving her leniency
in exchange for giving a truthful statement,
known as a proffer.
Chandrika agreed to cooperate through her attorney...
and told us
that she had restarted her relationship with Gavin Smith,
but they were not having sexual relations.
And they had a connection,
and they were talking to each other in the car as friends.
She said she was consoling him on his breakup,
and what is he gonna do, his kids, and basically being a friend.
And that's when the door to the car ripped open,
and Johnny jumped in on top of her and him,
and started beating him.
How many times did you see Johnny strike Gavin?
- Five. Five?
She was yelling and screaming,
and she said Johnny was just pummeling him over and over in the face,
and she was able to shimmy her way out the door,
and yelling at him to stop, that he's gonna kill him.
And, at one point, Johnny stopped while Gavin was unconscious,
uh, blood everywhere,
and he looked at her and he says,
"Shut the fuck up or you're next."
She said she finally turned and got away out of there.
And Johnny just kept beating him while he was unconscious.
I think Chandy helped cover it up 'cause Chandy was scared to death of him.
The prosecution of John Creech started in June 2017.
The plan worked!
Gavin Smith is dead!
And he kept his secret for over two years.
I had to argue to the jury that no, this isn't classic emotional killing,
but in fact the defendant knew about the affair for a long time,
and he took the step of tracking where his wife was,
so he wasn't in a state of emotional distress
such that he did not know what he had planned to do.
Some of the important witnesses were, of course, Chandrika,
who was able to tell the story of exactly how Gavin got killed.
He wasn't fighting back or anything.
He wasn't even pushing away. He wasn't moving at all.
As a result-- - And he was moaning.
John Creech took the stand
and said he got into a mutual fight with Gavin.
He punched me, pulled me in by my sweater.
He put his hand on my throat, choking me in my throat.
He's got my head pinned against the ceiling,
and he's got his thumb in my right eye.
I'm hanging out the car with just my head inside
as he's choking me and gouging my eye.
John Creech was claiming Gavin Smith was armed with a hammer.
John Creech testified he was able to overpower him and take that away.
Eventually, he got the upper hand and accidentally killed Gavin,
but that it was completely in self-defense.
And that, eventually, he took that...
whatever tool or item it was back to his house
and threw it in his neighbor's yard.
You made the decision not to call 911. Is that correct?
I made that decision.
I live with that every day.
In my opinion, he lied about everything he said.
We the jury in the above entitled action
find the defendant, John Creech,
not guilty of the crime of first-degree murder of Gavin Smith.
The verdict that came down
was not guilty on first-degree murder, premeditated murder.
We the jury in the above entitled action
find the defendant, John Creech,
guilty of the crime of voluntary manslaughter of Gavin Smith.
But guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the state of California.
That's, "Fuck you."
This was premeditated, planned, and calculated, and he killed him.
Any time that you hear a verdict that isn't what you wanted,
there's a deflation, sadness.
The trial judge went out of his way
to say that he disagreed with the jury's verdict
and felt that the prosecution had proven that it was murder.
Any other person sitting in this courtroom
would have called 911, would have sought medical help,
and you did not.
And I think it's because, frankly, you're a cold and cruel person.
He was going to sentence the defendant to the maximum,
which was 11 years.
In my mind, I was like, "He's gonna get 30, 40 years, right?"
I mean, this was premeditated.
And then get 11 years? That didn't seem like justice at all.
I was angry all over again.
I was so mad.
I mean, furious that... Gavin wasn't gonna get justice.
The good news was that he was being investigated
for new drug-related charges
and later on prosecuted for transportation and sale of drugs.
And he got around 26 years for the federal charges.
And mainly that was because he was a prior convicted federal felon.
He ended up getting 40-plus years altogether.
So that's some comfort to Lisa and her kids.
And the fact that he got significant time in custody,
which was very deserving.
There were a lot of things about him
that were pretty incredible.
You know?
Not everybody is perfect, and, by far, he was not.
He was a lot of things.
But he was an incredible person.
He took advantage of what life has, and he did a lot with it.
It's sad, it's tragic, but I have no regrets in this case.
I honestly don't think there's a lot of investigators in our building
that would have done half of what we did.
It boils down to a passion and a sense of duty.
Our job is to seek the truth, and the facts,
and bring the person to justice.
That's what we do. That's what we signed up for.
August 20th, I get a phone call from Bruce,
and he tells me that his wife, Jana, has been missing since that morning.
Just like the Gavin Smith case,
it's critical to look at anybody that has close ties.
You have to look at every entity.
Who would want to hurt her? Did she have enemies?
Bruce said because of Jana's father,
someone may have abducted Jana.
Her father was a very prominent politician in the state of California.
Maybe she ran away.
Maybe there was an extramarital affair that was occurring.
She's starting to really change her outward image.
She'd had her teeth done.
Something just doesn't seem right, seems kind of suspicious.
She's a very sweet, friendly girl.
No reason for anybody to do this.