Episode 58:
Hollywood Executive Vanished After Meeting His Forbidden Lover, Leaving Only Phone Signal

In West Hills, one of Los Angeles's wealthiest neighborhoods, lived a family anyone would envy. Gavin Smith was vice president of 20th Century Fox, and his wife Lisa raised their three athletic, good-looking sons — Evan, Austin, and Dylan.

On the morning of May 2, 2012, while Lisa was away visiting family, her son Austin called in a panic: their father had promised to drive him to school, but wasn't answering his phone.

Gavin and Lisa were separated at the time, but he never missed showing up for his kids. His phone was off. He hadn't gone to work. Something was wrong.

The Vanishing

Police traced his last known movements: after an evening event, Gavin returned to a friend's house, changed into purple sweatpants, and watched TV. Around 9 p.m. his friend went to bed. An hour later, Gavin left with nothing but his phone — his wallet, with two credit cards missing but never used, stayed behind.

At 57, Gavin was a former UCLA basketball star and stuntman whose back injury had redirected him into film distribution — where his instincts turned Titanic, Avatar, Star Wars, and X-Men into some of the highest-grossing films in history. With no robbery motive and no ransom demand, and his phone's final signal traced to Sylmar, the family launched a massive search, a $20,000 reward, and national media coverage. Nothing came of it.

A Family Unraveling

A tweet from Gavin's son Evan gave investigators their first real thread: "My Dad decided to leave the family last night. Real family sticks together." Behind the image of the Mercedes and the studio job, Gavin's finances and health had both been under strain — an overpriced house bought at the height of the 2006 bubble, and a back injury that led to an oxycodone prescription and a serious addiction.

In 2008 rehab, Gavin met Chandrika Creech, a married woman in her thirties. Their affair was discovered by her husband John within two years, patched over with a tearful promise to end it — and quietly resumed. When Lisa learned of it herself, she sent her eldest and youngest sons to confront Chandrika directly. They found John home alone instead, and his reaction was explosive: he threatened to kill Gavin on the spot, backing off only when the boys begged him not to destroy both families. Gavin swore it was over. It wasn't. By 2012 he and Lisa had separated — making it easier for him to see Chandrika. The night he vanished, he'd gone out to meet her.

The Storage Unit

When police reinterviewed Chandrika, a black car idled outside, watching, before speeding off — it belonged to John. Arrested and rambling about an unrelated drug charge, he was evasive about the timeline. Phone records showed all three — Gavin, Chandrika, and John — in the same location from 10 p.m. until Gavin's signal died at 4:30 a.m., after which Chandrika went straight home and John made stops at two friends' houses, driving what turned out to be Gavin's Mercedes.

One friend, seeing a body wrapped in a blanket in the passenger seat, refused to help. The other unknowingly stored the car in his garage until the smell gave it away, then quietly returned it to John. With no body and no confession, police could only hold John on an unrelated drug charge — eight years, handed down in September 2012 — while they kept digging. Nine months after Gavin vanished, investigators traced a storage unit rented in the name of Chandrika's grandmother's caregiver. Inside was Gavin's Mercedes, blood soaked into the passenger seat, floor, and trunk — and on a single leftover license plate screw, John's DNA and skin tissue.

Final Thoughts

The body itself wasn't found until October 2014 — two and a half years later, when a dog walker's dog led its owners to a skull half-buried in the desert south of Palmdale, alongside a pair of purple sweatpants. John stayed silent through it all, betting that without a body, murder could never be proven. It was only after police wired one of Chandrika's friends that she finally described watching her husband beat Gavin unconscious in the car, screaming that she was next, then helping burn his bloodied clothes afterward.

At trial in 2017, prosecutors argued premeditated murder; John's defense claimed self-defense against a man who'd fought back first. The jury split the difference: not murder, but manslaughter — eleven years. For a killing that involved a stolen identity, a hidden storage unit, a body dumped in the desert, and nine months of silence, it read to many as far too light. Gavin's family, who had spent months believing he'd simply abandoned them, learned the truth only to lose him all over again — this time for good.