Edward Shin and Chris Smith
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. Two young entrepreneurs in Southern California were living the dream. Big money, fast cars, and beautiful women. Business was booming. But Chris had enough.

So he sold his shares in the company to travel the world. Without notice, he left. Months and months passed, but something didn't feel quite right. While traveling, Chris always stayed in contact with his family through email. At first, his emails were cheerful and happy, but the emails turned sinister.

And Chris's family was left wondering, did Chris really leave to travel the world? Was it really Chris behind those emails? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 127, the story of Edward Shin and Chris Smith. ♪

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

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Now, let's jump right into this week's case. In June 2011, private investigator Joe DeLue began tracking down a small business owner who had recently moved out of his Southern California office without paying rent. The renter had left the place a complete mess and owed the building's landlord over $40,000 in back rent.

The office sat slightly off the I-5 freeway in the city of San Juan Capistrano, California. The total space rented out to the tenant was massive. It included several private offices, a conference room, a break room, and a reception area.

After failing to get in touch with the renter himself, the building's landlord asked another tenant of his, private investigator Joe DeLue, to help track down the business owner. He told DeLue his tenant had skipped out on their lease a few months early and owed him thousands. Private investigator Joe DeLue quickly got to work on the case.

He found out that the office space had been rented out to the owners of 800 Exchange, Edward Shin and Chris Smith. Ed and Chris started the company 800 Exchange back in April of 2009. Previously, in 2008, Ed Shin worked for a company called Lead Generation Technologies, or LGT.

He was hired to manage a new category of advertising leads related to real estate mortgages. While working for LGT, Ed met Chris Smith. At the time, Chris worked for a company called LeadPoint. Chris helped Ed capture leads for his company, LGT.

About a year and a half after their first meeting, Ed and Chris decided to leave their jobs at LGT and LeadPoint to start their own company, 800 Exchange. They also took several co-workers of theirs from both companies to start their new business. Initially, Ed, Chris, and their employees worked remotely. But when the company started to grow, they moved in to that San Juan Capistrano office space.

800 Exchange advertised itself as being an advertising and technology firm. But at the business's core, it was a lead generation company. The business operated by creating ads that targeted certain people, like people in debt, owed a lot of money to the IRS, or people looking to refinance their mortgage.

People who heard or saw 800 Exchange ads on TV, online, or on the radio would call in to a 1-800 phone number and leave their information. 800 Exchange then sold those leads to private attorneys, mortgage companies, and debt consolidators. Within months of starting the new business, it was turning over a profit. And I mean a big profit.

Ed Shin boasted online that his company made almost $1 million in revenue at 80% profit margins during the first five months they were in business. And the growth didn't stop there. By the summer of 2010, 800 exchanges' monthly gross income was estimated to be between $500,000 and $1 million.

The rapid success of 800 Exchange was a far different world than what Ed Shin and Chris Smith were accustomed to. Chris Smith grew up near Santa Cruz, California. Santa Cruz is situated on the central California coast, a place known for its expansive beaches and some of the world's best offshore breaks, making it a popular spot among surfers.

Besides surfing, like many of the other kids from Santa Cruz, Chris also shared a passion for wakeboarding. And he was good at it. Chris became a professional as a teenager. But his dreams of a long career as a professional wakeboarder came to an abrupt end when he blew out his Achilles tendon during a competition. After that crash, he decided to retire from professional wakeboarding.

By 2004, Chris was couch surfing at different friends' houses throughout Central California. He knew he wanted to do something in the tech field, but he didn't know how and he didn't know what. Fortunately, one of his wealthy friends sparked an idea. Chris's friend told him that he owned a warehouse full of junk. It was stuff that his friend no longer wanted, but didn't know how to get rid of it.

So Chris decided to sell some of the more valuable items at a flea market. This turned out to be a really good idea. For once, he started making real money. The simple flea market idea inspired Chris to start his first company, LocalProfit.com. LocalProfit.com launched into a massive search engine for wholesale shoppers.

At its peak back in 2006, Chris's website earned him over $70,000 in a single month. He took the idea of helping his friend get rid of some junk and then turned it into a successful online business. After starting LocalProfit.com, Chris also started a social media community for surfers. He called it Sweltster.

Although Sweltzer didn't see as much financial success as LocalProfit.com, the concept inspired Chris to move to Southern California to connect with the growing tech market. Once he moved down to Southern California, he got the job working at LeadPoint, and in 2008, he met Ed Shin. Ed Shin had a much different start in life than his friend Chris Smith.

Ed grew up in a traditional, conservative, Orange County, California household. In high school, he played violin in the school's orchestra. He was a member of the school's key club and played on the golf team. Unlike his friend Chris, who barely made it out of high school and never went to college, Ed Shin excelled in school.

He became the president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. After graduating from high school, he attended college at the University of California, San Diego. After college graduation, Ed met Joseph Gray. At the time, Joseph Gray was the CEO of LG Technologies, LGT. Ed and Joseph met through The Nest, a men's Bible study group at church.

After meeting each other, their families became friends, and they ended up spending a lot of time together. Joseph even helped Ed and his wife purchase a new home. Joseph Gray was the one who gave Ed a job at his company, LGT. Ed Shin started with the company as vice president, then eventually became president. Ed Shin became Joseph Gray's right-hand man.

It wasn't only school and IQs that separated Ed Shin and Chris Smith. They were also polar opposites in their personal lives and in their relationships. After Ed graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 2001, he got married and had three children. He was also a devout Christian who spent his Sundays at church with his family.

On the other hand, Chris Smith went through girlfriends like they were going out of style. He never stepped foot into a church and wore board shorts every day. Chris was a carefree surfer, while Ed was the religious family man. Chris was the one always full of big ideas, while Ed was fact-driven and detail-oriented.

But for all of their differences, they had one thing in common, their ambition to make a lot of money. At 800 Exchange, Ed was managing the company's finances and leading the office during business hours. Chris focused more on the business's creative side. Instead of coming into the office during the daytime, he would usually pop into the office later in the day or even sometimes work overnight.

Chris also kept busy developing a software program for a new company called S2. While private investigator Joe DeLue searched for Ed Shin and Chris Smith, he uncovered secrets about the young successful business partners. Joe DeLue discovered that they had been involved in a civil lawsuit with Ed's former company LGT.

After Ed resigned from LGT to start 800 Exchange with Chris Smith, the company noticed financial discrepancies across its books.

The company launched an internal investigation into these discrepancies and found that about $750,000 up to $900,000 and information related to the company's prospective leads were missing.

After a little more digging, the internal investigation learned that Ed Shin was the person in charge of those specific leads that were missing. He altered account information so that the money owed to LGT, the company, was directly wired into his personal checking account. And the company believed that they knew exactly what Ed Shin did with all of that money.

The answer? He went to Las Vegas. Following this discovery, LGT filed a civil lawsuit against Ed, Chris, and their company 800 Exchange. The lawsuit, filed in Riverside County, California, alleged that Ed stole up to $1 million from the company during his employment there.

Attorneys for LGT argued that Ed Shin wasn't the family man and churchgoer like he liked to portray himself to be. Instead, he's a man who likes to party and participate in high-stakes gambling. Ed Shin, Chris Smith, and their friend Tom Ramey would make frequent trips to Las Vegas, Nevada, the country's unofficial gambling capital.

During these frequent trips out to Nevada's desert, Ed was known to blow a lot of cash on gambling. He lost $140,000 in one single hour on one single night while playing blackjack. Court records from the lawsuit alleged that Ed wrote almost $200,000 worth of checks to the Wynn Casino in 2008 alone.

Any person who spends that kind of money at a Las Vegas casino will be treated like royalty. Ed Shin and his group of friends were no different. The Wynn Casino and Hotel soon arranged private jets to take Ed, Shin, and Tom from Southern California to Las Vegas for quick weekend trips.

Once they arrived on the strip, the casino comped them for everything. Free meals at five-star restaurants, tickets to any type of entertainment they wanted, and accommodations in the hotel's high-end suites. Everything was covered by the house when Ed Shin was in Las Vegas.

Ed was known to get his friend, Tom Ramey, to hire women to hang out with him and his friends during some of these trips to Las Vegas. This type of work is sometimes referred to as, quote, atmosphere modeling or, quote, arm candy work.

These women were paid to simply walk around and hang out with Ed and his friends. They essentially became a part of their entourage. So when Ed sat down at a poker table, he gave off this illusion that he was this cool guy. As soon as he sat down, flocks of beautiful women surrounded him. Ed and Chris both hired attorneys to represent them in this lawsuit with LGT.

By May of 2010, the case was coming to a close. The proposed settlement was for Ed to pay LGT $700,000 within the next five months. If he couldn't afford to make that restitution amount within five months, he would then serve 16 months in prison.

A big part of this proposed settlement was that as long as Ed made this $700,000 restitution payment, that his friend and business partner, Chris Smith, would ultimately be dismissed as a party in the lawsuit.

Ed eventually accepted the deal and was ordered to pay LGT the $700,000 in restitution, and then the court placed him on probation. If he failed to come up with the amount of money within the next five months, he would be sent to prison. As the lawsuit was wrapping up, Chris sent an email to his attorney, Ernesto Aldover.

In the email, Chris expressed concerns that his friend and business partner, Ed, might take some of 800 Exchange's assets to make the restitution payment. He asked his attorney to help ensure that Ed couldn't remove money from the companies. Because he was worried if Ed took cash from the business, this would ultimately hurt the business.

In one particular email, Chris wrote to his attorney, quote, we need to make sure he doesn't have room for fraud. He is itching to do it again, end quote.

In a separate email, Chris asked his attorney to set up some protections. These protections included that all bank accounts and check or wire transfers more than $10,000 would require both Ed and Chris's signatures, preparation of regular third-party reports for each company they own together.

Changes to the bylaws would require 66% of the vote and that Chris's share of the revenue could not be used to pay the LGT settlement. After Chris sent the email to his attorney, he felt much better about the situation. And for the first time in months, he felt like a huge weight had been lifted off his shoulders.

After Chris spoke with his attorney, they reached out to Ed and his attorney about these concerns. On the evening of June 3, 2010, Chris and his attorney, Ernesto Aldover, and Ed and his attorney exchanged several emails regarding these concerns. The emails continued until about 1 o'clock in the morning.

When Chris's attorney, Ernesto Aldover, returned to the office later that morning, Ed's attorney sent him an email saying that Chris and Ed had agreed to the new terms. Except there was one issue. Chris told his attorney that there was still one outstanding issue.

According to Chris, some of the passwords to the bank accounts had been recently changed and that he didn't know how much money was in the bank accounts. He said Ed was the one who changed the passwords and he knew them, but Chris didn't have access to it. Chris told his attorney that he wanted to meet with Ed to get these new passwords so that he could see how much money they had in the business accounts.

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That's betterhelp.com. At 6.01 p.m. that evening, Ernesto Aldover received an email from Chris Smith's email address. The email said that Chris would buy out his portion of 800 exchange for $1 million and 10 gold coins.

He told his attorney in the email that he no longer wanted to be in business with Ed Shin and that he wanted to buy out his interest in the company. He said he planned to work on his own business, S2, and that he wanted nothing to do with 800 Exchange anymore.

This email from Chris annoyed Ernesto Aldover. He had just worked so hard to develop these new terms with Ed Shin. So why did he suddenly want to leave the business? He also thought it was weird that Chris would leave the company now since they were so close to resolving the LGT lawsuit.

But then again, maybe Chris wanted a fresh start. Maybe the entire lawsuit with Ed Shin and LGT was enough for him to decide that he wanted to move on completely and that he was done with 800 Exchange.

A few days later, Aldover received the official paperwork indicating that Chris had signed his interest in the company over to Ed Shin. The paperwork showed that Chris cashed out of the company and was no longer owner of 800 Exchange.

At the same time Chris's attorney received the paperwork, Chris's family and friends started receiving emails of their own. Emails from Chris himself.

On June 8, 2010, Chris sent his girlfriend, Erica Kloman, an email. The email was short and to the point. I don't love you anymore. I met a stripper in Vegas. I'm going to go to the Galapagos Islands with her.

Chris's father, Steve Smith, also received a similar email. Chris told his dad that he and a former Playboy playmate named Tiffany were taking off together to sail the world. He told his dad that he cashed out his share in 800 Exchange and wanted to take some time off from work.

He said he met Tiffany on a trip to Las Vegas and they planned to charter a 45-foot yacht together. A yacht complete with a captain and a full-time chef. Initially, the emails didn't come as a complete shock to Chris's family. Yes, breaking up with his girlfriend so suddenly and leaving 800 Exchange was a little bit of a surprise initially.

But a total shock? Well, not if you really knew Chris Smith. Those who knew Chris knew that he often referred to something that he called the Moo. To Chris, people were like cows. They simply went through the motions in life. They believed in following the rules. They listened to the laws of the land. They didn't stop to question authority.

They thought that working hard gets you to the top. He also believed that most people worked too hard in life and played too little. People lived their lives like cows. He called this way of living the moo. When Chris's family received those emails about taking off with a girl he met in Vegas, yes, it was a surprise, but the emails didn't come as a total shock.

They knew Chris was in the prime of his life. He had money in the bank because he just cashed out his portion of 800 exchange, which was close to $1 million. And he was always known to be this free spirited person. Maybe, just maybe, he wanted to make some money, quit his business, and then simply take off and travel the world.

Chris's younger brother, Paul Smith, and his family returned home from a vacation on Wednesday, June 9th. The original plan was for Chris to be there to pick them up at the airport. But when they got there, Chris was nowhere to be found. So Paul called their dad and found out that Chris was taking off on a yacht with this Las Vegas stripper.

The following day, Paul got an email from his brother. This email included a picture of the Playboy Playmate with a quick note that read, This is the girl I'm with. The email told Paul that he was on a boat in the Galapagos Islands.

Paul was confused when he learned about his brother taking off. Although he knew his brother was a free spirit, he thought it was weird that he would just take off like that, especially when he said that he was going to be there to meet him and his family at the airport and give him a ride home. It wasn't like Chris not to follow through on his promises, free spirited or not. Chris's lawyer, Ernesto Aldover, sent him several emails saying,

Aldover was representing Chris in the LGT lawsuit until Ed Shin made his restitution payment. Throughout several email exchanges, Aldover started noticing that Chris sounded different. He didn't sound like the Chris Smith he knew so well. His emails were full of typos and included language that just didn't sound like Chris.

In one of the emails, Chris told him he wasn't planning to return to the U.S. because he didn't want to face the LGT lawsuit. Aldover thought this was strange because if Ed Shin made the restitution payment, Chris Smith would be completely dismissed from the entire case.

he began to be concerned that the person he was communicating with via email might not be his client, Chris Smith. Back in San Juan Capistrano, 800 Exchanges home office, Ed Shin was now the company's sole owner.

On Saturday, June 5th, 2010, Ed sent an email to all its employees telling them they didn't need to come to work the following week. He told the employees that he and Chris would be reviewing business plans and they didn't want to be disturbed. Instead, he told the staff that they could work remotely from home the entire week and don't come into the office.

On Saturday, June 12th, he sent another email to its employees, which is one week later. He told them that they could return to the office on Tuesday, June 15th. He said in the email that he and Chris completed their business plans and that everyone could return to the office.

When Tuesday, June 15th came around, 800 exchange employees, Jennifer Matthews Osborne and Jocelyn Levy, were one of the first two to arrive at the office. Like the other employees, they had just spent the last week working from home and they were ready to be back in the office. But when they stepped foot inside the office, they were hit with a strange odor.

They noticed that portions of the office had been repainted and the carpet was wet, like it had been recently cleaned. They also saw a dark colored stain right in front of Chris's office. When the two employees asked Ed about the weird smell coming throughout the office, he had an explanation for them.

He said that while he and Chris sat down and came to an agreement about the company, Chris had become extremely intoxicated. He was so drunk that he urinated on the office walls, and that's why the office had a strange odor, and that's why the carpets had to be deep cleaned.

The following week, the entire company moved out of their San Juan Capistrano office and relocated to an entirely new office building, leaving the office empty without paying rent. By late June, Chris had been sailing on his yacht for several weeks. Back in Orange County, California, Ed hired Kenny Kraft to be his new personal assistant.

Shortly after hiring Kenny, Ed gave him the keys to Chris's Laguna Beach apartment. He also gave him keys to Chris's Range Rover and told Kenny that he could live in Chris's apartment and he could drive the Range Rover because he said that the company 800 Exchange had paid for both of them.

When Kenny moved into Chris's old apartment in Laguna Beach, Ed told him to throw away whatever was inside the apartment. Any furniture he didn't want, Chris's clothes were still in the closet. He could get rid of even two of his surfboards if he needed the extra space.

Over the summer, Chris maintained email communication with his family and friends. But the longer Chris stayed away, the stranger his emails got. During the first few weeks, the emails were light and happy. Chris seemed like he was living his best life sailing around the world.

One of the many emails read, quote, I finally found what I love, moving around and seeing the whole world. I can't believe I almost trapped myself, end quote. By the end of the 2010 summer, his tone completely changed. His parents, Steve and Debbie, noticed that their son's emails suddenly took a much darker tone.

In one alarming email, Chris told his parents that he was thinking about doing, quote, the unspeakable, a reference to committing suicide. He started confiding in his parents that he felt down about himself and that he was feeling depressed. He said he was taking drugs and thought about killing himself. These emails were in stark contrast to the earlier message he sent back home.

Once a happy guy, excited about his new adventure around the world, was now talking about suicide.

Although Chris had never talked about suicide in the past, his brother Paul knew that his little brother was under a lot of pressure before he went on this trip. His brother knew about the lawsuit with LGT and he knew about the buyout from 800 Exchange.

Maybe all of this stress was finally getting to him and that the glamour of sailing around the world had suddenly lost its luster. But Chris's parents, Steve and Debbie Smith, suspected something else. Just like with Chris's attorney, they started suspecting that it wasn't really Chris sending those emails.

Instead, it was someone pretending to be Chris. By the fall of that year, Chris had been gone for months. Except for the sporadic emails, no one had seen him since early June. If Chris's family and friends were suspicious about his whereabouts before, their suspicions were confirmed after one fateful night in Las Vegas.

One night, Ed Shin hired a woman who went by the name Taylor. Taylor was a Playboy playmate whose real name was Summer Hansen. Ed hired Taylor, aka Summer, to host an 800 exchange event in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Many of the company's employees attended the event, including Chris's brother Paul, who still worked for the company. At this event, Paul ran into Summer and immediately recognized her from a photograph in one of his brother's emails. She was the playmate traveling with Chris.

He was so sure that this was the same person, he decided to approach Summer and ask her if she went to the Galapagos Islands with his brother Chris. She said no. She said she didn't know who Chris Smith was and that she had never been to the Galapagos Islands.

When Paul returned to California from Las Vegas, he drove straight to Chris's old apartment in Laguna Beach. Out in front of the apartment, he saw Chris's Range Rover parked in his stall. Right away, he knew something was seriously wrong.

In one of Chris's emails, he specifically told Paul that his Range Rover was parked at the airport when he left for the Galapagos Islands. He told his brother not to worry about the car because it was safe at the airport. By December of 2010, Chris's emails to his family suddenly stopped. It became pretty clear that Chris was not the one behind the emails.

And he was not sailing around the Galapagos Islands with a Playboy playmate. His dad, Steve, decided to drive out to Orange County, California to see if he could figure out where his son really was. The first stop he made was to end Shin's new apartment. Ed told Steve that the last time he saw Chris was when they met at the office to discuss Chris's buyout of the company.

He said that Chris was extremely intoxicated on sleeping pills and on wine and that during their meeting, he urinated, vomited and spilled wine all over the office walls. He said that he had to close the office for an entire week to get everything professionally cleaned after this incident with Chris.

Ed said that once he and Chris came to an agreement about the business, he wired $1.2 million on Chris's behalf to an account in the Cayman Islands. He told Steve that before Chris left, they went to Los Angeles together so that Chris could get a fake passport.

After that, Ed said that Chris left and that he hasn't seen him since. In April 2011, 10 months after Chris was last seen, Steve filed a missing person report with the Laguna Beach Police Department.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security had confirmed with officers that Chris did not use his passport to leave the United States. It was also determined that Chris's Range Rover had never been left at the airport, as his emails had said. Laguna Beach police officers also discovered that Chris had not used his bank account in nine months.

The Laguna Beach Police Department brought Ed Shin in for questioning. Ed was one of the last people to have seen Chris, so naturally he was the first person they wanted to speak to. Ed acknowledged the LGT embezzlement case against him to the Laguna Beach police officers. He said that his former business partner and friend, Chris Smith, was also named in the case.

He told the officers that the case might be related to Chris's decision to take off. Ed told the officers, quote, Honestly, I think he is on the other side of the world, and I think he doesn't want to be found, end quote. Three months after Chris's dad filed the missing person report, the Orange County Sheriff's Department took over the investigation from Laguna Beach.

To start their investigation into Chris's whereabouts, the department sent officers to 800 Exchanges' old office building in San Juan Capistrano. When the police officers got there, the office was completely dark. The lights in the ceilings flickered, and the officers had to use their flashlights to get around the place. It was clear that no one had been there in months.

When the officers approached what used to be Chris's office, they spotted marks on the doorknob. They were small, dark stains. Stains that looked like blood. The sheriff deputies immediately called for the forensics team. If there was blood on Chris's doorknob, the entire office could be a crime scene. The forensics team swept the office for potential evidence.

First, they took samples of Chris's doorknob and tested for the presence of blood. The tests came back positive for human blood. But Chris's doorknob wasn't the only place they found blood. They also found traces of it throughout the entire office, including the break room walls and on the hallways.

Bloodstains were also found on the carpet inside and immediately outside of Chris's office. Also, blood on his desk, on one of the office chairs, and on the ceiling above his desk. While the forensics team searched the office, another group went to search Chris's Range Rover parked outside his old apartment.

Inside the car, technicians found a small amount of blood in the rear cargo area. Blood samples taken from both the office and Chris's car were taken over to Orange County's crime lab for analysis. The tests on the samples all came back with the same results. All the blood samples were taken from the office and the car all matched the same genetic profile.

This meant that all of the blood came from the same person. But was it Chris's blood? Because Chris wasn't around to provide his DNA, investigators took the samples and compared them to his parents' DNA.

This type of comparison won't necessarily say whether the blood came from Chris, but it can tell investigators if the blood samples have any similarities.

The comparison determined that Chris's parents could not be excluded as being the biological parents of the person in the DNA profile. In other words, more likely than not, the person whose blood was found inside the office and inside of Chris's Range Rover did in fact belong to Chris Smith.

Investigators also compared the blood sample to Ed Shin. The test showed that none of the blood samples matched Ed's DNA profile. Once Orange County Sheriff investigators began suspecting that Ed Shin might have had something to do with Chris Smith's disappearance, they conducted a forensic search of his iPad.

Investigators searched for anything that might suggest that Ed knew what happened to his former business partner and former friend.

A forensic search of the iPad found emails purporting to be from Chris sent from an email address that was created on December 17, 2010, using an internet provider address from the same company as Ed's internet service provider. There was also another email account on the iPad that was associated with Chris.

This evidence suggested that some of the emails Chris allegedly sent to his family when he was missing were actually sent from Ed Shin's iPad. On August 28, 2011, over a year after Chris was last seen, Orange County Sheriff's deputies arrested Ed Shin at LAX International Airport where he was just about to board a flight to Canada.

He was being charged with murder with special circumstances for financial gain, which under California law meant that Ed was eligible to receive the death penalty. When officers brought Ed in for questioning, they questioned him about the blood evidence found in 800 Exchange's San Juan Capistrano office.

Ed said the blood came from him. He told the officers that he cut his hand while cutting an apple and that that's why there's blood throughout the office. But when the officers told him that the blood did not belong to him and that it belonged to Chris Smith, well, that's when his story changed.

Ed initially said that right before Chris disappeared, they met at the office to discuss splitting up the business. Initially, Ed said that Chris was extremely drunk and had urinated throughout the office. That's why the employees worked remotely for the next week while he had someone professionally clean the carpets.

Even though Chris was drunk, Ed claimed that the two of them were okay and that they amicably split up Chris's interest in 800 Exchange. After that, he said Chris left. But once the police confronted him about finding Chris's blood inside the office, he offered a different explanation about what really happened during that final meeting with Chris.

eventually admitted that things that night didn't go the way he initially claimed. Ed claimed that sometime between 2 and 5 p.m. on June 4, 2010, he went to Chris's office to talk about his demands for the company. He said Chris told him he wanted to make sure he didn't use any of the company's money to pay the restitution for the LGT lawsuit.

Ed said he became angry during the conversation because Chris was drunk and he was hard to communicate with. He also said he became angry at how dirty the office was. He said Chris then stood up and took a few steps towards him like he was ready to fight. To try and de-escalate the situation, Ed also stood up.

According to Ed, Chris grabbed his neck and began strangling him. Ed was able to grab Chris's shirt and pull him off. After Ed took a few steps backwards, he said Chris lunged at him again. Ed shoved Chris back. By this point, Ed said he knew he had to start fighting back because Chris wasn't going to back down.

Over the next several minutes, both Ed and Chris exchanged punches. One of the punches caused Chris to fall into the desk drawer. According to Ed, this allowed him to step back. But he said Chris got up and went towards him again. He lunged at Ed, but Ed grabbed him and threw him into a pile of water bottles in the break room.

Seconds later, Chris got up again and lunged at Ed to try and tackle him. Ed said he stepped to the side just a second before Chris got to him, and that's when Chris hit his head on the side of a desk. According to Ed, Chris was on the ground, unresponsive, in a fetal position. But instead of checking to see if Chris was okay or calling for help,

He just stared at his friend in total, utter disbelief at what just happened. Ed said he went to the bathroom to clean off the blood. At this point, he admitted that he thought that Chris was most likely dead.

20 minutes later, he said he returned to the office and saw that Chris was in the same position. But this time there was a lot more blood around his head. Ed told the officers that he didn't call the police because he was in the middle of the lawsuit with LGT. And if he called the police to tell them what happened, he didn't think that anyone would believe him.

So he grabbed Chris's wallet and cell phone, left the office, drove around for about 15 minutes, and then returned to the office. When he eventually returned, he came up with a plan to try and explain Chris's death.

He decided that he would tell everyone they settled the LGT lawsuit, he bought Chris's interest in the company, and then Chris would sail off to the Galapagos Island using the money he got from the company. That night, he even drafted the fake paperwork showing that he bought out Chris from 800 Exchange.

Using Chris's email account, Ed sent an email to his attorney, Aldover. Then using Chris's cell phone, he sent a text message to Chris's brother, Paul, pretending to be Chris, saying that he and Ed had negotiated a settlement and that they were going to Las Vegas to celebrate. Just before 7 p.m. that night, Ed called his friend, Tom Ramey, to help get rid of Chris's body.

According to Ed, Tom told him to call a guy named Johnny Keponin. Ed went home around midnight. Then around 10 a.m. the next morning, Ed called this Johnny guy using a burner phone he purchased that morning. He explained to Johnny that he needed, quote, garbage disposal at his office, end quote.

The man told Ed to get $15,000 in cash and wait for further instructions. About an hour later, Ed returned to the 800 Exchange office and tried to clean the blood smears off the walls. While at the office, a man called him and told him to meet the man at a gas station in Long Beach later that afternoon, give him the money, and directions to the office.

He also told Ed to make sure that the office door was left unlocked. The man assured Ed that he would, quote, referring to the disposal of Chris's body.

Ed said that Chris's body was gone when he returned to the office the next day, but there was still blood everywhere. That's when he said he hired professional cleaners and told his employees to work remotely for the next week. Ed continued sending messages to Chris's family through December 2010, pretending to be Chris, all while knowing that he was already dead.

He wanted his family to believe that he was alive and well. According to Ed Shin, he did not plan or intend to kill Chris that night. Instead, he was simply defending himself. Orange County District Attorneys disagreed. They believed that Ed Shin was a cold-blooded murderer who killed his former business partner and friend for the money.

Even if Ed's claim about the fight that night really happened, Ed never called 911 or the police. He never once tried to help save his friend's life. Instead of calling for help, he called someone to help get rid of the body. And then for months, he sent fake emails to Chris's family pretending to be Chris.

According to the prosecution, this behavior proves intent. That Ed intended to murder Chris that day. And they had the forensic evidence to back up their case. On December 7, 2008, after an 18-day trial, the jury deliberated for only two hours. After deliberating, they came back with a verdict.

They found Ed Shin guilty of first-degree murder for financial gain. The jury believed the prosecution's narrative that Ed killed his friend for the money, and then he spent months trying to cover it up. After his conviction, Ed filed a motion for a new trial, but his motion was denied and the court sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Today, Ed Shin maintains his story that Chris's death was accidental. He portrayed an image of a God-loving family man, a good man who had his friend murdered and then his body stripped from a proper burial. Ed might have gotten away with his evil acts, but the blood evidence never lies. The blood evidence trail pointed straight to Ed.

Sadly, Chris Smith's body has never been recovered. To share your thoughts on this week's episode, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each weekly episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case.

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