John Creech bludgeoned Gavin Smith to death in May 2012 after catching him having an affair with Creech’s wife — then buried him in a shallow grave in California's Angeles National Forest.
Facebook/Remembering Gavin Smith!Gavin Smith shortly before his disappearance.
Gavin Smith led a seemingly charmed life. He worked a glamorous job as a film executive for 20th Century Fox while living with his wife and three sons in California. Charming and good-looking, Smith was beloved by those who knew him, who described him as a model father.
But behind closed doors, Smith was struggling with marital issues, financial strain, and drug addiction. During this rough patch, he also pursued multiple extramarital affairs, including one with a married woman named Chandrika Creech. Tragically, this affair would cost him his life.
On May 1, 2012, Smith suddenly went missing after leaving a friend’s house late in the evening. More than two years later, authorities finally found Smith’s skeletal remains buried in a remote area of rural California. Before long, investigators would unravel a shocking story of infidelity, jealousy, and murder.
The Basketball Star
Facebook/Remembering Gavin Smith!A young Gavin Smith, circa 1968.
Born in 1954, Gavin Smith grew up in the San Fernando Valley in California. While in high school, Smith made a name for himself as a star basketball player.
He went on to attend the University of California, Los Angeles and to play as a forward for the school’s basketball team. In 1975, the team won the national championship under coach John Wooden.
In 1976, Smith transferred to the University of Hawaii and played for the Rainbow Warriors in his last season.
“[He was] a big-time scorer. Scored a lot of points,” Rainbow Warriors head coach Riley Wallace told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2015, according to ESPN. “He had the long hair and wore a bandanna and was a heck of an offensive player.”
But by the time he graduated, Gavin Smith had set his sights on another kind of stardom.
Gavin Smith Settles Down In Hollywood
Wikimedia CommonsGavin Smith was a loving father and successful film distributor. But loved ones say he led a double life.
After college, Smith decided to leave basketball behind him. He moved back to California and pursued an acting career, appearing as a bodyguard and a bartender in a few small productions.
In 1989, Smith settled down and married Lisa Smith, an accountant he’d met earlier that year while working as a waiter. The couple had three sons together.
Smith eventually gave up on his acting dream, and it was then that his career started to take off. After his brief stint in front of the camera, Smith pivoted to work on the business side of the film industry. As an executive at 20th Century Fox, he made $180,000 a year distributing films like Avatar, Titanic, and the Star Wars trilogy. By 2012, Smith had become the company’s regional branch manager for the Dallas and Oklahoma City areas.
Smith FamilyGavin Smith with his wife, Lisa.
But while it seemed from the outside as if Gavin Smith had it all, loved ones say he was secretly living a double life of sex, drugs, and irresponsible spending.
Living A Double Life
Although Gavin Smith maintained a well-paid job, finances became a major stressor for him and his family starting around 2008.
The Smiths’ home had plummeted in value shortly after they bought it, causing them to panic. The family reportedly struggled to pay their mortgage and tried selling their house.
Meanwhile, Smith had begun dabbling in drugs to manage his chronic back pain and soon became addicted. In 2008, he wound up in a rehab facility called Matrix. It was there that he met a married woman named Chandrika Creech. The two began a sexual relationship, kickstarting a string of affairs Smith would have with multiple women.
LA Sheriff’s OfficeGavin Smith’s former lover, Chandrika Creech.
Lisa Smith soon found out about Chandrika Creech. She also learned that her husband had become increasingly irresponsible with his spending. It turned out that Gavin had swiftly burned through his year-end bonus from Fox and had been taking money from his pension fund. He had also begun a sexual relationship with another woman named Melanie, and was allegedly paying to set her and her children up in a new home.
To Lisa Smith, it seemed as though her husband was in the throes of a mid-life crisis.
“In hindsight, all the signs were there,” Lisa told Daily Mail in 2013. “He was dressing like a 20-year-old to go to drug rehab meetings and working out like mad.”
She kicked him out of the house in April 2012.
“To be honest I wanted to scare him,” Lisa explained. “We loved each other, he loved our sons, neither of us wanted to divorce. But I couldn’t cope with him cheating and I wanted to make it clear that he could never do that again.”
Sadly, only two weeks after Lisa kicked Gavin Smith out, he disappeared.
A Father Of Three Goes Missing
On May 1, 2012, Gavin Smith left the home of a family friend he had been staying with at around 10:00 p.m. He did not tell the friend where he was going, nor did he take any of his personal belongings.
The next day, Lisa Smith called the police to report Smith missing after he failed to show up to a planned arrangement to take his son to school. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) issued a missing persons report for Smith.
As L.A. County Sheriff’s Detective John O’Brien told The Daily Beast in 2012, phone records showed that Smith had “stayed in the Valley” the night he disappeared.
“He was bouncing around the Valley or, at least, his phone was,” O’Brien said. “We are talking about after bars close.”
On May 9, 2012, the Smith family created findgavinsmith.com to spread awareness about Smith’s disappearance, while the LAPD conducted searches in the nearby mountains and beaches.
Then, in February 2013, the LAPD discovered Smith’s black Mercedes at a Simi Valley storage facility, covered in his blood. Police began investigating his disappearance as a homicide. Before long, the storage unit was linked to a man named John Creech — a convicted drug dealer and the husband of Chandrika Creech.
Facebook/Remembering Gavin Smith!Gavin Smith went missing on May 1, 2012.
The LAPD had previously issued a search warrant for the Creech home in June 2012 in connection with Smith’s case. At the time, John Creech claimed he had never met Smith.
Finally, investigators had a strong lead in the case. And it only became stronger the following year, when they received a report of buried human remains in rural Palmdale.
A Steamy Affair Ends In Murder
On Oct. 26, 2014, a hiker was exploring a remote area of California’s Angeles National Forest with his family when his dog suddenly sniffed out a human skull. The man called the police to report this macabre discovery.
When authorities arrived at the scene, they discovered a set of severely decomposed remains buried in a shallow grave. The body had been wrapped in a comforter and plastic sheets and bound with duct tape. Before long, investigators identified the remains as belonging to Gavin Smith.
It was soon revealed that Smith had died of blunt-force trauma. He had been beaten so brutally that his skull was crushed on both sides.
During the course of their investigation, the LAPD pieced together a timeline that revealed a probable motive for Smith’s murder.
According to court documents, Chandrika and Gavin Smith had begun their relationship in 2008. Soon after, Chandrika’s husband John Creech found out about the affair and demanded Chandrika put an end to it.
Facebook/Remembering Gavin Smith!In October 2014, Gavin Smith’s remains were found in a shallow grave.
However, the two reportedly rekindled their relationship shortly before Smith was killed. In mid-April 2012, John Creech caught his wife getting into Smith’s car. Again, he warned Chandrika not to see Smith anymore.
On May 1, 2012, Creech tracked his wife’s movements via a GPS app on her phone — and discovered her with Smith in Smith’s Mercedes. Enraged, Creech attacked Smith, reportedly punching him “too many times to count” until he became unresponsive. Chandrika fled the scene, and John Creech buried Smith’s body and hid his Mercedes in the storage facility.
The Trial Of John Creech
In January 2015, authorities charged John Creech with the murder of Gavin Smith. He pleaded “not guilty.”
During the trial, Creech’s attorney referred to Smith’s death as an “accident” and insinuated that the two men had fought in a moment of passion. The defense claimed that Smith had instigated the fight, and that Creech had simply been defending himself.
When Chandrika Creech took the stand, she testified that when her husband arrived at the scene, he and Smith did argue for a moment before the fight began. However, she insisted that “definitely [John Creech] was the instigator.”
In July 2017, the jury found John Creech guilty of voluntary manslaughter — but not of his original first-degree murder charges. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
LA Sheriff’s OfficeJohn Creech, the man charged with the murder of Gavin Smith.
The Aftermath Of Gavin Smith’s Death
In the wake of the court decision, many of Gavin Smith’s friends and family members felt that they had not received justice.
“There was so much proof for a premeditated murder,” Gavin Smith’s brother-in-law Ed Addeo said in 2017, according to True Crime News. “I just don’t know how they could come to that conclusion.”
Detective John O’Brien was likewise disappointed in the verdict, suggesting that the jury had been biassed against Smith because of his infidelity.
“My opinion is that they didn’t like the fact that Gavin and Chandrika had an affair,” he said. “I think the jury felt that he went back even after he had been warned, so in a way he kind of got what was coming to him. I don’t even understand that logic, because there’s no right to kill somebody.”
Gavin Smith’s loved ones remember him as a “larger-than-life” personality who was devoted to his sons and had hoped to repair his relationship with his wife. Following his death, they fretted that his memory had been tainted by the sensational circumstances surrounding his case.
“He wasn’t some adulterer having flings here and there… that just wasn’t him,” Smith’s brother Greg said. “Unfortunately this liaison cost him his life. Smiling, always happy, he was bigger than life. I loved him and I miss him, but he’ll always be here. Always.”
After reading about Gavin Smith, dive into the story of Kelly Cochran, the “Devil Woman of Michigan” who murdered her lover and husband. Then, read the story of Erin Corwin, the pregnant 19-year-old who was murdered by her lover in Joshua Tree and left in a mine shaft.
