A convicted drug dealer who’s already behind bars has been charged in the May 2012 slaying of a Fox executive.
John Lenzie Creech, 42, is scheduled to be arraigned on Monday, the Los Angeles County District’s Attorney’s Office said.
He’s accused of killing Gavin Smith, a Fox entertainment executive whose remains were found in a shallow grave last year — more than two years after he vanished.
The Fox executive’s black Mercedes-Benz 420E was found in 2013 in a storage facility that was connected to Creech, prosecutors said.
Creech is serving an eight-year jail sentence after pleading no contest to selling a controlled substance.
He told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times that he’d never met Smith.
Smith was an 18-year veteran of 20th Century Fox’s distribution department, serving as a liaison between the studio and movie theaters, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Smith, a former UCLA basketball player, was last seen alive in May 2012, when he left a friend’s house.
After he went missing, his family offered a $20,000 reward for information to help find him. It took nearly two and a half years before hikers walking a dog stumbled upon his remains in a remote area north of Los Angeles.
Authorities have said they believe they know how and why Smith was killed, but they haven’t revealed details.
“We have witnesses that are paramount to the case,” Lt. Dave Dolson of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said last year. “There was evidence in the car that indicated he was killed in the car.”
