Edward Shin made it seem like his San Juan Capistrano business partner was alive, but he had killed him months before

How do you make another person disappear?

For Edward Shin, faced with his friend and business partner lying in a pool of blood in their San Juan Capistrano office, it was a pressing question.

For more than half a year, Shin found the answer: bold deceptions and brazen lies, taking over his dead friend’s emails and concocting wild tales of exotic trips across the world.

Those tales, Shin’s own attorney would later admit, emotionally tortured Chris Smith’s increasingly worried parents and brother before the whole charade unraveled – with a Santa Ana jury, earlier this month, quickly finding Shin guilty of murder.

Testimony, including from Shin himself, and the 100-plus emails sent through three Chris Smith email accounts and admitted as evidence during the trial, show how the illusion was kept alive.

Friends … to a murder

Shin and Smith met while employees of competing lead-generation companies focused on the debt-consolidation industry. Fast friends, the pair struck out together to create a successful company of their own, 800XChange, with Smith as the creative driver and Shin the financial brains.

A life-long surfer, Smith settled into a Laguna Beach apartment with an ocean view and a serious girlfriend up the coast in Santa Barbara. He kept his family close, even persuading his brother, Paul, to move from Oregon with his wife and children to work alongside him at 800XChange.

An athletic man who first started surfing at 8, the 33-year-old had grown up in Watsonville, between Santa Cruz and Monterrey. A professional wakeboarder out of high school until an injury cut his career short, Smith turned to online companies, including a website he founded call Swellster, a kind of Facebook for surfers.

Described as quirky, happy and gregarious by friends and co-workers, Smith also harbored another side, with his girlfriend recalling that he was at times drawn to conspiracy theories.

Shin, a graduate of El Toro High School in Lake Forest and UC San Diego, worked short stints at a variety of financial institutions, including Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley before ending up in lead generations.

Considered affable, charming and articulate by those who knew him, Shin, then in his early 30s, also cultivated a taste for the finer things, including high-stakes craps games at high-end Las Vegas casinos, which he would get to by private jet, staying in comped suites.

From the outside, the pair’s relationship appeared smooth, their employees would say. Shin worked traditional daytime hours at 800XChange, while Smith often came in late in the afternoon or in the evening and stayed through the night.

But Shin was caught up in a legal battle over the embezzlement of $600,000-plus from his previous employer, a theft that led to a criminal investigation against him and civil lawsuits that also swept in Smith, because they owned the subsequent company together.

Shin settled criminal charges, agreeing to pay back the stolen funds within five months, but needed Smith’s approval before putting the civil lawsuits to rest. Before signing off, Smith wanted Shin to agree to increased financial transparency, including audits and the need for co-signuatures, at 800XChange.

Late on Friday, June 4, 2010, after other employees left the office, Smith was killed.

His body was never found, but based on the blood found in his office investigators have said they believe Smith was bludgeoned or stabbed. Shin would later claim that Smith attacked him and died after striking his head on his own desk.

Shin hacked into Smith’s email accounts, sending Smith’s attorney a fake buyout agreement giving full control of the company to Shin.

The next day, Shin emailed the other employees at 800XChange, telling them to not come in the following week: He and Chris were meeting to discuss the future of the company.

Later, Shin would admit, he needed time to call in multiple crews to attempt to clean up the bloody mess. To deflect suspicion, Shin wrapped up a hand to make it appear the blood was his. To cover for the smell, Shin told the workers that Smith had gotten drunk, spilled wine, urinated and vomited in the office.

“Around the world”

The week after the killing, Smith’s family members received the first of many emails from Shin posing as Smith. Those emails mentioned the fake $1.5 million buyout from Shin, and said Smith was setting off for the Galapagos Islands and then headed to South America.

Shin sent emails to Smith’s girlfriend, saying he was running off with a Playboy Playmate he had met.

“Need to just get out of the matrix and find myself,” a June 9 email to Smith’s mom said.

During the first month, the emails to Smith’s parents spoke of an escape from the work grind. An email to Smith’s father and brother, on July 12 of that year, described a sailing trip near Argentina following visits to the Galapagos and Costa Rica.

“No phone, didn’t bring one. Didn’t want to talk to anybody for a bit, needed to clear my head from all the stress. things are better tho,” says an email to Smith’s parents on July 13. “I see things so much more clearly now because I’ve unplugged myself of that crazy society and fast lane.”

An Aug. 31 email to Smith’s attorney says he is “still backpacking through South America.”

By Oct. 20, an email to Smith’s father described being in Mumbai, with plans to travel through India, then “back to Turkey and Cyprus and then Africa.”

On Nov. 24, an email to his father described plans to “jump on a yacht with a guy I just met who is sailing to Egypt. Then it’s off to the Serengeti, and Congo.”

A Dec. 17 email, to Chris Smith’s father: “I found a conflict diamond for Paul, I’m gonna give it to him for his birthday.”

Suspicions start to mount

Over the months, doubts crept into the family’s minds.

Wanting to learn more about the woman his brother supposedly ran off with, the Playboy Playmate, Smith’s brother asked him for a photograph of her. Shin sent along a professional photo he found online of a woman in a bikini.

A short time later, prosecutor Matt Murphy explained in court, in a crazy turn of events, while on a company junket in Las Vegas, Paul Smith and his co-workers happened to be eating dinner when the woman in the bikini photo walked up to their table.

She was an atmosphere model, hired to linger about and chat with the guests. Paul Smith recognized her. Very confused, he asked: Why aren’t you on the trip with Chris? The woman said she had no idea what he was talking about.

At the time, Paul Smith apparently had no inkling that Shin – who was on that trip – was behind the emails.

In November, five months into the ruse, Chris Smith’s mom emailed her son, pointing out the mentioned routes would place Chris in waters known for piracy. And the parents, the next month, sent an email to Chris noting that Shin had closed the office months prior to “repaint and re-carpet.”

“It seemed fishy to dad and I,” Smith’s mother wrote in a December email. “We had not heard from you since Nov. 1st and with that story we heard, we thought maybe you had been killed and Ed had covered it up … posing as you in the emails … but a lot of your emails sounded like you.”

An email by Smith’s dad was even more blunt.

“If this is Ed (S)hin, and I find out you have hurt or injured either of my sons I am going to (expletive) you up. Your nightmare has just begun.”

A mid-December email to the parents mentions suicidal feelings and anger.

And then the emails stopped.

During his trial, Shin testified that after sending the initial emails he “didn’t know what to do, so I had to continue to create this idea that he was continuing to travel.”

He finally did stop, Shin said, when he “couldn’t handle it anymore. … It was a terrible thing to do, to try to convince a family their dead son is still alive, still traveling.”

In early 2011, Smith’s father met with Shin, who told him that he had wired Smith the buyout money to an account in the Cayman Islands and that Smith was traveling under a fake passport he had gotten from a man nicknamed Johnny Vegas.

In April, unconvinced, the father went to the police in Laguna Beach, where his son lived, and filed a missing person’s report.

Orange County sheriff’s investigators got involved, finding blood they tied to Smith at his old office. In August, investigators decided they had enough evidence and took Shin into custody at Los Angeles International Airport just as he was boarding a plane headed to Canada.

At first, Smith fed investigators the same story he had given Smith’s family. Then, realizing he was getting arrested, Shin abruptly changed course – saying Smith’s death was in self-defense.

Shin has kept denying he knows the whereabouts of Smith’s body. In court, he said that Johnny Vegas put him in touch with an unknown European man who accepted $10,000 to $15,000 to dispose of the body.

Authorities have said they believe that Shin used a rental truck to dispose of the body himself in the desert expanse near the Mexican border.

Today, Shin is at the Theo Lacy Facility, a maximum-security jail in Orange, awaiting his court appearance to be sentenced, scheduled for Feb. 1. He faces life in prison.