Gavin Smith (December 10, 1954 – May 2012) was an American college basketball star, actor, stuntman, and film studio executive, formerly a regional manager of distribution for 20th Century Fox.

On the night of May 1, 2012, Smith left a friend's house in Oak Park, where he had been staying due to reported marital difficulties.

Two years later, with Smith still missing and no evidence of his presence anywhere past the night of his disappearance, he was retroactively declared legally dead.

[7] According to testimony before the grand jury that indicted Creech on the murder charge, he allegedly beat Smith to death after catching him and his wife together.

[11] Smith set the school's single-season scoring record of 23.4 ppg, a mark that stands despite the subsequent introduction of the three-point field goal.

[11] While he was not involved with the creative aspect of the business, he has been credited with helping films such as Titanic, Avatar and the rereleases of the original Star Wars trilogy succeed.

[12] By 2012 he was Fox's regional branch manager for theaters in the Dallas and Oklahoma City areas, working out of the company's Calabasas offices.

One of his sons, Evan, played basketball for University of Southern California, and was later featured on the reality show Temptation Island.

"Upside-down" as a result of the Panic of 2008, the market value of his home plunged to less than the balance owed on the mortgage, leaving him under significant pressure, steeped in a negative equity position.

[14] Smith attended CinemaCon, the annual convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners in Las Vegas.

Upon his return to the Los Angeles area, he went not to his West Hills home but, due to recent problems in his marriage,[14] that of a female colleague and family friend who lived on Kellwood Court[20] in nearby Oak Park.

Recent marital problems had led Smith's son, Evan, to criticize his father for "leaving the family" in a since-deleted tweet two weeks earlier.

[20] Lisa Smith, who had been busy attending to her ill mother, says she spoke with Gavin during the day to arrange for him to pick up one of their other sons from school the morning of May 2.

His family agreed it was unlike Smith to leave the house in the late evening without plans to do so or at least giving notice that the trip was unplanned.

Furthermore, since he had left his cellphone charger, a shaving kit and other personal belongings at the Oak Park residence, likelihood loomed large that Smith didn’t expect anything beyond an immediate return.

[4] When Smith didn’t show up the next morning at work nor to pick up his son, his family and coworkers reported him missing.

They had suggested that they had pings from Smith's cell phone after 10 pm the night he disappeared, although they didn’t make the specifics public.

The waitress who served the man also believed him to be Smith and said he paid in cash and told her that he and his companion would be staying in town for a few days then continuing north up the Pacific coast.

[25] On June 8, police, accompanied by a SWAT team, executed a search warrant at a Canoga Park home belonging to a couple identified as John and Chandrika Creech in connection with the case.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Dave Dolson said Smith met Chandrika Creech while they were both in drug rehab and that they were in a romantic relationship.

[28] After the affair had begun in 2008, she had broken it off at the request of her husband John Creech, a convicted drug dealer who was facing new charges at the time of the search and had reportedly had no contact with Smith other than an email exchange in 2008.

[27] Smith's family and friends spent the second weekend of July distributing fliers and putting up posters in Sylmar, the city's northernmost neighborhood.

[36] It led investigators to Smith's missing Mercedes, found a month later at a Simi Valley storage facility, also connected with Creech, whom police continued to describe as a person of interest.

Blood and body tissue, including skin stuck to the car seat, was found inside, later identified as belonging to Smith.

[40] A hiker's dog found a shallow grave containing a skull, some bones and clothing in a rural area between Palmdale and Acton just outside the Angeles National Forest.

Nevertheless, the Los Angeles Times quoted anonymous sources as saying that investigators believe that Smith was killed at the direction of one person by others with experience in violent crime.

[1] In January 2015, three months after Smith's remains were discovered, Creech, two years into an eight-year sentence, was arrested and charged with his murder.

He and McQuay then extracted Smith's body and disposed of it, wrapped in a bloodied sheet and buried it in a shallow grave east of Acton in the Antelope Valley off Angeles Forest Highway.

McQuay temporarily stored Smith's missing vehicle in his garage one week from the night of Smith's murder, affording Creech sufficient time to make clandestine arrangements for its long-term concealment and was then parked in a car-sized room at a public storage facility just west of McQuay's Porter Ranch residence in Simi Valley.