Officials: Orange County man tried to cover up murder with emails supposedly from Africa

“The emails were short and sweet,” said Jim Amormino, an Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman. “They were just too generic.”

The reason Smith didn’t seem like himself is because it wasn’t him. Authorities say Smith never went to Africa at all, but had been murdered in his Southern California office by his business partner Edward Younghoon Shin, who hijacked Smith’s email account and pretended he’d gone overseas.

Shin is due to be arraigned in an Orange County courtroom Wednesday.

Messages started arriving soon after Smith was last seen in June 2010. In one, he was sand boarding on South African dunes. In another, he was paragliding near Johannesburg.

Authorities say Shin, 33, kept up the deceit until the final message arrived in December.

“The last one said he was going to the Congo,” Amormino said. “I guess (Shin’s) thought process was the Congo was dangerous and something must have happened to him there.”