Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Deserves to be in Prison // The Edward Shin Murder Story

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Edward Shin was convicted in 2011 for the first-degree murder of his business partner, Chris Smith, whose body has never been found. In 2010, Shin killed Smith inside their San Juan Capistrano, California office after a bitter legal and financial dispute over their lucrative marketing firm, 800Xchange.

What have I always told you? You can never trust a gambling addict. Specifically, I'm talking about this guy. His name's Ed. And Ed's around 29 when this story starts. He's living in California. And Ed, he owns a small sports magazine. But here's the thing about him.

He's kind of a shady dude. He really loves gambling and partying with women. Problem is, he can't actually afford that lifestyle. His magazine is barely making enough money to exist. So Ed starts looking for ways to get more cash, even if he has to rip people off. Then one day in 2006, he's at church, because apparently he's a religious man, and that is when he meets this dude, Joe Gray. And Ed and Joe Gray, they start chatting and they hit it off, and pretty quickly they become friends.

And eventually, Ed shares with Joe Gray that he's having a hard time financially and that his sports magazine business is in trouble. And Joe Gray, he's a nice guy, so he decides to help him out, and he lends Ed money to keep the business running. But Ed, he doesn't invest that money into his sports magazine business? No, no, no. He takes it right to the casino, and he gambles it away. Because it turns out that Ed loves the casinos. He's apparently a gambling addict.

And so after that, he goes back to Joe Gray, and he asks him to lend him more money. And he gives him all kinds of excuses, like his business. is struggling and his family needs money or whatever. And Joe Gray lends him more money. And of course, Ed takes that money and he gambles it all away again at the casino. Now eventually, all the small loans that Joe Gray gives him just aren't enough to sustain his gambling habits. And Ed needs a more reliable way to get paid.

So he tells Joe Gray that he's suddenly unemployed and he needs work. And once again, Joe Gray steps in to help. He offers him a position at his company, a tech advertising business. And so Ed starts working at this tech advertising business. And he does pretty well there. And over time, he climbs up the ranks. And eventually he becomes vice president of the company.

And later he gets promoted to president of the company. And this is great and all. Like he's getting a real paycheck now. You know, there's no need for him to borrow money and gamble it away anymore. Well, actually, the problem is that these upper level positions in the company give Ed access to the company's funds. And once he gets the opportunity, he starts embezzling some of those funds. Whenever clients send payments to the company, Ed will secretly divert a portion of it into his own personal accounts. Then he takes that money to the casino and he gambles it all away. And he does

this over and over and over again. And all these shenanigans, they go on for quite a while, because the scheme works perfectly. No one in Joe Gray's company notices anything missing. While Ed, he's just out here having the time of his life. But then one day, in 2009, Ed is in Las Vegas, in a casino, gambling his ass off, of course, and there, I guess someone who knows Joe Gray spots him. And this person notices that Ed is throwing a lot of money around. Way more money than someone with his salary should be spending.

Not only that, but the casino is treated. Ed like a VIP. They cover his hotel room and his meals. They send a private jet to pick him up. They're treating him like a guy who regularly spends a lot of money there. And so eventually, word gets back to Joe Gray about all of this. And Joe Gray, he knows something is definitely wrong. He's been working with Ed for a long time. So he knows this guy doesn't have the money to gamble. So then where did all the money come from? So Joe Gray decides to investigate and he takes a closer look at the company finances and records. And that is when he discovers that more than a million dollars is missing and that it had to have been stolen by Ed. And so Joe Gray

alerts the police. And bam, Ed gets arrested. And later, Ed takes a plea deal and he gets put on probation and he's ordered to pay around $700,000 in restitution. Here's the thing about the restitution, though. If he doesn't pay it within the the allotted amount of time, he gets sent to prison. Those are the conditions of his plea deal. So now the clock is ticking, and Ed has to find hundreds of thousands of dollars before his second chance runs out. And if that isn't bad enough, he still has a lot of gambling debts back in Las Vegas. So he needs money for that, too. And here is where things get even crazier. While Ed was working with Joe Gray, he had secretly started his own company on the side, a competing

business, and he started it with this guy, Smith. And at one point, Ed had even stolen some of Joe Gray's clients and brought them over to this new company. But whatever, Ed's side business is doing pretty well, and therefore he comes up with a plan to siphon money from the company and use it to pay off his restitution and therefore stay out of prison. Perfect plan. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Ed's business partner eventually learns that Ed was previously convicted for embezzlement. And so he gets super paranoid. I mean, he's worried that sooner or later, Ed is going to start stealing from the company's accounts. And knowing Ed, he probably would. And if that happens, the whole business could collapse. And so Smith decides that the best thing he can

do is get out of the business and walk away from the company altogether. And so he goes, goes and he hires an attorney and he makes an official demand saying that he's leaving that he wants around a million dollars for his share of the company. And when Ed learns about this, he gets super pissed off. Because now, instead of being able to steal money from the company, he's about to lose even more of it. And that is when Ed decides that the only way out of this is to get rid of Smith for good. And so one day, Ed and Smith are at the office and they're talking and they get into an argument. And this argument gets heated, like really heated. And then suddenly, Ed grabbed some kind of sharp object and boom, he attacks him over and over again. And unfortunately,

Smith doesn't survive this attack. After that, Ed loads Smith's body into a vehicle and he drives to a remote location and he dumps it. Later, he hacks into Smith's email accounts and he starts impersonating him, trying to make it look like he's still alive. So pretending to be Smith, he emailed Smith's attorney, claiming that he's willing to settle the business dispute with Ed, not for the million dollars that Ed wanted, but for around $45,000. He also messages Smith's family, pretending to be Smith. He tells them that he cashed out from the business and he bought a yacht and he decided to

travel around the world, and that's why they haven't seen him in a while. So I don't know what Ed's long-term plan is here, but it looks like he's going to keep this up until he gets away with it completely. Until Until Ed finally screws up. After taking control of the business, he eventually abandons the company's office space and he never pays the remaining lease. So the landlord of the place hires a private investigator to track him down. And this private investigator goes to inspect the now empty office space. And while he's looking through the space, he notices traces of blood on the walls.

And immediately, he reports this to the police. And the police get the blood tested, and it comes back as Smiths. And so, bam, Ed is arrested. Here's his mugshot. And ultimately, he goes to trial, and he's found guilty, and he gets sentenced to life in prison.