Fugitive millionaire caught
For four years, millionaire murder suspect Peter Chadwick was nowhere to be found, though his image was everywhere – in widespread media coverage, on the US Marshals’ most wanted fugitive list, and in a police-produced podcast about his case.
All the attention and hundreds of tips paid off, authorities said yesterday after the 55-year-old real estate investor from Newport Beach, California was arrested by immigration authorities in Mexico on Monday and deported to the US, where prosecutors hope he will stand trial.
While Chadwick left leads for law enforcement to make it look like he fled to Canada after skipping a court appearance, law enforcement officials said they believed he had been in Mexico all along.
At first, Chadwick – who had several aliases and fake IDS – stayed at high-end resorts, but when he needed to show a passport, he moved to more modest hostels and residences such as the duplex where he was arrested in an expatriate community near Puebla, officials said.
Chadwick is charged with strangling his wife Quee Choo Chadwick, known as QC, in 2012. Newport Beach police began investigating after he failed to pick up his children after school. Inside the family’s upscale home, authorities said they found a broken vase, drops of blood on the floor, and QC’S cellphone and wedding ring.
The next day, Chadwick told authorities that a handyman had killed his wife and kidnapped him, and had fled with her body.
Chadwick quickly became the suspect, however, and his wife’s body was found a week later in a rubbish bin in suburban San Diego.
Chadwick was released on US$1 million bail, and at first attended court appearances. When he vanished from his father’s California home in 2015, police said he had withdrawn large sums of cash and researched how to change one’s identity.
Authorities declined to pinpoint a specific tip that led them to Chadwick but said they had received leads from around the world.
Craig Mccluskey, supervisory inspector with the US Marshals Service, said Chadwick told authorities he had learned Spanish while on the run. ‘‘He studied how to be a fugitive,’’ Mccluskey said.