Adea Shabani
Aspiring actress Adea Shabani vanished from her Hollywood apartment. Her boyfriend Chris Spotz killed her and buried her body in a desert. Spotz died in a police chase.
On February 23, 2018, twenty-five-year-old Adea Shabani, a Macedonian-born aspiring actress living in Hollywood, was last seen leaving her apartment with her boyfriend, Chris Spotz, an aspiring screenwriter who was secretly married.
When Adea's acting coach and friends couldn't reach her, they launched their own investigation, tracking Spotz's movements through surveillance footage and records. They found evidence he had traveled to Northern California and Nevada after Adea's disappearance.
On March 12, when LAPD attempted to stop Spotz's car on the 5 Freeway near Castaic, he led police on a high-speed chase that ended when he fatally shot himself. Before dying, Spotz had told his father where he had buried Adea's body.
Adea's remains were found buried in a shallow grave near the Nevada border. She had been strangled. The case highlighted both the dangers faced by women and the role that citizen investigators can play in solving crimes.
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