Decade-old Pinole murder investigation ends in charges [The Oakland Tribune, Calif.]

Dec. 29--After years on the run, Pinole homicide suspect Raymond Wong stood before a judge Thursday in Contra Costa Superior Court, charged with murdering the mother of his child in the Nevada desert a decade ago.

Wong's arrest Dec. 24 capped a 12-year investigation into the shooting death of 21-year-old Diablo Valley College student Alice Sin, whose body turned up in rural Churchill County, Nev., in January 2000 near a scattering of shell casings and Monopoly money.

Pinole police have suspected her boyfriend, and father of her son, from the outset. But until recently, the case against Wong proved too weak for prosecutors. Instead, Wong served a federal sentence over child porn that investigators found on his computers while searching for evidence in Sin's killing.

Investigators developed new evidence of late, Pinole police said, and took advantage of Wong's unexpected appearance in the Bay Area -- he had moved to Beijing in 2009 -- to slap handcuffs on him.

"It is special," Pinole Police Chief John Hardester said. "And we owed it to the family of Alice Sin to never let up in our pursuit of this individual. Now it's up to the courts to decide. I am confident that justice will be served."

Thursday, the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office charged Wong, 40, with murder using a firearm and with the special circumstance of killing for financial gain. He did not enter a plea during his court appearance in Richmond, and remains held without

bail in Martinez.

Senior deputy district attorney Harold Jewett said Wong could be a candidate for capital punishment if convicted, but his office has not decided whether to pursue it.

Wong took out a $2 million life insurance policy against Sin before her disappearance. Jewett said a love triangle involving Wong's other paramour, Jessica Tang, also factored into his alleged motive.

"He fathered two children, one by each of these women, so there was a conflict there that he sought to eliminate," Jewett said.

Wong never collected on the insurance policy.

"It has been a very long case," said Wah Sin, the victim's father. "I don't know what he was thinking. He enjoyed it. He liked cheating the system, playing games.

"I only feel a little bit better," added Wah Sin. "It's been too much hell."

Sin lived with Wong in Pinole in 1999. Wong reported her missing Nov. 22, 1999 -- the day before their son's first birthday.

Wong's behavior immediately aroused police suspicion. Tang moved into Wong's home a few days after Sin's disappearance. Sin's son went to live with family.

On Nov. 24, 1999, police found Sin's car in a shopping mall parking lot half a mile from Wong's home. A police dog searching for the scent of a cadaver zeroed in on the car's trunk. A consensual search of Wong's home yielded a 9 mm handgun, and Wong failed a lie-detector test administered Nov. 30 of that year, according to court records.

Then, on Jan. 24, 2000, off-roaders found Sin's body in rural Churchill County, near a dirt road in the desert. Someone had shot her four times, and police found 9 mm shell casings nearby. They also found Monopoly money marked with the letters "NWO" and "ZOG," symbols with significance in the white supremacist movement.

Jewett called the Monopoly money placed near Sin's body a "misdirection tactic intended to deflect suspicion from any suspects who may be closer to home." Three days before the killing, Wong did an Internet search on NWO and ZOG, he added.

Pinole police got a warrant and searched Wong's home on Estates Avenue in Pinole again on Jan. 26, 2000, but he and Tang were gone: That day, he took a trip to Canada, where he married Tang.

This newspaper and several other media outlets received a short e-mail soon thereafter, claiming to be from a white supremacist group. The author claimed responsibility for Sin's death, stating in part that Sin was killed "because our demans (sic) were not meet (sic) within the time frame."

Police later traced the e-mail, sent through a free web-based service, to a cyber cafe in Calgary, Canada.

The owners of the cafe identified Wong as being in their cafe and using a computer the same day as when the electronic mail message was sent. Wong also returned to the cafe the next day, according to a police affidavit filed in Contra Costa Superior Court.

Police arrested Wong in March 2000 over the child porn on his computers. Prosecutors charged him with possessing child pornography in federal court, and he pleaded no contest in 2001. A federal judge sentenced him to 27 months in prison.

Wong returned to Pinole after his federal commitment under an assumed name. He failed to register with police as a sex offender, a requirement of state law, but police discovered him during a sex-offender sweep in 2009.

Under the alias "Edward Wong," he fashioned a new life for himself after prison that included an Internet technology job at Kaiser Permanente and a 22-year-old college-student girlfriend, with whom he lived when police arrested him for failing to register in April 2009.

A subsequent search of Wong's home yielded more computers, most of which were loaded with violent pornography depicting rape scenes, many involving young Asian women.

Wong posted $100,000 from County Jail in Martinez shortly after his arrest and fled the country, police said. Efforts to find Wong in China were complicated because he had access to several million-dollar homes, Pinole police Cmdr. Matthew Messier said at a news conference Thursday. "He lived very comfortably," Messier said.

Pinole police heard from federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport on Dec. 19, saying they detained Wong as he tried to re-enter the country because of his warrant for fleeing in 2009. Wong returned to visit a sick relative, Messier said, and was carrying a fake passport, fraudulent documents under his alias, and technology used to jam cell phone and police radio signals.

Police arrested him Dec. 20, but he quickly made bail. By Dec. 24, before Wong could leave again for China, police got a warrant for his arrest in the Sin case based on new evidence that police would not discuss to preserve elements of their investigation.

Sin was "young and impressionable and very much in love with Raymond Wong," Messier said. "I bet she had no idea that this was going to happen."

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