(12-29) 18:17 PST Pinole -- A dozen years ago, the body of a young mother and college student from Pinole was found off a remote dirt road in Nevada. Alice Sin, 21, had been abducted, shot four times and adorned with monopoly money marked to suggest a racially-motivated slaying.
But police always suspected domestic violence rather than a hate crime against a Chinese-American woman.
And on Thursday, Contra Costa County prosecutors finally decided there was enough evidence to file a murder charge against Sin's onetime boyfriend, Raymond Wong, a registered sex offender who married another woman soon after Sin's death.
Wong, who is now 40, was arraigned in court in Martinez, and could face the death penalty because he is charged with the special circumstance of killing for financial gain.
Police said he had been living comfortably in Beijing in recent years, working as a computer company executive under an assumed name.
"We've been waiting for 12 years," said Sin's father, Wah Sin of Oakland, who with his wife, Ling, is raising his grandson, who is now 14. He said the couple was relieved but added, "It doesn't end until the court proves it."
Wong was arrested in Pinole on Christmas Eve, marking a new chapter in a long investigation that was handed down from detective to detective over the years. It relied on circumstantial evidence and was bogged down by the question of whether California or Nevada authorities had jurisdiction.
Sin, a student at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, vanished from her Pinole home in November 1999. Motorists looking for mining claims found her body two months later off Interstate 80 in Churchill County, Nev.
Authorities quickly focused on Wong, who shared a home with Sin in Pinole and had reported her missing. According to police affidavits, he failed a lie detector test and was listed as the beneficiary on a $2 million life insurance policy that was applied for shortly before Sin disappeared.
Detectives believe that after Sin was found dead, Wong visited a cybercafe in Calgary, Alberta - where he was on a business trip - and sent an e-mail to four news reporters about Sin's killing.
The e-mail message, claiming to be from a white supremacist group that was taking credit for the killing, was laced with racial slurs and said, in part, that Sin was killed "because our demans (sic) were not meet (sic) within the time frame." Police said witnesses placed Wong in the cybercafe.
At around the same time, Wong married another girlfriend in Calgary named Jessica Tang, records show.
While Wong has not faced a murder charge until now, he has been in trouble. Police who served search warrants at his house after the slaying found stores of child pornography on his computers, leading to a 27-month prison sentence.
Wong moved back to Pinole after the sentence, but failed to properly register as a sex offender and at one point assumed a new identity in order to land a job at a nearby Kaiser hospital, said Pinole police Commander Matthew Messier.
In 2009, Wong fled to China, where Messier said he invented another alias. But he returned earlier this month, on Dec. 19, and was arrested at San Francisco International Airport for failing register as a sex offender. He made bail four days later.
By Christmas Eve, three Pinole detectives - Sgt. Tim Cauwels, Matthew Wallace and Essex Combong - had discovered new physical evidence, Messier said. They arrested Wong at the police department, where he had gone believing he had paperwork to fill out.
Messier declined to say what the new evidence was or whether the gun used to kill Sin had been found.
"Justice had to be served for this victim," Messier said.
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