A multimillionaire who jumped bail while awaiting trial for killing his wife in their beach community a decade ago has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
A judge immediately sentenced Peter Chadwick, 57, to 15 years to life in prison. San Diego police originally arrested him, but he jumped bail and was sought for years.
In the negotiated plea deal with Orange County prosecutors, Chadwick, 57, waived his custody credit and will have to serve at least 85% of his sentence before being eligible for parole.
Chadwick choked up in court Wednesday and cried as he admitted killing his wife, Quee Choo Lim Chadwick, 46, known as Q.C., on the morning of Oct. 10, 2012, in their Newport Beach home.
They had fought over a possible divorce and related financial issues.
“I just want to express that I am truly sorry,” Chadwick said, while calling his late wife a “wonderful person.” He added that he irreparably harmed his family.
“I destroyed everything,” he said. “So I deserve whatever the court decides.”
Chadwick said he hoped his sons and his wife’s family can “somehow carry on remembering what kind of a person she was. Such a great person, so loving and she cared for everyone. I am sorry for what happened.”
The victim’s brother said in a statement read aloud in court by Senior Deputy District Attorney Jennifer Walker that when his sister immigrated to the U.S. for college in the late 1980s she lived with him at the time.
“When I moved to Southern California in 1998, she followed me to move too. Since 2001, we have had family vacations every year. We regularly got together since we were the only two immediate family members living in the U.S.”
He said he felt “guilty” because he gave his “blessing to marry Peter when she asked me for the opinion.”
He also described the hardships of gaining guardianship of Hardwick’s sons, who remained in Newport Beach schools when their father was arrested. The boys lived with their uncle and aunt in Pasadena and had to commute to Orange County for classes.
The victim’s sister said in a statement also read aloud in court by Walker that she continues to struggle with her sibling’s death.
“QC was chatty, inquisitive and compassionate and we would speak on the phone almost every day,” she said. “Family was the most important thing to her. She would go to extraordinary lengths to do anything to help us. She looked after my family as I would hers. It was her who would initiate and spend countless hours planning our annual family reunions. We still feel her loss every year at these events, an emptiness that cannot be filled.”
She said she would “never understand how after hurting her, Peter was so barbarically able to dump her body as if she was a worthless piece of trash.”
Chadwick was captured in August 2019 in a residential duplex in a community of American expatriates near Pueblo, Mexico, after seven years on the run.
Newport Beach police and U.S. Marshals Service officials said Chadwick was nabbed thanks to one of thousands of tips generated by a $100,000 reward and a podcast about the case.
Though the case began in Orange County, it led to San Diego County, where police arrested Chadwick and authorities located his wife’s body.
Neither Chadwick nor his wife arrived to pick up their sons, then 8, 10 and 14 years old, from school the fall afternoon in 2012 when she was killed.
Another student’s parent drove the children home and requested that Newport Beach police conduct a welfare check when the Chadwicks could not be found. A subsequent search of the home revealed blood and signs of a struggle inside, according to police.
Sometime between the morning of the murder and the following morning, Chadwick drove to San Diego and called police, telling them that a handyman killed his wife and then kidnapped him and forced him to drive to Mexico to dump her body, according to authorities.
San Diego police, who arrested Chadwick four miles north of the border that day, noticed he had scratches on his neck and dried blood on his hands, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.
Chadwick admitted to investigators that he made up the story about the handyman.
After questioning him, detectives found the victim’s body in a gas station trash bin in Lakeside. She had been strangled.
When he was released on Dec. 21, 2012, after posting $1 million bail, he surrendered his British and American passports and agreed to live with his father in Santa Barbara, according to a federal arrest warrant.
When Chadwick skipped a January 2015 court date, Newport Beach detectives went to his father’s home and were told the defendant was not living there and no one knew where he was, according to the Marshals Service.
Chadwick’s family later told investigators that Chadwick told them he was going to Seattle and left in a taxi. Authorities said Chadwick called a cab at 11 a.m. on Jan. 9, 2015, and was taken to the Santa Barbara airport, where video footage showed him leaving the airport in a different cab six hours later wearing different clothing, according to the Marshals Service. His cell phone was turned off the same day and was later found in a trash dump.
Bank records showed he withdrew $600,000 from an account that same month, according to the Marshals Service.
– City News Service
