SEATTLE (AP) — A 62-year-old Kent man has been charged with killing his ex-girlfriend more than two decades ago, though her body has never turned up.
The Seattle Times reports that video-surveillance footage from a Tukwila casino that was recently reviewed by a detective led to the arrest of Phan Kim Seng, a retired car salesman.
Seng was arrested on Oct. 27 and has been charged with second-degree murder. He is being held on $2 million bail.
Investigators had long suspected Seng, who they say had previously assaulted Anna Nguyen and had threatened her new fiance, and who had used her debit cards after she vanished.
While he maintained over the years that Nguyen had moved to Vietnam, authorities say, a long search turned up no trace of her, and she was declared dead in 2015.
Cold case investigators began taking another look at the evidence and reviewed nearly 300 hours of video footage, collected by the King County Sheriff’s Office at the time of Nguyen’s disappearance in 1998. They say it showed that Seng was at the casino where her car was found. They said he had denied going there.