Defendant claims self-defense in murder trial of FOX executive

The prosecution says Gavin Smith was viciously killed out of revenge and is urging a first degree murder conviction. The defense argues it was self-defense.

It has all the makings of a lurid made for TV movie. Sex, violence, murder allegations, Viagra, hidden bodies, grieving families, and children left without parents.

Except this is the graphic reality of life in a 9th floor courtroom in Downtown L.A.'s famed criminal courts building.

Gavin Smith, a married father of three, had apparently carried on an affair for years with a married woman with three children of her own whom he met while they were both in rehab years ago.

The short story is that the woman's husband was enraged over the continuing affair and tracked his wife to a secret rendezvous with Smith using a cell phone app, surprised them, and beat Smith to death.

He then 'panicked'', hid the car and buried the body, later described by attorneys as ''errors in judgement' by a convicted drug dealer out on parole.

Defendant John Creech looking rested, coifed, and handsome in a well cut suit, testified in his own defense that the 6'6 " Smith, a former UCLA national championship basketball player attacked him that night in may of 2012, that it was a fight to the death, and that Creech never meant to kill Smith, but had to defend himself to his 'dying breath.'

It's his constitutional right to do that, his defense attorney said, even using a photo of Philadelphia's Independence Hall to show jurors as she made that point.

Today it was closing arguments from both sides, then twelve men and women will debate whether or not to send Creech to prison for the rest of his life without the possibility of parole.