Missing Real Estate Broker Found Dead in Car Trunk

The body of real estate broker Arlene Chee of Seal Beach, missing for 2 days, was found in the trunk of her Mercedes with a single gunshot wound to the head, police said Friday.

Chee, who with her husband owned Century 21 Fortune in Long Beach, was last seen Wednesday as she left her office for a noon appointment with another real estate agent, police and family members said.

She never returned to the office, and when she didn’t come home that night, family members began calling around and driving through the area looking for her, her brother-in-law, Alan Chee of Seal Beach, said. Eventually, about 30 relatives searched for her. Her husband reported her missing to the police the following day.

Thursday night, Arlene Chee’s father-in-law and one of her brothers turned onto Fashion Avenue near 25th Street, a residential neighborhood in west Long Beach, and saw her 1985 Mercedes, Alan Chee said. The car’s license plate was missing.

Wanted to Wait for Police

“My dad called my brother to get the keys to open the car trunk, but the rest of us wanted to wait for the police to get there,” he said. “As things go, sometimes you just can’t tell. It’s a sixth sense, something that made us not want to open it. You don’t want to disturb the fingerprints.”

The brother flagged down a passing patrol car, and the Long Beach officers opened the trunk and found the body, police said. Her purse was missing, but Alan Chee said she was still wearing her diamond ring.

Long Beach police said Chee, 46, probably died Wednesday. They said they knew of no motive for the killing.

Chee was known as one of Long Beach’s more successful real estate brokers, said John Spear, president-elect of the Long Beach Board of Realtors.

“She apparently was quite a high achiever for Century 21,” Spear said.

The couple had owned the company for 8 to 12 years--Alan Chee and other family members said they were not sure--and built it into an organization with 25 agents.

Jim Utterbach, owner of Century 21 Action! in Long Beach, which has 90 agents, said that Arlene Chee “was doing pretty well and had a nice organization there.”

Pleasant to Work With

“She was very pleasant to work with, but she kind of kept to herself,” he said. “Arlene didn’t really participate in lots of Century 21 things. She almost never went to our monthly meetings. But people knew her.”

Alan Chee described his sister-in-law as “energetic and hard-working.”

“She was a very dynamic person,” he said. “She was aggressive, hard-working, personable and she worked at least a 12-hour day every weekday.”

The family, he said, “is very upset.”

Chee, of Seal Beach, originally came from Los Angeles, he said. The Chees have four children, all grown.

When she didn’t come home Wednesday, Alan Chee said, the family immediately worried.

“It’s unusual that she would do that,” he said. “She was married to my brother for 27 years and something like this had never happened. . . . We called all the relatives, we did all the normal things anyone would do if someone were missing.”

He said police do not accept missing-persons reports until a person has been missing 24 hours.

At the sight of the car and the missing license plate, he said, “we reached the same conclusion anybody would--that somebody didn’t want that car to be recognized.”