Erased: Missing Women, Murdered Wives (17 page)

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Another five years have passed since the Black trial, and it seems

more and more likely that no one will ever be held accountable for

the disappearance of Kathie Durst. No body, no crime. The Durst

case is another example reinforcing the widespread belief that a killer

clever enough to erase his victim will never be punished.

Today Durst is a free man. In 2006, while serving out his parole

in Texas after being released from jail on the cutting-up-the-corpse

charge, he had one more brush with the law, running into the trial

judge at a mall beyond the jurisdiction he was allowed to travel. After

she reported the violation to the parole board, she found something

very disturbing outside her home: the severed head of a cat.

Q

Men who kill their wives or girlfriends are hardly ever given

the harshest punishment, even when their crime involves multiple

victims or some other ‘‘special circumstance’’—such as lying in wait,

murder for financial gain, or murder by solicitation—that would

make them eligible for capital punishment. From the judges and

juries who decide cases to the prosecutors who determine how to

charge them, people largely still view domestic homicide as a rash,

unplanned act committed in the heat of the moment. Very often when

a conviction is obtained it is for second-degree murder—meaning

that the killing was intentional but not premeditated.

University of New Mexico law professor Elizabeth Rapaport refers

to this phenomenon as the domestic discount, a tendency in the law

and in sentencing policy to view domestic homicide as mitigated by

some emotional suffering from which the killer was seeking relief—in

essence, the belief that killing an intimate partner is by its very nature

a ‘‘hot-blooded’’ crime of passion, not cold-blooded premeditated

murder. In a study she conducted of all men sentenced to death in six

states from 1976 to 1991, Rapaport found that less than 12 percent

of those who received the ultimate sanction had killed an intimate

partner or other family member.

However, the discount appears to apply only to men. Half of all

the women in the United States who are on Death Row are there for

committing domestic homicide.

At the very least, the killing of an intimate partner is viewed as

a crime not likely to be repeated. The most emotionally compelling

argument Scott Peterson’s attorneys made for sparing his life was

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that he was not the ‘‘worst of the worst,’’ no Adolf Hitler or even

Charles Manson, not someone who would kill again. However, that

argument overlooks the fact that Peterson had already taken two

lives, and perhaps was considering eliminating the woman who was

working with police to bring him down.

A surprising number of eraser killers do kill again, or attempt to.

Some, like Barton Corbin and John Smith, murder a subsequent wife

or girlfriend and are only caught after a second or third murder.

Others kill someone they fear may expose them, as Steven Poaches

said he was prepared to do to the man he asked to help him move his

victim’s body. Still others, such as Perry March and Bryce Thomas,

turn their aggression against those who may be attempting to hold

them accountable for their original crime.

John David Smith erased at least two women from his life—maybe

more.

Fran Gladden Smith, forty-nine, was still practically a newlywed

when she vanished from their New Jersey home in 1991. Her husband

of sixteen months claimed that he came home from work one day to

find his wife gone, and a note reading simply ‘‘Going away for a few

days. Don’t forget to feed the fish.’’ He wasn’t concerned. He said he

just assumed she had gone to visit relatives.

Fran’s relatives have never believed that she took off on her own

or left behind such a cryptic note (which Smith said he threw away).

Fran was barely mobile at the time she disappeared, still recovering

from a broken hip she had suffered a month before on their belated

honeymoon, and could not even walk without the assistance of

crutches.

Thanks largely to the efforts of Fran’s sister and daughter, who

pursued their own dogged investigation and discovered that Smith

had a previous wife who had also mysteriously disappeared, John

Smith is in prison today— but not for Fran’s murder.

John told Fran when they first met that he had never been married

before. But Smith, as Fran’s horrified relatives later discovered, was a

master of deceit. He lied about having a college degree; he was actually

a dropout. He convinced employers that he was an aeronautical

engineer when he was really just a computer programmer. He lied

about his upbringing. He used altered names and the Social Security

number of an exotic dancer.

While he was married to Fran he was leading a full-blown double

life—spending weekdays with Fran in New Jersey, and weekends in

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Connecticut with his ‘‘fiancé,’’ Sheila Sautter, a woman he had been

seeing for eight years. Neither had any idea the other existed. Smith’s

girlfriend believed his job required him to live away from ‘‘home’’

during the week. His wife believed that he spent weekends renovating

a beach house he was ‘‘renting out.’’

Three months after Fran went missing, as he got dressed one

morning at the beach house, Smith turned to Sautter and as casually

as if commenting on the weather said, ‘‘By the way, I’m married. And

she’s missing.’’

Smith had also lied to Fran when he claimed never to have been

married. In fact, in 1970, when he was nineteen years old, John had

eloped with his high school sweetheart, Janice Hartman. Four years

later, just three days after Janice’s divorce from Smith was finalized,

John reported Janice missing (claiming that he believed she, too, had

gone to visit relatives).

But like so many erased women, Janice was never lost. John knew

where she was all the time: in a plywood box he had built for her in his

grandparents’ Ohio garage. To make her corpse fit into the too-small

box, about the size of a set of golf clubs, he sawed off her legs below

the knees. For five years, she remained in the garage in her makeshift

coffin, until Smith’s curious younger brother, Michael, pried open

the box one day and recognized his sister-in-law’s mummified face.

Smith’s grandfather made a family decision not to call Janice’s

relatives or report John to the police. Instead, he called John and

ordered him to remove the box. Smith immediately drove the three

hundred miles to collect it, put it in his car, and drove away. When

he got to Indiana he tossed the box, with Janice’s remains still inside,

into a ditch alongside of the highway.

Q

For a decade after she was found by a highway work crew, Janice

was known as the ‘‘Lady in the Box,’’ more formally as Jane Doe, the

name under which she was buried in Indiana. She wasn’t identified

by DNA until 2000, some twenty-six years after she had gone missing.

After years of pressure from authorities, John’s brother eventually

revealed the story of the box to the FBI. He recalled that when John

built the strange contraption, he told him that Janice was a narc and

had gone into the witness protection program. He asked Michael

to help him clear all Janice’s possessions out of their house, and he

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remembered seeing his brother rolling up some of her clothes and

placing them around the edge of the box.

Agents began looking for Jane Does in Ohio but found no one

who matched the ‘‘Lady in the Box.’’ Eventually they started checking

neighboring states and got around to Indiana.

In 2001, John Smith was sentenced to fifteen years to life for the

killing of Janice Hartman. He will be eligible for parole after serving

just ten. The trial judge did not allow the jury to hear evidence about

Smith’s second wife going missing as well.

‘‘There are certainly some similar circumstances surrounding the

disappearance of the defendant’s first two wives,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But the

court finds lacking the substantial proof required before it can admit

this evidence.’’

Fran Gladden Smith remains missing, and her family keeps search-ing. In a chilling postscript, during a search of a storage unit rented

by Smith, police found pictures of some women they have not been

able to identify, one wearing a wedding ring, and several fragments

of bone identified as being from the skull of an unknown woman.

That discovery raised a horrifying new specter. Could John Smith

have still other missing wives out there?

C H A P T E R

S I X

Hiding in Plain Sight

Q Somekillerserasenottheirvictimbutthecrimethey

have committed. They make it appear that their wife or girlfriend

died not in a domestic homicide but as the result of a tragic accident,

a suicide, or a crime perpetrated by someone other than her intimate

partner— such as a robbery turned homicide, a carjacking, or a

rape-murder.

One might say that in this variation, the killer is hiding in plain

sight. He does not disappear his victim’s body. In fact, he wants her

to be found, wants there to be an explanation for her death that clears

him of any involvement. What he erases is the true nature of the

crime, the actual motive, and his responsibility for her death. He may

destroy and alter evidence at the true crime scene, or he may stage a

completely phony scenario to account for the victim’s death.

In some ways, this type of killing is easier to pull off than a more

classic erasure. The man doesn’t have to get rid of a body and account

in any way for his partner’s absence, doesn’t have to pretend to search

for her, doesn’t have to keep the ruse of an open-ended mystery going

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over a long period of time. The crime is done and over with in one fell

swoop. He can move on with his life without a shadow or question

hanging over him; he may even be viewed with sympathy as the victim

of a horrible tragedy. If he can distance himself from any appearance

of involvement in the killing, he can get away with murder.

In other ways, however, the staging and deception involved in

these disguised partner homicides are more difficult and risky than

simply vanishing the victim. They require erasing all evidence of the

actual crime and fabricating a scenario that is logically consistent

with the story he is trying to tell.

Like that of a stage director, his goal is to create an alternate ‘‘real-ity’’ over which he is in complete control: setting the scene, dressing

the set, directing the action, choreographing the movements of the

players. Unlike an ordinary director, whose passive theater audience

is willing to suspend disbelief, the director of this illusion must be

able to pass the scrutiny of police, forensic, and medical investigators

wandering through his set, picking up the props, checking behind

the false fronts. One must be truly Machiavellian to be able to fool so

many trained skeptics, or even to believe one could do so.

In constructing these elaborate illusions, they draw from their

environment, their background, something that seems plausible in

their view of the world. For an eraser killer from the inner city,

that might mean staging a murder that appears to be a random

street crime. Someone with training in science might draw on his

specialized knowledge, killing by stealth with poison. Chester Gillette,

for example, knew that boating accidents were fairly common in the

lakes of the Adirondacks where he committed his crime and that

most of them were not subjected to lengthy investigation.

An added thrill for this type of eraser killer is getting away with

murder right under the nose of the law. One of the reasons we have

no good statistics for how often murder by erasure occurs is that

the true nature of many of these crimes is never detected. Instead,

they are written off as accidental deaths, suicides, or other types of

murders committed by unknown suspects or, worse yet, by innocent

men wrongfully convicted.

Q

Perhaps the most nefarious of this breed of eraser killer are those

who attempt to make a murder look like a suicide—in essence,

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making the victim out to be her own killer. These murderers inflict

not only the trauma of sudden loss on the victim’s friends and

family but also the stigma of feeling complicit in the death, for not

recognizing the victim’s emotional pain and doing something to

prevent the tragedy.

Atlanta dentist Barton Corbin may be one of the most audacious

eraser killers ever. In 1990, he staged the killing of his girlfriend to

look like a suicide and managed to fool authorities into believing she

had taken her own life. Fourteen years later, he tried it again in the

exact same way, this time with his wife.

He was ultimately caught and held accountable for both crimes,

not because of lack of planning or care in execution, but only because

his narcissism and Machiavellian arrogance blinded him to the danger

of sticking so scrupulously to the same plan.

Neuroscientists have been studying this aspect of the psychopathic

mind for years, but recent research indicates that psychopaths may

have considerable difficulty processing ‘‘bottom-up’’ information.

That is, they may be able to conceive a plan at the abstract level

and carry it out in detail, but they have difficulty learning from or

adapting to changes in the complex world outside themselves—the

things they did not plan or create themselves.

Getting away with murder gives the eraser killer reinforcement

that his plan was brilliant and that he was able to manipulate people

and prove himself smarter than and superior to everyone around

him—a veritable Nietzschean Superman. But he remains unable to

take the long view, unable to understand that when another woman

close to him dies in precisely the same way, or three or four wives

seemingly walk off the face of the earth, he is dangerously pushing

the odds. And because psychopaths have a greatly dampened fear

response, he is unable cognitively to read signs of danger even to

himself.

Q

Barton Corbin was a bright, football-loving Georgia dental student

the first time he erased a woman. On June 6, 1990, three days before

his graduation, his recently estranged girlfriend, classmate Dorothy

‘‘Dolly’’ Hearn, was found dead on her couch in her Augusta

apartment from a single gunshot wound to the head, a pistol lying

in her lap. Corbin was called a ‘‘person of interest,’’ but neither

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the medical examiner nor an independent pathologist hired by

Hearn’s family could rule out suicide. The means of death was ruled

undetermined, and Corbin was not charged.

Even though Corbin had made very visible his anger over the fact

that Dolly had refused to reconcile with him, he was not thoroughly

investigated. Six months before Hearn’s death, when she first broke

off with him, Corbin engaged in disturbing stalking behavior about

which she had filed several police reports: breaking into her home,

stealing her mail, vandalizing her car, stealing expensive dental tools

and equipment she needed for school, pouring hair spray in her

contact lens solution. He even kidnapped her cat.

Dolly had told several friends and neighbors that Corbin was

harassing her, and was so fearful for her life that she asked to stay at a

friend’s house when her roommate was out of town. Her dad was so

concerned for her safety that he lent her a gun for her protection—the

gun that was used to kill her. Corbin admitted to a friend that he

staked out her apartment one night with a gun. Another friend was

so worried about Corbin’s mental state that she begged his mother

to hospitalize him so that he could get psychiatric treatment.

A few days before Dolly’s death, Corbin told a friend that he had

come up with a plan for the perfect murder.

One of the reasons that Corbin got a pass on his first killing was

his skill in stage management. After Hearn’s roommate came home

and found Dolly, it was a deputy sheriff who first arrived on the scene

and managed the investigation. What he saw was a young woman

seated almost comfortably on a sofa, a .38-caliber handgun in her

lap, dead from bullet wound to the right temple. With the help of

others from the county sheriff’s office (there were no forensically

trained crime scene investigators at that time as there are today), he

found no sign of forced entry, no signs of burglary or other crime,

and no indication at all that any struggle had taken place. He wrote

his judgment in his report—suicide.

When the coroner arrived, he made a brief examination of the

victim and scene, and soon thereafter medics arrived to put Dolly in

a body bag and take her away. There was no effort to secure a crime

scene or check for fibers, fingerprints, or footprints, because the first

impression of suicide was not questioned, and therefore the room

was not considered a crime scene per se. Although Dolly’s family

and friends were extremely distressed at the cursory investigation her

death received, the almost self-fulfilling nature of such quick labeling

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