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July 22 - September 7, 2025
Every possibility had to be checked out, and Sheriff Metts’s office and SLED were devoting the necessary manpower.
Because Hilda and Bob Smith had observed Shari’s blue 1978 Chevette stopped at the mailbox by the road, we pretty much knew the exact time she had disappeared.
“There’s no doubt she was kidnapped,” Captain Bob Ford of the sheriff’s department told the State newspaper the next day. “She’s not a runaway. We can’t accept any theories that she ran away from home.”
The reality of the situation did not sink in. It seemed more like an inconvenience that Dawn’s big show was opening the next day and she was supposed to be at work to be there.
It was a scene that she could never imagine taking place in her front yard. There were patrol cars and law enforcement officers everywhere, family and friends and church members had come, and there was no longer any doubt that this was real.
Despite the searing heat, hundreds of volunteers joined the land search and the sheriff’s deputies with bloodhounds. It was about 10:30 on Friday night when one of the searchers discovered a red bandanna belonging to Shari along the side of Platt Springs Road, about a half mile from the house.
Neighbors reported seeing a late-model yellow Chevrolet Monte Carlo, a blue Ford pickup, and a reddish-purple General Motors car of some make—possibly an Oldsmobile Cutlass—near the Smith driveway around the time Shari disappeared.
By the next morning, sheriff’s department helicopters from Lexington and adjoining Richland County had fanned out in all directions hoping to pick up some trace. The FBI flew an infrared-sensing plane down from Washington.
“I won’t believe I’ve graduated until they find her,” Rene Burton, a senior who was in the school chorus with Shari, told State reporter Michael Lewis. “A part of our family is missing.”
It wasn’t just her classmates and teachers who were traumatized. If a sweet, innocent girl like Shari Smith could just disappear like that, no one in the community felt safe.
Dawn and Robert Smith had been spending the nights in their parents’ bedroom. Even though sleep didn’t come easily, it seemed like the only refuge for the four of them. Exhausted from the emotions of the day, they each gradually drifted off to sleep.
“When you have no answers,” Dawn told us when we finally met, “you’ll take anything that is any sort of answer.”
The call was traced through Alltel, the telephone service provider, to a pay phone outside C. D. Taylor’s Grocery store on Highway 378. It was about five miles outside of Lexington and twelve miles from the Smith home.
The envelope was postmarked June 1 and carried a twenty-two-cent stamp from the Folk Art series, featuring a mallard duck decoy. Roof informed the officers that the duck decoy stamps had been issued that year and were being sold currently.
I can tell you from several impressive encounters working with the United States Postal Inspection Service that anyone involved with the mail regards the sanctity and security of the postal system with utmost seriousness.
What the envelope contained was the most excruciating, heartrending, and at the same time, most moving, courageous, and transcendent statement I have seen in all my years in law enforcement.
speechless. I have returned to it in my mind over and over again through the years. I certainly choked up when I read it. I can only imagine, even to this day, how Shari’s family reacted when they read it.
As an important part of my process of working on a case, I try to put myself in the shoes—and the head—of the victim. For me, that is the best way to comprehend all the dynamics of the crime, correlate what the UNSUB was thinking to the evidence left at the crime scene and other sources such as medical examiner’s report, to understand how he viewed the relationship between himself and the victim.
While striving to be empathic, those of us in law enforcement try to maintain our objectivity and a reasonable detachment. But that just isn’t possible when you have to try to feel what the victim was feeling. Putting myself in Shari Smith’s head at the time she was writing this was almost unbearable.
And once he no longer had Shari to torture emotionally, he could continue his indulgence through repeated phone calls to her family so he could torture them emotionally.
As I read the letter and listened to the recordings, I hated this man I had never met, which is not particularly useful in terms of objectivity in my line of work but is sometimes unavoidable.
The envelope and letter were photographed and dispatched to the SLED Questioned Documents Unit, where Lieutenant Marvin H. “Mickey” Dawson first compared the handwriting with known exemplars of Shari’s and determined that she had, in fact, written it. Dawson was one of the country’s top forensic document examiners. Ten years earlier, in 1975, he had established SLED’s Document Laboratory.
identifying clues on the letter or envelope. Among the analyses Dawson and document examiner Gaile Heath performed was to put them through the ESDA, which stands for Electrostatic Detection Apparatus. This is a machine about the size and shape of a desktop computer printer.
Re-creating the timeline, it was after the Last Will & Testament document was received that Undersheriff Lewis McCarty had first called Quantico and spoken to Ron Walker.
Under a broiling sun in hundred-degree temperatures, with one arm around Hilda’s shoulders and the other around Dawn’s, Bob Smith declared, “We just want to simply say whoever it is who has our daughter Shari, we want her back. We miss her. We love her. Please send her back home where she belongs.”
The Signal Analysis Unit of the Bureau’s Engineering Section had determined that the caller was using a pitch modulator, or variable speed device, to disguise his voice, which spoke to his degree of sophistication.
Victimology is always a critical consideration: How high risk for the victim was the situation in which the crime took place? Did the victim have any known enemies? Had the victim received any threats or observed any suspicious activity prior to the crime?
His asking if the Smiths had received the letter showed his egotism and wish to be in control of the family’s emotions.
More likely, it was for her body to have time to degrade in the one-hundred-plus-degree heat and whatever soft, humid earth in which he had deposited it, leaving few useful forensic clues. This guy was compulsive and meticulous in his criminal methodology.
In a way, it sounds like a perversion of the way the media almost always identifies criminals by their first and middle names as a matter of style for clarity.
I don’t want to overstate this, but Shari’s abductor appeared to feel that once he had her in his control, he could define her according to his own whim and perception.
We thought it significant that the caller immediately shifted away from the reference to Shari and Richard’s relationship because in his own mind he had probably already constructed a relationship between himself and Shari.
In addition to getting a “feel” for the offender and insight into his narcissistic and sadistic teasing of the family on Shari’s status, we could tell, for instance, that he was following the media reports, which is a highly useful piece of evidence because it allows us to anticipate his next move based on what he is hearing.
After the police made a very public show of “screwing up” his instructions of where to look, he did call again to gloat, and they were able to catch this aging redneck right in his own house.
If we could determine that an UNSUB was following news accounts, we could publicize facts that would lead him to react in a certain way.
Among the materials on the conference room table on Thursday were photocopies of the Tuesday editions of the local papers, both of which made the case their lead story. The State featured the portrait photo of Shari next to a shot of her family and Sheriff Metts at the news conference on the driveway. The headline read, SHERIFF THINKS TEEN STILL ALIVE, with the subhead MISSING GIRL’S FAMILY PLEADS FOR HER RETURN.
The Columbia Record had the same photo of Shari and one of a SLED agent briefing volunteer searchers. Its headline read, SHERIFF EXPANDS SEARCH, with the subhead METTS STILL OPTIMISTIC TEENAGER IS ALIVE.
There was an implication here of murder-suicide, and if the calls continued, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to keep threatening/promising to kill himself. But we didn’t believe for a moment that he would do it. This guy was too full of himself and his perceived power to take his own life.
Since Monday, when Ron first laid out the case to me, he said it didn’t seem like a one-off to him. This UNSUB liked what he was doing too much.
The fact that he apologized for misstating the time, as opposed to, say, apologizing for kidnapping Shari, spoke to his narcissism and internal need for control. It was as if he wanted to establish the exact time so he could receive proper credit from the people whose lives he was ruining.
He was neither glorying in his hideous crime, nor feeling bad about it. It was as if he was fulfilling a sacred destiny and it was altogether natural that the Smiths should go along with it.
His frequent invocations of God also suggested an omnipotent and invincible sense of himself,
When we see this kind of behavior from an UNSUB, directing the cops or ridiculing them for not being able to catch him, it often indicates an internal war within him over his own inadequacy, and the need to prove himself to himself.
Based on the behavioral evidence assimilated thus far, the guy was no genius, but he was criminally smart and sophisticated, meaning he had some experience. We didn’t believe this was his first crime involving assaulting or otherwise harming women.
If he had any prior murders, they would be against children or young girls. Unlike a lot of serial killers, he’d be too intimidated to go after adult women—even professional sex workers, whose job makes them inherently more vulnerable.
Along with this, and based on our experience with this personality type, we expected he would collect pornography, with a particular emphasis on bondage and sadomasochism. He would always be fantasizing about his power over women.
We were just about certain he had some kind of low- to medium-level blue collar job, maybe in electrical work based on what the Signal Analysis Unit had told us about the voice-altering device he was using. We also believed he must have a job with flexible hours so that his time was often his own, and he had mobility to travel at will.
despite the preference people have for imagining a stranger committing a horrible crime in their community instead of considering the possibility of evil in their midst.
As the days ticked by with law enforcement seemingly no closer to identifying him, he stopped using the voice-altering device. We saw that increasing cockiness as something we could use against him in developing proactive strategies to get him to reveal himself.
As a result of our research with incarcerated offenders, we had come up with the categories organized, disorganized, and mixed to describe criminal behavior, having determined they were more useful to investigators than more abstract psychological terms such as schizophrenic or borderline personality disorder, which don’t convey identifiable behavioral traits.
