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July 22 - September 7, 2025
Disorganized UNSUBs tend to be younger or have severe mental problems or character disorders. However, we learned from anomalies to our methodology, such as when Special Agent Gregg McCrary profiled a serial killer who was targeting prostitutes and homeless women in the Rochester, New York, area in 1988 and 1989.
fact, Arthur J. Shawcross was forty-four, and Gregg wondered why he had gotten this one part wrong.
Shawcross spent fourteen years in state prison before being released. As it turned out, those years in prison were essentially time on ice, and when he got out, he resumed life at his emotional developmental age of thirty.
kept hearing how beastly hot it was down in South Carolina, and Metts and McCarty felt badly for the hundreds of people who were braving the heat, out looking for Shari or clues. As I’ve said, we had already concluded that if Shari had been killed, as available indicators and most of the UNSUB’s pronouncements suggested, he was probably holding the discovery off long enough for the body to decompose so that less forensic evidence would be obtainable.
We had profiled this guy as bold, megalomaniacal, and cocksure from a distance but unsophisticated and intimidated up close and personal, fantasizing about relationships with unattainable women.
Whether he was actually trying to have sex with the corpse—appallingly, not all that uncommon among a certain type of serial killer—or just spending time with and “possessing” her, we thought he would continue this practice until the body degraded to the point where he no longer felt a human connection. This was a behavior we would later see with Shawcross.
None of us in the conference room said anything after hearing the transcript of the call spoken aloud. That call had come just one day earlier, on Wednesday, and there was a sense of chilling resolution to it—the reality he’d been teasing had finally come to pass.
We quickly realized that Wednesday had been the critical day: the day when the case started coming together, and lives finished falling apart.
They would turn off most of the pay phones throughout the area and surveil the ones they left working. We thought that was a pretty good idea and hearkened back to my days as a street agent in Detroit when we tried to stop a rash of bank robberies by hardening the obvious targets, thereby ...
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A helicopter dispatched from South Carolina Wildlife & Marine Resources Department spotted the body at 12:35 P.M. A crime scene team, led by Lieutenant Jim Springs and Agent Don Grindt, was immediately dispatched from SLED headquarters.
They said their presence would interfere with police work, but their stronger motive was not wanting the parents to see what they expected to find.
Dawn related that her mom absolutely refused to even begin to consider that Shari was not going to be found alive. She even packed a little overnight bag because she knew she’d probably have to go to the hospital. She had her nightgown and her toothbrush and all the things that she thought she would need.
The SLED officers and sheriff’s team converged at the Masonic Lodge off Highway 391 in the Pleasant Grove section of Saluda County: a two-story white building with a pitched tin roof, mostly surrounded by thick woods. It was roughly sixteen miles west of where Shari was abducted.
She was lying on her back, dressed in her white shorts over the yellow and black bikini bathing suit bottom and her black-and-white-striped blouse over her yellow tank top. Around her neck was the gold chain necklace that had been a gift from Richard. There was a gold stud earring in her left ear, but her right earring was missing. She was still barefoot, as she had been when she’d stepped out of her car on Friday. And as expected, the body was badly decomposed.
It also supported our profile of him as an inveterate list maker; someone who would want everything he considered important in his life organized and under control.
As the SLED crime scene team took photos and processed the scene and surrounding area, forensic pathologist Dr. Joel Sexton of Newberry Memorial Hospital was sent for. At the same time, Captain Gasque went back to his car for the difficult drive back to the Smith house.
Dawn, her brother, and her parents remained in her bedroom, realizing that Shari was gone forever. And the reality began sinking in that this man had been so cruel to tell them all these things that were completely untrue, that gave them the hope that he really was taking care of her as he said, having her drink sufficient volumes of water to counteract her diabetes insipidus since she didn’t have her medicine.
From the line of bent-over saplings and bushes, it was determined that a vehicle had been driven to the back of the lodge, and the body then dragged from there into the woods where it was found.
I have seen too many cases when the murder of a child or loved one strikes a deeply religious family. I have found that they seldom lose their faith; but nearly always, among their first thoughts is, “God, how could you let this happen?”
As a law enforcement agent, my questions had to be of a more worldly nature, though the more transcendent ones Dawn posed have never been far from my mind.
I just know this: As long as individual men and women have the power and agency to exercise free will and choice, evil will continue to exist, and it must be challenged and fought.
It was possible to tell that Shari had been bound with rope ligatures and duct tape, which was removed prior to the body being deposited in the woods, as evidenced by the residue on her face.
As far as the manner of death, since the death occurred during abduction, the manner of death will still be homicide, regardless of whether it is due to depriving the decedent of water or from some type of homicidal asphyxia.
As the State reported the next day in a story by Peter O’Boyle III and John Collins, many of those who had searched for Shari, and other interested people, continued driving by the Smith home in the afternoon to show their ongoing support.
“‘Is she all right?’ one passerby asked from her car Wednesday, several hours after authorities learned of Miss Smith’s fate. “‘No, I’m afraid she’s not,’ said the deputy guarding the entrance to the Smith home.”
As we wrapped up our case consultation meeting Thursday, we told Undersheriff McCarty to keep us up to date on any new developments as they occurred to see if we could come up with any proactive strategies. Personality-wise, we felt we knew a lot about the UNSUB, but so far there wasn’t much to lead us in a direction that would help Sheriff Metts’s team home in on a specific individual. Columbia SAC Robert Ivey said he was preparing a telegram formally requesting the Behavioral Science Unit’s ongoing assistance in the case.
The banner headline across the top of Thursday morning’s edition of the State was POLICE HUNT “SICK” KILLER. A large aerial photo showed the Masonic Lodge and its surroundings, with a phalanx of police and rescue vehicles converged in the front. Below that was a map showing where Shari’s body had been found relative to the Smith home.
We noted the UNSUB’s familiar tropes such as “listen carefully” and “this is not a hoax,” and mentioning with specificity the date and time on the Last Will & Testament when he described it to the reporter.
His statement “I didn’t know she had the rare disease” proved we were right when we assessed the business about his being a friend of the family, which he’d also said in calls with Hilda and Dawn, as bunk. Anyone truly close to the family knew of Shari’s condition. It was just another part of his fantasy, trying to draw a connection with this beautiful girl he had first seen at a distance.
The only true words he uttered in the entire exchange with the reporter were when he said he’d wanted “to make love to her.” But whether he was able to accomplish that as a sexual assault while she lived or not, he would have known that he would have to kill her afterward.
There is a common misconception that some violent predators actually do start to feel guilty about what they’ve done and want to turn themselves in. And despite great literature like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in real life, this almost never happens.
One of the few instances of a serial killer turning himself in was the first incarcerated subject we interviewed, Edmund Kemper, a very large and intelligent man who became infamous as the Coed ...
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When I interviewed Kemper, it became clear that all of his adult crimes were in reaction to his punitive and emotionally abusive mother, who belittled him by telling him he wasn’t good enough for the beautiful coeds at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked. And once he worked up the nerve to kill her and, by association, her friend, instead of targeting the surrogate women whom she said he could never have, he was done. There was no point to his killing any longer. Turning himself in seemed the logical and prudent thing to do.
Earlier in my FBI career, one of my assignments had been as a hostage negotiator. This can be a very delicate balancing act with an offender you’re trying to keep calm so he won’t harm his hostages on one side, and a SWAT team ready to break down the door, sweep in, and neutralize the hostage holder as quickly and efficiently as possible on the other. Some of the techniques we now use in behavioral science came from that experience.
I had advised him to train the Smith family in basic hostage negotiation strategy; that is, to stall for time and try to “outlast” the offender, to listen carefully and then paraphrase and restate what he has told you. This should give the impression of understanding between the parties and may make the offender open up, reveal more, or even reveal what his actual wishes or intentions are. It can also help you know if you’re making progress or going in the other direction.
It was a technique I used when I interviewed Charles Manson. The only way I could gain any insight into his raving and lecturing was to paraphrase and restate declarations he made, and then go one le...
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Then he paused, and in the next thought handed us the strategy that would become the central focus of our manhunt.
We had noticed the striking similarity between the two beautiful blond Smith sisters, and apparently the UNSUB had, too. In his rape-fueled fantasies, he was conflating them.
As I listened to the recording of the next thing he said, at the same time my stomach was turned by his self-indulgent cruelty, I was dumbfounded by what his recitation indicated about Shari’s bravery and strength of character.
I’m sure that the only way Dawn could handle this outrage was that she knew that nothing he said about Shari and complicit sex was believable on any level. She steeled herself for the next
On one level, this was a complex character. He was living in his own surreal fantasy world as far as his relationship with Shari and the Smiths was concerned, but he was also organized and pragmatic on a practical level. The nexus of those two traits would be where we would direct our attention in setting our trap to catch him.
“My God, how could you?” “Well, forgive us, God.” “Not us. You.”
In the UNSUB’s own mind he may have considered three ways to kill Shari, but we sincerely doubted he gave her a choice or that even if he had, she would have chosen the excruciatingly slow and agonizing process of suffocation. He
This individual was getting to do it while still a free man, and with the unwilling assistance of the very people whose lives he had shattered.
Friday was the day we received the teletype from the Columbia field office formally requesting Behavioral Science’s involvement with the Smith case. It didn’t really change things, since we’d been analyzing the case and consulting with the sheriff’s office all week, but now we were officially collaborating with local authorities, so there would be no questions about FBI involvement, either from officials on the scene in South Carolina or our own bosses at headquarters.
The longer this went on, I said to McCarty, and the more reaction he gets from the family, the more comfortable and into the whole experience he would become.
Once he gets over the high of this application of manipulation, domination, and control, he will likely slip back into his normal self-doubting, inadequate, and depressed personality, and then he’ll be in danger of abducting and killing again.
In its continuing coverage, the previous day’s Columbia Record had a story detailing how and where Shari’s body was found. On the same front page, I noticed a story about how the federal police chief in São Paulo, Brazil, was 90 percent certain that a body found buried in a small nearby town was that of Dr. Josef Mengele, the fearsome Nazi “Angel of Death” who had conducted sadistically hideous medical experiments on inmates of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and who, like many other Nazis at the end of World War II, was believed to have escaped to somewhere in South America.
I couldn’t help reflecting on the juxtaposition of stories on the discovery of these two bodies. One belonged to one of the most evil men the modern world has ever known; the other to someone completely guiltless, much like Mengele’s own victims. The phrase “blood of the lamb” came into my mind, as it did from time to time when I had to work on violent crimes against children.
Though not on the level of the Smith family, I tried to maintain a degree of faith, yet it always plagued me to wonder if death truly was the end. On some level, that just didn’t make any sense and I certainly hoped not, because that would indicate a universe without divine justice, which was a difficult thought to maintain. But every time I started thinking like that, I would remind myself that such abstractions were way above my pay grade.
