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July 22 - September 7, 2025
Shari’s shiny silver casket, adorned with a spray of roses in her favorite color, pink, was closed. On a table next to the casket was a frame containing her senior class photo. Outside, appropriately, violent storms lashed the area, and the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Lexington and the surrounding counties.
Beyond the church’s 825 seats, every available space along the walls of the sanctuary was filled. Law enforcement officers scanned the crowd and videotaped the funeral service. Among the pallbearers was Andy Aun, who was supposed to sing the national anthem with Shari at their high school graduation. Honorary pallbearers included retired and active members of the South Carolina Highway Patrol, SLED, and the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department. The Smith family’s pastor, the Reverend Lewis Abbott, presided, assisted by the Reverends Ray A. Ridgeway, Jr., and Graham Lyons, who flew in from
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“God does not do what has been done here. It is because of the confusion and the sin and depravity of man that we’ve come to an occasion like this.”
Ridgeway cited the tragedy that had befallen the Welsh coal-mining village of Aberfan in 1966 when spring rains saturated and unsettled a large slag heap and sent it sliding 700 yards down a mountain, engulfing a school in mud, sludge, and rubble, killing 116 children and 28 adults.
Captain Bob Ford declared that the strain of the case had left the sheriff’s department personnel emotionally and physically strung out under great, self-applied pressure. The case hardly spared anyone in law enforcement its heavy emotional toll. Rita Y. Shuler was a forensic photographer with SLED who had been called upon to create detailed, high-quality images of Shari’s Last Will & Testament for close analysis, as well as much of the other physical evidence.
Meanwhile, Raymond Johnson, a twenty-three-year-old resident of Darlington, South Carolina, was being held in the Darlington County Detention Center on charges of extortion, alleged to be the anonymous individual who had called Bob Smith five or six times on Saturday, before and after the funeral.
This we thought was possible, because he would want, at least in his own mind, to maintain the illusion that he and Shari were emotionally close and that he was a friend of the family. On the other hand, he had come up with so many lies so far that this could have just been part of his larger fantasy.
It has been my experience that when someone says they’re not jerking you around, they’re jerking you around. When they claim they’re not playing games, it means they’re playing games. And highly intelligent people don’t often feel the need to go around telling anyone how intelligent they are.
Okay, and uh, tell Sheriff Metts and the FBI . . . Damn, that’s like the fear of God in you for sure. They treat this like Bonnie and Clyde. They go out and gun you down, and if I decide, if God gives me the strength just to surrender like that, I’ll call you, like I said.
he could be treated like Bonnie and Clyde, shot to pieces in their car back in the 1930s, was a healthy sign for us and an important behavioral clue. It meant he was now likely to be showing signs of strain to those around him: drinking or drug-taking, losing weight or eating compulsively, probably talking about the case nonstop and asking others what they knew.
We found that killers often took part in searches for their victims. They could blend in with the crowd, dispel any doubts about themselves, and get the vicarious thrill of knowing something no one else did, plus perceiving that they were smarter than everyone else because they were getting away with it.
Here was another example of how he was starting to mentally decompensate, to lose the ability to react in a reasonable or methodical way, due to the increasing stress he was under. Logical thinking involves a progression of ideas. Saying he’d be sent to the electric chair and then put in prison for the rest of his life was illogical, regressive thinking. He was starting to come unglued from the pressure he was under.
Several times a day, Metts would meet with Saluda sheriff Booth and SLED captain Gasque to share information and coordinate efforts. All vacation and leave were canceled until the case was solved, and food was brought in so investigators wouldn’t have to break for lunch.
There were no more calls from the UNSUB that week, and we began to worry that the combination of Dawn’s more aggressive tone and Metts’s public statements had driven him underground or even farther away from the area than neighboring Georgia. At the same time, several families reported what they hoped were crank calls threatening their children. Parents became hypervigilant and gun sales rose.
The “Crime Stoppers” reenactment was produced by a WIS-TV film crew on Friday, June 14, two weeks to the day after Shari was kidnapped, and scheduled to be aired on local television stations beginning the following Monday. It was filmed on location at the Town Square shopping center parking lot and on the Smiths’ driveway. Twenty-one-year-old University of South Carolina junior Tracy Perry, a SLED agent’s pretty blond daughter who resembled Shari, portrayed her. Shari’s own blue Chevette was used, and her boyfriend, Richard, took part.
In explaining her willingness to participate to a reporter, Tracy said, “I would be willing to do anything I can to catch this guy. It’s just got everyone scared to death.”
It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and Debra Louise Helmick, mother of Debra May (referred to as such because they shared a first name), was about to leave for work at Ray Lever’s Bar-B-Q Hut restaurant, driven there by her new neighbor Vicky Orr, who lived in one of the other twelve white siding-clad trailers in the park with her husband, Clay, and their two children.
About a half hour later, a silver-gray car with red racing stripes drove into the park’s only entrance and down the short driveway, which ended at a grove of trees. The car paused, then turned around and slowly cruised back toward the street. The driver stopped near the Helmicks’ trailer, and with the motor still running, opened the door.
Though it was another unusually hot day, still in the upper nineties, the nineteen-year-old Morgan was not running his air conditioner and instead had the windows open. He heard something indistinct, looked out, and saw a white male get out of the car, approach Debra May, grab her around the waist, pull her into the car with him, and speed off as Debra May screamed.
Police officials are quick to point out that composites, generally created with the Smith & Wesson Identi-Kit, are not presumed to look exactly like an unknown subject but are useful, rather, in helping witnesses eliminate as many suspects as possible.
Interestingly, some Identi-Kit artists say that women and children are better at recalling and describing faces than men, and young children are sometimes invited to play with the kit themselves to come up with the beginnings of a composite.
We hoped that just by being there, he would feel that he had colleagues willing to share that strain with him and his associates. We told him we had arranged one of our private VIP rooms with a bath for him in the dormitory building so he wouldn’t have to share with any other resident.
We walked him back down the long corridor to the Forensic Science Building where our offices were located and took him to Roger Depue’s office so we could introduce him to the Behavioral Science unit chief.
We also had two Forensic Science Section agents sit in with us, which had become something of a regular practice for major case consultations because they could answer questions for us relative to any forensic findings or scientific tests that had been done or which they could recommend.
There is no way to avoid the sense of “This could have been my child!” gnawing constantly at the edge of your consciousness.
He further noted that the public level of fear was hampering the efficiency of law enforcement because people were calling the sheriff’s department if their spouses or children were fifteen or thirty minutes late getting home. It even got to the point that church officials were calling for advice on how to reassure their parishioners.
He would also be unable to refrain from discussing the case in detail with anyone who would listen. His friends and family members would be surprised by his obsession with the murder of Shari Smith and the disappearance of Debra May Helmick, not understanding why he seemed so fixated on them.
For example, given our expectation that the UNSUB would have a collection of pornography focused on bondage and sadomasochism, we advised that if they identified a suspect, this was something they could include in a search warrant application.
Though the timing is different for each offender, we explained that our research into the mindset of the serial killer showed that the crime begins as a fantasy in his mind, and generally can be interpreted as some form of personal and sexual empowerment.
The longer and more times he gets away with a violent crime, the more he will refine his M.O., and the more confident he will feel about the next time. This makes him even more dangerous.
While Shari would seem a grown-up and appropriate partner for him, someone he had to kill only because he otherwise would have forfeited his freedom, Debra May was only nine, a four-foot slip of a girl who would not be an appropriate romantic or sexual partner for him under any circumstances. He wouldn’t feel particularly good about her abduction, and he couldn’t pull off the illusion that he was a friend of the family and had any kind of reasonable relationship with her. If he had any image of self-worth at all, this is a crime he would be ashamed of.
After about five hours in the conference room, we adjourned upstairs to the Boardroom for a few drinks and to unwind from the intensity of the discussion. The Boardroom was the official name of the Academy’s bar and social lounge, and it was a very popular place after the workday. We continued discussing the case with McCarty while we imbibed and then through dinner in the dining hall.
As a sheriff or undersheriff, you pretty much have to divide yourself between the administrative and political side of the job, and the investigative part. I knew that like Sheriff Metts, McCarty was a strong administrator. But after many hours with him, he was the one who was running the investigative end of the case on a day-by-day basis, and Ron and I really wanted to do right by him if we could.
He went home with what he said was a twenty-two-point list of conclusions and characteristics relating to the UNSUB. “I know the man,” he announced upon his return. “Now all we have to find out is his name.”
And since this now appeared to be an active potential serial killer case that was drawing a tremendous amount of publicity and fear in the Midlands region of South Carolina, both Columbia SAC Robert Ivey and Sheriff Metts requested that we offer on-site consultation to the law enforcement effort.
It was pretty damn hot and humid, even by our miserable Virginia summer standards. It was the main reason we decided to dress casually, rather than in the standard FBI agent uniform of dark, sharply pressed suit, white shirt, and conservative tie.
On the drive between the locations, McCarty related some of the problems in dealing with different jurisdictions. Since the Helmick abduction, there had been a degree of conflict between the Saluda and Richland sheriffs.
development or shopping center was under construction. Lexington was a moderate-size southern town, actually kind of a suburb of Columbia. But the area around it was pretty rural, with farms, woods, and a lot of open space, much of it covered in kudzu. Maybe it was just because we came from the high-pressure world of the FBI, but it did seem the pace was slower and more relaxed.
She spoke for the entire community when she said, “Every time one of my children walks out the door, I pray to God that they’ll come back safely.”
a parent who lived in the large North Gate trailer park across the street from Shiloh Mobile Home Park told a reporter, “There are not many people who let their children play out by themselves anymore. It’s a direct result of the kidnapping. It scared a lot of people, and if you excuse my language, it scared the hell out of me.”
TRAIPSING AROUND IN THE WOODS BEHIND THE MASONIC LODGE, I BECAME MORE convinced than ever that the UNSUB had to be a local who knew the area intimately. You wouldn’t just stumble upon a place like this.
I remembered a case up in Idaho in which two adjoining counties had very similar murders around the same time and neither police department realized it. It wasn’t an instance of linkage blindness—that is, when investigators are unable to see that two or more cases are connected. Each department literally hadn’t heard what had happened in the other county.
McCarty dropped us off at the motel he’d booked for us. It was a one-story affair, as I recall, not terribly luxurious, but it met our basic needs, which were to shower and sleep.
He seemed to have photos of himself with every Brownie or Girl Scout he had ever bought a box of cookies from. Where I come from, we call that an “ego wall.” Ron said when he was in the military, it was referred to as a “love-me wall.”
Metts took his place behind an appropriately massive desk. McCarty, Bob Ivey, Ron, and I sat in a semicircle facing him.
Whatever affected depression or despondency he had indicated in his calls with Dawn would have been alleviated by the thrill and satisfaction of taking Debra May. Even though we didn’t think he felt particularly good about that one, he now would have confidence that he could snatch away another young woman any time he wanted and get away with it.
We thought the best hope would be to figure out where he was holding her and mount a quick-strike SWAT operation to rescue her. But despite what Metts would have to say to the media, we didn’t want to get the hopes up of anyone in the meeting.
“He’s stopped calling the Smiths,” Metts lamented. “I’ll get him to call again,” I said. I figured that was part of why I was there.
The Smith home was a good-size brick house with a pitched roof and two dormer windows in the main section, and from the entrance to the driveway where the mailbox was on Platt Springs Road, it looked fairly far away up the long drive.
Aside from the neatness, it looked like a typical teenage girl’s bedroom, albeit one with a religious dimension. There was a cross mounted on one wall and a couple of biblically themed pictures, as well as the usual dolls and school-related memorabilia.
