The state laboratory could not prove the bones were Robin Smith's. Hikers had found skeletal remains in woodland near Greenwater, Washington, in the same stretch of country her family had already searched themselves, and technicians had teeth, bone chips and blood to work with. It was not enough. She had not seen a dentist since she was a child, so there were no dental records to compare against, and she had no blood type on file anywhere. Without an identification there could be no murder charge.
Her mother got one filed anyway.
Edna Smith pushed the police to charge murder before the remains were found at all, and they agreed with her, not because the case was ready but because the heavier charge would intensify the hunt for the man who had left the bar with her daughter. Then she helped them advertise it. Wanted-for-murder posters went out to bookshops that sold Louis L'Amour novels, because the suspect was known to read them, and to beauty salons, because he had his hair permed.
In June 1987 the FBI made Darren Dee O'Neall the four hundred and thirteenth name on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
Robin Smith was twenty-one; one account says twenty-two. Her friends called her Rockin' Robin. Accounts place her at Edgewood and at Des Moines, Washington. On the night of March 27 into the 28th, 1987 she was at Baldy's Tavern in Puyallup with her fiancé, Larron Crowston, when a man introduced himself as Herb Johnson. He was there with a girlfriend, Mary Barnes, and he had her announce an after-hours party at their apartment. Crowston left early to go fishing, Barnes went out for a few hours, and when she came back O'Neall and Robin Smith were gone. She was reported missing the next day.
A family friend, Jim Chaney, went to question him, and a man who was there said he saw a leg in the trunk of the car, with a purple and white sock on it.
When the remains near Greenwater were eventually identified, she had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer.
Herb Johnson was one of several names he used. There were others, Mike Johnson, Mike James Johnson, Jerry Macranahan, Larry Sackett, and he took some of them out of the westerns he read. He had been born in Albuquerque on February 26, 1960, the youngest son of an army family that moved from post to post, to Bad Tolz in Bavaria and to Fort Polk, Louisiana, where he met his wife in high school. He served in the army himself in Bremerhaven until February 1982. Colorado Springs police knew him for indecency offenses; a 1984 sexual assault charge collapsed when the woman disappeared, and in July 1986 he skipped out on a second-degree sexual assault charge. He was a drifter who lived on theft, moved between states in stolen cars, and had a robbery conviction in Wyoming behind him.
Ten weeks before he met Robin Smith he had done something in Oregon that would eventually earn him a longer sentence than her murder did.
On the night of January 17, 1987, in north Portland, O'Neall saw a fourteen-year-old girl walking along the freeway to a convenience store, waited for her to come out, and abducted her at knifepoint, threatening her with a revolver too, and forced her into the sleeping compartment of his truck, where he tied and gagged her, and raped and sodomized her over several hours before releasing her near Aurora. She got to a truck stop, and an employee drove her home. She survived. She testified. Years afterward she said what she had been afraid of was facing him in a courtroom and then watching him walk out of it and come looking for her.
The indictment that followed ran to two counts of first-degree kidnapping, three of first-degree rape, sexual penetration with a foreign object, three counts of third-degree rape, and single counts of first-degree sodomy, third-degree sodomy and sexual abuse.
Between Portland and Puyallup he had reconnected with a former high school classmate in Washington, taken a duplex and found work driving a truck in Tacoma.
He was caught in Lakeland, Florida on September 22, 1987, after officers tried to pull him over for a traffic violation. There was a short high-speed chase and a crash. Fingerprints confirmed who he was in February 1988 and Washington extradited him.
Jury selection in the Smith case began on January 4, 1989, and rather than face a jury he pleaded guilty. The sentence was life, which in Washington then meant a maximum of twenty-seven years and nine months, with release possible after eighteen. A prosecutor describing the record in open court decades later called it a conviction for murder in the first degree in Pierce County.
Oregon then took its turn, and the girl he had abducted in Portland gave her evidence in detail. He was convicted on sixteen counts of kidnapping and rape, and Judge Kimberly Frankel sentenced him to a hundred and thirty-five years. Five times what the state of Washington had given him for a killing.
That is where the case sat for a quarter of a century, and there was a third woman in it the whole time.
Wendy Aughe was twenty-nine and a single mother of two, working at a beauty school in Bellingham. In April 1987 a man calling himself Mike James Johnson had been tending bar at the La Paloma restaurant there for two days. She told colleagues she was going on a date with a man she had met that day, and in the early hours of April 25 the two of them left the restaurant together in her red 1972 Ford Torino.
She was reported missing on the 28th, when she failed to arrive to collect her eight-year-old daughter. Her mother went to the apartment and found pools of blood in the bedroom, semen stains, and bedding soaked through. Her body has never been found.
O'Neall had emptied the restaurant's till and taken its liquor on his way out. Her car crossed into the United States from Canada at the Oroville port of entry the following day and turned up abandoned in Eugene, Oregon, on April 27 by one account and May 2 by another, with his fingerprints inside. Whatcom County charged him with stealing it, and in 1989 a jury convicted him of second-degree theft. Nobody charged him with her death.
The forensic work that changed that took three decades and three separate laboratory results. In August 2015 the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory identified DNA from her apartment as his. In November 2020 blood on a pair of men's trousers found in her car was matched to her. In July 2021 investigators took a cheek swab from O'Neall, and a month later the laboratory confirmed it.
He was charged with second-degree murder on October 11, 2022, and extradited on March 1, 2023 from the Two Rivers Correctional Institution at Umatilla, Oregon, where he had been held since 2008. Bail was set at ten million dollars. On March 10 he pleaded not guilty.
His public defender, Starck Follis, went straight at the delay, asking why O'Neall had not been charged with killing Wendy Aughe back in 1987, when Whatcom County had been perfectly willing to charge him with stealing her car. Thirty-five and a half years had passed between the two.
Bellingham's chief of police, Rebecca Mertzig, said the case had taken three generations of detectives in her department.
No verdict has been reported. As of late 2025 the case was reported still awaiting trial.
Other names have been attached to him over the years and they rest on geography. Lia Szubert was from Twin Falls, Idaho; her car broke down near a truck stop at Mountain Home on June 9, 1987, and she was found strangled along Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon. The FBI wanted to question him. He denied it, and the only thing connecting him is that his route and its timing overlapped with hers. He has been named as a suspect in unsolved killings in Utah and Idaho on much the same basis.
That is worth stating carefully, because a drifter's route through four states will coincide with a number of unsolved disappearances without that meaning anything at all.
He is in Washington state custody on the Aughe charge. The Washington murder sentence is long served. His earliest release date on the Oregon case is May 9, 2033, when he would be seventy-three.