The axe is the oldest tool in most houses and the last thing anyone expects to see raised in anger. It hung by the woodpile, leaned in the shed, waited on the porch. In several of the cases that follow, it belonged to the household before it belonged to the crime, and that ordinariness is part of why the cases have lasted. Some ended on the gallows. Some ended in acquittals that still divide historians. Two have never been solved. A few belong to the history of the insanity defense, and one to the history of American drug law. They follow in the order they happened.
The brig Mary Russell left Barbados for Cork on May 9, 1828, carrying hides and sugar. Her master, William Stewart, was an Englishman whom the Cork police later described as well known and well regarded in Skibbereen, a humane man and a kind master, according to History Ireland. About a week out, he began to believe that his crew meant to kill him and take the ship.
Around June 21, on the long run home, Stewart killed seven men with an axe and an iron bar. The coroner’s inquest at Cork named them: Captain James Gould Raynes, a passenger and the brother of Cork’s harbor master, and the seamen Francis Sullivan, John Keating, James Murley, Timothy Connell, John Cramer and William Swanson. The first mate, William Smith, and a sailor, John Howes, survived with serious injuries. Several boys aboard, apprentices and a young passenger, lived through it as witnesses. Mental Floss, reconstructing the case in 2021, gave Stewart’s age at the time as 53.
On June 23 the American schooner Mary Stubbs, under Captain Robert Callendar, sighted the brig about 300 miles from Cork, flying a distress signal. Stewart told Callendar he had put down a mutiny. Callendar took the survivors aboard his own ship, and the two vessels came into the Cove of Cork around midnight on or about June 25. Stewart had gone over the side and was picked up and handed to the coast guard; he was later arrested at Skibbereen after confessing to the seven killings.
The inquest jury found that the men had died at Stewart’s hand while he was "in a state of mental derangement." He was tried at the Cork Assizes on August 11, 1828, before Baron Pennefather, for the murder of Raynes. Dr. Thomas Carey Osborne of the Cork asylum testified that he was insane. The jury’s first verdict was guilty with a finding of insanity, Mental Floss reports, and the court had it amended. As History Ireland records it, the verdict was "not guilty, having committed the act while labouring under mental derangement." He was ordered confined for life, at His Majesty’s pleasure.
Stewart was held first in the Cork city jail, then in the Cork asylum, where Osborne looked after him, and later in the asylum for criminal lunatics at Dundrum, near Dublin. According to History Ireland, after Osborne’s death Stewart suffered another episode and killed a hospital attendant. He died at Dundrum in 1873. A subscription was raised in Cork for the dead men’s widows and children, and a brother of Timothy Connell put up a gravestone at Passage West.
Just before Christmas 1831, in a cabin on the Toe River in the mountains of western North Carolina, Frances Silver killed her husband, Charles, with an axe. The cabin stood in what was then Burke County and is now Mitchell County. Court records spell her name Frankey or Frankie, and the surname sometimes as Silvers. She was 18, according to the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, and the mother of a daughter, Nancy, then about a year old.
She told her neighbors that Charles had gone hunting and not come home. Search parties found nothing. When his family grew suspicious, a closer search of the cabin followed, and a neighbor, Jack Collis, found evidence in the fireplace ashes that pointed to her. She was arrested on January 10, 1832.
The trial in Burke County Superior Court, at Morganton, ended on March 30, 1832, after two days of testimony. The evidence was largely circumstantial, and no motive was offered. The jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to hang. The North Carolina Supreme Court heard her appeal in the summer of 1832 and denied it. The law of the day did not allow her to testify in her own defense, so she never gave her account to a judge. Many who knew the couple said Charles had badly mistreated her, and the clerk of court, B. S. Gaither, later said that had she admitted the killing and claimed self-defense she would probably have been acquitted.
Delays followed: a judge who failed to appear, a court adjourned until the spring of 1833. Her execution was finally set for June 28, 1833. About ten days before that, her father and uncle helped her escape; she was back in custody within hours. She was hanged at Morganton on July 12, 1833, behind the Burke County courthouse, before a crowd the Encyclopedia of North Carolina put at about 10,000. The state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources calls her the first woman hanged in North Carolina; the Encyclopedia says more cautiously that she is considered the first white woman executed in the state.
She made no public confession. A ballad said to be her own scaffold song was printed in the Lenoir Topic in 1886, 33 years after her death, and the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography records that eyewitness accounts contradict the legend that she sang it. Her father buried her about nine miles west of Morganton. The case has since passed into the folklore of the state, retold in books including Sharyn McCrumb’s novel The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998).
On the night of Saturday, April 9, 1836, a young woman known as Helen Jewett, or Ellen Jewett, was killed with a hatchet in a fashionable house of prostitution in lower Manhattan, and an attempt was made to burn the building. Her name at birth was Dorcas Doyen. She had been born in Maine and had worked as a servant girl before she came to New York.
The keeper of the house, Rosina Townsend, told the court that she had let Richard P. Robinson, a 19-year-old clerk and one of Jewett’s regular visitors, into her room that night. Robinson was charged with murder. The case was a major event for the city’s newspapers. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald went to the house himself and wrote about it, and young men turned up in court in caps named for "Frank Rivers," the name Robinson had used with Jewett.
The trial ran from June 2 to June 7, 1836. District Attorney Thomas Phoenix and Robert H. Morris prosecuted; Ogden Hoffman led the defense, with Hugh Maxwell and William Price; Ogden Edwards presided. Townsend was the prosecution’s first witness, and cross-examination did not shake her. But the judge told the jury, according to the Library of America, to set aside the testimony of the women of the house unless it was corroborated by others. The closing arguments took about ten and a half hours. The jury went out shortly after midnight and acquitted Robinson in less than 15 minutes. No one else was tried.
Robinson left New York. Within a year, according to Bernard Ryan Jr.'s entry in Great American Trials, he was running a saloon and billiard room in Nacogdoches, Texas, under the name Richard Parmalee. He later farmed, married in 1845 and died of a fever in 1855 on a steamboat on the Ohio River. Many in 1836 believed he had been made to answer for wealthier patrons of the house, Brown University’s library records, and many others believed he had simply been acquitted against the evidence.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Jackson Borden, a prominent Fall River banker and mill manager, was found dead at his home in the city. About half an hour later his second wife, Abby Durfee Gray Borden, was found dead upstairs. Both had been killed, by what the authorities took to be a hatchet. His daughter Lizzie, 32, was at home; so was the family’s housekeeper, Bridget Sullivan, who had been washing windows that morning.
Lizzie Borden was questioned at the coroner’s inquest, where her answers were short and often argumentative, and she was arrested on August 11, one week after the killings. A Bristol County grand jury sat from November 7 and on December 2, 1892, indicted her for the murder of her father.
The trial was held at New Bedford from June 5 to June 20, 1893, before three judges, Caleb Blodget, Justin Dewey and Albert Mason. Hosea Knowlton and William H. Moody prosecuted. Andrew Jennings and George D. Robinson, a former governor of Massachusetts, defended her. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial. It produced four axes and hatchets from the house, none of them bloodstained, and testimony that Lizzie had burned a dress in the days after the killings; her sister, Emma, told the jury the dress was old and stained and that burning it was nothing unusual. Lizzie did not testify. Her only words to the jury were that she was innocent and would leave it to her counsel to speak for her.
The jury deliberated for a little more than an hour. On June 20, 1893, it acquitted her. She stayed in Fall River, spent her inheritance on a larger house and became a benefactor of local causes, animal shelters most of all. She died in 1927, at 67, and was buried in the family plot beside her father, her mother and her stepmother. Police had first suspected a laborer, but she was the only person arrested and indicted.
On the night of June 9, 1912, or in the first hours of June 10, eight people were killed with an axe in the Moore family home in Villisca, a small town in Montgomery County, Iowa. Neighbors found them at about 8:30 that morning. The dead were Josiah Moore, 43, his wife, Sarah, 39, their children Herman, 11, Mary, 10, Arthur, 7, and Paul, 5, and two sisters who had come to spend the night with Mary, Lena Stillinger, 12, and Ina Stillinger, 8. The family and their guests had attended a church program earlier that evening.
Suspicion fell first on F. F. J., a state senator for whom Josiah Moore had once worked and with whom he later competed in business. A grand jury declined to indict him. In May 1917 a traveling minister, G. K., who had been in Villisca for the church event that night, was arrested and charged. He confessed and then withdrew the confession. His first trial ended in a hung jury; at the second he was acquitted. Others said he had left town by train at 5:20 on the morning of June 10.
No one else was tried, and the Villisca murders remain unsolved. Edgar Epperly, a retired Luther College professor who began studying the case as a student and published a book on it in 2021, told the Creston News Advertiser that the minister was "a viable suspect" but that no one knows for sure. The axe is in the collection of the State Historical Society of Iowa. The Moore house has been restored to its 1912 condition, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is open to visitors.
For about a year and a half in 1918 and 1919, someone broke into the homes of Italian immigrant grocers in New Orleans at night and attacked the families sleeping there, usually with an axe that belonged to the household. The intruder often came in through a back door after chiseling out a lower panel. The newspapers called him "the Axman." He was never identified, and the series remains unsolved.
The families were part of the largest Italian community in the South. By 1900, the historian Miriam C. Davis wrote in Smithsonian Magazine, about 20,000 people of Italian birth or parentage lived in New Orleans, many of them Sicilians who had come to work the sugar and cotton fields and then saved enough to open small groceries. By 1920 Italians owned about half the groceries in the city, and the families usually lived behind the store or over it. That was where most of the attacks happened.
On May 23, 1918, Joseph Maggio and his wife, Catherine, were killed in their grocery Uptown; an axe from their own home was used. On August 10, Joseph Romano, a barber whose family ran a small grocery from the front of their house, was attacked in bed and died in the hospital hours later. Other families were attacked and survived. No two sources count the victims the same way. The Historic New Orleans Collection puts the dead at at least six between May 1918 and October 1919; a 1919 tally by Times-Picayune reporters, as reported by The Advocate, listed 16 victims between 1915 and 1919, five of whom died. Davis herself drew the list narrowly and argued that an earlier run of attacks on Italian grocers in 1910 and 1911 was the same man’s work.
The only convictions came in Gretna, across the river. At about 3 a.m. on March 9, 1919, an intruder attacked the grocer Charlie Cortimiglia, his wife, Rosie, and their two-year-old daughter, Mary. The child was killed and both parents were badly hurt. Gretna officials quickly settled on a neighbor and business rival, I. J., then 68, and his 17-year-old son, F. J., although, as Davis wrote, there was no physical evidence against them. Rosie Cortimiglia, who could not read or write English, was arrested as a material witness the day she left the hospital and signed an affidavit naming her neighbors the next day. At a trial in May 1919, from which the defense was barred from raising the New Orleans attacks, both men were convicted. The son was sentenced to hang and the father to life in prison.
On February 3, 1920, Rosie Cortimiglia told a Times-Picayune reporter that her accusation had been false; she said Saint Joseph had come to her in a dream and urged her not to die with the sin on her conscience. On April 5, 1920, the Louisiana Supreme Court overturned both convictions, and on December 6 the district attorney dropped the charges. The National Registry of Exonerations lists perjury or false accusation and official misconduct as the causes of the convictions. No one else was ever charged with Mary Cortimiglia’s death.
The case is remembered as much for a letter as for the killings. In March 1919 The Times-Picayune printed a message dated "Hell, March 13, 1919," signed as if by the Axman, which promised to spare any house where a jazz band was playing at a named hour that week. On the night in question the city’s dance halls were full and bands played at house parties across New Orleans, and no one was attacked. A local composer, Joseph John Davilla, published a piano piece called "The Mysterious Axman’s Jazz (Don’t Scare Me Papa)." Davis came to believe that the letter was not the attacker’s work, and that its author may have been Davilla himself, who was never accused of any attack. Mike Pepitone, a grocer killed in Mid-City in 1919, is usually counted as the last victim, though Davis saw his killing as part of a long-running vendetta. After 1919 no further New Orleans attacks were attributed to the Axman.
Eva Dugan had been a cabaret entertainer in Alaska before she came to Tucson. In early 1927 she was hired as housekeeper by Andrew J. Mathis, an elderly Pima County rancher who raised chickens, and was dismissed after a few weeks. Soon afterward Mathis disappeared, and so did his Dodge coupe and many of his belongings. According to True West magazine, she sold the car in Kansas City for $600.
Pima County Sheriff Jimmy McDonald traced her to her daughter’s home in White Plains, New York, where she was arrested; 12News in Phoenix reports that a postal clerk intercepted a postcard that gave her away. She was returned to Arizona and convicted of stealing the car. Time magazine reported in 1930 that she was accused of murder only after serving that sentence. Mathis’s body was later found by a camper, and Dugan was tried and convicted of his murder with an axe. True West reports that her trial also brought out that she had been married five times and that each husband had died in unexplained circumstances; none of those deaths was ever charged.
In prison she was cheerful enough that Time headed its report "Cheerful Eva." She made friends with the attendants and embroidered her own silk shroud. On the night before her execution she played whist and cooked oyster stew for friends around midnight. At dawn on February 21, 1930, after a last-minute plea for a reprieve was refused, she walked to the gallows at the state prison in Florence between two guards. She was 52, according to Time. The hanging was botched: the drop was set too long. 12News, citing the Santa Cruz News, reports that five witnesses fainted, two of them women; it was the first Arizona execution that women had watched.
She was the first woman executed in Arizona and, by True West’s account, the last person legally hanged in the state. The outcry over her death led Arizona to replace the gallows with the gas chamber; True West dates the change to three years later, 12News to 1934. She is buried in the prison cemetery at Florence, and a noose from her execution was later shown at the local historical museum.
In 1933, in the Ybor City district of Tampa, Victor Licata, 21, was believed to have killed his parents and three of his siblings with an axe in the family home. Police, according to a 2023 report by Cox Media Group’s national desk, initially pointed to marijuana as a factor. He became known as the "Dream Slayer."
He was never tried. He was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to the Florida Hospital for the Insane. He later escaped; the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2020 that a 1950 Tampa Tribune story recorded his arrest five years after he had fled the institution. After his recapture he was moved to Florida State Prison, and he died by suicide in 1950.
The case had a longer reach than its own facts. Harry J. Anslinger, the federal official who led the government’s campaign against marijuana, seized on it as proof of the dangers of what he called the demon weed, and the press took up his warnings. The killings, by the account of the Tampa station WTSP and of the Cox report, were a loose basis for the film Reefer Madness. Yet the journalist Johann Hari, writing in 2016 after reviewing the history, reported that Licata’s family had a history of mental illness, that the family had been told a year before the killings that he needed to be institutionalized and had refused, and that his psychiatrists' files did not mention marijuana in connection with him at all.
At about 2:30 on the morning of October 30, 1947, two Tacoma patrol officers, Andrew P. Sabutis and Evan "Skip" Davies, answered a report of screams from a house in Tacoma. A barefoot man ran from the back door, and they caught him nearby after a chase over several fences. He pulled a knife and wounded both officers before Sabutis, a former prizefighter, subdued him. Inside, Bertha Kludt, 52, and her daughter, Beverly June Kludt, 17, had been killed with an axe.
The man was Jake Bird, 45, a transient laborer from Louisiana who had spent much of his life on railroad section gangs and, by his own estimate, about 15 years in prisons in various states. He signed a confession that morning. He said he had come to burgle the house, taken an axe from a nearby shed and taken $1.50 from Bertha Kludt’s purse before she confronted him.
He was charged with one count of first-degree murder, for Bertha Kludt’s death; HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington history, explains that a single charge was then customary when more than one person had been killed. At trial a police witness admitted that he and another officer had beaten Bird after his arrest, but Judge Edward D. Hodge ruled the beating unrelated to the confession and let the jury hear it. On November 26, 1947, after 35 minutes, the jury found Bird guilty and recommended death.
At his sentencing on December 6 he spoke for about 20 minutes. Then, by HistoryLink’s account, he told the courtroom that everyone who had anything to do with the case was going to die before he did. Within a year five of them had: Judge Hodge, the undersheriff who drove Bird to Walla Walla, the court reporter, the detective lieutenant who took his confession and his own defense lawyer. The Tacoma News Tribune, as cited by HistoryLink, gave heart attacks as the cause in each case. The run of deaths became known as the Jake Bird Hex.
On death row Bird claimed that he could clear up at least 44 killings across a dozen states over some 20 years, and the governor granted him a 60-day reprieve so that police could hear him. HistoryLink reports that 11 of the claims were substantiated, without naming the cases. None was ever tried; his only conviction is the one from Tacoma. After a run of appeals to the Washington Supreme Court and three refusals by the United States Supreme Court, he was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla at 12:20 a.m. on July 15, 1949. He left his estate, $6.15, to his last lawyer.
Elifasi Msomi was a young Zulu man in Natal, in what is now KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, who had set up as a traditional healer and was not prospering. Time magazine, reporting his execution in February 1956, told the story as he told it. He went for advice to an older healer, and there, he said, he met a tokoloshe, a small spirit of southern African folk belief, which appeared to him in the shape of his own son. The older man, in Msomi’s account, told him to bring back the blood of 15 people, starting with a girl.
Over about 18 months, by Time’s account, Msomi moved through the back country of Natal and said the spirit traveled with him. The first victim was a girl. He was jailed after that killing and escaped, crediting the spirit with his escape. Fourteen more people were killed in the months that followed, with an axe and other weapons. Their names have not been reported. When the fifteenth was dead, Msomi said, the tokoloshe thanked him and the two parted.
He was arrested at last for petty theft and identified as the man wanted for the killings. He admitted them and helped the police in their search for evidence. At his trial, as Drum magazine recalled in 1968, he confessed to all of the murders but said the spirit had forced him to commit them. The court did not accept that the spirit excused him. He was convicted of murdering 15 people and sentenced to hang.
Local Zulu chiefs, Time reported, feared that the tokoloshe might still save him, and asked to watch the execution. Permission was given. He was hanged in a Pretoria prison in February 1956 with nine Zulu witnesses present. Afterward one of them, Chief Manzo Iwandla, said he was satisfied: the tokoloshe had not saved him. Msomi’s name outlived him. A gang in Alexandra township in Johannesburg took it, and Arnold Benjamin of The Star, writing on the gang in the journal Africa South, described Alexandra’s gangs as having borrowed the name of the Natal axe killer who was hanged for his murders.
Phindile Joseph Ntshongwana had played rugby for the Blue Bulls, the South-Western Districts Eagles and the South African under-23 side before he left the provincial game in 2002; his father had played for the Springboks. Acquaintances described him as a gentle giant. In late November 2010, the courts later found, he assaulted a man in Yellowwood Park, Durban, and kidnapped and raped a woman, holding her at his home there for three days.
In one week in March 2011 he killed four men in greater Durban with an axe and tried to kill two others. Thembelenkosini Cebekhulu was killed in Montclair on March 20; a man attacked in Umlazi on March 21 escaped; Paulos Hlongwa was killed in Lamontville on March 22; and Simon Ngidi was killed the following day, the Mail & Guardian reported. A fourth man killed that week was never identified. Police traced a silver car seen near the attacks, searched his home and found an axe, and arrested him on March 28, 2011, according to the Independent on Saturday.
He faced nine charges in the Durban High Court before Acting Judge Irfaan Khalil. His lawyers argued that mental illness had left him without criminal capacity and without memory of the events; he did not testify. The judge rejected the defense, pointing to the planning of the attacks and his efforts to conceal evidence, and called the claimed loss of memory an afterthought. In September 2014 Ntshongwana was convicted of four murders, two attempted murders, kidnapping, rape and assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm, and he was sentenced to five terms of life imprisonment, with shorter terms on the other counts. The story that he had set out to avenge an attack on his daughter does not hold: the Independent on Saturday reported that he had accused the kidnapped woman of harming "his daughter," and that he does not have a daughter.
A full bench of the KwaZulu-Natal High Court in Pietermaritzburg dismissed his appeal. On November 21, 2023, the Supreme Court of Appeal dismissed his further appeal against conviction and sentence, finding his conduct "clearly indicative of conscious and goal-directed behaviour" and calling him a dangerous criminal. As of that ruling, he was serving his life sentences.
Tyree Lincoln Smith grew up in Bridgeport and Ansonia, Connecticut, and later lived in Lynn Haven, Florida. Angel Gonzalez was killed in Bridgeport in December 2011; he was found dead there in January 2012. A cousin of Smith’s testified that she had seen him with an axe that December.
A psychiatrist testified that Smith heard voices that told him what to do. In July 2013 a three-judge panel of Bridgeport Superior Court, Judges John Kavanewsky, John Blawie and Maria Kahn, found him not guilty by reason of insanity. In September 2013, at 36, he was committed for up to 60 years to the Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital in Middletown, the state’s maximum-security psychiatric hospital. In court he apologized. "I’m really sorry for what I did, that I couldn’t be myself," CBS News quoted him as saying.
On February 21, 2025, the Connecticut Psychiatric Security Review Board authorized his conditional release, citing the full remission of his schizophrenia and of his drug and alcohol abuse, The Root reported. The Gonzalez killing ended without a conviction; the verdict was not guilty by reason of insanity.
Set side by side, the twelve cases share little but the tool. Two of the killers were women, both hanged; two of the accused, Robinson and Borden, were acquitted after trials that filled the newspapers. Three men, Stewart, Licata and Smith, were found insane or unfit, and their stories run through hospitals rather than prisons. Bird and Msomi were convicted and hanged; Ntshongwana is serving life. Villisca and New Orleans have no answer at all. In each, the axe was close at hand, and in each the courts, not the weapon, decided what the record would say.
• May 9, 1828: The Mary Russell sails from Barbados for Cork.
• Late June 1828: Captain William Stewart kills seven men aboard; the brig reaches the Cove of Cork about June 25.
• August 11, 1828: Stewart is tried at the Cork Assizes and found not guilty, having committed the act while laboring under mental derangement.
• December 1831: Charles Silver is killed in his cabin on the Toe River, North Carolina.
• January 10, 1832: Frankie Silver is arrested.
• March 30, 1832: She is convicted of murder at Morganton.
• July 12, 1833: Frankie Silver is hanged at Morganton.
• April 9, 1836: Helen Jewett is killed in New York.
• June 2 to 7, 1836: Richard P. Robinson is tried and acquitted.
• 1873: William Stewart dies at Dundrum.
• August 4, 1892: Andrew and Abby Borden are killed in Fall River.
• December 2, 1892: Lizzie Borden is indicted.
• June 20, 1893: Lizzie Borden is acquitted at New Bedford.
• June 9 to 10, 1912: Eight people are killed in Villisca, Iowa.
• 1917: A traveling minister is charged in the Villisca killings; after a hung jury, a second jury acquits him.
• May 23, 1918: Joseph and Catherine Maggio are killed in New Orleans.
• March 9, 1919: Mary Cortimiglia, 2, is killed in Gretna.
• March 1919: The "Axman" letter appears in The Times-Picayune.
• May 1919: Two Gretna neighbors are convicted of Mary Cortimiglia’s murder.
• April 5, 1920: The Louisiana Supreme Court overturns the Gretna convictions; the charges are dropped on December 6, 1920.
• 1927: Andrew J. Mathis disappears near Tucson.
• 1927: Lizzie Borden dies in Fall River.
• February 21, 1930: Eva Dugan is hanged at Florence, Arizona.
• 1933: Five members of the Licata family are killed in Tampa; Victor Licata is found unfit for trial and committed.
• October 30, 1947: Bertha and Beverly June Kludt are killed in Tacoma; Jake Bird is arrested.
• November 26, 1947: Bird is convicted of first-degree murder.
• July 15, 1949: Bird is hanged at Walla Walla.
• 1950: Victor Licata, recaptured after an escape, dies by suicide.
• February 1956: Elifasi Msomi is hanged in Pretoria.
• November 2010: A man is assaulted and a woman kidnapped and raped in Durban.
• March 20 to 23, 2011: Four men are killed in greater Durban; Joseph Ntshongwana is arrested on March 28.
• December 2011: Angel Gonzalez is killed in Bridgeport.
• July 2013: Tyree Smith is found not guilty by reason of insanity.
• September 2013: Smith is committed for up to 60 years.
• September 2014: Ntshongwana is convicted in the Durban High Court.
• November 21, 2023: The Supreme Court of Appeal dismisses Ntshongwana’s appeal.
• February 21, 2025: The Connecticut Psychiatric Security Review Board authorizes Smith’s conditional release.