Larry Gene Bell kidnapped and killed two girls from the Columbia area of South Carolina in June 1985. Shari Smith, 17, was taken from the end of her family's driveway two days before she was to sing at her high school graduation. Debra May Helmick, 9, was taken from the yard of her family's home in a trailer park two weeks later. In between and afterward, Bell telephoned Shari's family again and again, mailed them a letter he had made her write, and gave them directions to both girls' bodies.
The search for the caller became one of the largest manhunts South Carolina had seen. It drew in the Lexington County Sheriff's Department, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) and the FBI, including the profiler John Douglas. The case was broken by forensic document work on the paper Shari had used for her letter, which carried the faint indentations of a phone number written on an earlier sheet. Bell was arrested on June 27, 1985, tried twice, sentenced to death twice, and executed in South Carolina's electric chair on October 4, 1996. He was the last person the state electrocuted until 2004.
Reliable records say little about Bell's early life. He was a native of Alabama, according to Fox News. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department gives his date of birth as October 30, 1948, which fits his reported age of 36 at the time of his arrest and 47 at his execution; several secondary accounts give the year as 1949. In 1985 he was working as an electrician's assistant, Publishers Weekly and Fox News reported, and he was dividing his time between his parents' home and a house he was minding for a couple who were away. The Fourth Circuit's opinion refers to both places.
His criminal record before 1985 is known mainly from the courtroom. At the penalty phase of the Helmick trial, a former assistant solicitor testified that Bell had tried to abduct a young woman at gunpoint in 1975 and had pleaded guilty in 1976 to assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature. The South Carolina Supreme Court's 1990 opinion notes that Bell's own mitigation witnesses then spoke at length about his tendency to assault women, as part of a defense strategy to show the jury that he was mentally ill. At the Smith trial, the mother of a young girl Bell had threatened while living in North Carolina testified that she had become anxious about her daughter's safety afterward. The court called it a "prior crime" and did not describe it further.
Charlotte police had also interviewed Bell before 1985 about the disappearance of Sandee Cornett, a 26-year-old woman who vanished from her home in November 1984. That case is discussed in the section on unproven claims below.
Sharon Faye Smith, known as Shari, was 17 and a senior at Lexington High School. Her parents, Bob and Hilda Smith, lived on 20 acres off Platt Springs Road near Red Bank, about ten miles outside Lexington, at the end of a 750-foot driveway. Bob Smith was an engineer who sold electronic scoreboards and also ministered in prisons and in correctional schools for boys; Hilda was a part-time substitute teacher. Shari had an older sister, Dawn, who was studying voice at Columbia College, and a 15-year-old brother, Robert. These details come from the prologue of John Douglas and Mark Olshaker's 2022 book on the case, When a Killer Calls.
Shari sang. She was a soloist with the school jazz band, sang in the chorus and stage choir, had been named to the All State Chorus and had attended the Governor's School for the Arts. She had spent three years on student council, and her classmates voted her Wittiest. She had been chosen to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Class of 1985 graduation, set for Sunday, June 2, at the University of South Carolina's Carolina Coliseum, and she planned to follow her sister to Columbia College in the fall to study voice and piano. A summer job singing and dancing at the Carowinds amusement park had fallen through when she developed nodules on her vocal cords. She had also performed several times on the stage of the Village Square Theatre in Lexington, which still presents a music scholarship in her name.
Shari had diabetes insipidus, a rare condition that made her lose water quickly. She carried medication for it and could become dangerously dehydrated without it.
The Friday before graduation was a day of errands. Shari phoned home several times, met her mother at a bank in the Lexington Town Square shopping center, and then went with her boyfriend, Richard Lawson, and her friend Brenda Boozer to a pool party at a friend's house on Lake Murray. At about 2:30 p.m. she called to say she was on her way. Richard followed her car until she turned onto Highway 1 toward home.
She pulled up to the family mailbox at the foot of the driveway and stopped with the engine running. The Fourth Circuit fixed the abduction at about 3:15 p.m.; Douglas and Olshaker put her arrival at about 3:25 p.m. Hilda saw the car sitting by the road and assumed Shari was reading a letter from Dawn. When Shari did not come up the drive, Bob went down. He found the driver's door open, the engine running, mail on the ground beside the open box and his daughter gone. Her bag, wallet, medication, towel and shoes were still in the car. Bare footprints led from the car to the mailbox and none led back.
SLED photographer Rita Y. Shuler, who worked the case, wrote in her 2007 book Murder in the Midlands that two men driving past the house at about that time had seen Shari at the mailbox and a car nearby, which they described as a reddish-purple Oldsmobile Cutlass with a driver who appeared to be in his thirties. At trial, a witness identified Bell as the man she had seen near the Smith home around the time of the abduction, according to the Fourth Circuit.
The search grew quickly, drawing in volunteers from the surrounding communities, the Lexington County Sheriff's Department under Sheriff James Metts, SLED and local FBI agents. Police set up equipment to trace and record calls to the Smith home.
At about 2:20 a.m. on Monday, June 3, the Smiths' phone rang. A male caller with a muffled voice described what Shari had been wearing and said a letter from her would arrive that day, Shuler wrote. The call was traced to a pay phone outside a store on Highway 378, about twelve miles from the house, but the caller was gone and no usable fingerprints were found. Officers and the local postmaster searched the mail before dawn and found the letter in a Columbia mail bag. It was postmarked June 1 in Columbia, carried no return address, and had the Smiths' address on a slip of notepaper pasted to the envelope.
Inside was a letter in Shari's handwriting, headed "Last Will and Testament" and dated June 1, 1985, 3:10 a.m. A SLED questioned-document examiner, Lieutenant Mickey Dawson, confirmed the handwriting was hers. In it Shari told her family and her boyfriend that she loved them, wrote of her faith, asked that they not let what happened ruin their lives, and expressed hope that something good would come of it. Fox News reported that she also asked for a closed casket. Her sister later said the letter became part of how the family survived.
The calls continued. Because the caller knew things only Shari or her kidnapper could know, the family took notes on the first calls; authorities traced and recorded the later ones. A 2026 Guideposts profile of Dawn put the total at eight calls, many of them answered by her. The caller used a device to alter his voice, according to Douglas's profile as reported by Fox News. On June 5 he gave directions to Shari's body. It was found that day in Saluda County.
By then the body could not tell the pathologist much. He could not determine the cause of death or whether she had been sexually assaulted; he believed she had either suffocated or died of dehydration related to her diabetes, the Fourth Circuit recorded. Bell later told the family in recorded calls that he had wrapped her head in duct tape and suffocated her, and the South Carolina Supreme Court found that he described having sex with her. The courts treated these calls as among the most important evidence in the case.
The calls went on for about three weeks after the body was found. In one, the Fourth Circuit noted, Bell discussed Shari's funeral arrangements with her sister.
On Friday, June 14, 1985, exactly two weeks after Shari's abduction, Debra May Helmick was outside with other children in the front yard at the Shiloh Trailer Park in Richland County, where her family lived. At about 4 p.m. a silver car entered the park and stopped near the children. A neighbor saw a man get out, grab Debra and put her in the car, and drive off. The neighbor ran after the car and got within about 40 feet, close enough to see a South Carolina license plate beginning with the letter D, then alerted Debra's father, the South Carolina Supreme Court recorded.
Debra was nine and a half. Her father, Sherwood Helmick, had been born in Richwood, West Virginia, and spent most of his working life in construction; his 2021 obituary describes a man who "loved to build and tinker with most anything" and lists Debra among the family members who died before him. Little else about Debra's short life appears in the published record.
About eight days after Debra was taken, Bell called the Smith family again, not the Helmicks, and gave directions to her body. The final directions came in the fifth recorded call of that series, which ended, according to the court, with the words "Debra Mae is waiting. God forgive us all." Police followed the directions and found her body in Lexington County on June 22, 1985. A substance consistent with duct tape was found in her hair. The court described evidence that the crime was sexually motivated.
The Lexington County Sheriff's Department asked the FBI for help, and the Bureau's Behavioral Science Unit was brought in. Fox News, citing an interview Douglas gave to A&E, reported that the request came from the department's undersheriff; Lewis McCarty was the department's second in command from 1973 to 1999, according to the sheriff's department. A 2015 South Carolina Senate resolution honoring McCarty credited him with helping bring behavioral science to bear to profile and identify a serial murderer who was later convicted and executed. The resolution does not name the case.
Douglas expected a white man in his late twenties or early thirties, unmarried or divorced, with above-average intelligence, some knowledge of electronics (from the voice-altering device), and a history of sexually motivated offenses or threats against women, Fox News reported. Publishers Weekly, reviewing the 2022 book, said the profile also pointed to a man with a military background. Bell was 36.
Douglas also proposed a risky step: using Dawn, who looked like her younger sister, to draw the caller out. Dawn and her parents agreed, according to the publisher's description of Douglas and Olshaker's book. Dawn later testified that after her sister's death she would not leave the house alone.
The break came from the letter itself. SLED's Questioned Document Unit processed the letter and its envelope with an Electrostatic Detection Apparatus, or ESDA, a device that makes indentations in paper visible by drawing fine particles into them, Shuler wrote. When someone writes on a pad, the pressure leaves impressions on the sheets below. The sheet Shari had used had been under another sheet on which someone had written, among other things, a telephone number, and part of it could be read.
Shuler's account names the SLED examiners, Lieutenant Mickey Dawson and Gaile Heath, as the people who ran the ESDA. Douglas's account, as summarized by Fox News, credits FBI scientists. The courts say only that investigators raised "a telephone number imprinted on the paper." Investigators worked out the missing digits and traced the number to a couple, Ellis and Sharon Sheppard (the spelling varies between Sheppard and Shepherd in different accounts), who lived about 15 miles from the Smiths. Bell had been staying in their house while they were on vacation, and the couple identified his voice, Fox News reported.
Tips from the public pointed the same way. The Fourth Circuit recorded that authorities found Bell "through an anonymous tip" as well as the indented number, and added in a footnote that police later identified Bell as one of the callers whose tips led to his own arrest.
Bell was arrested on June 27, 1985, while driving a gray 1978 Buick Riviera. The car bore the license plate OCH 241, but a second plate, DCE 604, was in the trunk along with a registration card showing DCE 604 was the car's real number. The D matched what the neighbor at the trailer park had seen.
Searches of Bell's parents' home and of the Sheppards' house produced evidence that, in the words of the Fourth Circuit, "confirmed Bell's involvement." Investigators also seized a bag of women's underwear from his bedroom, which was later admitted at the Helmick trial. Bell refused to give voice and body-fluid samples before trial and was held in contempt.
After his arrest Bell was questioned by Douglas and another FBI agent. Asked when he had begun to feel bad about what happened, he said, as Douglas later recounted, that the good Larry Gene Bell could not have done it but the bad Larry Gene Bell could have. Bell also told the Smiths that Shari was now part of him, according to Fox News. The Fourth Circuit recorded that after his arrest he made statements linking himself to the murder.
Bell was indicted in Saluda County, where Shari's body was found. On his motion, because of the heavy publicity in the Columbia area, the trial was moved to Berkeley County, near Charleston. It took place in February 1986.
The evidence was strong, and the defense did not contest most of it. Bell's lawyer, an experienced, retained South Carolina defense attorney, spent seven months investigating and then, with Bell's agreement, conceded the kidnapping and asked the jury for a verdict of guilty but mentally ill on both charges, hoping to spare him a death sentence. Lay and expert witnesses testified that Bell was mentally ill when the crimes were committed; State experts testified that he was not. The State's case was that the illness was contrived to avoid the death penalty.
Bell testified at length. His answers were often off the point, and his lawyer believed the jury would see for itself, from his loose and disconnected manner, that he was ill. On cross-examination Bell said that faking mental illness was a common practice he knew about and that manipulating doctors could "save a person from the electric chair." He admitted that he had invented stories of blackouts and visions in the past to avoid harsher penalties. At one point the judge told him, "I know Mr. Bell that you understand the question." The defense moved for a mistrial on the ground that the remark signaled the judge's disbelief; the judge refused, called the remark inadvertent and told the jury to disregard it.
The trial judge held three competency hearings: one before trial and two during it, the later ones at the request of defense counsel, who said Bell had stopped communicating and would not cooperate. Each time the judge found him competent. The South Carolina Supreme Court later held that the test was whether he was able to assist his lawyer, not whether he chose to.
During defense counsel's closing argument, Bell stood up twice to object that the trial was going on during the Sabbath. The judge sent the jury out, explained his right to be present and its limits, and recessed. When court resumed Bell interrupted again, complaining that he was tired and hungry, and said he could not sit quietly and would obstruct the proceedings. The judge had him removed for the rest of the argument, refused a request for an audio feed to his holding cell and told the jury to draw no inference from his absence. The judge also barred people from entering or leaving the courtroom while witnesses testified.
The jury convicted Bell of kidnapping and murder and recommended death. Dawn Smith testified at the sentencing phase, as did the mother of the girl Bell had threatened in North Carolina. The judge imposed the death sentence.
The Helmick case was originally set for trial in Lexington County, where Debra's body was found. Venue was moved to Pickens County in the Upstate. In March 1987 Bell was tried, convicted and sentenced to death for her kidnapping and murder. Some jurors knew he had already been convicted and sentenced to death in the Smith case; they said they could set that knowledge aside, and the State's highest court found no error in seating them.
The jury heard redacted recordings of Bell's calls to the Smiths, including the calls giving directions to Debra's body. The court ruled the calls admissible because they showed a common scheme and motive linking the two crimes. The neighbor who chased the car, the license plates and the underwear seized from Bell's bedroom were also part of the State's case. In the penalty phase Bell again pursued a mental-illness defense, calling numerous witnesses about his history of assaulting women.
The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the Smith conviction and death sentence in State v. Bell, 293 S.C. 391, 360 S.E.2d 706, decided August 24, 1987, rejecting arguments about competency, the restrictions on courtroom entry, his removal during closing argument, testimony about Shari's life and plans, the prosecutor's closing argument and the instructions. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1988.
Bell then sought post-conviction relief in state court. After hearings, the court dismissed the application in August 1991 and denied reconsideration in January 1992; the South Carolina Supreme Court declined review in November 1992, and the U.S. Supreme Court again declined in 1993.
The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the Helmick conviction and sentence in State v. Bell, 302 S.C. 18, 393 S.E.2d 364, decided February 26, 1990, in an opinion by Justice Jean Toal. Bell's appellate lawyers in that case included David Bruck and John Blume.
Bell's federal habeas corpus petition in the Smith case was denied by the U.S. District Court in Columbia. On December 18, 1995, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed in Bell v. Evatt, 72 F.3d 421, rejecting a dozen claims, among them that his trial lawyer had been ineffective in conceding the kidnapping, that his competency examiners were not neutral, and that he had a right to hear the closing argument from his cell. The court called the State's evidence "devastating" and the decision to seek a guilty but mentally ill verdict a reasonable strategy that Bell had agreed to. Bell did not challenge the Helmick sentence in that proceeding.
Under South Carolina law, prisoners executed after June 1995 receive lethal injection unless they choose electrocution, WIS reported. Bell chose the chair. Before his execution his lawyers argued that he was too mentally ill to be executed; experts described him as schizophrenic and said he believed he was Jesus, while prosecutors argued it was an act, Fox News reported. A circuit judge found him competent. David Bruck, a death penalty opponent who had represented Bell, later told WIS that Bell was psychotic and believed he would go straight to heaven.
Bell was electrocuted in Columbia early on October 4, 1996. He made no final statement. The Death Penalty Information Center's list of 1996 executions records the date and the method. Outside the prison, television footage recorded by the CONUS news service shows a crowd counting down and cheering, a separate candlelight vigil, and the hearse leaving; the reports included interviews with a spokesman for the Smith family, with Debra's father, Sherwood Helmick, and with a Charlotte police detective still working the Cornett disappearance. Bell was the last person executed in South Carolina's electric chair until James Neil Tucker chose electrocution in 2004, WIS reported.
Dawn Smith kept singing. She received a bachelor of music degree in vocal performance from Columbia College in 1986, was crowned Miss South Carolina that year and was second runner-up at the Miss America pageant, and in 1986 sang "Amazing Grace" at a Billy Graham crusade in South Carolina. As Dawn Smith Jordan she has spent decades as a Christian singer and speaker, telling the story of her sister's death and of her faith. Asked how she survived, she has said that the deeper the tragedy, the greater the grace.
The Lexington County Arts Association, which runs the Village Square Theatre where Shari performed, has awarded the Shari Smith Musical Study Scholarship every year since 1986 to a Lexington High School senior planning to study music.
Sherwood Helmick died at his home in Williston, South Carolina, in November 2021, aged 67.
The case became a CBS television film and has been revisited in many documentaries and books, among them Shuler's Murder in the Midlands (2007) and Douglas and Olshaker's When a Killer Calls (2022). Douglas has described Bell as a sadist who wanted to be in control. The sheriff's department's practice of recording a victim's family's calls was described by the producers of a later documentary as a first for a case of this kind.
Sandee Cornett. Sandee Elaine Cornett, 26, disappeared from her home on Eaglewind Drive in Charlotte, North Carolina; a neighbor reported her missing on November 19, 1984, after she failed to arrive at work. Several months into the investigation, detectives identified Bell as a suspect and investigators from several agencies interviewed him, but he was not charged. He denied any involvement but drew a map of a supposed burial site; nothing was found, Fox News reported. On February 24, 2025, after a full review funded by the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative and in consultation with the Mecklenburg County District Attorney's Office, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department announced that detectives had determined Bell kidnapped and murdered Cornett and that he would have been charged had he been alive. The case was cleared "Death of Offender." Her remains have never been found, and she remains listed as missing. This is a police finding, not a conviction. The release did not say what evidence the finding rested on.
Other cases. Secondary sources mention Bell as a possible suspect in a 1975 disappearance in Charlotte. The link rests on those secondary accounts alone; when a Charlotte station reported on the case in 2023, it named no suspect.
The North Carolina threat. The court record confirms that Bell threatened a young girl while living in North Carolina but does not say when, what he did, or whether he was convicted.
Mental illness. Whether Bell was mentally ill or feigning was the central dispute at both trials. Juries rejected the guilty but mentally ill verdict, judges repeatedly found him competent, and Bell himself testified that faking illness could save a person from execution. Defense experts and his later lawyers maintained that he was psychotic.
Details that differ between sources. Debra's middle name appears as May in the Fourth Circuit opinion, her father's obituary and most press accounts, and as Mae in the South Carolina Supreme Court's 1990 opinion and the call quoted in it. Her age is given as nine (most accounts), nine and a half (South Carolina Supreme Court) and ten (Fourth Circuit). Bell's birth year is given as 1948 by Charlotte police and 1949 elsewhere. The time of Shari's abduction is given as about 3:15 p.m. by the Fourth Circuit and about 3:25 p.m. by Douglas and Olshaker.
1948 or 1949: Larry Gene Bell is born in Alabama (October 30, 1948, per Charlotte police).
1975: Bell tries to abduct a young woman at gunpoint.
1976: He pleads guilty to assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature.
November 18 to 19, 1984: Sandee Cornett disappears from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina; Bell is later questioned as a suspect.
May 31, 1985, about 3:15 p.m.: Shari Smith, 17, is abducted at her family's mailbox in Lexington County.
June 1, 1985: Shari's "Last Will and Testament," dated 3:10 a.m., is mailed from Columbia.
June 3, 1985: First call to the Smith family; the letter is recovered from the mail.
June 5, 1985: The caller gives directions to Shari's body, found the same day in Saluda County.
June 14, 1985, about 4 p.m.: Debra May Helmick, 9, is abducted from her yard in Richland County.
About June 22, 1985: Bell calls the Smiths with directions to Debra's body, found that day in Lexington County.
June 27, 1985: Bell is arrested after an indented phone number on Shari's letter pad and tips lead investigators to him.
February 1986: Convicted in Berkeley County of kidnapping and murdering Shari Smith; sentenced to death.
March 1987: Convicted in Pickens County of kidnapping and murdering Debra Helmick; sentenced to death.
August 24, 1987: South Carolina Supreme Court affirms the Smith conviction.
1988: U.S. Supreme Court declines review of the Smith case.
February 26, 1990: South Carolina Supreme Court affirms the Helmick conviction.
August 1991 to 1993: State post-conviction relief denied; U.S. Supreme Court declines review again in 1993.
December 18, 1995: Fourth Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief in Bell v. Evatt.
October 4, 1996: Bell is executed in South Carolina's electric chair.
May 2004: James Neil Tucker becomes the first person electrocuted in South Carolina since Bell.
November 28, 2021: Debra's father, Sherwood Helmick, dies.
February 24, 2025: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police name Bell as the person who kidnapped and killed Sandee Cornett and clear the case "Death of Offender."