Mark Alan Smith was a United States soldier stationed in Germany who confessed to killings there that were never prosecuted; the number is not established, with sources giving eight and one police account at least three. He was convicted of four further killings after returning to the American midwest, and was sentenced to 500 years in Illinois in 1971.
Mark Alan Smith was born in 1949 and was a teenage American serviceman when he was posted to West Germany in the late 1960s. Women were killed in the towns around his base, stabbed and strangled, and German police investigated the deaths as separate cases; a large transient American military population made any attempt to link them harder.
How many there were is not established, and the entry will not pretend otherwise. He confessed to eight. One police account puts it at at least three. He was never prosecuted for any of them, so no court has ever tested a single one, and the figure of eight is his own account of himself.
What is established is what happened after he came home. He killed four women in Arkansas and Illinois by the same methods: Obie Faye Ash, Jean Irene Bianchi, twenty-seven, Janice Bolyard, twenty-three, and Jean Ann Lingenfelter, seventeen.
He joined the search for the missing Jean Ann Lingenfelter, and then found her body himself. He led searchers to it with an accuracy nobody else could have had, and that is what turned suspicion on him and produced the arrest.
He pleaded guilty in McHenry County in 1971 to the rape and murder of Bianchi and Lingenfelter and was sentenced to five hundred years. A moratorium on the death penalty was in force, which is the only reason he did not face it. Further convictions followed in Cook County and in Arkansas, and in 1977 an attempt to escape the Pontiac Correctional Center through the boiler room added eighteen years.
He has been refused parole at least ten times, most recently in September 2024, after a hearing at which police officers and the McHenry County state’s attorney appeared to oppose his release. He says he has changed. Prosecutors have quoted him telling an earlier hearing that everybody has got to die sometime.