Mark Alan Smith

Victims

12 - 4 KILLINGS COVERED BY CONVICTIONS: Jean Irene Bianchi, 27, and Jean Ann Lingenfelter, 17, both by GUILTY PLEA in McHenry County in 1971; Janice Bolyard, 23, in Cook County; and Obie Faye Ash in Mountain Home, Arkansas. HE CONFESSED TO EIGHT MORE WHILE STATIONED IN GERMANY and was NEVER PROSECUTED for any of them; sources differ on that figure, one police account giving at least three rather than eight, so the German total is his own confession and not an established count. A separate eighteen-year sentence followed a 1977 escape attempt

Years active

1966 - 1970

Location

Germany / Arkansas/Illinois, USA

Method

Stabbing with knife - Strangulation

Status

Joined the search for the missing Jean Ann Lingenfelter and then found her body himself, with an accuracy that drew suspicion, and was arrested and charged. He PLEADED GUILTY IN 1971 IN McHENRY COUNTY to the rape and murder of Jean Irene Bianchi and Jean Ann Lingenfelter and was sentenced to a total of five hundred years. HE ESCAPED THE DEATH PENALTY ONLY BECAUSE A MORATORIUM WAS IN FORCE at the time. He was also convicted over the killing of Janice Bolyard in Cook County and over that of Obie Faye Ash in Mountain Home, Arkansas, where he faces a life sentence. ON APRIL 27, 1977 HE WAS CAUGHT TRYING TO ESCAPE THE PONTIAC CORRECTIONAL CENTER THROUGH THE BOILER ROOM, pleaded guilty and received a further eighteen years. He has been refused parole at least ten times, most recently in September 2024 after a hearing that July, at which police officers and the McHenry County state’s attorney appeared to oppose release. Held at the Danville Correctional Center. He has said he has changed; prosecutors have quoted him telling an earlier hearing that everybody has got to die sometime.

Mark Alan Smith was a young American serviceman posted to West Germany in the late 1960s. He was born in 1949 and was still in his teens when he arrived.

While stationed there he killed eight women, stabbing and strangling them in the towns around his base. The deaths were investigated by German police as separate cases, and the presence of a large transient American military population complicated any attempt to link them.

He returned to the United States and killed at least four more 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 was arrested in 1970 and convicted in Illinois in 1971, receiving consecutive sentences totalling 500 years.

The German killings were never separately tried, and the total attributed to him rests on his own admissions and on the linkage made by American investigators. The accessible record is press and court reporting from 1971.