On the night of July 4, 1982, Sherry Melissa Eyerly, eighteen, a recent graduate of Sprague High School working part time for a Domino's in Salem, Oregon, was sent out with an order to an address on Riverhaven Drive. Hours later her delivery car turned up on a dirt road outside town, the engine running and the door open, her collie still inside. The caller's name and address were fictitious, and the call-back number led to a motel. Searchers found nothing. For twenty-five years it was the most famous missing-person case in the mid-Willamette Valley, featured more than once on Unsolved Mysteries, with psychics quoted in the Statesman Journal and reward money no one ever claimed.
Less than two years later Salem lost two more young women in eight weeks. On February 19, 1984, the morning crew at a Circle K arrived to find the night clerk, Rebecca Anne Darling, twenty-one, gone; her Volkswagen was in the lot and her purse, keys and coat were in the store. A farmer found her body on March 25 in the Little Pudding River, strangled. Before her shift a stranger had asked for her by name three times. On April 11, Katherine Ione Redmond, eighteen, a Willamette University freshman, left a party; within two hours her Datsun was found idling at a rural intersection with the driver's door open. Police thought she had been rear-ended and grabbed when she got out to look. Four days later her body was found in woods outside the city, raped and strangled. Women stopped traveling alone, Mace sold out, and students organized escorts.
The police were already watching William Scott Smith, twenty-four, born April 29, 1959 in Portland, a high school dropout, unemployed truck driver and sometime fry cook with a record going back to 1977 for harassing women, including a 1978 conviction for menacing at Silverton. On the night Redmond vanished he had called a tow truck to pull his car out of a ditch near where hers was found. At the district attorney's request newspapers held back his name. On April 23 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for obscene and threatening calls to a young Salem woman and was jailed for it, and two days later, on April 25, he was charged with the murders of Darling and Redmond. He signed a written confession to both that gave no reason. Two psychiatrists found him sane; one, Dr. Wesley Weissert, called him a sexually sadistic serial killer and an extreme danger. He waived a jury, the court refused to suppress the confessions, and on July 9, 1984 Judge Val D. Sloper found him guilty, calling the crimes heinous. He was sentenced to two life terms. The 1984 investigators questioned him about Eyerly too, but an alibi put him far from Salem that night and they set him aside.
The Marion County sheriff's cold case squad reopened Eyerly in 2005. After two years and hundreds of interviews, and statements from another prisoner, Smith confessed in late 2006. He and an accomplice, Roger Noseff, had planned to kidnap a different Domino's driver they knew and hold her for ransom; she was not working that night, and they took Sherry Eyerly instead. Noseff made the phony order call. Smith strangled her in a secluded spot on the Little Pudding River and put her body in the water, where it was never recovered; the river has flooded many times since. He knew details never made public, down to the order, a Destroyer pizza with everything on it. Noseff had died of cancer in 2003 and could not be charged. On December 18, 2007, at forty-eight, Smith pleaded guilty to murder before Marion County Presiding Judge Paul Lipscomb, with Eyerly's family in the room, and took a third life term.
There was a fourth. On February 12, 1981 Terry Cox Monroe, twenty-one, a shoe store clerk, stepped out of the Oregon Museum Tavern in downtown Salem for fresh air and did not come back; her clothes and papers were found on the bank of the Willamette, and her strangled body was pulled from the river on March 15. In October 2012 Smith confessed to her murder to the Salem police department's new cold case unit, its first solved case, and pleaded guilty to a fourth life sentence. Oregon law in 1984 made his first two life terms parole-eligible after twenty years; the later pleas made that academic. He has been held out of state, in Washington, and investigators still consider him a suspect in other deaths.