William Scott Smith received three life sentences for the murders of young women in Salem, Oregon. In July 1984 he was convicted of killing Katherine Redmond, an 18-year-old freshman at Willamette University, and Rebecca Ann Darling, a 21-year-old convenience store clerk, and he was given two life sentences. More than two decades later, on December 18, 2007, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Sherry Eyerly, an 18-year-old pizza delivery driver who had vanished on July 4, 1982, and he received a third life term. Eyerly's body has not been found.
The Eyerly case stayed open for a quarter of a century. Smith had been looked at early on, and he had been set aside because of an alibi. The Marion County Sheriff's Office cold case squad reopened the file, went back to him in prison, and found information that undermined the 1982 alibi. In prison interviews he admitted taking part in her kidnapping and murder.
Sherry Melissa Eyerly was 18 in the summer of 1982 and worked delivering pizzas in Salem. On the evening of July 4, 1982, she was sent out with an order of three pizzas to an address that, the sheriff's office later said, did not exist. Less than an hour after she left, her car was found near the address on the order with its engine still running, according to KATU, the Portland television station. She was not seen again.
A prosecutor told KATU in 2007 that a ransom call had gone into her employer the day after she vanished. No one was charged, and the case went cold.
Rebecca Ann Darling was 21 and worked as a clerk at a convenience store in Salem. She was killed in 1984; her death was one of the two murders for which Smith was convicted that July. Few details of her life or of the day she disappeared were ever made public.
Katherine I. Redmond, known to her friends as Katie, was a freshman at Willamette University in Salem. She had lived at the Alpha Chi Omega sorority house since the end of the previous summer, and her sorority sisters later wrote of her humor, her spontaneity and her strong personality in a tribute printed in the student newspaper, The Collegian. A memorial scholarship fund in her name was set up, with donations directed to a bank in Mill Valley, California.
In April 1984 Redmond left a party at a fraternity house on a Friday night and did not come home. Her car was found abandoned on the morning of April 7. About 100 students joined search parties on the Sunday and Monday that followed. The following Wednesday, Marion County District Attorney Michael Brown announced that a body had been found near the place where the car had been left and that investigators were "virtually certain" it was hers. He called the death a homicide. He would not link it to the killing of the convenience store clerk or to the Green River investigations.
The death shook the university. Its vice presidents met staff to manage information and rumors, the counseling office held a discussion for students, and the Alpha Chi Omega house closed its doors to the press and the public. Members told The Collegian they felt numb and empty. A Willamette vice president, Sam Hall, said there was no suggestion that anything had happened on campus. Police reviewed videotapes of the fraternity party; the house president said there was no obvious tie between the party and her disappearance. A memorial service was held on the evening of Saturday, April 14, 1984, in the university's Putnam University Center.
Smith had come under suspicion by April 11, 1984, when investigators seized his car. District Attorney Brown later released photographs of the car and asked anyone who had seen it near the place where Redmond's body was found to come forward; The Collegian reported that Salem police telephones were "ringing off the hook." Sheriff Chuck Foster said the investigation had run around the clock for three weeks, and that his deputies had claimed only part of the overtime they had earned.
By the time of the indictments he was serving a sentence for obscene telephone calls. His questioning by police was later examined in detail by a federal appeals court. According to the Ninth Circuit, it began with an interrogation on April 23 that lasted about an hour, in which police gave him no Miranda warnings. He said he did not want to talk and asked for a lawyer. The questioning went on: officers spoke about his need for professional help, and one of them slapped the table and urged him again to confess. He cried, asked several times to be taken back to his cell, and was eventually returned to it. He made no incriminating statement that day.
On April 24, more than a day later, his father and stepmother visited him, asked whether he was guilty and told him he needed psychiatric help. He asked to see his fiancee and his mother, who were due to visit that day. He confessed first to his fiancee and then to his mother. His father then came into the room and persuaded him to confess to the police. The father told officers that his son would confess if burglary charges pending against him in Vancouver were dropped. The charges were dropped, police read Smith his rights, he waived them, and he confessed. He later admitted that he had confessed because his father thought he should.
A Marion County grand jury indicted Smith for the aggravated murder of Katherine Redmond and charged him as well in the killing of Rebecca Ann Darling. The indictments were announced at a press conference in late April 1984, and The Collegian reported on April 27 that each charge carried life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for 20 years. Members of Redmond's sorority sat in the courtroom as Smith was handed certified copies of the indictments.
Smith asked for a court-appointed lawyer. The judge appointed James J. Jusse, a former deputy district attorney, with Richard Stein, who had represented Smith on the telephone harassment charge, assisting. Brown said a change of venue might be needed because of the publicity, and that Smith would be tried separately on each charge. Asked whether other cases of missing women in Salem were connected, Brown said only that his office would keep an open mind.
In July 1984 Smith was convicted of murdering Katherine Redmond and Rebecca Ann Darling. He was sentenced to two life terms.
Smith later challenged his confessions in federal court. His petition for a writ of habeas corpus, filed against the superintendent of the Oregon State Penitentiary, was denied by the district court, and he appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He raised three arguments: that his statements to his father, mother and fiancee were the product of custodial interrogation without warnings; that his April 24 confession to police was obtained in breach of the rule against questioning a suspect who has asked for a lawyer; and that the confession was involuntary.
A three-judge panel heard the case on January 7, 1994, and rejected all three claims in an unpublished memorandum on April 29, 1994. It held that his relatives were not acting as agents of the government: his mother had had no earlier contact with police, his fiancee had not questioned him, and his father had acted for his own reasons. The panel agreed that his April 23 remark had been an equivocal request for a lawyer, that police should have stopped questioning him, and noted that the state conceded he should have been given Miranda warnings. It called that interrogation troubling. But it found that the session had been short, that he had said nothing incriminating in it, that more than 24 hours had passed with no contact in between, and that Smith himself had started the later conversation after the deal over the Vancouver charges. Those facts, the court said, cured any taint.
On voluntariness, the panel found that repeated offers of psychological help did not amount to coercion, that the family's influence did not create a coercive atmosphere, and that police had only arranged visits the relatives asked for. Smith, it wrote, was of at least low average intelligence and had testified that he was familiar with the criminal justice system and understood his rights; his claim of a borderline mental condition did not make his waiver involuntary. The denial of relief was affirmed.
The Eyerly file stayed open at the Marion County Sheriff's Office. The office's cold case squad later worked the case for two years, following hundreds of leads and conducting hundreds of interviews. Smith, by then serving his life sentences, became a focus again.
The original investigators had ruled him out on the strength of alibi information, the sheriff's office said. A behavioral analysis found many similarities between Eyerly's disappearance and his other crimes. Investigators set out to eliminate him as a suspect; instead they found information that undermined his 1982 alibi, and follow-up interviews pointed more and more toward him. Detectives confronted him in prison, and in those interviews he admitted his part in her kidnapping and murder.
Detectives said Smith and an accomplice had planned to kidnap a pizza delivery driver and demand a ransom. Accounts of the plan differ. KATU reported that detectives described Eyerly herself as the intended target. The East Oregonian reported that Smith told the cold case investigators he killed her during a botched kidnapping, after taking the wrong woman. Don Abar of the Marion County District Attorney's Office described the ransom call made the day after the abduction. Smith told investigators that he strangled Eyerly and left her body in a river. Searches of the area he described found nothing; KATU reported that 25 years of flooding might explain why. The accomplice was not named when Smith entered his plea, and no one else was charged.
On Tuesday, December 18, 2007, Smith, 48, pleaded guilty to the murder of Sherry Eyerly at a brief hearing before Marion County Presiding Judge Paul Lipscomb. Law enforcement officers and members of Eyerly's family were in the courtroom. Under the agreement with prosecutors he began a third life sentence at once, running concurrently with the two he was already serving. The sheriff's office said the plea ended a two-year cold case investigation. Eyerly's body has not been recovered.
In April 1984 The Collegian reported that authorities in Boise, Idaho, were examining Smith as a possible suspect in unsolved cases there, among them the killing of a 13-year-old girl. No charge in Idaho was reported. At the same time, District Attorney Brown declined to say whether other cases of missing women in Salem were linked to him.
At Willamette, Redmond's sorority sisters began circulating petitions in April 1984 to put the death penalty on the November ballot, working with a citizens' group, Concerned Citizens for Justice, that still needed 30,000 signatures by June 1. Her friends set up the Katie Redmond Memorial Scholarship Fund.
For Eyerly's family, the 2007 plea answered after 25 years the question of what had happened to her, but her body has not been found. The Marion County Sheriff's Office lists the case among the cold case squad's solved cases.
July 4, 1982: Sherry Eyerly, 18, is sent on a pizza delivery to an address that does not exist and disappears; her car is found with the engine running.
1984: Rebecca Ann Darling, 21, a Salem convenience store clerk, is killed.
April 7, 1984: Katherine Redmond's car is found abandoned after she left a fraternity party.
April 11, 1984: Investigators seize Smith's car.
April 1984: Redmond's body is found in the Salem area; District Attorney Michael Brown calls her death a homicide.
April 14, 1984: Memorial service for Redmond at Willamette University.
April 1984: A Marion County grand jury indicts Smith for aggravated murder in the Redmond and Darling cases.
July 1984: Smith is convicted of the Redmond and Darling murders and sentenced to two life terms.
January 7, 1994: The Ninth Circuit hears his federal habeas appeal.
April 29, 1994: The Ninth Circuit affirms the denial of relief.
December 18, 2007: Smith pleads guilty to the murder of Sherry Eyerly before Presiding Judge Paul Lipscomb and receives a third, concurrent life sentence.