Killer stabbed wife and told cops a beggar attacked her
The case of Jacquelyn Smith sparked fear of the homeless population of Baltimore
Wearing a white, strapless wedding dress, a traditional veil and clutching a bouquet of white and yellow flowers, Jacquelyn smiled happily for the camera. Her new husband, Keith Smith, stood proudly next to her, coordinating with a yellow bow tie and matching waistcoat. Jacquelyn and Smith had married later in life but still made a pictureperfect bride and groom.
Four years later, in 2018, they were living in Aberdeen, in the US state of Maryland. Jacquelyn, 54, who had two grown-up sons from a previous relationship, was an electrical engineer at an army research facility. She was intelligent, generous and quick-witted.
Smith, then 52, had a grown-up daughter called Valeria and had worked as a driver.
On 1 December, Smith made a distraught 911 call at around midnight from his car, saying he was on his way to the hospital with Jacquelyn, who was bleeding. “You’ve got to help me,” he cried. “They stabbed my wife!”
When he got to Johns Hopkins Hospital with Valeria at his side, doctors fought to save Jacquelyn. She had been stabbed five times in the chest and also had a knife wound to her lower right arm.
Tragically, nothing could be done and she died from her injuries.
Distraught, Smith and his daughter described what happened. They said they had been out that night celebrating Valeria’s 28th birthday at the American Legion Hall in Baltimore. Smith said he was driving them home when Jacquelyn had spotted a homeless woman begging, holding what she had believed to be a baby.
He said Jacquelyn, who was in the passenger seat, had asked him to pull up next to her, so she could give her a $10 note. Valeria was in the back seat. Smith and his daughter described how they’d stopped and Jacquelyn had wound down her window.
They claimed that suddenly, the woman was joined by a man who reached into the car and snatched a necklace Jacquelyn was wearing. He’d then stabbed her five times in the chest with a knife, stolen her purse and fled with the woman, they said.
Smith claimed they had then rushed Jacquelyn to hospital because they believed it would be quicker than waiting for an ambulance. Valeria backed up his story.
The killing horrified America. The men and women begging on the street were known locally as panhandlers and Baltimore was in the grip of a homelessness crisis at the time, with more than 12,000 people living on the streets.
Jacquelyn’s “Good Samaritan” killing was all over the headlines and made people fear that homeless people were a threat. Smith and Valeria gave grief-stricken interviews to the press, urging the authorities to ban panhandling before somebody else lost their life.
Tearfully, Smith said that just hours before the killing, he’d danced with his wife to their wedding song, John Legend’s All Of Me.
“They took my wife’s life. I hope it was worth it because you’re going to answer to that one day,” Smith said in one interview.
Events not adding up
The murder even caught the attention of chat show queen Oprah Winfrey. She tweeted her response to the killing, and how it had negatively changed her opinion on giving money to the homeless.
“This story struck my heart,” she wrote. “I’ve done this a 1k times. But will think twice before ever doing it again.”
It put Jacquelyn’s death even more firmly in the spotlight. But was everything as it seemed?
Investigators had started looking into the killing and Smith’s version of events just didn’t add up. Why had he stopped that late at night and let Jacquelyn wind down a window to strangers? While her family didn’t doubt
that she would have wanted to help someone, they were sceptical that she would have wanted to stop so late and in such a way.
Police looked at surveillance footage from the street where the stabbing had allegedly occurred – but they couldn’t find any sightings of Smith’s car. Also, his mobile phone records didn’t put him on the route he said they’d taken. Instead, they placed him four miles away, at Druid Hill Park.
They then found out that Smith had once asked his brother to kill Jacquelyn because she’d been planning to divorce him after four years of marriage.
And Smith had a criminal history. In
2001, he had pleaded guilty to robbing the same bank three times in nine months in Timonium, Maryland. He had served six years of a 12-year prison sentence for robbery with a weapon and for running from the police.
He’d been released in 2007 and it’s not known if Jacquelyn had any idea of his past.
As the evidence started mounting up, suggesting his story was a lie, officers discovered that Smith and his daughter
were missing. He had told people he was going to Florida but the rental car he’d hired was located 1,700 miles away – heading towards the Mexican border.
On 5 March 2019, Smith and Valeria were arrested in Harlingen, Texas – 20 miles from Mexico. They said they were going on holiday but Smith had been trying to book one-way tickets to Cuba and Canada.
The problem was he didn’t have a passport, so he had done web searches to find a way to leave the country without one.
Both were charged with first-degree murder and the headlines were suddenly very different. Police said Smith had exploited the homelessness crisis and fuelled a false fear in the community to cover up the fact that he’d killed his wife.
Smith insisted he was innocent, but just before the trial was due to start in September 2019, Valeria made a deal. She pleaded guilty to one charge of accessory after the crime and admitted she’d watched her father kill Jacquelyn – and helped him cover it up.
She agreed to testify against him and in return she was sentenced to five years in jail, followed by three years’ probation.
In December last year, Smith went on trial. The prosecution said he had killed his wife because she had been planning to leave him and the story about the homeless pair had been “a hoax”. Crime scene technicians found blood spatter inside the window of the car where Jacquelyn had been sitting, while Smith had claimed she’d rolled down the window to hand over the money. Valeria testified that her stepmother had been asleep when Smith drove them to the park.
Smith had stabbed Jacquelyn, then Valeria had helped to make his story believable. She had left Jacquelyn’s purse at a bus stop and her dad had then coached her on exactly what to say to the police.
“The story was supposed to be that it was a homeless person, or two homeless people, that had a baby, and Mrs Jacquelyn was supposed to feel sorry for them,” Valeria told the court.
Calm after the killing
She said her dad was calm after the killing but pretended to be distraught when he called
911. Then, a few days after the murder, she said he went to Jacquelyn’s workplace to get paperwork for her life insurance policy, as he was in line for a payout.
Smith didn’t take the stand. His defence said Valeria’s version of events was not to be trusted as she had simply changed her story to avoid going to prison.
They highlighted her drug use and Valeria admitted that she was using substances at the time. But the car, and all three mobile phones, placed Smith, his wife and Valeria at the park for 15 minutes – a place Smith had never mentioned being that night.
The jury found Smith guilty of first-degree murder. In March, the 55-year-old was sentenced while appearing from prison by video link. The judge said she had never seen facts that “showed more premeditation, wilfulness and intent”.
“The victim had no way of knowing her husband would stab her over and over again,” she said. “The victim was the definition of defenceless and vulnerable. She was asleep. He blamed vulnerable people: panhandlers.”
The judge sentenced Smith to life in prison, plus three years for use of a deadly weapon, to be served concurrently. Jacquelyn’s family released a statement saying they were happy with the sentence and while it didn’t bring her back, they felt justice had been served.
Smith’s crime was truly appalling. Not only had he murdered his wife while she slept and got his daughter to cover for him, he had sown social division in the city by trying to blame her death on the innocent and vulnerable panhandler community.
‘The victim was the definition of defenceless and vulnerable’