JOHN BELUSHI KILLER: UNWANTED OUTCAST
Ex-con Cathy Smith, 72, scrapes by on disability & is banned from bars
THE woman who did time for killing legendary funnyman John Belushi has been tracked down in Canada after a dogged six-month GLOBE investigation!
Catherine Evelyn Smith is now an unwanted outcast holed up in the Vancouver suburb of Maple Ridge, where the notorious 72-year-old lives on the edge of poverty and is banned from many of the local bars, GLOBE has learned.
Smith went to prison in
pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter. She served 15 months after bragging, “I killed John Belushi,” and admitting she injected the 33-year-old Saturday Night Live standout with a deadly mixture of heroin and cocaine — known as a speedball.
The Blues Brothers star died on March 5, 1982, at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel. His death was initially ruled an accidental overdose — until Smith crowed about her killer act.
Before her downfall, Smith had been a Hollywood drug dealer known as Cathy Silverbag because she sold drugs out of her metallic purse and partied with celebs like The Rolling Stones, Robin Williams and Belushi.
But now, 37 years after Belushi’s tragic death, GLOBE discovered disheveled Cathy living in a senior citizen building, wearing a worn terry-cloth robe and blue slippers while hanging out in her building’s lobby.
“I know Cathy Smith,” says a bartender at a seedy local saloon. “I don’t want to have anything to do with her!”
Despite her California prison stint, Smith continued her party-hearty lifestyle in Canada after being released and
later deported from the U.S.
She was busted in Vancouver in July 1991 with two grams of heroin in her purse and fined and sentenced to 12 months’ probation.
“My life hasn’t been a bed of roses. That’s for sure,” she said in 2002 when she earned a living dumpster-diving to collect cans and bottles.
“I’ve had several run-ins with the law, and I was on house arrest for six months a few years ago for possession of heroin with intention to sell,” she said. “I live basically hand-to-mouth now and my main source of money these days come from disability checks.”
Smith filed for bankruptcy in June 2009, according to court documents, while in living a dodgy run-down apartment building.
But she eventually moved into senior housing. She even showed up at a June 2018 public hearing to gripe about potential increased vehicle traffic spawned by a new neighborhood development, according public records.