Man jailed in Dean death case

A man who has long been linked to the 2015 murder of Samantha Dean and her unborn child was booked in the Bastrop County jail Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him for capital murder earlier this month.

Freddie Lee Smith, 33, who arrested last week in Harris County on the capital murder charge and taken to the Bastrop County jail Tuesday, is being held without bail.

Smith is charged as one of two associates in a murder-for-hire scheme in which police believe VonTrey Clark, who was indicted in Dean’s killing in 2016, offered $5,000 for Dean’s death. Witnesses said Clark, who has a family, hired Smith and Kevin Leo Watson to kill Dean because she didn’t want to end her pregnancy, according to court documents. Watson was indicted for capital murder in 2016.

Dean, who was a Kyle Police Department crime victims counselor, was seven months’ pregnant with her and Clark’s child, Madeline, when she was shot and killed, court documents show. Clark, a former Austin police officer, was arrested and charged with capital murder five months after authorities found Dean’s body with three fatal gunshot wounds behind a vacant office building in Bastrop County.

Watson and Smith were both connected to the case through cellphone records of burner phones that police say were used to coordinate the killing. Both were arrested in Harris County, where they lived.

Clark was fired from the Austin police department in 2016 after he left to Indonesia without permission.

His attorneys said at the time he was seeking medical attention for an undisclosed ailment. He was detained in Bali, Indonesia, and was flown back to Texas by FBI agents after he was charged with murder.