OH Murder Suspects Trapped After Run to the Border

[Ken [NY]]

OH Murder Suspects Trapped After Run to the Border

Ohio - 8/13/2001

Amanda Garrett
Cleveland Plain Dealer

Tabatha Ulsh had spent most of her life running away from one thing or
another. Now, stopped on a bridge straddling the U.S.-Mexico border,
she knew she had not run far or fast enough.

She and her boyfriend, Jimmie Woodland III, were trying to escape a
gruesome secret buried beneath the bramble bushes in rural western
Ohio. But U.S. Customs agents had caught on to them in late July as
they tried to re-enter the United States.

"Where is he? What have you done with him?" investigators demanded to
know.

The blue Chevy Blazer that Ulsh and Woodland were riding in belonged
to Fred A. Smith, a Dayton-area businessman. Smith had disappeared two
days before while attending a trapshooting contest in Findlay.

Police in the northwest Ohio town of Findlay feared that the
43-year-old family man had been kidnapped, even killed, nearly
unheard-of crimes in the area.

Ulsh was upset.

She was only 24, but already knew the machinations of the justice
system. Two years before, her stepfather was arrested for murdering
two men at a motel. She knew he es caped the death penalty by
admitting his crimes.

In tears, Ulsh decided to confess hers, too - she killed Smith.

First, she told investigators, then a Texas television reporter. Ulsh
said she met Smith at a Findlay dance club, bashed him over the head a
few hours later and then buried his body beside a remote lover's lane
between Fostoria and Bowling Green.

When investigators followed her directions, they found Smith's lower
leg sticking up through the weeds like a marker. A perfume bottle Ulsh
had described lay nearby, along with some cash.

A coroner ruled that Smith had died of head injuries, wounds possibly
caused by a shovel.

Woodland and Ulsh have been indicted on federal counts of interstate
transportation of a stolen car and Smith's Perazzi 12-gauge shotgun
and are awaiting a state grand jury that will consider murder charges.

Investigators have declined to say about what they think led to the
slaying, but court records suggest a plot to kill Smith, steal his
credit cards and head to Mexico.

Along the way, authorities say Woodland, 27, and Ulsh freely cashed in
on Smith's debit and credit cards at a series of service stations and
Wal-Marts in Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas and Texas, spending more than
$1,000 at several stops, never bothering to scrub the blood from the
back seat of the Blazer or to remove the vanity plate - O WELL.

Meanwhile in Fostoria, authorities allege, Woodland's mother cleaned
the shovel used to bury Smith and then returned it for a refund at a
nearby Wal-Mart.

"We still don't know everything that happened or why," said Lt. Chuck
Frizzell of the Wood County Sheriff's Office who is leading a
three-county task force investigating the crime.

"And with something as strange as this, we may never know," he said.

A strait-laced kind of guy

Fred Smith loved trapshooting. There was something thrilling about the
whizzing sound of the clay targets flying through the air, that moment
of intense concentration, and then the rifle's explosion.

Two years ago, Smith had impressed Dayton-area shooters by hitting 98
out of 100 at a tournament and hoped to do as well this year at the
Flag City Championships in Findlay, about 100 miles north of his Eaton
home.

On Friday, July 20, the first day of the tournament, he did not win
any prizes, but he shot well, friends said, and was in a good mood.
Smith and two shooting buddies, Roger Barlow and Dean Townsend, met
for dinner at a steakhouse and then, about 9:30, moved on to Wooley
Bulley's, one of only two dance clubs in town.

The 3,000-square-foot bar was crowded with young people, and the trio
of men were surprised when a flirtatious blonde approached. According
to an affidavit, she told them that she was a stripper from Toledo and
that she wanted to go to Mexico.

The woman with dark-painted fingernails coated in glitter seemed
especially interested in Smith, a conservative man with wire-rimmed
glasses. He and his friends talked to her for a while, but Townsend
grew tired and Barlow agreed to drive him back to the Ramada Inn where
they were staying.

When Barlow returned to Wooley Bulley's about 12:30 a.m., Smith, the
woman and Smith's Blazer were gone.

Barlow did not think much about it, but at 3:09 a.m. Saturday, about
15 miles away in Fostoria, a man called police to report a loud fight
outside his house. He reported a group beating a man and then shoving
the man into a Chevrolet Blazer and driving away.

An officer responded a few minutes later, but did not see anything and
drove on. Later that morning, a neighbor found a large puddle of blood
and a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses, the kind Smith wore.

At the time, no one connected the scene to Smith because no one had
reported him missing. It was not until he missed a family reunion in
Columbus on Sunday that his wife, Denise, became concerned and filed a
missing person's report.

Findlay police took the case seriously after learning that all of
Smith's belongings were still in his motel room but that neither he
nor his Blazer had been there for two days. Then they discovered that
someone was using his debit and Visa cards.

The first transaction was at 8:05 a.m. Saturday, hours after he had
left Wooley Bulley's. It was at a Speedway service station in
Brookville, south of Findlay. By 10 a.m., someone had spent $522 at a
Wal-Mart in Plainfield, Ind., and by day's end more than $1,200 more
at other stores between Illinois and Arkansas. All of the transactions
were made in stores near freeways on a direct route to Mexico.

Smith's friends and family began calling local newspapers, hoping to
draw media attention to the case. They insisted that Smith was not the
sort to run off.

He was devoted to his children - two girls and a boy - and to the
family business, Rexarc International, a welding and equipment
manufacturer near Dayton. Smith was president of the company, which
employs about 30 people with more than $5 million in annual sales.

A few weeks before he disappeared, he and his wife had served as
greeters at St. John's United Church of Christ in West Alexandria,
where Smith's resonating baritone anchored the choir.

He was a contented man, his friends and family said. Why would he run
away?

Another side of life

For Tabatha Ulsh, now 24, it was a different story.

Her family said she began running away from home when she was about 12
and she never really stopped, even after she married and had two
children of her own.

She never divorced, but hooked up with Jimmie Woodland, whom she had
grown up with in a poor section of Fostoria - a town famous for its
beautiful glassmaking but also known in some circles as a drug
pipeline.

She and her friends got into trouble for marijuana possession, and
some of their friends and family stumbled in deeper with crack and
cocaine.

Ulsh's stepfather, Wesley "Mike" Brown, is serving 40 years to life
for the murders of two men at a Fostoria-area motel. He said he and
his former wife had tried to discipline Ulsh, "but she was some sort
of wild."

Once, she and some friends caused $3,000 damage to a car and stole
$1,500 in jewelry and rare coins, Brown said. When police tried to get
her to name her accomplices, Tabatha Ulsh refused. "It was a macho
thing," Brown said. She took all the blame, and the Browns had to pay
all the restitution.

Brown said he later asked the courts to put his stepdaughter into a
juvenile home, but she fought back, claiming that he had sexually
abused her. Social services investigated briefly, but no charges were
pursued. Brown remains bitter over the allegations. Yet he doesn't
believe Ulsh killed Smith. "She doesn't have it in her," he said. "You
keep pushing her and pushing her, she's going to run away."

When U.S. Customs agents stopped Smith's Blazer on July 23, Ulsh told
investigators and a reporter that she killed Smith because he had
tried to rape her.

She and Woodland ran away, Ulsh insisted, because no one would ever
take "white trash" like her seriously. "I believe even if I would have
let him sit there and rape me that he would still kill me," Ulsh said.

Officials have declined to discuss the allegation but clearly do not
believe Ulsh acted alone.

Last week the task force arrested Woodland's mother and half-brother -
Mary Woodland, 46, and Joe Alexander, 18 - and friend Justin Doll, 18.

Mary Woodland is charged with obstruction of justice and tampering
with evidence. Investigators said she lied to them about what happened
and helped dispose of the shovel used to bury Smith by cleaning it and
returning it to Wal-Mart.

Alexander and Doll, known as bullies by some in Fostoria, face
aggravated assault and kidnapping charges for beating and kicking
Smith.

Ken (NY)
--
Chairperson,
Department of Redundancy Department
____________________________________

To do is to be - Socrates
To be is to do - Sartre
Do be do be do - Sinatra

"Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and
for all." (Nikita Khrushchev , February 25, 1956 20th Congress of the
Communist Party)

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is
best for society." (Hillary Clinton, 1993)

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