Calif: Long trail of mystery, death leads to arrest
Patty
Oceanside man held in first wife's slaying
By Elizabeth Fitzsimons
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
April 29, 2001
The box might have lain there for years, in the weeds along an Indiana road, had a highway
crew not spotted it one warm spring day in 1980.
Though weathered and dirty, the plywood box was cleanly cut and constructed, as if built
for shipping golf clubs. Puzzled, two men hauled it onto the road, took a tire iron from
their truck and pried it open.
A skull rolled out.
Twenty years would pass before investigators identified the remains of the woman locals
called the "Lady in the Box" and uncovered a trail of deception to the Oceanside home of
her former husband.
John David Smith III, remarried and working at an Escondido auto shop when he was arrested
in October, now sits in an Ohio jail awaiting a July murder trial.
That may be just the beginning of his troubles. Authorities believe Smith also killed his
second wife, who disappeared from New Jersey in 1991. And snapshots of two unidentified
women found along with photos of Smith's wives have FBI investigators wondering if he
killed them, too.
Smith, 50, who has been charged only in connection with the death of his first wife,
maintains his innocence.
"We don't have to prove anything," said his attorney, Kirk Migdal. "It's up to the state
to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt."
But the families of his missing wives say Smith was a habitual liar with a violent temper,
a coldblooded killer.
"It took 26 years to get us here, but we got here and hopefully we'll bring John David
Smith to justice," said Jocelyn Stefancin, assistant prosecutor for Wayne County, Ohio.
'A different boy'
John Smith grew up in Seville, Ohio, a town of 3,500. After his parents divorced, Smith
and his younger brother, Michael, spent much of their time with their grandparents,
Chester and Ethel Chaney. Their home was attached to a service station on the highway that
cuts through town.
Ethel was one of the town's first dispatchers. Chester was a firefighter and a Mason and
sat on the town council.
"Just good people," said Richard Armstrong, the mortician at the funeral home next door.
Armstrong said the eldest grandson was another matter: intelligent, private, not
interested in sports.
"John was a different boy," he said.
While attending high school, John always seemed to have a job, money and a nice car. John
and Michael were close, relying on each other for companionship, Armstrong said.
That relationship, the FBI said, would help keep John Smith free for years.
Small-town girl
Janice Hartman grew up not far from Seville. Her mother hoped her daughter would become a
math teacher, but Janice wanted to travel. After high school, she went to Kansas to become
a flight attendant.
Home for a visit, she met John Smith. The attraction was instant.
"He had a motorcycle. She liked adventure," her mother, Betty Lippincott, recalled.
Months later, in 1969, the two 19-year-olds eloped to Detroit and then settled in
Columbus, Ohio, where John attended Ohio State University and Janice managed a gas
station.
The marriage quickly soured. Lippincott said she followed its descent into the abuse and
violence she heard about in her daughter's collect calls.
She said she witnessed Smith's temper one night when the couple arrived unexpectedly and
all she had to offer them was soup and sandwiches.
"He had a fit," Lippincott said. "He was pounding my cupboards and stomping the floor."
Janice kept calling her mother until November 1974, the month the couple split their
meager belongings and ended their marriage.
Three days after the dissolution was legal, Janice and a girlfriend went to a Doylestown
bar. It was the last time she was seen alive.
"I knew what happened -- right off the bat," Lippincott said.
Into thin air
Lippincott spoke to her former son-in-law only once after her daughter disappeared when,
days later, he called to say Janice's Mustang had been found halfway to Columbus.
It was a lie. Authorities said they found the car at Smith's trailer, in Wooster, Ohio.
His stories, authorities said, kept changing.
First Smith told investigators Janice must have left the Mustang at his trailer, then got
a ride somewhere else. Then he said the state patrol must have towed the car to his
trailer.
While Smith gave investigators a detailed description of what Janice was wearing the night
she disappeared, he had no plausible explanation as to where his former wife might be.
The investigation went nowhere. About a year later, Lippincott put up a gravestone for
Janice Hartman Smith near Killbuck, Ohio.
"I knew she was gone," Lippincott said. "I was that positive."
Authorities know little about John Smith's life during the next few years. He moved from
state to state, varied his name -- and added "III" -- and took a Social Security number
belonging to an exotic dancer, the FBI said.
He may have married again.
Among the belongings Smith stashed years later in an Escondido storage unit were pictures
of the two unidentified women.
In one photo, Smith is standing by an airplane with a golden-haired woman.
"It's grainy, but you can see a ring on both of their hands," said Deanna Weiss, who
became Smith's stepdaughter when he married her mother, Betty Fran Gladden, several years
later.
"I've got to believe between '74 and '91 he didn't live by himself."
Another marriage
Smith next appears in investigators' accounts in 1990, working as an engineer at an
aeronautical company in Destin, Fla. That's where he met Gladden, a secretary whose family
called her Fran.
Smith told Fran's family he was a Mennonite, never married, came from a dysfunctional
family and wanted to be part of a real one.
They met in March 1990. They were married in May.
"That's John's pattern. He meets a woman . . . and within two dates he's wanting to get
married. He must be very convincing," said Fran's sister, Sherrie Davis.
Smith bought and refurbished the house next door to Fran's mother. But in 1991, he was
laid off. He and Fran moved to New Jersey for a new job.
Their marriage was quickly on shaky ground, family members said. The two talked of
divorce.
In September 1991, while on a weekend getaway to the Pocono Mountains in eastern
Pennsylvania, Fran, 49, slipped while getting out of the hot tub and broke her hip. Back
home, on crutches and in pain, she couldn't get around their condominium, much less
navigate its three flights of stairs.
Then she disappeared. Smith said his wife, broken hip and all, had gone on a trip.
But his story, relatives say, kept changing.
When Fran's daughter, Deanna Weiss, called on Sept. 29, 1991, Smith told her they were on
their way out the door. For three days, Davis tried reaching her sister, finally phoning
Smith at work.
"Oh, I thought you might be her checking in," Smith said, adding that he had given Fran
$2,000 to visit her family in Florida or Texas.
"I asked him: Was he out of his mind?" Davis said. "Fran never did anything without
calling the family. We always called each other with travel arrangements."
Days later, Davis said, Smith changed his story, saying Fran left without a word to him,
only a note saying: "Feed the fish. I'll be back in a few days."
Fran's family persuaded Smith to report his wife missing to police Oct. 4. They called
Smith daily. He told them he was canvassing the malls, posting leaflets. Suspicious, they
checked up on him.
"He was doing nothing. He was going to Connecticut every weekend," Davis said.
Fran's family think Smith killed her when she became suspicious about her husband's
weekend trips to a beach house in Connecticut that he was fixing up.
Fran's boss, familiar with Connecticut, urged her to take a closer look.
Smith's former fiancee, Sheila Sautter, was living there. Sautter told authorities she
didn't know anything about Fran -- that is, until December 1991, when Smith turned to her
as he was dressing and said: "By the way, I'm married. And she's missing."
After talking to investigators, Sautter briefly went into hiding. She could not be reached
for comment.
Searching for answers
With police stumped, Weiss and Davis embarked on their own investigation.
In February 1992, they flew to New Jersey and met Smith at the condo. He told them Fran
was traveling, but her makeup, toiletries, even her prescription glasses were still there.
"My niece went in the closet and she could smell her mother," Davis recalled. "Everything
was there except Fran."
Smith told his in-laws that Fran might have killed herself. He showed Davis a page that he
claimed was from a nine-page suicide note.
But Davis didn't buy it, knowing Fran often wrote down her feelings.
Continuing to probe, Davis learned from Fran's boss that Smith had been married before.
Fran had kept that fact from her family. Shocked, Fran's family soon made more
discoveries.
They looked in Detroit for people who might have known Smith and Janice Hartman. They
pored over yearbooks at Cloverleaf High School in Ohio, searching for people who
remembered John Smith.
They went through telephone books and left a message for a Garry Hartman of Wadsworth,
Ohio. They thought he might be related to Janice.
"I'm Janice Hartman's brother," Hartman said when he returned the call.
Davis told him her sister, who was married to John Smith, was missing. Hartman's response
was swift: "My God, lady, you got a problem."
A long wait
Investigators now knew Smith had a connection with the two missing women, but they had
little evidence and no bodies.
In 1997, when Smith moved to San Diego County, so did the investigation.
He found work at La Forza Automobiles Inc., an Escondido company that assembles Italian
sport-utility vehicles.
Through a mutual friend, he met Diane Bertalan. Six weeks later, they were married in a
Ramona log cabin.
"John seemed happy. She seemed happy. Boom, they get married," said Trevor Haywood, a
former co-worker at La Forza who had rented out his one-bedroom Poway guest house to Smith
for two years.
The Haywoods liked Smith. When the Haywood home had mice, Smith set sticky traps for them,
gently removing the animals and setting them free outside. He abhorred the sight of blood,
whether on his finger or in a movie, said Sue Haywood, Trevor's wife.
A creature of habit, Smith showered every day at 5:45 a.m. Each month, he laid out his
rent -- five crisp $100 bills -- on their kitchen counter.
On his wall he hung a photo of Fran. He told the Haywoods she had died of cancer.
A world collapsing
Bob Hilland had been a West Windsor, N.J., police officer before joining the FBI's Cold
Case Homicide unit, dedicated to unsolved killings. Because of Hilland's connection with
Fran's case, local police agreed to work with the FBI.
In July 1998, authorities from New Jersey, New York and Ohio met at FBI headquarters in
Quantico, Va. The following spring, investigators interviewed Smith's former employers,
friends, family, his new wife and Smith himself. During his interview, Smith curled into a
ball, crying, the FBI said.
One of those interviewed -- John Smith's attorney says it was Smith's brother, Michael --
gave authorities their big break.
Michael Smith told them of the plywood box.
In 1979, their grandfather came across the box, stored on a shelf in his garage. He asked
Michael to pry it open to see what was inside.
Michael thought he already knew. He recalled his older brother building the box in late
November 1974, saying it was to hold his missing wife's belongings.
The box remained in the garage for years. And the foul smell the family sometimes noticed
was attributed to a hidden, dead animal.
That afternoon, as his grandfather watched, Michael pried off the lid and with a stick
poked at the contents. At one end was what appeared to be clothing. At the other end, a
clump of rusty, orange-colored hair.
He pushed at it with the stick until he saw a mummified face, one he recognized as that of
his sister-in-law.
He called his grandfather to look.
"It was his grandfather's decision not to call police, but to call Mr. Smith," said FBI
Special Agent Roy Speer during Smith's October bond hearing.
John Smith immediately drove nearly 300 miles to Seville from South Bend, Ind., where he
was working as an engineer, the FBI said.
Asked by his brother for an explanation, John said, "I'll take care of it," Speer said. He
loaded the box into his 1979 Corvette and left.
After hearing Michael Smith's story, the FBI scoured Ohio for the box, then widened its
search to Indiana, sending letters to local law enforcement.
Within a week, Newton County, Ind. sheriff's Deputy Gerald Burman responded. He told the
FBI about the Lady in the Box.
Closing in
Back in San Diego County, Smith's marriage was in trouble. Fran's family had warned
Smith's new wife that she might be in danger. Diane Smith filed a restraining order
against her husband in December 1999, but later reconciled with Smith and had the
restraining order dismissed.
"She told us point-blank, 'I can't eat without him,' " said Deanna Weiss, Fran's daughter.
"And I told her, 'Well, your days of eating might be numbered if you keep living with
him.' "
Diane Smith declined to be interviewed.
Meanwhile, the case against Smith was mounting. DNA testing identified the Lady in the Box
as Janice Hartman Smith. And authorities learned of Janice's diamond watch, which Smith
had said she was wearing in a missing-persons report.
While living in Indiana, Smith gave the watch to his boss's teen-age daughter, telling her
it was his wife's, then adding: "That's OK. She's dead," the woman later told FBI agents,
said Stefancin, the Ohio prosecutor.
Agents recovered the watch, and Hartman's sister recognized it as belonging to Janice.
In August, a grand jury reviewed the evidence and gave authorities what they had long
sought: an indictment of Smith in the slaying of Janice Hartman.
Authorities were waiting for Smith when he arrived for work in Escondido one day last
October. He went quietly, and on the way to jail barely uttered a word.
Days later, while awaiting extradition to Ohio, he was served with court papers in the San
Diego County Jail. Weiss was suing him for the wrongful death of Fran Gladden.
Union-Tribune researcher Beth Wood contributed to this report.
PattyC
I found this especially chilling...."On his wall he hung a photo of Fran. He
told the Haywoods she had died of cancer."
Some killers keep "trophies" of their kills to re-live the thrill of the
murder. Maybe this guy found gazing at her picture a similar type of "nice
feeling?"
PattyC
"Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
Patty <la...@bug.com> wrote in message
news:OQ%G6.1486$LI6.9...@nntp1.onemain.com...
