John Smith, convicted of murdering his first wife and suspected in the disappearance of his second wife, had charges dropped against him in exchange for details about her death, a former FBI agent investigating the case says. This is probably a lie.
Smith, 73, was sentenced to life in prison in 2001 prison in ohio For the murder of his first wife, Janice Ellen Hartman, days after their divorce in 1974. In 2019, he was convicted of murder in the disappearance of his second wife, paralegal Fran Smith, who was last seen alive in September 1991.
Former FBI agent Robert Hiland told Dateline NBC that the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office dropped charges against the convict in exchange for information about how and where he was located. disposed of his bodyA decision he called a “failure”.
Hiland said of the settlement, “They should be ashamed to admit that.” “Now they have exempted him based on that.”
The body of 49-year-old Fran Smith, who disappeared in 1991, was never found. Murder charges against her husband, John Smith, were dropped in exchange for information about what he did with her corpse. But an FBI agent who worked on the case finds his account extremely unlikely and called the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office deal a “failure.” (FBI handout)
Fran’s sister, Sherry Davis, told the program prosecutors “left (her) family out to dry” and about Smith’s claims. What did he do with Fran’s body? Did “nothing” for them.
Hartman’s body lay rotting and dismembered for decades in a wooden box in the garage of Smith’s parents’ home and was then buried at the same location, in what Hiland described as a “Jane Doe grave”.
Although Smith provided prosecutors with details of what they did to Smith’s body last year, the office acknowledged in a statement to Dateline that “recovery” would be impossible given how much time has passed since her disappearance.
“In negotiating a non-prosecution agreement, Smith will not admit to murder, but will agree to tell us what he did to her body,” a spokesperson for the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office said in an email.
Investigators had long suspected that Smith was responsible for his wives’ disappearances, but had no evidence to convict him. His luck began to change after he contacted Dianne Beasley in 1998. According to reports, the single mother had no idea that her boyfriend was married twice before, before both women went missing. Sun,
John Smith, now 73, is serving a life sentence in Ohio for the murder of first wife, Janice Ellen Hartman, whom he eloped with after high school. She went missing soon after the divorce in 1974. (Ohio Department of Corrections)
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Beasley, who was living in a Connecticut beach home owned by Smith, agreed to cooperate in the investigation against her boyfriend.
“His whole world was turned upside down,” said Frank Barre, a Connecticut detective. Milford Police DepartmentTold Dateline.
In a recorded call, Beasley confronts Smith about his relationship with Fran and asks if she is dead. According to audio obtained by Dateline, he replied that, because he didn’t know where she was, “She thinks I might have hurt her.” Smith also told his girlfriend that he had recently learned that Hartman had been reported missing and was never found.
When asked if he had lied when police took a polygraph test, Smith replied, “I failed it,” and admitted that he “lied during the test,” according to Dateline.
But when Hiland spoke to him in person the following year, Smith denied making his comments about the polygraph test. According to Dateline, he moved to suburban San Diego, remarried and was working for a car manufacturer.
Hiland said of playing the taped conversation between Smith and his girlfriend, “I took out the tape recorder, pressed the play button, and John could hear in his own voice everything he had said.”
Hiland said that, when he heard the recording, Smith “got quite red and shrugged his shoulders.”
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John Smith was convicted of the murder of Janice Ellen Hartman in 2001. He is depicted in an undated photograph. (FBI handout)
According to Hiland, Smith told investigators, “I don’t know what happened to Fran. I just know she’s not dead. If she’s dead, she’s probably in heaven.”
The hours-long interview ended when Smith told investigators he was having a heart attack. But a few days later, Smith’s brother made a confession that cracked the case.
In exchange for a deal that prevented prosecutors from charging her, the brother revealed that he had removed her legs and placed her body in a large plywood box. Smith’s father discovered the box’s horrifying contents in 1979. But, according to Hiland, the family didn’t tell authorities for decades.
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In November 1974, the brother found a crying Smith putting the box in the garage. When Smith’s grandfather opened it five years later, he found that a woman inside was missing legs and had rainbow-colored hair, with authorities attributing the damage to the clothes decaying in the box. According to Dateline, with him.
“Grandpa said, ‘If we call the sheriff, it’s going to get your grandma dead,'” Hiland recalled the brother saying.
John Smith is brought before a remote court on trial for the death of Fran Smith. The charges against him were dropped in exchange for details of what he did to her body. (Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office)
Instead, the brother said the family called Smith, who took the box from the passenger seat of his Corvette.
Smith’s brother agreed to speak to him in another recorded phone call. According to Dateline, Smith described the box as a “joke”, saying that someone had left it with a dead goat.
When the brother told Smith that he had “nightmares where Jan chased (him) down the street (and) beat him with his feet,” Smith simply responded, “Okay.”
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Hiland said the box was later found by a road crew in a drainage ditch.
The unidentified body was exhumed in 2000, and dna test Confirmed it was Hartmann. Six months later, Smith was charged with her murder.
Although Hiland said he conducted several digs at Smith’s workplace in New Jersey and his Connecticut beach home, Fran’s body was never found. Secret informants at the prison where Smith was imprisoned were unable to provide any evidence.
Although there was no new evidence, Mercer County prosecutors contacted Hiland at the FBI training academy in Virginia, where he worked in 2019, and said they believed they had evidence to charge him in Fran’s death. There is enough evidence for.
“It was State’s position that, in 1991, Smith was confident he had a successful blueprint kill and get away “And followed their 1974 playbook, but corrected the only mistake they made in the murder of Janice Hartman — placing her body in a place where it could be accidentally discovered,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement at the time. “
But, according to NJ.com, in 2022, a judge ruled that the jury could not hear evidence about the murder of Smith’s first wife. Mercer County Judge Peter Warshaw said at the time that one murder of a spouse does not constitute the other and that introducing it as evidence could unfairly influence the jury.
In a final attempt to bring closure to the second wife’s family, prosecutors reached their agreement. His statement regarding Fran’s body was never publicized. But his daughter, Deanna Childers, told Dateline that he claimed he wrapped the woman’s body in a blanket and left it in a trash can at his former workplace in New Jersey.
Hiland, who retired from FBI In 2022, it was said that it was unlikely that Smith left Fran’s body there. There was heavy traffic in the area and the body could be easily seen, he said.
The former agent told Dateline that because he has cooperated with prosecutors — although he has not made a full confession or provided corroborating evidence — he may have a better chance of release on parole in 2029.
