Crime Junkie - MURDERED: Linda Smith

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Audiochuck’s newest weekly show, The Deck, is hosted by Ashley Flowers and takes true-crime listeners through a deck of playing cards that is unlike any other.For years, state prison systems and local law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have replaced the face cards of queens, kings and aces in traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people. Investigators have passed these modified decks out in jails and prisons hoping that they will make their way into the hands of someone with answers. These are the coldest of cases where investigators have no choice but to show their hand in the hopes of getting killers to fold.Join Ashley Flowers every Wednesday as she works with investigators and victims’ families to recount the details of these cases in hopes that justice may finally be served.Listen to The Deck wherever you get your podcasts or visit https://thedeckpodcast.com/

Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and you guys have known me as your host for, what, four years now? Well, what if I told you that I'm going to be your host on another weekly audio chuck true crime show that you are going to love just as much as Crime Junkie? It's called The Deck, and don't worry, Crime Junkie isn't going anywhere. Now you just get double the content, and we're going to bring attention to double the amount of cases.

Now, if you're a true diehard Crime Junkie, then you might be familiar with something called Cold Case Playing Card Decks. For decades, state prison systems and local law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing cards with images of missing and murdered people. And then they distributed those cards throughout prisons, hoping that someone will come forward with information. But starting today and every Wednesday going forward, I'll be dealing you in, recounting the details of some of the coldest cold cases across the country with the help of investigators

and victims' families in hopes that justice will be served. Want to see what's in the cards for the deck? Well, take a listen to our very first episode right here. Our card this week is Linda Smith, The Nine of Hearts from Idaho. In 1981, in her hometown of Pocatella, Idaho, 14-year-old Linda Smith was abducted from her family's home. Whoever took her all those decades ago snuck past her sleeping brother and into her bedroom. And to this day, that person remains unidentified.

To help tell us Linda's story, our team interviewed Linda's brother Ben on the 40th anniversary of his sister's kidnapping. What he remembers about this gripping story will leave you shook. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck. It's obvious that the photo of Linda Smith on her playing card is her middle school picture from 1981. According to her younger brother Ben, it's exactly how she looked when she vanished from their home.

In the picture, she's got a little smile across her face and is sort of looking off to the side. You know, the typical middle school girl, I don't get my picture taken a lot pose. Her short wavy brown hair is parted down the middle and underneath the photo are the words, homicide victim. This is how the Pocatello police department categorizes Linda. And sadly, it has been that way for four decades. On the night of June 14th, 1981, school was out for the summer and Linda and her younger

siblings, nine-year-old Ben and 13-year-old Laurie, were having a typical Sunday evening. Linda, who was 14, was babysitting Ben at home while their mother, Noreen, was having a night out with some friends and Laurie was spending the night at their grandparents' house about 45 minutes north in the town of Basalt, Idaho. According to Ben, he and Linda's evening at home that night was uneventful for the most part. The pair watched some TV together in the living room then Ben dozed off. When he stirred awake, it was late and the house was completely dark.

Their mom still wasn't home yet and when he looked over next to him, he didn't see Linda. At that point, he figured his sister had just gone into her bedroom and fallen asleep too. But right as he was thinking that, something happened that changed his family's life forever. Sometime during the night, I felt a bump against the recliner. I look up and there's this guy with Linda in his arms and it takes me a few minutes to get fully awake by that time he's out of the house. For a split second, Ben thought he was dreaming, but quickly realized he wasn't.

An actual stranger, a man Ben did not know had Linda fighting for her life in his arms. She was kicking, struggling and trying to scream. He had one arm around her mouth like this, and the other one around her was, he used around his waist this one. Because she was trying to scream and it was muffled and nobody heard. Before Ben could even really process what was going on, the man with a death grip on Linda rushed toward the home's back door toward an alleyway. Ben says everything happened so fast he barely had time to get his little body out of the

recliner and start running after his sister and her abductor. I chased him to the back of the house and tried to pull him away from her and I got pushed down into some, we had some weeds, not weeds, but bushes along the side of the house there and I got pushed down into the bushes. Basically, I was told to get away or I was going to get hurt and by the time I got up out of the bushes they had gotten into the vehicle and the alleyway and they were gone. Ben says back in 1981 and in his nine-year-old mind he couldn't really make sense of things and he didn't have a good grasp on what time the abduction actually happened, but there

was one detail he remembers without a doubt. The van he saw the strange man's stuff Linda into was black and had flames down the side of it. As soon as the van took off, Ben says he immediately ran to a neighbor's house across the street to call 911 because at the time the Smiths didn't have a phone in their home. In fact, the family was way more into CB radios than telephones. Noreen, their mom, was really into the hobby. She was a member of the Southeast Idaho CB radio club and the whole family had their

own radio handles. Noreen was white angel, Lori was dark angel, Ben was littlest angel, and Linda was teen angel. They jokingly called their house the honky-tonk angel base, it was so red-naked, it's not even funny. The reason Ben was so quick to go over to a neighbor's and call 911 after Linda's abduction was that he'd heard in school if something bad happens, you always call 911. It's the golden rule we teach pretty much every kid, but Ben never imagined what would

happen and how investigators would treat him after he dialed those famous three numbers. According to the Pocatello Police Department, when Ben placed the 911 call to report Linda's abduction, it was just after two o'clock in the morning. By this time, Noreen was on her way home when she got a page on her car's CB radio. It was the police and they were looking for white angel. Ben doesn't remember his mom going out all the time. He said she worked hard to provide for her three kids as a single mom. Their dad was never in the picture.

Patrol officers responded to the Smith's house with less than enthusiastic attitudes that Ben's report of an abduction was in fact legit. Ben says the officer's initial response to his panic was to calm him down and suggest that his sister likely voluntarily left with someone or just ran away. He said when he protested against that theory, the police immediately accused him of making up the story about Linda being kidnapped. They suggested that Ben's nine-year-old imagination was getting the best of him and that he was just covering up for Linda taking off on her own.

They thought this because some other reports had come into the department earlier that night that indicated a party was going on in the neighborhood a few streets over. The police, according to Ben, suggested that most likely Linda would have wanted to sneak off to the party. They had two very inexperienced patrolmen investigating a possible kidnapping. They thought it was a runaway. They even went down to, there was a party going up on Clark Street a few blocks away from where we were living and they went there to go look for Linda.

Not once did they believe that I saw somebody take my sister. Ben said officers doubted him so much that by the time his mom arrived on scene, he even started to doubt himself. His mind kept racing over the scene he'd experienced inside the house and in the alley and he questioned if it was real. Even when I told them what I witnessed that night, what I'd seen and I was in shock, so I would forget things and then I would remember things. So of course that to them looked like it was lying, so I was covering up for her.

But Ben knew that what he saw was real. When it came to dealing with law enforcement, he never retracted his initial statement. What didn't help the situation was the fact that Ben had very little helpful information to give the police about the identity of the man who he said took Linda. He had no idea who this man was. He'd never seen him before in his life. All he remembered was that for a split second he was able to look into the guy's eyes, though he couldn't be descriptive about them.

He knew that the man had a beard and he described the suspect as wearing a hooded sweatshirt or jacket with the hood pulled up around his face. And there was a smell that he can still recall to this very day. And anymore I honestly can't remember a whole lot of what I recognized from that, kind of the eyes and the smell of beer alcohol and body odor, sweat, will send me into a PTSD trigger that, I mean downward spiral. Oh yeah, those two combinations together sends me into a downward spiral, because I'm that nine year old kid again.

I think one of the reasons police might have initially doubted Ben's story about Linda being kidnapped is the fact that she was independent enough to leave the Smith's house if she wanted to. She was clearly the eldest and most responsible of the three kids, I mean enough so that Noreen felt comfortable leaving her to watch over Ben that night. There was also the fact that back in 1981, Pocatello, Idaho didn't have an extensive track record of violent crimes. The city is located in southeast Idaho about two and a half hours north of Salt Lake City,

Utah. More than half the population is Mormon, and for the most part Pocatello had had a fairly low crime rate over the years. Linda herself was a devout Mormon. Ben says she was shy and loved spending her time in the church and with her school friends who also shared her same beliefs. Something else Linda was devoted to, though it was short lived, was keeping a diary of her life.

Ben brought one of her journals with him to his interview for this episode. The pages are covered with Linda's writing about school, her friends, and boys she had crushes on at church. Her first journal entry was in October of 1979. She wrote, I went to church today and had a great time. I met the girls in my class and they treated me pretty nice. In January 1981, Linda wrote, I woke up about nine and Disco Duck was on, and about 9.30 my little brother woke up and we went roller skating.

Wow, Disco Duck. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. According to the diary, Linda made her last journal entry in late April of 1981, less than two months before she was kidnapped. She wrote that she was looking forward to her 14th birthday. Every page after that date is blank, and 10 days before she was abducted, Linda turned 14. There's limited information out there about what exactly happened in the police investigation

immediately after Linda was abducted on June 14, 1981. After talking with Ben on record and Lori who didn't want to be recorded, it doesn't seem like police did a whole lot to find Linda in those initial 48 hours of her being gone. The Pocatello Police Department declined to participate in an interview with us for this episode, likely because Linda's case is still considered open and active. But here's what we do know. In the days immediately after Linda was reported as being dragged from her home and stuffed into a van, police and many community members just kept thinking that wasn't the truth

and were hopeful she would just turn back up. Ben remembers people making up stories about having seen Linda in other towns. One person even said they saw her in Las Vegas, but later they admitted that was a lie. Ben says the family's church bishop also told police he thought based on everything he knew about the family, it was more than likely that Linda probably ran away. One week after her abduction report was taken and no one except the family was really taking it seriously, the entire case changed in a major way. Clothing showed up and it belonged to Linda.

A man found several pieces of young girl's clothing scattered off a highway exit in Pocatello. At the time, the man didn't know what to make of the clothing and waited a day or so before he called police to tell detectives about what he'd found. When police did finally get a hold of the clothing, officers asked the Smith family to confirm if any of the items belonged to Linda, and Noreen, her mother, positively ID'd the articles as belonging to her daughter. What's bananas is that even then, when the cops had Linda's own mother saying yes, this belonged to my daughter, Ben says police in Pocatello still wouldn't call the case

a kidnapping. The details are slim, but I guess whatever state the clothing was in didn't make it apparent to the police that something violent had happened to Linda. To them, it was just clothing on the side of a highway that her family said was hers. So for an entire year after the clothing was found, not a lot happened with the case. Until the start of summer in 1982, when tragic news came in. In May, three young girls were out playing near a Pocatello subdivision called Sagewood Hills when they came across several bones.

Now bones in the Idaho woods don't always cause concern right away because there are large animals like bears that roam that part of the country. But something about these bones really stood out. In the pile was the upper part of what looked like a human skull. The girls took the bones home and showed one of their mothers and that woman called the police to report the find. Police quickly got out to the subdivision where the girls had been playing and conducted a more thorough search and you probably guessed it.

They found more remains scattered throughout the area. The medical examiner's best estimate was that the bones had been there for several months to a year. The teeth from the skull were compared to dental records of recent missing people from Pocatello. And eventually police announced that the partial skeleton belonged to Linda Smith. Officers also found human hairs and remnants of three pairs of pants with the remains. Whether or not any of those pants belong to Linda is unclear and even Ben doesn't know

that information. But I have to think that since some of Linda's clothing had already been found by the highway a few months earlier, the pants probably didn't belong to Linda. Anyway, according to reporting by the Idaho State Journal at a press conference on the day police announced the bones were Linda's. The police department confirmed they believed foul play was likely involved but no cause of death could be determined. The bone fragments and skull that were found were just too deteriorated.

In the ground around several spots where remains were recovered, police said they found bullet casings. But the department made sure to note in a public statement that the wooded area was a popular place for target practice. There was no way that they could know for sure if any of those casings were relevant to Linda's remains or a potential cause of death. On the day authorities held their press conference, Ben was just days away from turning 10 years old.

He remembers coming home from school and learning the terrible news. His grandpa was waiting for him in his bedroom to tell him that police had finally found his big sister. I remember more about that night and I remember more about the day that they found her remains than I can remember before. Finding Linda's remains was a big turning point in the case. Finally, the Pocatello police reclassified the case as a kidnapping and murder. But by then it was sort of too little too late to process the crime scene or collect

any evidence that might have been left behind by the suspect in the Smith's house. You see, shortly after Linda was taken, Noreen, Ben, and Lori moved close to Noreen's parents in Bay Salt, Idaho. They never went back to the Pocatello house after that and other people moved in. For Noreen and the kids, the memories of Linda in that house were just too painful and staying in Pocatello became unbearable. So any chance that investigators were going to find something useful to the investigation in the old house a year after Linda was kidnapped was low.

Today, the house is still there, but sits empty. It hasn't changed much. The alley is still there, and so is the back door where the man dragged Linda from. One of our reporters, Emily, actually went there in person to get images for us, and you can see those in the blog post for this episode on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. Before the abduction, Ben says the Smith's house was never locked. He says the Smith's had a sort of open door policy for family and neighborhood friends. Noreen was raising the kids as a single mother, and she was on welfare at the time.

Ben says that his mom worked really hard to make ends meet, and that often meant that she wasn't around a lot. People were always coming and going from the Smith's house, and it wasn't unusual for adults to come and go and visit with the kids while Noreen was working. As he's grown older, Ben has come to believe the family's open door policy may be how the suspect got in that fateful night. After 40 years of always thinking about his sister's case, Ben doesn't think it was a complete stranger who took Linda.

Whoever had taken my sister, I think, had been in the house before, honestly, because they knew where to go to get her. Honestly, that theory makes sense. Statistically, a true stranger abduction is very rare, especially if you're talking someone coming into the home. But those cases do happen, and while I agree with Ben and think her abductor had some familiarity with the family, you might disagree when you learn that Linda Smith was not the only young girl to be kidnapped and killed in Southeast Idaho in the early 1980s.

If you want to hear the rest of Linda Smith's story, you can listen to the full episode of the deck right now wherever you listen to podcasts. And once you finish Linda's story, we have a whole other episode ready for you to listen to right after. So go check it out and make sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and join us every Wednesday for a brand new case. Crime Junkie is an audio check production. So what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?