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978-1-878086-24-2
1-878086-24-3
$21.95 hardcover
6" x 9"
202 pages
black-and-white photographs
Down Home Press
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Shortly after 7 a.m. on
August 24, 1981, a distraught 15-year-old boy banged on a neighbor's
door at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. "Call the MP's," Butch
Smith told the woman who answered the door. "Everybody at my house
is dead."
Not everybody in the
apartment next door was dead. Seven children who had been sleeping there
were still alive. But the only adult in the apartment, Butch's
34-year-old aunt, lay dead along with his 12-year-old sister, Connie,
and their 13-year-old cousin. Their throats had been expertly split,
Connie's body butchered.
When Naval investigators
learned that the murdered boy supposedly had made a call the day before
his death alleging that Butch was having a sexual relationship with
Connie, the investigation focused on Smith, who recently had been
released from a program for disturbed teenagers. Despite a lack of
physical evidence, a child witness's claim that Smith didn't do it, and
the emergence of another suspect, the investigation moved forward with
what one agent later described as "tunnel vision." Yet it was
not until five years later that Smith finally was charged. Then he spent
five years in jail without ever being brought to trial while courts
argued jurisdiction.
about the author
N. P. Simpson is a graduate of Old Dominion University in Norfolk,
Virginia. She has worked as an actress, teacher, art director, reporter,
columnist, and editor. Her work has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock
Mystery Magazine. She was living at Camp Lejeune with her husband, a
Marine officer, when she took an interest in the Butch Smith case. She
now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is writing a biography
of a Marine general.
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