Wednesday, Feb 2, 2022 • 20min
MURDERED: Linda Smith
Play Episode
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/
Read more
Talking about
Speakers
(2)
Ashley Flowers
Ben Smith
Transcript
Verified
Ashley Flowers
00:01
Hi
Crime Junkies
. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers and you guys have known me as your host for what? 4 years now. Well what if I told you, that I am 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.Share
00:28
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.Share
01:16
Our card this week is Linda Smith, the 9 of hearts from
Idaho
in 1981 in her hometown of Pocatello
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.Share
01:44
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.
Share
02:28
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.Share
02:45
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.
Share
03:04
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 Lori 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 Lori was spending the night at their grandparents house about, 45 minutes north in the town of
Basalt
Idaho
.Share
03:28
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.
Share
03:47
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.
Share
Ben Smith
03:58
Sometime during the night I felt a bump against the recliner and I look up and there's this guy with Linda in his arms. It takes me three minutes to get fully awake. By that time he's out of the house.
Share
Ashley Flowers
04:11
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.
Share
Ben Smith
04:27
He had one arm around her mouth like this and I don't want around her waist and you just want to be used around his waist. Is one that because he was trying to scream and this muffled and nobody heard.
Share
Ashley Flowers
04:38
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.
Share
Ben Smith
04:57
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 where I was going to get hurt. And by the time I got up out of the bushes, they had gotten into the vehicle and in the alleyway and they were gone.
Share
Ashley Flowers
05:18
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 stuff Linda into was black and had flames down the side of it.
Share
05:38
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.
Share
05:52
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.
Share
Ben Smith
06:11
The honky tonk angel base, We're so redneck. It's not even funny
Share
Ashley Flowers
06:15
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.
Share
06:45
According to the Pocatello Police Department. When Ben placed the 911 call to report Linda's abduction, it was just after 2am 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.
Share
07:01
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.
Share
07:19
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.
Share
07:46
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.
Share
Ben Smith
08:03
I had two very inexperienced patrolman investigating a possible kidnapping. They thought was a runaway. They even went down to there was a 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. Now, once they believe I saw somebody take my sister.
Share
Ashley Flowers
08:21
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.
Share
Ben Smith
08:37
Even when I told them what I witnessed that night, what I've 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.
Share
Ashley Flowers
08:50
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.
Share
09:12
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.
Share
Ben Smith
09:34
And anymore. I honestly can't remember a whole lot of what I recognize from that kind of the eyes and the smell of beer, alcohol and body odor, sweat. We'll send me into a PTSD trigger. Those two combinations together sends me into into a downward spiral because, I'm that nine year old kid again.
Share
Ashley Flowers
10:01
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.
Share
10:11
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. This city is located in Southeast Idaho
, about 2.5 hours north of Salt Lake City
.Share
10:32
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.Share
10:49
Something else Linda was devoted to those. 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 boy's, 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 9am and Disco Duck was on and about 9: 30am my little brother woke up and we went roller skating,
Share
Ben Smith
11:28
Wow, Disco Duck! Oh my gosh, that's so funny.
Share
Ashley Flowers
11:33
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.
Share
11:52
There's limited information out there about what exactly happened in the police investigation immediately after Linda was abducted on June 14 1981.
Share
12:03
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.
Share
12:22
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 we're 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.Share
12:47
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.
Share
13:11
A man found several pieces of young girls 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 ahold of the clothing, officers asked the Smith family to confirm if any of the items belonged to Linda.Share
13:32
And Noreen, Her mother, positively, I. 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.Share
13:53
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.
Share
14:05
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 Sage Wood Hills when they came across several bones.Share
14:26
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.Share
14:43
The girls took the bones home and showed one of their mother's and that woman called the police to report the find.
Share
14:50
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.
Share
15:01
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
.Share
15:18
Officers also found human hairs and remnants of three pairs of pants with the remains. Whether or not any of those pants belonged 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.
Share
15:40
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 believe 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.Share
16:02
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.
Share
16:18
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.
Share
Ben Smith
16:35
Remember more about that night and I remember more about the day that they found her remains than I can remember before.
Share
Ashley Flowers
16:42
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.Share
17:01
You see, shortly after Linda was taken Noreen's Ben and Lorrie moved close to Noreen's parents in basalt
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.Share
17:27
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, The Deck podcast. com.
Share
17:49
Before the abduction, Ben says the Smith's house was never locked. He says the Smiths 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.
Share
18:08
A lot of people were always coming and going from the Smith 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. Maybe 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.
Share
Ben Smith
18:31
Whoever had taken my sister. I think had been in the house before honestly, because they knew where to go together.
Share
Ashley Flowers
18:37
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 1980's.Share
19:12
If you want to hear the rest of Linda smith 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 another 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.
Share
Speaker 3
20:07
Crime Junkie
is an audio chuck production. So what do you think chuck? Do you approve?Share
Add podcast
🇮🇹 Made with love & passion in Italy. 🌎 Enjoyed everywhere
Build n. 1.38.1
Ashley Flowers
Ben Smith