A California woman’s plan to fake her own abduction in 2016 has brought renewed attention to the unsolved disappearance of 16-year-old Terra Smith, who vanished while on the run nearly 26 years ago.
While the fake kidnapping of Shelly Papini inspired the Hulu documentary series “The Perfect Wife,” which premiered earlier this year and garnered national attention, Terra’s 1998 missing persons case has received little attention, even though Papini and Terra attended the same high school in the 1990s.
Papini graduated in 2001. Terra, who didn’t make it past his sophomore year, was scheduled to graduate in 2000.
This has been a troubling moment for Terra’s family, who believe the man who kidnapped and murdered their daughter has been roaming free for more than two decades, possibly victimizing others.
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Terra Smith’s sophomore yearbook photo. She was scheduled to graduate with the class of 2000. (Handouts for families)
Shelley Papini’s freshman yearbook photo. She graduated in 2001. (Handouts for families)
“I’m really upset about the magnitude of what she did. She lied. She took money that she shouldn’t have received. That’s what she did,” Terra’s mother, Marilyn Smith, told Fox News Digital. “And [authorities] It took a lot of money and resources and a very long time. … We suspected from the beginning, given her background, that it might be a lie. But it took us four or five years to tell her that we knew she was lying.”
The Smiths even invited her and her then-husband to dinner after she was “discovered,” and Marilyn said Papini put on a very convincing performance to make it seem like he had survived some traumatic event.
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“It was really humiliating in retrospect for her to come in and make such a big deal out of the fact that we had really lost our daughter,” Marilyn said.
Defendant Shelley Papini (center) leaves the federal courthouse after federal Judge William Schaub sentenced her to 18 months in federal prison, on September 19, 2022, in Sacramento, California. (Rich Pedroncelli/The Associated Press)
Despite the strange connection between the two cases (if it can even be called a connection), the Smith family is grateful that the two documentaries about the Papini case have brought new attention to their daughter’s unsolved disappearance.
“We expect arrests to be made.”
“We hope there will be an arrest and trial within the next few years, but we’ve been waiting for 25 years,” Marilyn said.
On August 22, 1998, Terra, who was not allowed to go outside at the time, went for a jog near her rural Redding, California home and told her sister she would be home in 20 minutes. However, she never returned. Terra, who was 16 years old, drove every road she might have been on that night and for several days, combing the area but finding nothing.
On August 22, 1998, Terra, who was grounded at the time, told her sister she was going for a jog around her rural home in Redding, California, and would be home in 20 minutes. She never returned. (Handouts for families)
To this day, Terra is believed to be dead, but her body has never been found.
The parents are unsure what evidence remains in their daughter’s case and what has been lost over the years. Authorities have provided the family with little information over the past two decades, but they remain hopeful. In fact, they believe their daughter knew and trusted the man who allegedly kidnapped and murdered her.
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Terra was a spiritual teenager who had kept extensive journals since childhood, felt a deep connection to the Earth, and had taken taekwondo lessons in the months before her disappearance.
Based on the contents of her diary and other evidence uncovered over the years, Terra’s parents believe that her instructor, Troy Zink, a man in his late 20s at the time who was married with children, seduced, sexually assaulted, and ultimately murdered their daughter.
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Terra was a spiritual teenager who kept extensive journals throughout her childhood. (Handouts for families)
“I knew right away he was involved,” Marilyn said.
Zink reportedly told police and the Smiths that he had seen Terra at his house earlier that evening, asking for a loan. When he told her he couldn’t give her the money she wanted, she became upset and asked him to give her a ride home. He complied, but then a fight broke out in the truck and she asked to be dropped off at the intersection of Oregon Trail and Old Alturas Road in Redding.
“Part of us was worried that she might be pregnant. … We never believed that Terra had run away or wanted to run away,” Marilyn said. She also said that Terra had told several friends that she was having a sexual relationship with Zink, but that Zink did not want that information to be known to his family.
“[H]There was an incentive to silence her.”
“She was 16 and he was 29, so he knew the law, and he knew that if it was exposed and he went to prison, he could lose his wife and his young son, so he had an incentive to silence her,” Marilyn said.
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Zink, who could not be reached for comment, also claimed that Terra had been praying in a secluded area deep in the mountains at the time of her disappearance.
Troy Zink told police Terra had requested to be dropped off at the intersection of Oregon Trail and Old Alturas Road in Redding. (Google Maps)
However, Smith’s family recently learned that witnesses had seen Terra and Zink in the same truck on the evening of August 22. According to Marilyn, one of the witnesses said they made eye contact with Terra through the passenger window as the car drove by, and that Terra mouthed the words “help me.”
“The police had a pretty accurate idea of where he had taken her along the Sacramento River – between Keswick Dam and Shasta Dam – that was the area they focused their search on, but then it became a cold case,” Marilyn said.
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Zink was immediately considered a suspect, but the only crime he was charged with and convicted of in connection with Terra’s disappearance was possession of a firearm by a felon, and when police searched his property to investigate possible connections to Terra, they found guns that were not supposed to be in his possession.
He was sentenced to three years in prison on a gun possession charge in Shasta County, but the case did not progress any further.
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He had a history of being convicted of spousal rape and of raping his high school sweetheart after they broke up.
“They didn’t connect the dots,” Marilyn said of police at the time.[T]His subordinates who are currently investigating the case are saying, ‘Looking at the circumstantial evidence, we have enough to arrest and prosecute this guy. We don’t want to do a missing body case.’ But at some point, you have to accept the fact that there may not be a body. So I think it’s up to the prosecutor to decide whether there is enough evidence to arrest and prosecute.”
