John Smith, who was convicted of murdering his first wife and accused of her second wife’s disappearance, was arrested in exchange for a former FBI agent investigating the case revealing details of her death. The charges were dropped, but a former FBI agent investigating the case said they were probably false.
Smith, 73, was sentenced to life in prison in Ohio in 2001 for killing his first wife, Janice Elaine Hartman, days after they divorced in 1974. In 2019, he was charged with murder in the disappearance of his second wife, paralegal Fran. Smith was last seen alive in September 1991.
Former FBI agent Robert Hiland told NBC Dateline that the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office dropped charges against the convict in exchange for details of how and where her body was disposed of. He said he called the decision a “failure.”
Hiland said of the agreement: “We should be ashamed of ourselves for accepting it.” “Now they’ve given him immunity on that basis.”
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The body of 49-year-old Fran Smith, who disappeared in 1991, has never been found. Her murder charges against her husband John Smith were dropped in exchange for information about what he did to her corpse. But an FBI agent who worked on the case believed it was highly unlikely his account would go through and called the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office deal a “flop.” (FBI handout)
Fran’s sister, Sherry Davis, told the show that prosecutors were “hanging her.” [their] The family went to dry,” and said Smith’s claims about what he did with Fran’s body did “nothing” for them.
Ms. Hartman’s body remained for decades in a wooden box in Ms. Smith’s parents’ garage, left to rot and disintegrate in what Ms. Hiland called the “Jane Doe Grave.” He was buried in the same place.
Smith told prosecutors what they had done to Smith’s body last year, but acknowledged in a statement to Dateline that “recovery” was impossible given the amount of time that had passed since her disappearance. .
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“In negotiating a non-prosecution agreement, Mr. Smith did not admit to the murder, but agreed 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 Smith of being involved in the wives’ disappearances, but there was no evidence to convict him. Their fortunes began to change in 1998, when they became close to Diane Beasley. The single mother had no idea that her boyfriend had been married twice before, much less that the two women had disappeared, the report said. Sun.
John Smith, 73, is currently serving a life sentence in Ohio for the murder of his first wife, Janice Elaine Hartman, with whom he eloped after high school. She disappeared shortly after her divorce in 1974. (Ohio Department of Corrections)
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Beasley lived in a Connecticut beach house owned by Smith and agreed to cooperate with the investigation into her boyfriend.
“Her whole world was turned upside down,” Frank Bahr, a detective with the Milford Police Department in Connecticut, told Dateline.
In a recorded phone call, Beasley questioned Smith about his relationship with Fran and asked if she was dead. “They think I might have hurt her,” the man replied, not knowing where she was, according to audio obtained by Dateline. Smith told his girlfriend that she had recently learned that Hartman had been reported missing and that she had not yet been found.
According to Dateline, when police asked if she had lied during the polygraph test, Smith replied, “I failed,” and admitted that she “lied during the test.” That’s what it means.
However, when Hiland spoke directly to Smith the following year, Smith denied making any comments about the polygraph test. According to Dateline, he moved to the San Diego suburbs, remarried and worked for an automaker.
“When I pulled out my tape recorder and pressed play, I could hear everything John said in his own voice,” Hilland said of playing the recorded conversation between Smith and his girlfriend.
Hilland said that when Smith heard the recording, he “turned bright red and shrugged his shoulders.”
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John Smith was convicted of the murder of Janice Elaine Hartman in 2001. She appears in her undated photo. (FBI handout)
Hiland said Smith told investigators: “I don’t know what happened to Fran. I just know that she’s not dead. If she is, she’s probably in heaven.” “I guess so,” he is said to have said.
The hours-long interrogation ended when Smith told investigators he was having a heart attack. However, a few days later, Smith’s brother confessed and the incident was brought to light.
In exchange for an agreement barring prosecutors from prosecuting him, the brothers revealed they removed her legs and placed her body in a large plywood box. Smith’s father discovered the box’s horrifying contents in 1979, but Hiland said the family didn’t tell authorities for decades.
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In November 1974, the brothers saw a crying Smith put the box in the garage. Five years later, Smith’s grandfather opened the box to find a woman with a missing leg and rainbow-colored hair. The authorities are conducting a detailed analysis of the cause, saying that the clothes had deteriorated inside the box. According to Dateline, she is with her girlfriend.
“Grandpa said, ‘If you call the sheriff, your grandma is going to die,'” Hiland recalled his brother saying.
John Smith has been filmed appearing remotely in court at the trial of Fran Smith’s death. Her charges against him were dropped in exchange for details about what he did to her body. (Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office)
Instead, the family called Smith, and Smith took the box away in the passenger seat of the Corvette, the brothers said.
Smith’s brother agreed to speak with Smith on a separate phone call that was recorded. According to Dateline, Smith described the box as a “joke” and said someone dropped it with a goat carcass inside.
When his brother told Smith, “I had a nightmare where Jean was chasing me.” [him] down the road [and] beat [him] With her legs,” Smith simply replied, “OK.”
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Hiland said the box was later found in a drainage ditch by road crews.
The unidentified body was exhumed in 2000, and DNA tests confirmed it was Hartman. Six months later, Smith was charged with her murder.
Hiland said multiple excavations were conducted at Smith’s workplace in New Jersey and at his coastal home in Connecticut, but Fran’s body was never found. An undercover informant at the prison where Smith was incarcerated was unable to provide evidence.
Although there was no new evidence, Mercer County prosecutors contacted the FBI training academy in Virginia, where Hilland worked in 2019, and said they believed there was enough evidence to charge him in Fran’s death. He said that
“In 1991, Defendant Smith believed he had a successful blueprint for getting away with murder and followed his 1974 playbook, only to make the only mistake he made in the murder of Janice Hartman: putting her body in a dangerous position. The state’s position was that it had corrected its storage in a location where it would have been accidentally discovered,” prosecutors said in a statement at the time.
However, in 2022, a judge ruled that a jury could not hear evidence related to Smith’s murder of his first wife, according to NJ.com. Mercer County Judge Peter Warshaw said at the time that the murder of one spouse did not prove the murder of the other, and that introducing it as evidence could unfairly sway the jury.
In a last-ditch effort to bring closure to the second wife’s family, prosecutors reached an agreement. His statement regarding Fran’s body was never made public. But her daughter, Deanna Childers, told Dateline that she claimed he wrapped the woman’s body in a blanket and left it in a dumpster at her former workplace in New Jersey.
Hiland, who retired from the FBI in 2022, said it was unlikely Smith left Fran’s body there. He said the area has a lot of foot traffic and the body would have been easily noticed.
A former agent told Dateline that although he did not make a full confession or provide supporting evidence, he cooperated with prosecutors and may increase his chances of being paroled in 2029.
