The body on the ground was a 15-year- old high school cheerleader named Patty. Her killer was kneeling next to her, staring at me.
He identified me, but 46 years later I still can’t positively identify him, even though everyone in southwest Ohio is pretty sure who he is.
It became Cincinnati’s top news story of 1963 and it was my 15 minutes. My name was on the front page for more than two weeks.
It was a mid-summer night. I was walking home and passed a side yard where I saw two people. There wasn’t much of a moon and the street lights weren’t helping. And I wasn’t wearing my glasses. It turned the scene into an out-of-focus, black-and- white photograph, one that is still indelible and indistinct.
I have long wondered what would have happened if I had recognized the killer. If I had said his name, asked if anything was wrong. Would he have run away or chased me down?
I was told that when I saw Patty, she was probably unconscious. She was later dragged to the property line and beaten to death with a fence post.
I woke the day after the crime to the sound of my sister wailing. She was a cheerleader, too, and Patty was a friend.
Girls rarely spoke to me back then, but for some reason Patty did. I was shy and self conscious, but Patty always said hello like we were pals.
Greenhills, Ohio, had been created as a suburban “greenbelt” community meant to ease some of the congestion of Cincinnati. It became a too-clean, too-white village that looked like it had been fabricated at Disney Studios. It was the last place in Ohio where the crumpled body of a beautiful 15-year-old girl should ever have been found.
That night, Patty and I were minutes apart, walking in the same direction. I didn’t know she was ahead of me. She had left a dance to go see her boyfriend, and maybe break up with him. I was on my way home after filling in for my best friend, cleaning up a doctor’s office.
Ohio clings to you in August. It’s humid. Windows are open and you can hear televisions and radios. Elvis, Peter, Paul and Mary, Stevie Wonder, and The Four Seasons all had top 10 songs on the night that Patty was killed. And so did the Angels.
“My Boyfriend’s Back” immediately took on a new meaning:
“He’s kind of big and he’s awful strong.”
“If I were you I’d take a permanent vacation.”
Patty’s boyfriend was brought in for questioning. Patty’s blood was found on his pants; he admitted he might have had an encounter with Patty at about the time she was murdered. He positively identified someone who was walking past when he encountered Patty. It was Craig Marshall Smith.
What happened, and didn’t, between August 1963 and February 2001, when the trial began, is the stuff of Kafka. (Details can be found on the Internet under “Her Last Wish,” a two-part article in “CityBeat.”)
The Hamilton County prosecutor flew out here and videotaped my deposition. I was two years away from retirement and a long way from that summer night in Ohio.
The boyfriend, now a family man, was found not guilty.
There is a yellowing newspaper photo of a boy in a cut-off UCLA sweatshirt standing in a side yard talking with a detective. He didn’t know it, but his childhood was over.
Craig Marshall Smith (craigmarshallsmith@ ) is a retired emeritus professor of art and an abstract expressionist painter. He lives in Highlands Ranch.
